The Ottoman Empire in the Post-Tanzimat Period and World War I

 The Ottoman Empire in the Post-Tanzimat Period and World War I

 

     The map of the Middle East was completely redrawn as a result of World War I. The only prewar border in the region that remained essentially unchanged was that between Iran and what became the Turkish Republic. These changes had extraordinary effects on the region’s entire population, upsetting centuries of commercial, social, political, and cultural ties. The effects of these wholesale changes still reverberate nearly a century later. The twentieth century began with the Ottoman state facing a multitude of external and internal problems, including dissent throughout the provinces and among reformers unhappy with the absolutist rule of Abdülhamid II. The reformers believed that Abdülhamid II had moved the Ottoman state backward by suspending the constitution in 1878 and by using religious rhetoric to prop up his authority. He was deposed in 1908 by a group of reformers known as the Young Turks in a revolt that started as a military insurrection in the Balkans and eventually moved to Istanbul.19 After the coup, power moved from the older Ottoman institutions to the newly formed Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) that the Young Turks established. Across the Ottoman Empire’s ethnic and religious communities, groups of new leaders modeled on the Young Turks replaced the traditional leaderships. The new leaders did not possess the same allegiance to the Ottoman state and its institutions as the traditional elite. The stage was set for the rise of nationalist movements throughout the empire. The end of the nineteenth century also saw a shift in the British attitude toward the Ottomans. Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain had viewed the empire as a strategic asset because it acted as a buffer between the Mediterranean and the Russians, whom the British viewed as their most immediate threat. The only ports the Russians could use year-round were in the Black Sea, and this required them to pass through Ottoman-controlled sea-lanes. whenever they wanted to move. Later, the rise of Germany began to concern British strategists more than the Russians. Support that Britain had given the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century no longer seemed necessary. Instead of looking for ways to preserve the Ottoman Empire, Britain now contemplated the best way to carve it up. When the CUP government in Istanbul threw its support behind Germany and the Central Powers in World War I, the die was cast. Britain now had a green light to begin dismantling the Empire. In 1914, Britain declared the Ottoman province of Egypt a protectorate of the British Crown, independent of the Ottoman Empire for the first time in four hundred years. The British deposed the khedive, Abbas II, the Egyptian head of state, and chose the pliant Hussein Kamel from among the descendants of Mehmet Ali and gave him the title of sultan of Egypt. After two years, the war in Europe had been fought to the bloody stalemate and wholesale slaughter of trench warfare. Worried about troubling signs of unrest in Russia, the British sought ways to keep the Russians in the war. At the outset of hostilities, the Russian military had inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottoman army in the east. The Ottoman forces were completely wiped out not by enemy bullets but by the catastrophically inadequate supply lines set by Enver Pasha. This defeat led Enver to seek a scapegoat for his mismanaged and ill-advised plan to march through the Caucasus during the dead of winter. He accused the region’s Armenians of actively supporting the Russians and, beginning in April 1915, used the crisis as an excuse to deport the entire Armenian population in eastern Anatolia. This precipitated what is now referred to as the Armenian Genocide and resulted in as many as one million deaths. Less than two years later, however, the Russians seemed to be the ones wavering. The British were convinced that they could knock the Ottomans out of the war and, by doing so, alleviate the pressure on the bogged-down Russian-led eastern front. This thinking led to the disastrous campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula southwest of Istanbul in 1915 to 1916. After nine months of bloody fighting, the British withdrew in ignominious defeat, and the Ottomans had their first war hero. The Ottoman commander, Mustafa Kemal, devised strategies that frustrated all attempts by the British to break out of their beachhead. Mustafa Kemal, who later became known as Atatürk, would make an even bigger name for himself after World War I as the leader of the new Turkish Republic. 

Contradictory British Promises 

                    After their defeat at Gallipoli, the British sought other ways to undermine the Ottoman Empire. British armies moved from Basra in Iraq toward Baghdad and from Cairo toward Palestine. They also responded positively to the promise of Hussein bin Ali (aka the Sharif or Guardian of Mecca) to revolt against his Ottoman overlords in exchange for British guarantees for an Arab kingdom after the war. The British were willing to support Hussein’s aspirations as long as they coincided with their own strategic interests. British advisers, including Thomas Edward (T. E.) Lawrence, later known as Lawrence of Arabia, aided the rebellion. Throwing in their lot with the British would make Hussein and his three sons Faisal, Abdallah, and Ali pivotal figures in the history of the Middle East. British interests in the Middle East at the time could be summarized by two words: oil and India. Oil had become a strategic asset a little more than a decade before World War I, when the Royal Navy switched from coal to oil. The British never wavered in their quest to control the oil fields of Iraq in any postwar settlement. Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, British strategic planning in the Mediterranean was fixated on the need to protect the supply lines to British India. Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Cairo, and Sharif Hussein exchanged a series of letters in 1915 and 1916, the content of which later became a source of much trouble. Hussein understood the letters to say that the British pledged that the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab lands of the Eastern Mediterranean (except what is now Lebanon) would be granted independence as an Arab kingdom in return for Hussein organizing a rebellion against the Ottomans. McMahon, however, was intentionally vague so as not to restrict British maneuverability. The Arab Revolt nevertheless commenced soon after and was led by Hussein’s son, Faisal. In May 1916, about a month after making their pledges to Hussein, the British, French, and Russians completed other postwar settlement agreements. The Sykes-Picot Agreement violated the spirit if not the letter of the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. The French and British agreed to divide much of the Middle East between them. The British received most of Iraq and the lands of the Persian Gulf, while the French would control Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Anatolia. The fate of Palestine would be decided later through consultation with other allies and other concerned parties, including Hussein. The actual borders of the spheres of influence of the parties to the Sykes-Picot Agreement were to be delineated at a later time. In a separate agreement, Russia would realize its long-held desire to have access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea, as the Russians gained control of Istanbul, the Bosporus, and the Dardanelles as well as the Armenian lands to the east. However, this agreement was not honored because mounting Russian losses and the general misery of the Russian population resulted in Russia’s 1917 revolution. Russia soon dropped out of the war and signed a peace treaty with the Ottomans. If all of this were not already complicated enough, the British made one additional set of promises about how conquered Ottoman land would be divided. On November 2, 1917, an advertisement appeared in the newspaper Times of London that soon became a source of resentment and scorn among Britain’s Arab allies in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration, as it became known, was a note signed by Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary, and addressed to the banker Lord Walter Rothschild. The simple four-line announcement pledged British support for a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was the culmination of a massive lobbying campaign by the influential Polish-born chemist Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann was widely known in London’s power circles, and he had an important role in British munitions production. He also had a gift for political lobbying and networking, and he convinced British politicians to regard the small Jewish nationalist movement, Zionism, as a potential British ally in the Middle East. army after a mutiny in its infantry divisions. Some in Her Majesty’s government even believed that if Britain seemed positively disposed toward the Zionists in Palestine, the government might convince the Jews in the Russian revolutionary government to remain in the war. The Bolsheviks not only rebuffed this idea but also made a mockery of it by releasing the details of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the contents of which infuriated Britain’s Arab allies. In the end, the French stayed in the war, and the British managed to convince Greece to join the allies by making yet another promise of postwar spoils from the carcass of the Ottoman Empire. 

The End of the War and the Mandate System

        The end of World War I signaled the beginning of a new era in the Middle East. The peace treaties that followed the armistice introduced a new term into the lexicon of international relations: the mandate. A mandate was essentially a colony by another name. It was given an international legal fig leaf by its authorization through the newly organized League of Nations. The people of mandated territories were deemed unable to “stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” The state-designated as the “Mandatory Power” would provide “administrative advice and assistance” until the people of the mandate could “stand alone.” Just when that time would be was not specified. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formalized the mandate system, and it recognized the borders of the new Turkish Republic. This ended any hope for independent Kurdish and Armenian states as part of the Great War settlement. The British received mandates in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. The French, who had appended some Syrian territory to the Mount Lebanon area in 1920, creating a larger Christian-dominated entity, were granted mandatory power over Syria and over this new Greater Lebanon. The new lines are drawn on the post–World War I maps of the Middle East effectively divided a contiguous area into discrete entities. These new borders disrupted commercial ties that had existed for centuries and placed restrictions on the movement of people and the flow of goods around the region. The economies of these individual mandates became increasingly oriented toward the mandatory power and away from its neighbors. The mandate system’s multiple jurisdictions replaced the central Ottoman political and legal structure throughout the Middle East. Administering the new territories necessitated establishing individual governments and other institutions of the state. New borders created an assortment of regimes and forms of local administration that imposed new kinds of responsibilities and legal sanctions on the peoples of the various mandates. As a consequence, new kinds of ideas of a Greater Syrian Arab nation encompassing Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine/Israel, and parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran continued to have a powerful hold on some, it was not long before ideological rivals in the form of Iraqi, Syrian, or Palestinian nationalism came to vie for the hearts and minds as well.