The Ottoman Empire and Turkey facing the West

Edhem Eldem presents his lecture in the series les courTs du Collège de France

Video transcript

I'm inaugurating this new Chair in Turkish and Ottoman History with a lecture this year that will focus on the long ^19th century and the transformation of the Ottoman Empire in the face of the West.

The aim is to analyze, to examine in detail, the dynamics of these relations between an Empire that is said to be dying and a Europe that is extremely powerful, and increasingly arrogant, so it's quite a conflictual relationship, but also one of love and admiration, since Ottoman modernization was to be measured against the yardstick of the West, in other words, we were to copy, emulate and try to imitate what we considered to be a formula for success.

So the idea is to find a rhythm for this ^nineteenth century, and I'm establishing this rhythm in three stages. The first phase is one of flirtation, so to speak, where the Ottoman Empire begins to discover, albeit very superficially, Western reality, notably through technological innovations. The second phase was one of union, or almost marriage. The Ottomans realized that ad hoc corrections were no longer enough, and that it was therefore necessary to embark on an overhaul, a reconstruction of the State, and this project was launched with great enthusiasm, it has to be said, from the 1840s onwards, but it wasn't just the State, it was also society that was being transformed from above, and I believe that the culmination of this process came in 1856, with a decree that, for the first time, spoke of the equality of all subjects. Now, equality is something that, in a traditional Ottoman context, makes no sense, since it's a hierarchical society where you already have slavery, but also fundamental inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims.

And for a while it works. I call it an Ottoman People's Spring. For twenty years, the state played along, starting to recruit non-Muslims into the ranks of the bureaucracy. It didn't last long, because it was a little unnatural - it was the ^19th century, the age of nationalism - and, above all, the management was bad. After twenty years, the Ottoman Empire ran out of steam, both politically and economically, leading to a crisis, and it was this crisis that ushered in the third phase of this long ^nineteenth century, a phase of divorce, as it were, between the Ottoman Empire and the West, in which the Ottoman Empire, believing itself to have been betrayed by Europe, turned in on itself.

It became an increasingly Islamic empire, more and more Turkish, since the language was Turkish, since Turkish nationalism was being born, and this is what founded the Turkish state in its modernity, and a rather dark modernity at that, since it was the period of the massacres perpetrated against the Armenians, which prefigured the state violence that was to characterize the ^20th century. So, all this to say that the ^19th century is extremely formative, and crucial for understanding the dynamics of the transformation of an Empire into a nation-state, a fascinating process that deserves to be studied in detail, giving primacy to local voices, because one of the problems with the historiography of this period, consequently, what we need to do is try to give a voice to local texts, to Ottoman texts, not just Turkish, Greek or Armenian, and try to see how this period takes shape and expresses itself based on documentation that we'll read in detail to try to understand a little how it works.

Documents and media

Program

Lecture

14:00 - 15:30

The Ottoman Empire and Turkey facing the West

Edhem Eldem presents his lecture in the series les courTs du Collège de France

Video transcript

Documents and media

Program

Introduction

Curiosity and hesitation

The first signs of commitment

When doubt sets in

Towards new knowledge ?

The challenges of the new order

See also