Europeans intervened in the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century to increase their influence by “protecting minorities” they defined as at-risk. They offered non-Muslims and “heretical” Muslims special privileges and foreign education as protégés of the powerful European Great Powers. Watershed events in late Ottoman history read like a litany of European interventions in Ottoman affairs “on behalf of” the people deemed to be minorities: pressure to reform [leading in part to the Tanzimat, 1839-1876], the Crimean War [1854-56], the Lebanon crisis [1860], and the Balkan wars [1912-13]. In each of these interventions, “minority” status was based on religion. By the end of World War I, the victorious powers had become convinced that linguistic—or “national”—minorities had created the conflagration that had engulfed the world. To prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe, the US president called for self-determination of peoples, and the Great Powers imposed sovereignty-limiting “Minorities Treaties” on newly-created states. European defined minorities by language, and the new Minorities Treaties System [1919-1923] provided certain rights for those living in a state defined by a different language-group. They were to be provided access to education in their own language, permitted to their language during official business, and shown respect for their distinctive cultures. The last years of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of its successor state struggled to make sense of the new definitions of majority and minority. As Turkish nationalist forces fought off a Greek invasion, Europeans sought to define the contending parties according to their new paradigm. League of Nations officials contended that “Greeks” and “Turks” were different races, but defined these “racial” distinctions by religion. While language was largely irrelevant as a distinguishing category during the end of the Ottoman Empire, religion was unacceptable according to the new European notions of affiliation. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Europeans maintained their insistence on protecting the newly-defined “minorities” in its former territories. Their interventions, reformulated to conform to the new emphasis reflected in the “Minorities Treaties,” led not only to escalating conflict among the residents of disputed Alexandretta and Mosul, but also to a catastrophic “exchange of populations.” Using sources from the League of Nations, the local press, and French, British, and American archives, this paper seeks to reinterpret late-Ottoman “minorities” policies by comparing them to the new assumptions introduced into the region by the European Minorities Treaty regime.

After 1877-78 Ottoman Russian War, the secession of 5.5 million Christian subjects from the empire due to the loss of Balkan territories had transformed the empire into an overwhelmingly Asian and Muslim state. This transformation prevented sultan Abdulhamid II to cling on to liberal/Ottomanist policies which rested on confidence towards the west and the Christian elements. Only an absolutist/pro-Islamist policy could keep the remaining pieces of the Empire together. Islam began to assume a different function in this policy in comparison to the Tanzimat era. The Sultan embraced the Asian and Muslim identity of the state. The previous attempts of reformist state officials in promoting secular Ottomanism as the ideological glue holding the empire together was thus replaced by an Islamist one. In line with such a policy, Muslim clerics were venerated, new mosques opened and Islam incorporated more into the education system. The relations with Muslim countries were ever closer, clerics were sent to Islamic countries to promote the office of the caliph, pro-Islam newspapers were subsidized, and closer ties were forged with religious orders, with the overall aim of making the Y?ld?z Palace the Vatican of the Islamic world. Europe interpreted sultan Abdulhamid II’s relations with the Muslims of the world underpinned by the common denominator of religion as 'panislamism' and was intimidated by this policy. However the sultan, a ruler who was fully aware of the limits of his power, pursued the policy of maintaining the status quo would obviously not try and rally all Muslims of the world round his political leadership. So what did the Caliph intend to do? Von der Goltz Pasha, who apparently analyzed Abdulhamid quite well, responds to this question as 'to conquer from within.' The sultan, by boosting his reputation and hence strengthening the office of the caliph, was trying to keep the Muslim elements of the empire together. Put differently, the purpose was to prevent the virus of nationalism from infecting non-Turkish Muslims. The Sultan, intent on preventing the expansion of the Arab nationalist/secessionist movement, allocated a larger share of the state budget to Arabia and began to recruit more Arabs to the state administration as a countermeasure. The Tribal School established to educate the children of Arab notables and the construction of the Hejaz Railway were two such measurees to intgerate the Arabs into the Ottoman system.

During the nineteenth century, the negotiation of Western European modernity necessitated the reassessment of the location of religion in society. This reassessment was marked by three tendencies. First, the sources of authority it relied on had to be redefined and re-legitimated. As a consequence, the state had to strategically intervene in the domain of religion because of the inherent sources of legitimacy embedded within it. Second, as political participation in the public sphere escalated, the organization of politics as well as the shaping of political consciousness necessitated the development of a system of law based on Weber's conception of legal, rational authority. The development brought the state in direct challenge with the existing systems of law based on religion. Third, increased political participation and state centralization required a redefinition of national identity, one no longer based on religion but instead on certain unifying characteristics of the populace. Even though the process of Ottoman political secularization has been analyzed in depth, scholars often locate its roots after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution of the Young Turks as political power id definitively removed from the sultan. Yet, this paper proposes a new approach by arguing instead that the origins of political secularization ought to be traced instead to the autocratic reign of sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909). During the reign of sultan Abdulhamid II, this paper argues, the secularization of law, education and public administration continued to gradually reach a level that enabled the sociopolitical transformation of the whole system. As a consequence, even though the reign of sultan Abdulhamid II is often regarded as autocratic and conservative, the modern elements that eventually enabled the transformation to constitutional rule in general and secular administration in particular were also established and expanded during the same reign. In summary, this paper develops a new approach to late Ottoman history by locating the origins of Ottoman political secularization not in the early twentieth century as is the convention among historians, but instead in late nineteenth century in general and in the measures taken by the conservative sultan Abdulhamid II in particular. It does so based on official documents located in the Ottoman archives.

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a great deal of effort throughout Europe to establish international cooperation in fighting terrorism that had emerged as a new form of collective protest and violence. Espeically In the last quarter of the century, there had been many terrorist incidents that left both the populace and their states in great horror. There were, for instance, three assassinations against head of states and many bombings. It could be conjectured that the new vision of the French Revolution promoting equality, liberty and fraternity on the one side, but also generating discrimination, exclusion and collective violence on the other was one of the principle instigators of this mode of destructive expression. The year 1898 when the Empress of Austria was assassinated can be marked a turning point in the debate on international cooperation on security. During 1898, almost all the European states - including the Ottoman Empire- participated in a secret conference in Rome that was held withthe intent to take collective measures against anarchist terrorists. Eventhough the conference failed to ceate a joint stand against anarchist terrorism, it nevertheless enabled the spread of various administrative precautions that many states then applied domestically. Hence, the conference was significant in setting the precedent for many subsequent meetings that have been held not only later in the twentieth century, but also in teh twenty-first. At the conference, the Ottoman Empire initially sided with the conservative states, also attending the subsequent and more effective meetings and conferences that took place. This paper brings in a new approach to late Ottoman studies by focusing on the public negitona of the Ottoman Empire's stand on collective violence in the international sphere that it had started to participate in since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Specifically, the paper discusses the aims, motivations and, above all, the expectations of the Ottoman Empire in this context from archival documents that have not been previously studied.