In Ottoman history, the term Tanzimat (literally ‘the reforms’) designates a period that began in 1839 and ended by 1876. Literary scholars speak of ‘Tanzimat literature’ produced long after 1876, arguing that the literature displays continuities that warrant such usage. Reform policy also displays continuities after 1876. Yet the answer to the critical question of ‘who governs’ changed. The death of the last dominant Tanzimat statesman, Mehmed Emin Âli Paşa (1871), and the accession of the last dominant Ottoman sultan, Abdülhamid II (1876), decisively changed the answer to that question.

Background

No disagreement surrounds the beginning of the Tanzimat, for several watershed events occurred in 1839, including a change in ‘who governed’. However, Ottoman efforts at modernising reform had begun much earlier. The catastrophes that alerted Ottomans to the menace of European imperialism began with the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–74, ending with the disastrous Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. That treaty launched the series of crises known to Europeans as the ‘Eastern Question’, over how to dispose of the lands under Ottoman rule. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798) was equally traumatic, although temporary in its effects compared to Küçük Kaynarca, as it showed that the imperialist threat was not localised in the European borderlands but could make itself felt anywhere. These crises stimulated demands in both Istanbul and the provinces – for example at Mosul – for an end to the political decentralisation of the preceding two centuries and a reassertion of sultanic authority. Sultans Selim III (1789–1807) and Mahmud II (1808–39) responded with reform programmes that opened the Ottoman reform era (1789–1922).