A History of Islamic Societies

The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was one of the more complex cases in the transition from eighteenth-century Islamic imperial societies to modern national states. The Ottoman regime was suzerain over a vast territory, including the Balkans, Turkey, the Arab Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and North Africa. Its influence reached Inner Asia, the Red Sea, and the Sahara. While the empire had gone through a period of decentralization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had begun to give ground to its European political and commercial competitors, it retained its political legitimacy and its basic institutional structure. In the nineteenth century, the Ottomans restored the power of the central state, consolidated control over the provinces, and generated the economic, social, and cultural reforms that they hoped would make them effective competitors in the modern world.

While the Ottomans struggled to reform state and society, they depended increasingly upon the European balance of power for survival. Until 1878, the British and the Russians offset each other and generally protected the Ottoman regime from direct encroachment. Between 1878 and 1914, however, most of the Balkans became independent and Russia, Britain, and Austria-Hungary all acquired control of Ottoman territories. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire culminated at the end of World War I in the creation of Turkey and a plethora of new states in the Balkans and the Arab Middle East. The effects of European intervention mingled with the Ottoman institutional and cultural heritage to generate what we recognize as modern Middle Eastern society. The modern Turkish state emerged out of the reforms promulgated in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, and reforms in the period of national independence under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk. These reforms were challenged in the late twentieth century by a revived assertion of Islam. Turkey today is ruled by a democratically elected Islamic party and has the world’s sixteenth-largest national economy.