Tanzimat Reforms
The Ottoman Empire's sweeping 1839 to 1876 reforms, borrowing European models to modernize the state and hold its fraying territories together.
Faced with an empire visibly falling behind Europe, the Ottomans made a bold bet: to survive the West, they would have to borrow from it. The empire had just watched its own Egyptian governor's army shatter the sultan's and open the road to Constantinople; standing still now looked fatal. Between 1839 and 1876, a generation of reforming statesmen launched the Tanzimat, or 'reorganization,' a sweeping attempt to modernize the empire from the top down and hold its fraying territories together. It began with a single dramatic promise and ended, unfinished, with the empire's first written constitution.
A promise to every subject
The Tanzimat opened on November 3, 1839, when the young Sultan Abdülmecid I proclaimed the Edict of Gülhane, drafted by his reformist minister Mustafa Reşid Pasha. In it the sultan guaranteed the life, honor, and property of every subject, Muslim and Christian alike, and promised fair taxation and honest conscription in place of the old arbitrary abuses. A second reform edict in 1856 went further, declaring the legal equality of non-Muslims outright. The idea behind it, Ottomanism, was radical for its time and a break with the millet system that had sorted subjects by faith for four centuries: that a Greek Christian and a Turkish Muslim could be equal citizens of one shared state.
Building a modern state
The promises came with machinery, driven from the Sublime Porte, the grand vizier's offices that had become the working center of government. Reformers built a European-style conscript army, opened secular schools and mixed courts alongside the religious ones, and imported legal codes wholesale, borrowing a French commercial code and later assembling a modern civil code. Provincial administration was centralized and standardized under a new system of governors and councils. New telegraph lines, postal services, and railways began knitting the sprawling provinces to the capital. The goal was a state that could tax, draft, educate, and govern like its European rivals, and so stop losing wars and land to them.
The reformers' dilemma
But the project carried a contradiction it could never resolve. Reformers wanted Western strength without becoming Western; conservatives and the religious establishment bitterly resented granting Christians equality, feeling that Muslims had been stripped of their rightful primacy. Worse, equal citizenship did little to satisfy the empire's Christian nationalities, who increasingly wanted their own nations rather than a fairer seat in a reformed Ottoman one. The Tanzimat, meant to defuse nationalism, often fed it instead.
The era climaxed in 1876 with the Kanun-ı Esasi, the empire's first constitution, and a short-lived parliament, before Sultan Abdülhamid II suspended both within two years. Yet the ambition did not die with it. The Tanzimat's core wager, that the empire could be saved by remaking it along modern, secular, centralized lines, would be inherited by the Young Turks and, after the empire's fall, carried to its radical conclusion by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Turkish republic. The reorganization failed to save the Ottoman Empire, but it drew the blueprint for the state that replaced it.