Ottoman History Podcast - A New History of The Eastern Question

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

with Ozan Ozavci hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | How was European military intervention in the Ottoman Empire justified throughout the nineteenth century? What did Ottoman statesmen and subjects think of these would-be attemepts to provide them with more security? From the late eighteenth century, as a new international system was emerging, European powers considered the Ottoman Empire a weaker foil to their own expanding empires. In this episode, Ozan Ozavci explores how this perception of Ottoman weakness, known as the Eastern Question, affected the Ottoman Empire's place in and engagement with the new international system and law. Exploring the different phases of the Eastern Question, from the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the Civil War in Greater Syria durings the 1860s, Ozavci highlights agency of individual actors in the Ottoman capital and the provinces. « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Zeynep Ozavodica. In the past few decades, we have been witnessing increasing military interventions in the Middle East by mostly the US, but also Europeans and Russia, under the guise of providing international and regional security. But when did providing security become a legitimate justification for military intervention in affairs of another polity? In Dangerous Gifts, Imperialism, Security and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864, Ozan Ozovji provides a complex and multi-layered answer to this question. From the French occupation of Egypt in 1798 to the civil war in the Greater Syria in the 1860s, Ozovjiises the role and agency of Ottoman state and local actors

in not only responding to these interventions, but also encouraging and facilitating them. I asked Professor Ozavji why he decided to write this book, and what was the main question he wanted to answer. It was part of this larger project, a sub-project about how a European security culture emerged in the 19th century. So I started writing a micro-history of European intervention in Syria in 1860. But I was stuck at some point. about the literature on since when these European great powers were intervening in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire and allegedly supplying security in the Levant or what was later termed the Middle East.

That question made me read more and more into the literature before 1860 and I realized that even though there is a fascinating really exciting literature on the subject there are considerable gaps and mainly in between different episodes of interventions there were gaps in showing the links between these and and how how each of these interventions, mainly from the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 to 1860, how these interventions triggered one another, affected one another. And it led me almost halfway through the project to review the entire structure of the book. So what I thought would be a micro history of 1860-61 intervention in Syria turned out to be a study of nearly, as I say in the book, nearly a century of foreign interventionism in the Middle East and its origins. And the main question that I found myself answering consequently became how it all began. Since when and by what right the so-called

major European great powers of the time came to allegedly supply security in the Middle East? So one of the things you focus on in this story of great powers intervention is the paradigm of the Eastern question. What was the Eastern question? When did it start becoming an important factor in international or inter-imperial relations? Well, at its simplest, the Eastern question was the question of how to deal with the alleged weakness of the Ottoman Empire. In the 18th century, especially, major powers, Austria, century especially, major powers, Austria, Russia, and to a lesser degree France, and much lesser degree Britain, found themselves having to answer this question because it became more and more apparent to them that the Ottoman Empire was now a relatively weaker entity in the European international system. While up until late 17th century,

the Ottoman Empire posed a threat to European peace and security by way of its military might and expansionist diplomacy. As of the 18th century, it was again seen as a threat, but not because of its military might, but because it lacked that strength. The perceived weakness of the Ottoman Empire was seen as both a threat to European peace on the one hand, but on the other hand, it provided the powers with opportunities for further raw materials. But there was also a third dimension of the Eastern question, which is usually the one long neglected, which is Ottoman agency.

The Ottomans were also aware and shared answer to this and they did so through a number of means, from introducing new reforms to trying to be more proactive diplomatically by opening up new embassies, observing European reforms and policy-making processes, and also by attempting to show their European neighbours how its military was not actually as weak as they believed and gaining themselves a more secure position in the international system ensuring their what contemporary social scientists call ontological security by getting their position in the international system as a lasting polity affirmed by their European neighbours. So there was also an Ottoman Eastern question in addition to all these European calculations and Eastern question was this complex constellation. In Dangerous Gifts, you make a point of highlighting the agency of individuals. How did this play out during the French occupation of Egypt in 1798?

I thought that if I could foreground the stories of individuals, it would make it more relatable to the readers. But I think the main individual figure that I look into on the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 is the Ottoman Sultan Selim III and I needed to foreground his agency mainly because especially in the English language literature there is a considerable absence of how the Ottomans received the intervention or the invasion. And Selim's life story is providing us with an excellent, I think, also dramatic account. I call him a lonely sultan, mainly because at his youth,

when he was still a prince, a şehzade, living a life of seclusion in Topkapı Palace, as per the Ottoman traditions, he had this great admiration to France. And he hoped, Selim hoped, that one day when he ascended to the throne and became Ottoman sultan, he would form an alliance with France and upend the miseries that his empire had been going through one being the reoccupation of the Crimea which the Russians had placed under their indirect control after the treaty of Kuchuk Kaynarca and then annexed in 1783 and Selim considered it as a major threat. And indeed shortly after he became the Sultan, he started his reform program with the advice of his ministers by also introducing French engineers,

French officers, even French bureaucrats that would train his armies, bureaucracy and this is early 1790s but that story came to an abrupt end in 1798 and in the years before the French invasion of Egypt. Helm's plan was to form an alliance with France and stop Russian aggression but all of a sudden he found himself having to form an alliance with Russia for the first time in Ottoman history and Britain to halt French aggression in Egypt. This was a very dramatic twist and then there comes many other twists after the French were ousted from Egypt this time Selim would need the support of the French to drive the British armies that supported the Ottomans in Egypt out of you know that bountiful country that's what I believe makes him a lonely sultan because he realized that forming alliances with one or

another European power would not suffice to ensure the security of his empire and his territorial integrity and it led especially his nephew Sultan Mahmud II to pursue a more isolationist policy in the coming years. This is how we can better understand why the Ottomans decided not to be a part of the Vienna system when a new world order was established during the treaties or during the meetings in Paris and during the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815. Shifting from what was happening in the Ottoman center in Istanbul, then you talk about the changing definition of the Eastern question to the Istanbul-Cairo power struggles. How did the Egyptian question, as you call it, unfold? Two soldiers, one originally a Caucasian slave called Hüsrev, Mehmed Hüsrev,

and another, possibly a gangster from Kavala, an Albanian, possibly with Kurdish origins, Mehmed Ali. They were sent to Egypt in the year 1800 together with the Ottoman army to fight against the French. During the French invasion of Egypt. And those two soldiers. They remained. After the French were driven out.

One of them Hüsrev became. Governor. Of Cairo. And the other Mehmed Ali. Became. A middle rank officer. Under the command of Hüsrev. An Albanian officer. and the other Mehmed Ali became a middle-ranked officer under the command of Israf, an Albanian officer. But after the French left, after the Ottoman Imperial Army left

and the British Imperial Army eventually left, a civil war erupted in Egypt. Between the Mamluk base of Egypt and Ottoman Imperial Army first but then it became a fiendishly complex civil war when the Albanian units serving under Hüsrev split from Hüsrev's rule and turned against Hüsrev and the civil war turned out to be a three-parted civil war and Mehmet Ali this gangster from Kavala he would turn his sword against Hüsrev in 1803 and within two years time this middle rank officer would emerge as the new governor of egypt while Husrev would have to return back to the capital why am i telling you this story because within a few decades time in the late 1820s the parts of Hüsrev and Mehmed Ali would cross

more than once and it would be one of the reasons that would lead the Ottoman Empire into a major civil war between Cairo and Istanbul when Hüsrev became one of the most powerful men in Topkapı Palace after he was appointed as Seyreske, the Ottoman equivalent of Minister of War in 1827 and Mehmet Ali emerged as the commander of the most powerful army in the entire Ottoman world in the 1830s when Mehmed Ali launched a very daring campaign on Syria and invaded Syria and by the time we reached February 1833 Mehmed Ali's army was in Kütahya about 48 hours away from Istanbul and at any minute they could march and end the Sultan's empire for good. The Sultan, Sultan Mahmud II would respond to the Egyptian threat in early 1833 by doing something that they'd never done, no other Ottoman Sultan ever done in the history of

the Ottoman Empire, by appealing to the aid of a foreign power. Hüsrev Oluf Esedin emerged, as far as we can trace in Russian accounts Hüsrev emerges this figure who would pressure the Sultan to accept Russian aid so this interpersonal rivalry would affect the fortunes of not only the Ottoman Empire but the entire Europe because the moment the Russians arrived in Istanbul what was initially a crisis between the Sultan and the Pasha of Egypt turned out to be a trans-imperial crisis. So European powers came to the brink of war in fact as early as 1833 but that didn't happen nobody risked it at the time and for about six years the Egyptian question or the eastern crisis was halted in a very

discomforting situation for the Ottomans. How did this crisis between Istanbul and Cairo gets resolved? Well it is a very complex answer because we have multiple actors at stake here. So the British and the French want to end Russian influence over Istanbul together with Ottomans and the British and the Russians they really don't want Mehmet Ali to keep Syria or show further aggression toward the Ottomans but Mehmet Ali is backed by France so you will have this deadlock in the mid 1830s and how could this be appended in the book I looked at the agency of Mustafa Reşit the Ottoman ambassador eventually to Paris and London and a foreign minister as of January 1838. In July 1839 just after the Ottoman imperial army was once again defeated by Mehmed Ali's armies

in Nizib and only weeks after Sultan Mahmud II died of tuberculosis, Mustafa Rashid submitted a memorandum first to the French intervene in the crisis between Istanbul and Egypt. only because it provides us with a very tangible material evidence of how the ottoman the so-called what i call the levantine actress served as a pull factor to european interventionism it's always been a two-way process interventions with push and pull factors. But did that intervention occur? The answer is yes and no. Yes because the powers collectively intervened but no, France resisted. The idea of civilization was welcomed more and more in European international thought and Mehmed Ali was framed in French, mainly liberal public opinion, as the civilizer of the East, the civilized face of the East. opinion as the the civilizer of the east the civilized face of the east and figures like Adolphe Thier who became french prime and foreign minister would even argue that the cause of Mehmet

Ali is the cause of France so the intervention would take place but not with the involvement of France but what happens is the Ottoman and British agents, Mustafa Reshit, Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador in Istanbul, and Vakon Palmiston. They came up with this idea of orchestrating a revolt, scratching these Lebanese sentiments. The Lebanese were under Mehmet Ali's rule. sentiments the lebanese were under Mehmet Ali's rule if they could mobilize the Lebanese against Mehmet Ali if they could restart a revolt against Mehmet Ali and if Mehmet Ali continued to suppress mainly especially the Maronite peasants they could upend the perception of Mehmet Ali in the French public opinion. And that's what they did.

A British dragoman, Richard Wood, was sent to Syria along with British ships to orchestrate the revolt. When the Maronite peasants rose against Mehmet Ali, and as Mehmet Ali started to suppress them brutally, the civilized Mehmet Ali was suppressing Catholics that were under the protection of France. And Mehmet Ali's suppression would day by day adversely affect his image in French public opinion. And that's how the second crisis was resolved. France left Mehmed Ali alone and Mehmed Ali would not be able to fight against the intervening powers. He agreed on retreating back to Egypt and he agreed on limiting his army to about 20,000 men.

20,000 men but he was given hereditary rights in Eastern question. In the book, you argue that during the Egyptian question phase of the Eastern question. In the book, you argue that in the 1830s, the civilizational narrative had a global moment. Why did the civilizational narrative become an important idea in inter-imperial relations? How did it enter the Ottoman political discourse? Civilization, or standard of civilization, came to be used in the mid 19th century onwards from late 1830s 40s onwards as a license to intervene in the affairs of others. If you look at British parliamentary discussions during the Opium Wars, how the opium wars were justified if you look at how french policy in algiers transformed from occupation to elastic lasting colonialism you would find that the idea of civilization is looming large there that bifurcated lens of the world, seeing the world divided between civilized and uncivilized polities, it looms large, it loomed large.

What about the Ottoman Empire? What about Egypt? The idea of civilization or the term civilization entered in Ottoman political lexicon in the early 1830s, first with publications in the official journal Takvim-i Vekai but in my view it gained traction and came to inform Ottoman diplomacy through the agency of Mustafa Reşit as of 1830s because he was in Paris right at the time the term was gaining traction in international thought. He observed that and if you look at his dispatches from Paris and London back to Istanbul in the 1830s, you see that it does play a considerable role in his reading of European international system and how to incorporate the Ottoman Empire into this system during the civil war with Cairo.

The fact that the Ottomans declared the Gulhane Edict in November 1839 had much to do with the idea of civilization. The term civilization is not in the edict, nor is the term equality, müsavat. They are not there. But if you look at the subtext of the edict, if you look at the dialogues between Ottoman and European agents, both in the run-up to the declaration of the edict and after, you would see that they're explicitly talking about equality and you will find that the ottoman agents particularly mustafa reshid is explicitly lamenting that the istanbul government the ottoman imperial government was still called quote unquote barbarians and he wanted to append this barbarians and he wanted to append this and one his first dispatches after the edict was promulgated was to vicon palmerston to london and he was saying this edict should serve in

the interest of humanity he was trying to position the ottoman empire alongside the civilized actors in the 19th century and against Mehmet Ali. So the civilization game as I say in the book, painting Mehmet Ali in a darker light by orchestrating a Maronite revolt, they were all connected. But there is much more to tell there, much more to unpack about Mustafa Reci's agency, the idea of civilization, which became one of the main semi-ideological standpoints of the Ottomans by 1850s, especially at the hands of Reşit's protégés like Ali and Fuat Pasha's medeniyetçilik civilizationism became the ideology that they upheld mainly because they wanted to ensure a place for the Ottoman Empire within the concert of Europe And Ali and Fuat Pasha and some other Ottoman statesmen at the time believed being part of the Concert of

Europe would ultimately guarantee the territorial integrity and independence of the entire Ottoman Empire. But they could not have been more wrong, of course. The idea of civilization and the cycle of civil wars in Mount Lebanon were deeply intertwined in that in the first place the 1840 intervention in Mount Lebanon resulted or it was facilitated by invoking this idea by breaking French resistance painting Mehmet Ali in a negative light but the other hand, the belief that the Lebanese were the uncivilized other of the Ottoman imperial system, within the Ottoman imperial system, it also furnished the Ottoman imperial authorities, especially from early 1840s onwards, with a rhetorical tool to fend off great power interventions. So what they were trying to do was, just like in India and in Algiers,

so-called uncivilized polities would rise against empires and empires would have to appeal to violence to suppress them. What is transpiring in Lebanon is no different. The so-called age-old hostilities among the so-called barbaric, uncivilised Lebanese had to be suppressed by force if necessary and Ottoman elites would do that. How did the Ottoman state use the civilizational narrative, or Ottoman Orientalism as some scholars have prevent the powers to intervene in the civil war in Mount Lebanon and stop violence in Damascus. What they tried to do at the time was on the one hand to refer to the Articles of Treaty of Paris with which the powers were supposed not to interfere in the domestic affairs of Sultan and respect his territorial integrity.

And they were showing it is a sign of the fact that the Ottoman Empire belonged to the family of nations. And what was transpiring in Mount Lebanon was violence between two semi-civilized or uncivilized polities. This is how the Ottomans framed it. But from a European point of view, policies. This is how the Ottomans framed it. But from a European point of view, the Ottoman Empire, with its much weakened financial system, with its economic adversity, economic problems, and with its, what the Europeans believed, incapacity to rule over the variety of subject peoples. So they all considered this as a sign of the fact that the Ottomans were actually not quite there, if you look at the progress of civilization. And they saw it as a justificatory tool to intervene. So civilization or the standard of civilization, even though it was not always explicitly uttered, sometimes it was,

but it was used. At its simplest, this is how it was played into the diplomatic dynamics of the time. If you look at the longer history of emergence of sectarianism, you can find that as early as 1800s, 1810s, under the partial influence of revolutionary ideas, French revolutionary ideas, and weirdly enough, among the Maronite clergy, like figures like Yusuf Esfahan, you would find these egalitarian sentiments and postulations emerging and inculcated into the Maronite peasantry's worldviews. This is a gradual process, of course, but as earlier as that, we see these sentiments among the peasants unfolding, and they wanted lower taxes, they want lands for themselves and one reason one of among many for the 1822 revolts to erupt the peasant revolts against the feudal lords were these egalitarian sentiments and then in 1820s we see from archival sources we see that religious discourses, religious slogans were uttered,

used and weaponized. And then in the 1830s when Mehmet Ali invaded Syria and Bashir II, the Grand Emir of Mount Lebanon started started to serve under his rule. We again see this very explicit language against the Druze on the part of the Maronite leader in Mehmed Ali. So I would not argue that sectarian violence unfolded in Mount Lebanon, sectarianism unfolded in Mount Lebanon in the 1840s after the Gulhane Edict. Nor would I say it unfolded in 1830s nor in 1820s alone. I think here we are speaking of multiple vectors feeding into complex system that had class dimension, that religious dimension,

that had inter-faedal differences dimension, that is the economic dimension especially when it comes to land disputes. And sectarianism in my view gradually unfolded from 1800s through until 1860s. So it was a longer process that needs to be studied more holistically rather than pinning it down to one or the other event. The fact that European powers such as France tried to further their interests in Mount Lebanon after the 1840 intervention which was humiliating for Paris, they tried to regain their historical influence over the Maronites by supplying them with arms and ammunition. It heightened, indeed, the degree of schisms and crevices, as I say in the book, among different religious sects. But it did not start from scratch. Those differences were already there. There was a degree of sectarian violence even before.

That's how I read the emergence of sectarianism and sectarian violence in Lebanon in the course of the 19th century. In this one century-long story that you tell, we have the evolution of the idea of the Eastern Question, the introduction of the civilizational narrative. How does the idea of intervention change? How does what constituted a legitimate intervention evolve and change? I start my story in 1790s because even though in history there were other foreign interventions in the Middle East in the Levant by Western actors such as Crusades. With the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, a new discursive practice unfolds.

A practice which, in my view, lasts to this very day, given the Russian intervention in Ukraine and how it is justified. What is that? It is to intervene for the benefit of the locals. We are intervening and our intervention is a great service to the Sultan as Talleyrand would frame French invasion of Egypt. It is a disinterested intervention to assist the Sultan as Russian foreign Minister Nasser Rod would argue during the 1840 intervention, and so on and so forth.

The French invasion of Egypt was a unilateral one, and it was not placed on a legal footing other than this discursive practice. than this discursive practice but in 1850 with the emergence of the vienna order interventionism came to be placed on a quasi-legal footing through a quasi-legal organ that was the concert of europe the so-called great powers of the time, they were self-defined. The term great power emerged as a legal category in 1840 with the Treaty of Chaumont, I believe, and those five great powers of the time, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and eventually France, they gave themselves the authority to intervene. But they had to justify their interventionism before an audience, which was themselves. Of course, from 1820s onwards, public opinion also started to play a bigger role,

as we saw in the case of the 1840 intervention, how the French public opinion had to be affected. You said that this emergence of the new security culture, which justified great powers intervention in the Ottoman Empire, has had a lasting impact until today. What are the lessons from the story that you're telling for today on how we understand interventionism in the Middle East? on how we understand interventionism in the Middle East. So one of the main arguments that I'm postulating in the book is the fact that we need to see the processes that lead to civil wars and interventions, not only in reference to their immediate environments,

but we need to look at these long-term processes also because it would allow us to see that if you look at the agency of individuals if you look at how structures were morphed into new structures we see that there was an immense degree of complexity that historical actors had to deal with during each intervention a degree of complexity that historical actors had to deal with during each intervention. A degree of complexity produced not only by individual agency, local realities, but also inter-sectoral realities, how financial, economic, legal, religious, geostrategic considerations religious, geostrategic considerations fed into each moment in question. A degree of complexity that historical actors, mainly intervening actors,

could never fully understand. And in this respect, I see a great continuity between past and present. Consider American invasion of Iraq and how the approach to Iraq, how the planning of intervention in such a short interval of time proved to be a disaster, proved to be one of the reasons for a lasting civil war in iraq even though i never argue that before the 2003 intervention iraq was a stable and peaceful country this is the another point that i'm making in the book These interventions were not the main initiators of violence and civil wars and instability, but they only increased the degree. But the degree of arrogance in 1798 on the part of Bonaparte and Tadejwan and in 2003 on the part of neoconservatives is quite comparable. To expect that the locals would welcome these interventions. This is the discursive practice.

This is the continuity I'm talking about. So this is one thing. The other thing is about what economic and financial benefits did they procure and to whom in the end these interventions? Who were the net receivers of security and the interest that came out of these interventions? I think there is a continuity between past and present in this respect as well. We need to unpack how the military complex,

the financial interest since the invasion of Afghanistan, the intervention in Afghanistan that ended very recently, affected the nature of the intervening powers and the target states and societies in the past 20 years. What benefits did they actually procure for the locals, Financial, economic, whatever, all those investments. Who were the net receivers? A similar story unfolded in the 19th century as well. The 1840 intervention that took place with many pledges to the local actors, pledges of equality, pledges of lens,

or pledges of restoring their ancient rights and privileges. They did not really sit well with the post-intervention realities and only became a recipe for further civil wars and violence. So this is another lesson, or maybe more so than a lesson, a continuity between past and present and finally i think we need also we need to mention also the pull factors of interventions so it was not only about a group of strategists in a european or western metropole, rubbing their hands and thinking how to procure benefits and turn a complex situation to their favor. But there have always been pull factors also, as we see in the example of Mustafa Reşit,

who would explicitly write to the powers how to intervene, why to intervene, what languages to adopt and he was not the only Levantine actor that called for interventionism. I think they should also be taken into account in understanding why foreign armed interventions through imperial hubris tended to result in further turmoil and a security paradox, meaning further demand for security after or despite allegedly increasing supply of security in the shape of interventions. Thank you for listening. This is Zeynep Azarbadugan, and that's it for now. I hope you join us soon for our future episodes of the Ottoman History Podcast. podcast.