Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires: A Comparative Approach 9781474238564, 9781474238557, 9781474238540

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Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires

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Europe’s Legacy in the Modern World Series Editors: Martti Koskenniemi and Bo Stråth (University of Helsinki, Finland) The nineteenth century is often described as Europe’s century. This series aims to explore the truth of this claim. It views Europe as a global actor and offers insights into its role in ordering the world, creating community and providing welfare in the nineteenth century and beyond. Volumes in the series investigate tensions between the national and the global, welfare and warfare, property and poverty. They look at how notions like democracy, populism and totalitarianism came to be intertwined and how this legacy persists in the present day world. The series emphasizes the entanglements between the legal, the political and the economic and employs techniques and methodologies from the history of legal, political and economic thought, the history of events, and structural history. The result is a collection of works that shed new light on the role that Europe’s intellectual history has played in the development of the modern world. Published: Europe’s Utopias of Peace, Bo Stråth European Modernity: A Global Approach, Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner Historical Teleologies in the Modern World, edited by Henning Trüper, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam Forthcoming: Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age: Crisis, Populace and Leadership, Markus J. Prutsch Social Difference in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: An Intellectual History, Francisco A. Ortega

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Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires A Comparative Approach Adrian Brisku

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Adrian Brisku, 2017 Adrian Brisku has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : ePDF : eBook:

978-1-4742-3856-4 978-1-4742-3854-0 978-1-4742-3853-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Europe’s Legacy in the Modern World Cover image © INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Introduction

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Part 1 Men versus Institutions: Law and Religion 1

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Quests for Fundamental Change: ‘True Monarchy’ and the ‘Holy Alliance’

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‘Alternation and Complete Renewal of Ancient Custom’: An Unattainable Pledge

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Part 2 Managing the Future: From Law to Political Economy and Political Representation 3

Empire and Progress

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A Constitutional Empire

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Epilogue: From Reform to Revolution: Imperial Core in Turmoil

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Notes Bibliography Index

199 241 257

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Introduction

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.1 What would be a conceivable reason for bringing together the political projects and deeds of prominent nineteenth-century Russian historical figures such as Tsar Alexander I, statesman Michael Speransky, Tsar Alexander II , ‘enlightened bureaucrat’ Nikolai Miliutin, and Ottoman statesmen Reshid Pasha, Ali Pasha, Fuad and Midhat Pasha? The answer to this question, however awkward it might initially appear, is their embrace of the language of political reform; a language that seems to evoke – beyond the frame of time and space of the so-called ‘European century’ (1815–1914)2 – a sense of immediacy and recurrence. This is not to say that prior to this century such language did not exert political traction in the Ottoman and Russian empires. It did, but it had a particular meaning and relevance. In the constantly shifting eighteenth-century international scene of European alliances and wars – more importantly of cut-throat wars against each other – improving their military standing remained the most important aspect for these essentially militaristic and bureaucratic land empires. So, in the recurring efforts for renewal, the underpinning of which still had this relevance, these historical figures were foremost articulators and arguably less successful implementers of this language and its new vocabularies. Certainly, these vocabularies concerned not only the stability and survival of the Ottoman and Romanov dynastic houses, but also the regeneration of the imperial states: their internal conditions, political and administrative arbitrariness, public indebtedness, religious and social tensions, as well as their external relations and their status as great powers (with questions of the nature of alliances and world order). Thus, the survival of the dynastic houses was crucial in these efforts, but given the growing nineteenth-century political and economic pressures (domestic and inter-state), the stability of dynastic rule could no longer be guaranteed without engaging with change in state and society. This most 1

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Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires

certainly represented a semantic rupture in their political language, manifested thus in exalted yet contested new vocabularies on the primacy of new permanent laws and institutions, political economy and political representation. But the language of political reform, or engaging in change while preserving stability, and of having the best possible outcomes from the two, was, at best, a double-edged sword. It could either serve as a source for raising hopes and expectations or, as yet another meaningless move towards the status quo, disappointment, and even repression. From the perspective of the imperial state – an idea certainly conveyed by recalling the titles of the historical figures mentioned above – the new vocabularies could undermine the very power that each of these houses enjoyed in previous centuries. This was the kernel of the tensions that manifested in the attempts of each of the historical figures. Engaging with these concepts and, perhaps, projecting some notions of future based on the rule of law could range from providing for basic legal guarantees of life and property, the establishment of permanent laws and new institutions, to granting constitutions, or relapsing into arbitrariness and despotism. Notions of future were trumpeted based on political economy, from creating national wealth by opening up imperial economic space (labour, capital and monetary policy, attitudes with regard to agricultural or industrial sectors) to tenets of economic liberalism, or closing it in by upholding principles of economic paternalism and development, in fact ‘two sets of policies which were in each case reforms of an elaborate system of “protection”, external and internal’.3 Or, furthermore, based on the possibilities for political representation: would the source of ultimate power, and hence the power to legislate, still be derived from the monarch, or from the nation? Would there be a genuine division of this power between the two (constitutional monarchy), or would it simply be the creation of representative structures that would ultimately be to ‘counsel’ the monarch rather than to legislate in his stead? How realistic was the application of the notions of the separation of powers? Dilemmas in foreign affairs ranged from war and isolation to peace, diplomacy and alliances, where the goal was to remain an important player in the emerging and changing nineteenthcentury European inter-state order. With the advantage of hindsight we know that with all of these intensified efforts of state-led regeneration and political change – with perhaps some of the most prominent ones being unravelled in this book – and the range of alternatives and possibilities opened up in the domains of law, politics and economy, the end of the ‘European century’ was also the end of these two empires. It is only natural to pose the re-occurring questions: how and why? Eminent American historian Charles Tilly had already pointed out in his reflection on ‘How Empires End’ that:

Introduction

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‘From Herodotus to Montesquieu and beyond, poets, historians, and philosophers have recurrently produced one of our culture’s standard literary forms: the dirge for a fallen empire.’4 How, with all these attempts, was it not possible for their governments to avoid the downfall? Contemporaries with influence in politics, in both empires, sensed and articulated domestic and external dangers that threatened the respective entities. But they also thought they could be averted with political solutions that came to be articulated in certain vocabularies, as alluded to above. Of course, they could not predict the future, and so the future remained open and uncertain. The attempts, then, of ex-post explanations raises questions of their being rather simplistic, and particularly when it comes to a comparison, ‘the search for point by point correspondence should in principle have very little utility’.5 Prominent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, even though dismissing the attempt to offer explanations and compare these empires, did so briefly (including the Habsburg Empire) in order to move on to examine the consequences of their downfall, in an article titled ‘The End of Empires’, by writing that ‘all were obsolete political entities in an era of nation-state building, to which they offered no alternative. All were weak . . . and therefore endangered players in the international power game.’6 But, as this book argues and shows, there was an alternative offered in the language of political reform, traceable in the political moves and their articulation by these influential contemporaries for mastering their time and space in the face of an unknown and uncertain future. These ex-post explanations need to be considered, nevertheless: even more so when there is not much direct comparison between the two empires. There are in fact two somewhat contending traditional explanations or narratives. The first explanation, as Hobsbawm pointed out, focuses on the rise of nationalisms in the Ottoman and Russian empires. All successor nation states from these empires constructed their collapse as a prelude to the establishment of these new states.7 The second explanation points to the consumption of these empires from geopolitical rivalry, particularly the long and enduring wars against each other. The only – and most direct – comparison of the two empires on this point, which deals with the last decade of their military confrontations and subsequent human devastation, comes from Michael A. Reynolds’s book, Shattering Empires: The Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (2011). It argued that, ‘fear of partition led the Ottoman state to destroy its imperial order, whereas the compulsive desire for greater security and fear of an unstable southern border spurred the Russian state to press beyond its capacity and thereby precipitate its own collapse and the dissolution of its empire’.8 For all its merits, this book still argues within much of the established narrative (each

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Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires

empire, Ottoman and Russian, considered separately) of ‘decline and fall’9 – a heightened geopolitical determinism which thwarts reflections on whether the collapse was due to the possible future-oriented alternatives in the domains of politics, law and economy, and emerging geopolitical internal and external tensions that these imperial states (i.e. imperial houses and their central governments) were in themselves not able to negotiate. In other words, it was not only the military machines’ overstretch but also the unfulfilled political projects10 of the future of the bureaucratic apparatuses – the two legs on which the respective dynastic houses commanded and relied – that led to the collapse of their empires. Thus, their collapse, as with many other modernizing or modern empires, such as the Soviet Union, could be largely considered as a process triggered by ‘some combination of external conquest and internal defection’.11 It might be obvious by now that this language of political reform was a bureaucratic one, and the articulation of the efforts in these empires to solve emerging as well as deeply embedded (inter)national, or simply imperial, issues of the time. Having underlined this, two important points urgently need to be addressed. First, notwithstanding internal dynamics, degree and effectiveness, both empires increasingly became powerful bureaucratic states during the ‘European century’. This is a crucial point to make against a widely held notion in the literature, as discussed further below, of these two Eastern empires as weak and unstable in contrast to Western empires (the French, British, and later the Austro-Hungarian and German ones). In fact, one can go against the grain of the usual positive–negative binary categorization of Western empires/states – as moving from autocracy to constitutionalism; from unstable to stable international actors; from economic paternalism to that of liberalism; from lawless to a law-based state versus the Ottoman and Russian empires unable to do so – by arguing that bureaucratic machines and political elites of ‘Western empires’ actually felt less secure and stable because of emerging social and economic pressures caused by technological advancements in industry and agriculture as well as demographic explosions. Therefore, they had to resort to exporting these pressures to their own colonial territories, giving political power to a rising middle class (in Britain), or (as with the example of the French Revolution) resisting but then succumbing to it. Meanwhile, for the greater part of the century, the Ottoman and Romanov dynastic houses – and particularly reforming voices in their governments – did not feel any great insecurity in those terms. They seemed confident enough believing that, irrespective of internal and external issues, it was still possible to engage with change without actually involving more people in their political processes, even though they would be

Introduction

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critical. Hence, a generational confidence in a state-led bureaucratic, that is top-down, change from within remained steady until the point when it was challenged by revolutions at the turn of the twentieth century: namely, the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and the Russian Revolution of 1905 as well as the October Revolution (1917). Thus, in embarking on islahat, ‘improving, reforming, putting defective things into more perfect condition’12 in the Ottoman case, and peremiéna (change), reformy (reforms) in the Russian, these proponents of change and stability evoked existing political vocabularies of order and prosperity, respectively: asayiş (public order, public tranquillity), mülkün mamurluğu (flourishing condition, prosperity), together with adalet (justice, equity),13 and stabil’nost’ (stability), blagosostoyanie (welfare) and spravedlivost’ (justice). They believed that the language of political change (modernity, secularization, nation and West) and that of stability with its corresponding opposites (tradition, religion, empire and East), however contentious, could be reconcilable at some level to ensure both the survival and welfare of the imperial state and societies. There is a strong parallel in this including the way in which the collapse of the language of political reform due to these revolutions gave, for most of the twentieth century, political relevance solely to the vocabulary of political change through revolution: respectively, nationalist and communist. This leads us to the second point, which is familiarity of this prevailing, nineteenth-century, political language to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century one.14 The projects of nineteenth-century Ottoman and Russian political figures, such as Michael Speransky’s True Monarchy, Tsar Alexander I’s Holy Alliance of 1815, or Reshid Pasha’s sponsoring of the 1839 Imperial Decree of Gülhane (to name but a few), are interesting to revisit and juxtapose as accounts for reflecting on the nature of political reform: the perpetual dilemma of how to affect change aimed at ameliorating the existing order of things without undermining the powers that would allow for this process to happen – the middle ground between what was possible and what was necessary.15 But also, they are to be taken as illuminating historical accounts of projects, naturally with their own context-bound peculiarities, which entail future-oriented, bureaucratically led changes in multi-cultural and multi-ethnic populaces. These were political projects that from a twenty-first-century perspective can also been as undemocratic – progress is weak, if at all. The presentism from which probably no book project can escape makes the case for a reflection on the post-Second World War European political project as well as vicissitudes of political reform in these empires’ core successive entities, respectively, Russian and Turkish states. As a bureaucratically led endeavour, geared towards a pre-determined goal of ensuring

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lasting peace and progress, the European political project, with its concepts of peace (stability) and economic prosperity (change), can be seen as an illustration on its own of this dilemma. It is in this sense that the language of politics surrounding it, strangely perhaps, sounds much like those articulated in the Ottoman and Russian empires during the ‘European century’. The prevalence of politics of change (meaning revolutions) in the twentiethcentury Russian (Soviet) and Ottoman (Turkish) political landscapes is largely reflected by the ways respective historiographies – in their own separate ways (prisms and presentisms) – have understood and interpreted nineteenth-century imperial political developments. In this process of understanding and interpreting, contestation of more entrenched paradigms by new ones has become apparent; yet, as ex-post attempts to explain these political developments, these paradigms are unable to do so fully. As early as the 1960s, nineteenth-century Ottoman history has been scrutinized under the lens of modernization theory – a useful analytical tool for both a Turkish nationalist viewpoint and a wider Western scholarship. One of the most enduring interpretations held is the secularization thesis, which draws a direct link between the emergence of secularization of Ottoman politics and the rise of constitutionalism, parliamentarism and westernization.16 It did not take much to undermine this telos by those who pointed to the neglect in the analysis of internal drives in Ottoman state and society.17 If this was, at all, a historical analysis, then how could one make the case for the pre-eminence of secularization in the late nineteenth century, the ‘upward march from Islamic empire to secular republic’, when not more than a decade later it was being undermined by the Islamic resurgence?18 The other prism for analysing the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire has been through an even more entrenched thesis, namely that of ‘decline’. This thesis has also been challenged, but in quite the opposite direction to the modernization thesis, meaning pre-determined regress rather than progress of empire.19 For instance, in the economic sphere a widely held claim that economic liberalism de-industrialized Ottoman nascent industrial economy and brought about its dependency in world economy has been contradicted by the view of an Ottoman economic dynamism which, despite territorial losses accumulated during a century, was characterized by a vitality of its local workshops.20 In fact, the trope of decline had a strong presence in the seventeenth-century Ottoman political advice literature as a way for Ottomans to express this sense with regard to their dynasty ‘both as a prescription and a warning that Ottoman institutions needed rejuvenation to the state of vigour of previous generations’.21 This trope took centre stage in the realm of nineteenth-century foreign affairs, depicting

Introduction

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active British, Russian and French empires, as opposed to a passive Ottoman state doomed for extinction. Here, the persistence of the ‘Eastern Question’ (a British Foreign Office political and diplomatic term),22 and Russian Tsar Nicholas I’s sticky ‘sick man of Europe’23 metaphor, perpetuated this trope. But this was not so. For even some nineteenth-century literature,24 as well as new research,25 has pointed to the dynamism of Ottoman internal and foreign politics. This active role entailed a re-orientation within Ottoman politics towards a larger frame of European alliances and rivalries as well as changing avenues for participation of foreign states in Ottoman politics.26 Perhaps a good illustration of this was the remark of Ottoman statesman Fuad Pasha to a Western diplomat in the mid-nineteenth century, where he said: ‘our state is the strongest state. For you are trying to cause its collapse from the outside, and we from the inside, but still its does not collapse.’27 Three interpretative frames have dominated the historiographical discourse on nineteenth-century Russian imperial history. The pre-1917 revolutionary (the nineteenth-century ‘state school’28) historiography, and the Soviet interpretive frame (for instance Nathan Eidel’man’s ‘Revolution from Above’29) – in contrast to Western scholarship on Russian nineteenth-century history – share a common approach in upholding ‘centralistic’ and teleological visions on the transformative role of the Russian state and its ability to bring about socio-economic and cultural change. To a great extent, this cannot be denied. Seen as a ‘unitary, more or less centralised national state, dedicated to international recognition, the attainment of social-economic prosperity, and a high cultural level of a European type’,30 the state, however, was conceived without taking into account the international context it found itself in. It particularly overlooked diplomatic and military history in justifying its great-power status, and disregarding the multi-ethnic and multicultural aspects of the empire. These two interpretative frames shared understanding of an inherent self-propelling historical determinism of ‘vast impersonal forces’ and underlying laws of history seem to be at work here. With such a perspective, they completely disregarded any possibility for chance, or alternative developments, having any role to play.31 Meanwhile, Western scholarship, dwelling (like its Ottoman counterpart) on modernization theory, has been criticized for using concepts that confuse and misrepresent the language of politics of this century. Its descriptive dichotomies – liberal versus conservative, red versus reactionary and bourgeoisie versus feudal – appear as politically highly charged, serving to name enemies, or friends and supporters, rather than anything else.32 What all these three historical interpretations have in common is that they recognize the primacy of the transformative but insular role of the

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Russian imperial state – change from above – but disagree on whether this change was cyclical33 or progressive.34 Marked differences can be noted when Ottoman and Russian historiographical interpretations of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed: particularly on the theme here, namely political reform. The Russian side, in which reform became a major theme between the concepts of revolution and repression in Russian and Soviet political history only after the mid-1980s perestroika,35 pays little attention to the Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign affairs), or the Primat der Innepolitik (role of domestic politics) on the need for change,36 whereas their Ottoman counterparts debate both.37 Thus, the major contrast between the two is that while similarly the state (hence the top-down approach) is the key agent of change in both empires, in the Russian case it is understood as acting independently of internal and external pressures, whereas in the Ottoman case it is not. This was not entirely so. Speransky, Tsar Alexander I, Miliutin, Tsar Alexander II , as well as Reshid Pasha, Ali, Fuad and Midhat Pasha, all embraced the language of political reform because of pressures from the society within and from the European states without. Indeed, it is the argument of this book that both empires share a strong parallel in the nexus between domestic political reform and a search for a status among the other European empires and states. Therefore, political reform was deployed as a device (tool) for long-term stability. In this light, the aforementioned legal, religious, economic norms and orders were instruments to connect reform to stability. The contrast between the two in this regard is that Russian reform also had international relations as a target, whereas over time Ottoman reform became the target of the Concert of Europe (see p. 47), including of Russia. The trope of ‘decline’ is also a term that similarly accompanies both empires in the nineteenth century, with the important qualification that the Ottomans selfapplied it throughout the century, whereas the Russians only did so during the second half of the century. Thus, these interpretative and conceptual parallels and contrasts make the case for having a comparative approach on political reform in the two empires. This even more so when considering how persuasively the modernization theory, in both cases, has been used to inject that telos,38 the endgoal, Hegelian notion of a self-propelling role for the state in change and stability and of dialectical progression of time that leaves no room for chance. Such ahistoricity39 is easily undermined by offering such historical accounts, as this book does, of projects that emerged for establishing new permanent laws and institutions, of developmental political economy and of political representation, projects introduced by prominent people, which were constantly contested.

Introduction

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It is a-historicity, however, that can be ascribed not only to these two historiographies but also to that surrounding the political project of Europe, the EU. Indeed, the literature on the processes of EU political and economic integration40 and European modernity and identity,41 despite recognizing existential problems arising a long with these processes – such as the 2011 Euro and Greek Crisis, the 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis and the 2016 Brexit referendum (the UK ’s decision to leave the EU ) – continues to not reflect beyond what proponents of the ‘European political project’ advance as a self-congratulatory and self-propelling, bureaucratically led vision that will continue to ensure peace and progress.42 Even though the fallout from the impact of Brexit remains to be assessed, such a historical event most certainly will be considered as a potential watershed moment of the EU ‘disintegration’. This is because such a literature in its analysis has been solely engaged with the alternative of integration, through crisis and reform, without even doubting the possibility of disintegration. It has also been arrestingly introspective. Scholars of the EU integration have not paid any attention to the not so distant forms of integration in the post-state socialist bloc – viewed as inferior to the EU 43 – as well as to their subsequent disintegration. Even more lacking has been a retrospection on the nineteenth-century European legacy. The historical reflection on this legacy within and without the European continent reveals how ‘the conventional master narrative about Europe as a selfpropelling machine fuelled by Enlightenment values and progress’ has unwittingly sidelined ‘a negative counter-narrative about a continuous European tragedy of fate from post-war to pre-war and war’, and how rather than impersonal forces, it is human agency with the choices it made44 that have forged this legacy. The Ottoman and Russian experiences in the nineteenth-century political reform and the instigators of these major reform projects, as this book will explore further below, are also part of this nineteenth-century legacy of struggles for emancipation, retreat, regression and certainly war. Exploring how this master narrative about the contemporary Europe of the EU with its teleological assumptions in the Europeanization project in the scholarship is as problematic as master narratives of westernization and modernization in Ottoman and Russian historiographical scholarship. They also share an evolutionary approach to change, as opposed to revolutionary, as the only legitimate and viable option, even though by surveying the historical literature in both cases a cyclical mode to change also becomes available. These themes alone explored through such historical accounts that dwell on attempts to politically reform – contextualizing also how easily they are replaced by reaction and suppression as well as followed

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by revolution – make the case for this Ottoman and Russian comparison on reform as an integral part of this nineteenth-century European legacy. These themes are crucial in reading this book for usually – as the British historian on Russia, Dominic Lieven, rightly suggested – historical comparisons are a messy web of stories and events within unique societies.45 But this also has not refrained scholars, Ottoman in this case, of seeing a potential richness in studying Ottoman–Russian history because of its common history, including the contrast between the late seventeenth and the early twentieth century.46 Also, in fact, it has not refrained commentators of twenty-first-century Russian and Turkish relations to draw direct parallels between the two states, regarding their domestic politics dominated by ‘strong, authoritarian leaders’47 (a major theme of this book is framed as Men versus Institutions), more particularly towards Russian and Turkish presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leaders who see themselves as ‘heirs to the two mantles of these too long-gone [Ottoman and Russian] empires’,48 and who conduct their foreign policy in a nineteenth-century style of balance of power and zero-sum game.49 But to return to the scholarship, these two empires have indeed been compared, but not yet as one to one basis. Existing comparisons have been framed in the format of edited volumes where, aside from these two, other empires have been lumped together from the perspective of what caused and what were the consequences of their collapse50 from the aspect of their imperial modes of rule and legitimacy;51 from the prisms of political conflict, infrastructure development, ethnic pluralism and war experiences.52 But there is a more direct parallel to be drawn between the two empires in that, unlike all the European Powers in the continent, both Russian and Ottoman monarchies, while subscribing discursively to the rule of law for respective states, in practice denied the ‘very principal of a law-based state’53 to their respective realms. A scholar of Russian history, Peter Holquist attributed this distinction solely to the case of nineteenth-century Russia but in juxtaposing the trajectories of reform projects by the aforementioned figures, as will be done below, such a description is applicable to the Ottoman case, too. Historian of the Ottoman Empire, Carter C. Findley, in his book Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire (1980), pointed out also that these two empires indeed shared the same legal vocabulary, namely ‘rational legalism’. Referring to historian George Yaney’s assertion that in Russia rational legalism was part of official discourse,54 which certainly began with the Petrine reforms of the early eighteenth century, Findley drew a parallel with how similarly this vocabulary ‘was coming to exist in the minds of Ottoman statesmen as a myth and ideal, even if it did not exist in day to day working of the administrative system’.55 And, aside

Introduction

11

from this parallel with regard to the vocabulary of law (rational legalism), scholars draw similar lines on the nature of reforms per se as being ‘conservative’56 and of its agents as being ‘reformist conservatives’.57 One perspective, or paradigm as the prominent scholar of nineteenth-century Russian history Marc Raeff put it, for exploring that potential is Reinhart Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft (futures-past) approach.58 For it makes possible doing away with the determinism attributed to the Russian imperial past by focusing on human agency and the ‘accidental, fortuitous, and unpredictable features that make for the appeal, variety, and suspensefulness of the irretrievable past experience’.59 This is indeed an alternative way to engage also with the imperial Ottoman reform and survival strategies as opposed to rehashing teleologies of decline, westernization and modernization, which are deeply embedded in the narratives on the Ottoman Empire.60 Thus, both Russian and Ottoman historiographies could greatly profit by the analysis of political language of the nineteenth-century political projects (conceptualization by prominent figures, followed by debates, successes and/or failures), so far having been outside of their focus.61 Moreover, the insight of British intellectual historian Quentin Skinner about considering the intentions and background ideologies of texts62 and projects when reconstructing meanings in the past is elucidating. As such, this book does not build on new archival material. Rather, its novelty rests on a unique comparison: a contrast of contexts63 on the theme of political reform and historical concept of reform in the two imperial settings and the parallels in their meaning emerging from a futures-past historical perspective. Thus together with Skinner’s insight, Koselleck’s perspective with its conceptual metaphors of ‘horizon of expectations’ and ‘space of experience’, as well as a set of questions developed within it – such as: what visions were articulated, accepted or rejected?; how was resistance to change manifested and articulated?; and what was at stake internally and externally when change and reform(s) were proposed? – is helpful in uncovering the long-term tensions of the political reform and search for stability in these two powers, which spilled over as tensions between domestic and foreign politics. If ‘horizon of expectation’ and ‘space of experience’ are ex-post historical categories – as Koselleck posits, purported to ‘indicate a general human condition’64 – it is possible to view the Ottoman and Russian nineteenth century as the onset of a future-oriented notion of time, of political projects, amidst renewed calls for a return to traditions and informal conventions, whereby generated expectations became heightened by the opening up of alternatives and tensions to which experiences were not always matched. This book is divided into two parts, in which the respective chronologies of the two empires do not necessarily converge. Each part contains two chapters.

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Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires

The first part titled ‘Men versus Institutions: Law and Religion’ loosely covers the first half of the nineteenth century. What binds this part together is the notion that political reform is strongly entrusted to the rather miraculous effects attributed to new and permanent laws, domestically as well as in foreign relations, and new institutions. But tensions that arise in their constraining the unlimited political authority of powerful men remains unresolved. This is because even though renewal of the empires through ‘modern’ law, the rule of law, gains high traction, its nature and function are strongly contested. Would it be to curb the despotic power of powerful men or solely for regulating the workings of state institutions? Would laws, as in the Russian case, find their legitimacy from the unlimited power of the monarch, or would they be, as in the Ottoman case, disputed between the religious and secular domains? Would religion have an important role in domestic and international politics? These are some of the most important tensions tackled within this section. The first chapter, ‘Quests for Fundamental Change: “True Monarchy” and the “Holy Alliance”’ is an account built around two prominent early nineteenthcentury Russian imperial figures and their ‘projects’: Russian statesman Michael Speransky with his idea of ‘True Monarchy’ for internal constitutional change, and Emperor Alexander I with his European peace project of the Holy Alliance in the post-Napoleonic European restoration. The second chapter, ‘“Alternation and Complete Renewal of Ancient Custom”: An Unattainable Pledge’, is an account on Ottoman modern reformer, statesman Reshid Pasha – from the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century to the conclusion of the Crimean War in 1856 – around his project for new, permanent laws and institutions to engineer change internally and externally in the Ottoman Empire. Amidst a myriad of structural differences, their stories reflect unexpected mirror-like paths, efforts and destinies. Speransky’s ‘True Monarchy’ and Reshid Pasha’s ‘Permanent Institutions’ relied heavily on a similar legal vocabulary – permanent laws (European, French civil codes) that ran short of any contemporary constitutional conceptions – as well as a shared idiom of political economy. Whereas, in foreign relations, Tsar Alexander I’s geopolitical dilemmas in a post-Napoleonic European restoration entailed the use of constitutionalism in tandem with a paradoxical employment of the religious idiom (based on Christian precepts) in the project of the ‘Holy Alliance’ to forge a durable European peace. This, however, was not the idiom with which Reshid Pasha’s Ottoman Empire could make peace and forge alliances with European states. The vocabulary of civilization, with which European powers articulated their influences in inter-state affairs, was acceptable to him not in the sense of reinforcing an antagonistic religious dichotomy of Islam versus

Introduction

13

Christianity, but rather, a secular understanding of civilization that necessitated new laws and institutions was, in Reshid Pasha’s conception, the future for bringing the Ottoman monarchy closer to the Concert of Europe, as well as for regenerating the empire. Compelled by persistent immediate political concerns and personal shortcomings, their visions and efforts seemed daring, but met insurmountable resistance. Their political projects remained incomplete; while their drive for change faded so did the alternative to a future based on the prominence of laws. The second part, ‘Managing the Future: From Law to Political Economy and Political Representation’ is largely set between the mid-nineteenth century, the aftermath of the Crimean War (1853–1856), and the 1870s and 1880s, highlighting the urgency of political economy and political representation as key ideas for managing the future of the empires. But again, these concepts are highly contested. The ensuing chapter ‘Empire and Progress’ traces the diverging and occasionally converging visions and trajectories of three influential figures in the post-Crimean Russian wave of political and socio-economic change. They are: the reformist bureaucrat Nikolai Miliutin, embarking on a well-trodden path to change in order to prepare the most ground-breaking draft legislation in nineteenth-century Russian history (Emancipation of Serfs in 1861); the timid but determined Emperor Alexander II whose fear of Russia losing its Great Power status takes him into dangerous paths of change internally and externally; and hereditary bureaucrat, and minister of internal affairs Peter A. Valuev who saw a direct link between reforming the politics and the economics of the provinces of the empire with extending political rights of nobility as well as peasantry to the imperial level through a constitutional project. The final chapter titled ‘A Constitutional Empire’ is an account of the interactions of key Ottoman political figures, Ali, Fuad and Midhat Pashas, from the negotiations of the Paris Treaty in 1856 to the aftermath of the Berlin Congress of 1878, also in the context of the rise of the Young Ottoman intellectual movement and the 1870s Ottoman debt crisis. The chapter contextualizes the search for new imperial politics (in political representation and economic welfare) in the practice and the reflections of these three figures, particularly Midhat Pasha’s pragmatic move – grounded on his successful provincial Ottoman reforms – towards formalizing constitutionally what Ali and Fuad Pasha de facto had established, namely, the preponderance of the Porte as the fulcrum of the Ottoman political power over the Palace. By the end of their political careers both Fuad and Ali Pasha had seen the limits of Reshid Pasha’s spearheaded Ottoman reform project – a European-inspired, rule-based and

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economically liberal approach – either because of the impossibility of its rules and regulations to unify the diverse peoples of the empire, with Fuad suggesting to think otherwise in terms of forging a ‘union’, or because of an unsustainable combination of such reforms with European political intervention, with Ali calling for a rethink of Ottoman politics in terms of ‘common interests’. Meanwhile, taking on imperial politics where Fuad and Ali left it, Midhat Pasha’s alternative, for reforming the imperial centre, became constitutionalism – a fortuitous combination of his experience as a successful reformer of the Ottoman province, applying ‘developmental’ economy and ‘national’ political representation with the language of constitutionalism already articulated by the main proponents of the Young Ottoman movement. The ‘Epilogue’ reflects on whether the language of political reform in the two states was completely undermined, respectively, by the 1908 Young Turk, the Russian 1905 Liberal and the 1917 Communist political revolutions.

Part One

Men versus Institutions: Law and Religion Preface The first vocabularies regarding the politics of reform that came into prominence in both empires during the first half of the nineteenth century were those of new permanent laws – what Findley retrospectively referred to as ‘rational legalism’ – new institutions and religion. They were elevated and articulated as the fundamental means to think about, and act upon, the ordering of the imperial states and societies from within and in their relations to other European powers when the question of a single individual or a state threatened the internal and external power balances. In contextualizing them thus, a much more fruitful link is established between the ‘international’ and the ‘politics of domestic, social, economic and cultural transformation’.1 For a long time, the notions of law and religion had been used as tools for stability, in forging state order as well as alliances and boundaries within and between states. But they acquired the valence of change with the rapid political, military and economic transformations taking place in the continent in the nineteenth century. That had to do with what modern legal theory recognizes as a shift from a ‘view of law as the word of sovereign giver’ to that in which ‘law follows the dictates of reason for the welfare of mankind’.2 In the Ottoman case, the matter was directly more sensitive because secular law was entangled with the religious law. But even in the Russian case, following Speransky’s understanding of law, a similar entanglement was present, too. If in both empires legal, institutional and maybe constitutional (at this point) reforms became the means to constrain extreme political and economic imbalances, hence expand the power of central governments at the expense of nobility and regional notables, and so to revive imperial and European politics, Russian and Ottoman 15

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statesmen and rulers in discussion here differed on the role of religion, and its ultimate purpose, telos, in this renewal. Imperial Russian reformers sought to bring in religion for its perceived unity, while the Ottomans struggled with it, because of its divisiveness not only within the empire but also in relations to other Great Powers of Europe. However, unlike the Ottomans, more precisely Reshid Pasha, the Russians, with Tsar Alexander I as the main protagonist, reform through the vocabulary of religion had European and even global relations as its main target. In addition, because Russian centralizing efforts, bureaucratic and military (modern standing army), had begun with Peter the Great’s ‘Europeanizing’ reforms of the early eighteenth century – a century in which the Ottoman Empire had allowed for more provincial autonomy in its realm – the early nineteenth century found the Russian Empire more centralized than its counterpart. And thanks to it being connected to the Enlightenment intellectual currents, more than the Ottoman Empire, it had an emerging public opinion. Nevertheless, in their efforts to promote the state-led efforts for new institutions and permanent laws, Speransky and initially Sultan Mahmud II , on new institutions, would initiate the publications of official bulletins or newspapers (Speransky with Sankt Peterburgskii Zhurnal3 and Mahmud II ’s Le Moniteur Ottoman4) as way of promoting and educating existing or emerging public opinion on these fundamental changes.

1

Quests for Fundamental Change: ‘True Monarchy’ and the ‘Holy Alliance’

For a ‘true monarchy’ Permanent laws against despotism: the realm of constitution and the Russian ‘trinity’ (autocracy, nobility and serfdom) In 1809 rumours were growing in the Russian imperial court in St Petersburg, and within Muscovite high nobility, that the most trusted adviser to Emperor Alexander I (1777–1825), Michael M. Speransky (1772–1839), was secretly preparing a draft constitution. To be revealed only to the Emperor and his small, entrusted circle, the draft entailed great changes for imperial Russia. Fuelled by the fact that only a few parts of it were published1 – the full scope and the aims of changes proposed remained unknown to all but the Emperor until the middle of the century2 – these rumours turned into sharp negative reactions. Disgruntled by the immense political power that Speransky (an upstart, son of a village priest from the province of Vladimir)3 enjoyed as the State Secretary and a close confidant to the Tsar, members of the nobility anxiously wondered what the Emperor would do with the draft. There was no love lost between them and Speransky, even more so if those changes would mean the fruition of his vision of ‘True Monarchy’.4 We will return to this declared animosity between Speransky and the nobility much later, although some of the tensions will become obvious within the text, but it first needs to be laid out what makes Speransky relevant here: his historiographical significance and more importantly his conception of ‘True Monarchy’. Thus, his political language (change through new permanent laws and institutions) and constitutional ideas expressed by Alexander I, his high political position, and the reaction against these, make him a prime example of a contemporary whose thinking, deeds and interactions with his Emperor and others would shed light onto Tsar Alexander I’s two decades or so of attempts of 17

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political reform in imperial Russia. His significance as probably the most important statesman of nineteenth-century Russia has been duly recognized in historiographical trends over the last centuries. Already by the mid-nineteenth century, not long after his death, Russian intellectuals became divided over his legacy – whether he was a liberal or a conservative.5 Whilst at the onset of the twentieth century, and in the wake of the establishment of constitutional monarchy, Russian liberal historians firmly established him as ‘liberal constitutionalist’,6 in the Soviet period he was characterized as the defender of the feudal order by the Soviet historiography.7 For most Russian readers in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the image depicted by Leo Tolstoy in his famous work War and Peace8 of Speransky as a soulless face of abstraction – and as hypocritical and slippery as an eel9 – must have made a curious impression. More recent readings of his historical role, which include late-Soviet, post-Soviet and Western scholarship, have reiterated his liberal credentials10 some going even further in suggesting that Speransky synergized two great intellectual currents in Russia – both investing great hopes in political change at the dawn of Tsar Alexander I’s reign. On one hand stood the oldfashioned rationalist of the Enlightenment (influenced particularly by Scottish Enlightenment), who developed the concept of grazhdanskeo obshchestvo (civil society), underpinned by private property and legally safeguarded rights of men, and who entered into a path of political and constitutional change that would entail transformation of Russia from a military to a commercial state, hence secular liberalism. And on the other hand, it was the political mysticism of members of the mystical freemasonry, known as Illuminati or Martinists, who envisaged a religious rejuvenation of humanity, and aimed for a supraecclesiastical and universalistic understanding of Christianity.11 To his most important biographer, Marc Raeff, the first link is questionable; however, he would certainly agree with the second association. What remains is the labelling of Speransky as a liberal; a rather limiting adjective when his vision of ‘True Monarchy’ is unravelled further, as below. The much rumoured 1809 Vvdenie k ylazheniju Draft Statute was crucial, for it finally provided a materialization to the high expectations raised by Tsar Alexander I, at the onset of his reign, for a constitutional imperial state. Those expectations, whilst accelerating, had been derailed due to the Napoleonic wars in the European continent. It seemed as if there was a breathing space for the Russian state to engage with domestic reforms when the War of Fourth Coalition came to an end following Emperor Napoleon I signing the Treaties of Tilsit with Emperor Alexander I and the Prussian Emperor in the summer of 1807.12 The

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draft constitution would make a serious intervention in an already vibrant debate on the constitutionalism of influential political factions in St Petersburg and Moscow. The debate – to which Speransky contributed with the idea of ‘True Monarchy’, inspired by Montesquieu – had focused on changing the nature of monarchical power, limiting it through permanent laws,13 so to do away with the despotism that had characterized the short-lived reign of Alexander’s father, Emperor Paul I (r.  1796–1801). Emperor Paul I’s despotism had irritatingly manifested, particularly within two policy areas. He had disregarded what, during his mother Empress Catherine the Great’s reign (r. 1762–1796), had been a vital national interest: namely, foreign policy.14 For instance, by undertaking a serious quarrel with Britain over the island of Malta, the Emperor was seen as a great fool by his opponents. Gravely disregardful in the eyes of the nobility, the Emperor, by revoking his late mother’s Charter of the Nobility (1761) and Charter of the Towns (1875), was forcing them back into compulsory state service.15 Hence, a sense of urgency was given to the political debate among the nobility on the role and nature of Russian samoderzhavie (autocracy), which had been recurring in eighteenth-century Russia, whereby a dramatic shift gained currency by the end of the century for a role as a trigger of ‘dynamic change’, as opposed to solely being for the ‘maintenance of stability’. Emperor Paul I’s despotism brought into question, once again, the contention of whether it was beneficial for monarchical power to be unlimited, or limited and based on the rule of law.16 In addition to this fundamental political question, there was the pressing issue of serfdom: whether to emancipate the peasants or simply improve their conditions, and what the role of nobility would be – which was debated initially in the confines of the newly established Free Economic Society instigated by Catherine the Great in 1766.17 Speransky’s ‘True Monarchy’ represented rather systematic answers to these contentions, answers which did not necessarily convey a general and shared view of the whole Russian political spectrum. His contribution was about reforming the nature of monarchy through the establishment of new and permanent laws. In a wider sense, the ‘True Monarchy’ entailed a state based on law, guiding the spiritual and material progress of the nation,18 and reforms that ‘consist in establishing and founding the government, hitherto absolute, on unchangeable laws’.19 For his part, the twenty-four year-old Tsar Alexander I, in his proclamation of accession in 1801, had raised the expectation for a constitutional and legal state. He pledged a return to the principles of his grandmother Catherine the Great – hence tacitly agreeing that his father’s despotism had been unsupportable. ‘We

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accept’, he had declared, ‘the obligation to rule the people entrusted in us by God, according to the laws and spirit of Our August late grandmother, Empress Catherine the Great, whose memory will be eternally dear to us and the entire fatherland.’20 It was a political promise that future imperial politics would not be characterized by arbitrariness and despotism, but instead would be mediated by laws. This excited old dignitaries of Catherine the Great’s time, and the rest of the high nobility, who wished to firmly secure their privileges as the first estate of the empire. They were convinced that the concept of ‘constitution’, or better terms such as ‘fundamental laws and fundamental institutions’ – which did not evoke any associations with the French and American revolutions – would be the vessels that would contain those privileges.21 Their enthusiasm on Alexander’s seriousness to abide by his pledge was reinforced by an image of the young Emperor as a liberal idealist, influenced by republican Swiss tutor Frédéric César de La Harpe (1754–1838), and his liberal friends of the so-called Unofficial Committee (particularly his friends Victor Kochubei (1768–1834) and Prince Adam Czartorysky (1770–1861)),22 to whom he had expressed, respectively, the desire to give Russia a constitution and then retire on the banks of the river Rhine and the hatred against ‘despotism, wherever and by whatever manner it was exercised and that he loved liberty, that liberty was owed equally to all men’.23 The impression that laws would mediate imperial political interests was coupled by the promise that the chaotic legal structure of the empire would also have to be seriously dealt with. Within months of his ascension to the throne, Tsar Alexander I sought to address this chaos by demanding the establishment of a ‘single law’ for the whole empire. This was to be carried out by a new Commission on Laws – new in that it was his first, but actually the tenth established in the empire’s recent history. The Emperor told the president of the Commission that the goal was that of ‘basing the foundation and source of the people’s happiness in a single law [sic]’ [and change existing situation of the body of law, which] ‘had no connection with each other, no unity of purpose, no permanence in effect’ and that it had ‘resulted a general confusion on the rights and obligations of everyone’.24 His was the vision for a new legal code that provided clarity and efficiency for the Russian state. However, it was a vision that could not be implemented because the people assigned to make it happen could not, for a long time, decide on what should be the principia juris (legal principles) for the codification – whether to use a historical approach or apply enlightened legal principles. These rather technical choices were highly charged politically, for the historical approach implied bowing down to the demands of the old

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dignitaries, and in more technical terms it meant relying solely on old Russian legal codes – riddled with their own insufficiencies. The enlightened, rational, legal principles, on the other hand, were even more political because in technical terms it meant opting for a clean slate in legal reasoning; disregarding historical examples whilst more directly adopting these principles called for drawing on the most developed European legal codes of the day. In the Ottoman case, as we will see, it would not be a variety of legal historical precedents which would be challenged by the new legal reasoning and codes, but a robust religious system of law that already had defined the identity and the workings of the Ottoman state and society. These were the Code Civil in France (Code Napoléon), as well as those of Austria and Prussia. This legal and political ‘hot potato’ had finally landed in 1808 in the hands of Speransky, who was appointed the new chief of the Commission, as well as nominated Assistant Minister of Justice. Speransky, who was still by this time not well-versed on the technicalities of law, opted for the European models, which would have left him dealing with what he referred to as the ‘barbarian laws’ of the empire. Certainly, Speransky’s take backfired, and the code would not survive the political attack. Compiling the code in a rush in 1812, Speransky submitted it to the Council of State (this being a new institution he proposed, to be discussed below). As Russia was preparing for the war of 1812 against Napoleonic France, Speransky’s opponents accused him of imposing on monarchical, autocratic and orthodox Russia a code of laws copied from radical, revolutionary, atheistic France. Russian contemporary court historian Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) attacked him, asserting that the code was a complete copy of the French Civil Code.25 Later, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, Speransky would revise his principia juris by accepting the historical approach when compiling the Russian code; however, it was too late for this attempt to establish a single law for the empire. The process of codification, seemingly of a technical nature, was played out with geopolitical undertones, too. Unlike this process however, the expressed ambition of limiting the power of the monarch through the establishment of permanent laws was directly political. It would seem rather strange that the young Emperor actually asked the elder statesmen, many of them active in the regicide of Paul I on 11 March 1801, to reform the institution of the Senate by redefining its powers. As vocal representatives of this group, brothers Counts Alexander (1741–1805), who was main chancellor to Tsar Alexander I, and Simon Vorontsov (1744–1832), a long-standing Russian Ambassador to Britain, drafted what came to be known as the Charter to the Russian People, which they wanted to promulgate at the coronation of Alexander I. Drawing on the

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eighteenth-century example of England, with which Count Simon Voronstov was very familiar, and also from the so-called Konditsy (Conditions) – a set of rights demanded by Russian nobility to Empress Anne (r. 1730–1740) in 1730 – the draft sought a dominant role for higher nobility in the government, through the Senate. The latter would have a consultative voice and limited power of initiative in the legislative process. It would also oversee the proper implementation by imperial administration of decrees and edicts, making sure no bureaucrat violated the basic laws and privileges of the nation (meaning nobility). Certainly, the actual task of legislation remained in the hands of the Emperor and his immediate advisers, but the Senate would have droit de remontrance (a right to object), which effectively limited the absolute power of the monarch – ultimately exercising in Russian, by first securing rights and privileges for one class of the nation, the concept of Rechtsstaat (a state based on the rule of law).26 The Charter thus represented the first attempt to curbing the despotism of monarchical rule by enhancing the political powers of the senate and by granting rights to nobility, an attempt that Alexander I disregarded. One of the reasons, aside from the political implications of the Charter, was what was the purpose of the law, and ultimately of the constitution. If the nobility, through the Charter, expressed the vision for a political community based on ensuring substantial political rights for the first estate vis-à-vis monarchical prerogatives, Speransky’s constitutional conception, as alluded to above and shared by Tsar Alexander I, was not one of rights but of duties and obligations through permanent laws. In the meantime, in the early 1800s, Speransky’s career in government service was in ascendance. As an impressively bright young person, coming from a lower social background, serving as chief of a department in the Chancery of the Procurator General of the Senate during Paul I’s reign (Prince Alexander B. Kurakin (1752–1818)), when Alexander I took the reins of the empire Speransky sought to participate in political debates of the time. And he had acquired all the intellectual references to do so. Having excelled in his studies – at the prestigious Alexandro-Nevskii Seminary religious institute in Russia, near St Petersburg – he had mastered to the highest possible level the rules and norms of the eighteenth-century philosophical and technical style of writing. It was more a matter of chance that instead of joining the ranks of the Russian clergy, he came under the patronage of the powerful political magnate, Kurakin, dealing impressively with important judicial and administrative matters of the empire.27 Also, crucially, he was well-versed with the ideas of rationalism of German Enlightenment giants such as Gottfried Leibniz

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(1646–1716), Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804);28 French Enlightenment political philosopher Charles de Montesquieu (1689– 1755); and the Russian Enlightenment figures Alexander Radishchev (1749– 1802) and Vasily Karazin (1773–1842), with both of whom he had working relationships.29 That contribution, as mentioned above, came to be articulated through the concept of True Monarchy. As a critique to the existing political situation and as an alternative to political reform, in his concept of ‘True Monarchy’, which surfaced in a political treatise published between 1801 and 1802 – a treatise that remains accessible only in a summary form prepared by V. I. Semevskii at the turn of the twentieth century30 – Speransky was mainly indebted to eighteenth-century political philosophy and particularly to Montesqueiu’s The Spirit of Laws31 and Radishchev’s views on Russian imperial politics. In this treatise, Speransky underscored how the existing political situation of the monarchy, once characterized by stable moral and patriarchal relations between the rulers and ruled, had deteriorated into disorder, arbitrariness and widespread despotism. The political and social structure of the monarchy, he considered, remained unsuited to freedom. In fact, he thought that Russian society was made up of two kinds of slaves: those to the monarch, and those to the landowners; each of the classes being interested in the other remaining enslaved. The result was a permanent struggle and exhaustion of the two groups, beneficial only to a despotic state. ‘A state composed in this manner,’ he grimly observed, and very directly going against the nobility’s position in the Charter, ‘whatever external constitutional it has, even if the nobility and its towns have been given charters, and even if it were to have not only two Senates but as many legislative parliaments as well – this state is despotical [sic]. And as long as its elements remain in that relationship to each other, it will never be monarchical.’32 The only alternative he saw was in new kinds of rules, which protected the ‘welfare’ of people; ‘rules are called the fundamental laws of the state, and their collection is a general statute or constitution’.33 This view he developed further in the political essay titled O korenn’ikh zakonakh gosudarastva (On the Fundamental Laws of the State), which was his intervention in the September 1802 debates on the reform of the Senate and on the establishment of a new ministerial system, replacing the collegia, the twelve governmental departments established by Peter the Great in 1717. In it, he posed the question: ‘In what way can the fundamental laws of a state be made so immovable and unchangeable that no power can violate them, and so that the force of an all-powerful monarchy is powerless against them alone?’34 His answer entailed embarking on a political reform that established, as he distinguished,

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Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires

‘external’ and ‘internal’ forms of government. The former, which he believed was easily achievable, was about writing and promulgating these fundamental laws (state laws, statutes and political institutions), while the other was about generating a balance of power in the Russian political community.35 To him, the most important task was the second one in which a proper balance between the ruled and ruler ensured that the government did not abuse its powers and protected the ‘general conditions’ of the people. These conditions (and as we will see below are the same items that Resid Pasha would seek to put in place in the new Ottoman legal system), were about the protection of person, property and honour of every individual. Generally, he argued, the legitimacy of the government, whether monarchical or aristocratic, depended on how it dealt with these conditions. Despotic governments, left to their own devices (i.e., without established rules), were bound to abuse their powers, whereas a ‘limited monarchy or moderate aristocracy’ with detailed procedures of rules, which were laid out in a ‘general government statute or constitution’,36 did not. In the Russian case, this despotic behaviour had been practiced through the monarchical votchina notion of rule (inability to distinguish between the ruler’s interests and the welfare of the ruled). His prescription was that of setting up rules that resonated with the wishes of the people. ‘These rules are called the fundamental laws of the state,’ he wrote, ‘and taken together they form the general statute or constitution [emphasis in original]’, placing limits on the autocratic will.37 But rules alone did not ensure the durability of these fundamental laws, hence the need for establishing an ‘internal constitution’. The latter meant that in Russian society there had to be a balance of powers in which no single force ‘may acquire a preponderance in the system as a whole, nor destroy all of its relationships’.38 Drawing on the insights from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws39 – who, in his book XI , on laws that establish political liberty and constitution, had argued ‘to prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power’40 – and on the implications of the seventeenth-century English Glorious Revolution on English monarchy as discussed by eighteenth-century British jurist William Blackstone41 and Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, Speransky wrote that the same thing had to be applied to the Russian case,42 i.e. the force of the monarch had to be counterbalanced by the power of narod, once the latter’s consented will was abused by the monarch’s government.43 Dwelling further on the English experience of 1688 and 1689, in which King James II was deposed and replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband William III , Speransky asserted that the English monarchy no longer dared to

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surpass the boundaries set by law because of the revolution44 in which its subjects had shown the willingness and the capability of applying force. The point that he sought to put across was that constitutional durability was not simply a legal matter but also a question for the nation amassing a countervailing political power to it.45 It was therefore good that monarchical power would be encountered by force, but then who or which section of the Russian society – which paradoxically he recognized as being feeble vis-à-vis the government – would be able a face up to it and apply the principle of ‘checking force by force’? The direct answer to this was the people who made up and worked in the very same government structures: the army, police and bureaucracy46 – those through which the monarch exercised his power, and even despotism, and who largely represented the nobility. This was quite an absurd suggestion: why would he trouble to write extensively on limiting monarchical power when he could have accepted the view of old dignitaries for more rights and legal power vis-à-vis the monarch? The answer being, that although he wanted to ultimately transform the relations between the nobility and monarchy, he believed that the latter was in no position to actually play this role of balancing or countervailing power. In fact, he considered that this role would be played by the lesser nobility (middle class if you will) modelled after the British gentry, people from the lower estates who were free, had unrestricted right to private property and had done well economically. Their political and hence constitutional role would be to serve as ‘mediators’ between the common people and the tsar.47 Another group of people who would be part of the ‘mediators’ were optimates (the children of upper classes), who under the principle of primogeniture, in which the oldest male child inherited the property, were property-less but had the necessary education to have or become knowledgeable of their rights and the government’s responsibilities, setting the basis for a public opinion and uniting their ideas and interests.48 There was a historical precedent for his reform of the nobility found in the Muscovite categories of boiars and boiar children (later referred to as dvorianins). Nonetheless, for him they were still part of the nobility as he quoted with approval Montesquieu’s maxim ‘no monarchy without nobility’.49 Institutionally, and thus ‘constitutionally’, this new class of mediators like the optimates, would have no legislative power but could only advise or inform the sovereign about peoples’ needs; the optimates would form a hereditary High Chamber, the ‘mediators’ would fill the ‘Lower Chamber’.50 As regards the question of the serfdom, he thought that such fundamental changes had no real meaning so long as serfdom remained part of Russia’s reality.

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Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires

Serfdom was a phenomenon beyond reason and nature, soon to disappear – it was already abolished in Western Europe and would eventually be so in Russia, too. And even here he sought to engineer change, a gradual one nonetheless, in a two-stage process. The first stage would be that of limiting serfs’ barshchina (obligation, corvée) to their masters, which had already happened during Paul I’s reign when he sanctioned that their obligation could not be longer three days a week. The second stage, and the most important one, was their full emancipation. In the debates leading up to the Great Reforms, discussed at length in Chapter 3, it was greatly contested whether emancipation would be with land or landless; Speransky believed it had to be landless. The peasants would regain their right to move freely, but that freedom of movement had to be implemented gradually otherwise, he warned, the state would have to deal with a class of vagrants and ‘nomads’.51 In essence, as he pointed out in an article written in 1802 titled ‘On the Gradualness of Social Improvement’, social change had to be evolutionary without the use of force,52 implemented in line with the demands of the times and crucially by a ruler who knew his people and understood the times.53 Having written at length about what it took to have an ‘external’ and ‘internal’ form of government in his alternative for a ‘True Monarchy’, in the context of preparations for the 1802 Senatorial reform, paradoxically, Speransky would dismiss the demands by senators who sought real powers for the senate and rights to the nobility. ‘How greatly’, he wrote ‘they [senators] are mistaken who think that rights given to various classes or prerogatives given to various judicial or legislative bodies can make the laws secure or establish a form of government – they would be a building founded on sand.’54 Clues to this paradox are found in Speransky’s understanding of the concept of law, which unlike that of British jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) – whom he directly quoted – who maintained that it was about limitations of some natural freedoms of individuals, yet they had rights and responsibilities, he emphasized only duties and responsibilities.55 For him law or constitution, as a body of fundamental rules of government, did not grant liberties or license to individuals. The role of government was to bring about a state of equilibrium, i.e. stability, between individual egoism and law.56 ‘True Monarchy’ was the state of fundamental laws that provided clarity of duties and responsibilities for the state and the individuals. Individual interests of subjects were subjugated to the government, which – in turn – had a spiritual task of providing people with ethical and moral strength.57 In this way, the meaning of justice for him was that of a means to ready the Russian people for a higher moral goal. Instead of arguing for limiting sovereign power (at least this was an impression that could initially be drawn from his

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writings), he asserted that it could not be curtailed by any contractual relations.58 There was always the danger that unlimited sovereignty of the monarch degenerated into despotism, but that would not be the reason for putting up any barriers. For him, the unlimited monarchical sovereignty was the source of higher moral and religious conceptions of the desirable political community, and obviously a source for new legislation, if needed. ‘Sovereign right’, he wrote, ‘is distinguished from civil rights in that 1. its goal is not in itself but outside itself; it is the power established for the defence of another power [i.e., the divine], 2. that it disposes moral forces which are not inherent in it but given to it.’59 Thus, his conception of constitutionalism was, in a rather stark contrast to the Charter represented by Vorontsov, about the unlimited power of the monarch. But to render this power able to regain its moral high ground, it was of the outmost necessity to establish permanent laws that provided for a clear and orderly pattern of its governmental administration, which functioned according to the law and did not abuse its allocated administrative powers. It was a constitutional conception that resonated with the political ambitions of Tsar Alexander I and his Unofficial Committee. They were all for a well-regulated and orderly monarchical regime, whereby the many organs of the state, the branches of imperial administration, took administrative responsibility for their actions. But the monarchy could not relinquish some of its powers to the Senate. Thus, instead of restoring the Senate’s original rights bestowed by Tsar/Emperor Peter the Great (1672–1725) in his ‘westernizing reforms’ (which had been restricted over time) on the overseeing of the implementation of law, justice, finance, trade and financial affairs, questions of central and local government, and having the final say on judicial matters, Alexander I allowed it to exercise only its judicial powers. The Senate’s new right to petition the tsar on the cancellation of a disputable law, while given, was severely curtailed as soon as it tried to exercise it.60 That was why, ultimately, the Tsar rejected the proposed provisions on the senate reform, through a tactic that allowed for the existence of the Senate as an institution but rendered its powers meaningless. It seemed that the young tsar’s determination to maintain his prerogatives played out in a vocabulary of natural law (i.e. human reason) and, more particularly, ‘esprit de système’ as opposed to the appeals to historical traditions of the nobility. It was only a year or so after the aristocracy had overthrown the emperor, his father, and so there was no guarantee that they would not do the same against him. As such, why would he be willing to give them powers and sanctioning them in a constitutional format? Of course, he had professed liberal and even republican inclinations, but he was

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still very protective of his autocratic powers and prerogatives.61 Change in this instance was clearly about causing as little damage as possible to the status quo of the unlimited monarchical power, while allowing for an efficacious and nonabusive use of this power. This was also played out in the other major institutional reform, the ministerial reorganization of 1802. As mentioned, the tsar came to overhaul the collegia, adding the new governmental body of the Ministry of Internal Affairs on 28 March 1802 – a state body that aside from policing would play a crucial role in Russian reform. Political reform via institutional re-arrangement meant increasing bureaucratic power and preserving autocratic powers at the expense of other estates. In these efforts, the contention had been whether the reorganizing principle would be the ‘collegial rule’, advanced by the elder statesmen, or the ‘monocratic system’ preferred by the tsar and his Unofficial Committee. The first principle would have required for the ministers to all be responsible for the actions of the government, whereas the second model sanctioned that each minister would act as a staff officer to a military commander – being responsible to only their chief, the emperor, individually. This was a bureaucratization of the government on the model of the army, in which the real power tilted almost completely on the side of the governors and ministers as opposed to being in the hands of institutions that would claim to represent the estates of the realm; for example the Senate, the marshals of the nobility, assemblies of nobility, city assemblies and mayors. In turn, the reliance on a centralized and hierarchical bureaucracy led the Unofficial Committee to stress the need to preserve the autocratic power of the emperor.62 Already by this time, Speransky had gained the attention of the first Minister of Internal Affairs Count Victor Kochubei, the latter appointing him head of the Second Department in the Ministry that dealt with police functions and the welfare of the realm – tasks that he occupied himself with from 1802 to 1807. In this position, his minister encouraged him to prepare reports, such as Zapiska (the Report) of 1803, in which institutional proposals along the line of the notion of ‘True Monarchy’ with the practical reorganization of ministries and Senate took centre stage.63 Aiming to establish a sound public opinion as one of the two pillars for the proper existence of the ‘True Monarchy’, Speransky did much to establish the Sankt Peterburgskii Zhurnal – the first regular newspaper of the government – to widely disseminate the government’s position so that it gained its moral high ground by embarking on change through state guidance, and by giving political and economic education to the Russian obshchestvo (society).64 The emperor, meanwhile, had heard only great things about Speransky’s qualities. He was able to judge for himself in 1807 when Kochubei, having fallen ill, asked

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Speransky to make the weekly oral report on the affairs of the Ministry to the emperor. Impressed by him, Alexander I appointed Speransky as his chief administrative secretary and assistant, with one of the first tasks being to assist him in the meeting with Napoleon at Erfurt in 1808. After Erfurt, Speransky became the most trusted and intimate collaborator of Tsar Alexander on domestic political and administrative matters. For the Sardinian Ambassador in St Petersburg, Count Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), ‘the great and all powerful Speransky, the general secretary of the Empire, [was] in fact the first minister and maybe a unique minister’.65 Yet despite a meteoric rise, Speransky remained a lonely person both in his work and personal life. He made very few contacts with people outside his work, except for Vasily Karazin and a few of his old friends from the seminary. The hardworking reclusive had a few interactions with English émigrés in St Petersburg, from where he would meet his future wife Elizabeth Stephens, whom he married in 1798 (she died only a year after, following the birth of their only daughter). The more he gained the confidence of the emperor – which it seemed was the only friendship that mattered to him – the more he shied away from Petersburgian high society;66 one could not say many positive things about his interactions with the Muscovite high nobility.

Gaining the moral high ground When Tsar Alexander I ordered Speransky to prepare the Draft Statute of 1809, Speransky thought it to be a very opportune time indeed. Public opinion in imperial Russia had been strengthening and had become more assertive. ‘It is possible to conclude with certainty that the present system of government is no longer appropriate for the spirit of society’, he noted, ‘and that the time has come to change it and form a new order of things.’67 As he had elaborated earlier, the assertiveness of public opinion signified the existence of the ‘internal constitution’ as a prerequisite to sustaining the ‘external constitution’. The government had become the locus of criticism to this public opinion. Therefore, it could no longer oppose change demanded by people who were united by purpose, and with strength to resist. So after the rather detailed account of his vision of ‘True Monarchy’ and the contentious context from which it emerged, it is only fair to dwell on the much-rumoured Reform Plan of 1809, fully titled Vvdenie k ylazheniju gosudarstve’nnikh zakonov (A Draft Statute of State Laws).68 Of particular interest, then, were the motivations that he outlined to make the case for fundamental changes in imperial Russia. After all, this Draft Statute was to be the embodiment of the vision of ‘True Monarchy’. Then, of course, the

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nature of the desirable community was questioned in this draft; how would the vying for political power amongst monarchy, nobility and bureaucracy, be expressed in the legalistic vocabulary that he was increasingly becoming a master of? It was around these two issues – motivation and the proposed institutional structure – that Speransky framed his Draft Statute. Regarding the motivation; while in his early political essays the drive for change had been spurred by the urgency of doing something about despotism, now in the Draft he stressed the need to help the monarchical government to gain moral strength vis-à-vis its people, by ruling on clearly defined laws and institutions and catching up with progressive changes in the rest of Europe. In a similar manner on the Ottoman side, Reshid Pasha’s primary motivation for embarking on legal reform was that of countering monarchical despotism, but a major difference was that Reshid would seek to ensure legal equality for all Ottoman subjects (Muslim, Christian and Jewish). In the Draft, Speransky overviewed the conditions of imperial affairs – situating Russia in a broader European historical perspective – arguing that the goal of political reform was that of catching up with the rest of Europe. Conceiving European history as linear and dialectical (regress followed by progress), he singled out a golden age of its politics as the classical period of the Roman Empire, epitomised by its ‘republic’ form of regime. This was followed by the prevalence of ‘feudalism’, which had been undermined more recently by the principles of ‘republic’ in some European countries. ‘Republican’ versus ‘feudal’ principles remained a contemporary ideological and political struggle, and he clearly sided with the republican principles. The time had run out for a feudalist order. This political phenomenon had moved from the earlier period, ‘original feudalism’ of the Dark Ages, to that of ‘absolutist feudalism’, which meant absolute monarchy. Seeing Russia as still within this period, he expected that republican principles would become the main staple of future Russian politics. It is unclear to what extend he was familiar with Rousseau’s distinction between two understandings of the concept of republic – the first being that in which a lawful regime is pursuing the common good and the second, the ‘classical republic’ notion in which people who make their own laws achieve civic liberty69 – but certainly he subscribed to the first. His optimism about Russia becoming a ‘True Monarchy’ rested on several observable historical and contemporary factors. Firstly, and perhaps contradictorily, while considering Russia still in the period of ‘absolutist feudalism’ he thought that a fundamental feature of feudalism, primogeniture – as we saw earlier he proposed to reform the Russian nobility through it – was not strong in Russia, hence it would be easier to make the transition. In addition,

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there was the immense influence of Enlightenment thought, with growth of education and commerce throughout the eighteenth century. Therefore, it was no longer possible for the government to ignore the gap between relative changes in education, commerce – a sense of relative freedom and wealth – and lack of political liberties. He wrote: ‘What a contradiction to wish for science, commerce, and industry, and not admit their most natural consequences; the desire that reason be free and will in bonds . . . History does not know any enlightened and commercial people that remained in slavery for long.’70 In response to these factors – by suggesting as he did that for the sovereign to rule properly and regain his moral strength vis-à-vis his people his rule had to be based on clearly defined laws and rules, properly execute them and be divided into three major functions, legislative, judiciary and executive – was he advancing the notion of a legal or a constitutional state? The question of whether he was proposing to make the executive power more efficient or limiting the political will of the monarch could not be avoided even here. For his biographer Marc Raeff, however, Speransky was not suggesting a system of checks and balances (division of powers) because he still saw the political system of the empire as a whole and in unity; so even in this Draft his preoccupation was to ensure efficiency in the workings of the government and greater convenience.71 What he was after was undermining the traditional pattern of proivzol (delegating the arbitrary authority of the monarch to trusted individuals to carry out specific tasks or govern specific areas) by introducing rational, predictable bureaucratic procedures.72 This was his positive response to the critique of a nobility which resented the increasing role of bureaucracy in Russian society. Yes, Speransky would argue, there was a need for more bureaucracy and state rather than less, and to reduce its abuses proper and immutable laws had to be in place. So the constitutional suggestions that he advanced in the Draft were innovative in the sense that they offered a division of the powers into three branches: parliament, judiciary and executive. But there was a catch. Instead of these powers checking on each other, they would take responsibility for their own functions and coordinate these functions for the rational working of government. It is worth looking further at the details of this plan: regarding the legislative power, he envisaged a bottom-up approach in which duma (parliament), from the levels of Townships, Districts and Provinces, created a pyramid in which the emerging public opinion had a chance to be heard at the top of the dumas, gosudarstvenia duma (State Duma). At the lowest level, Township, its members were selected based on their property qualifications. They elected their administration as well as sent deputies to the higher level, in

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this case the District. The same pattern was to be followed for the provincial level, and the State Duma. In all these levels, there was no possibility to legislate or even regulate, but to act as advisory bodies to the executive heads appointed by the general government. The State Duma did have the right to meet once a year; but it had equal status with the Senate and the ministries. The tsar had the right to dismiss it and replace it with candidates from another list prepared by the Provincial Dumas. Like the dumas of the lower levels, the State Duma did not have the right to initiate legislation, as it remained the function of sovereign power exercised through central government institutions. Its role was advisory; it could petition and inform the government on the country’s condition and needs. One could not assess the reaction of the people who would fill the ranks of the legislative branch, as it did not come to fruition; nevertheless, with this political structure proposed, the idea of a legislative body was essentially meaningless. The status of the political power as it was remained intact.73 Speransky followed a similar approach with the judiciary branch, whose function would be that of guarding order and legality, in terms of setting up a court at each level. The court would be comprised of ‘jurymen’, elected by the respective dumas to deliberate on the facts of the case, and would be chaired by a court president whose task would be to observe the procedures rather than decide on the case. The Minister of Justice would assign the president of the court, after having been chosen from a list of twenty candidates submitted by each duma. The idea behind this was to phase out the bureaucratic preponderance over the judiciary. The highest of the courts was the Senate, which would have two departments: civil and criminal. It was allocated the ‘right to procedural review’, i.e. overseeing the transactions of the lower courts. It was also the last instance of appeal, besides the emperor. The emperor assigned the members of the Senate, again proposed by a list from the Provincial Dumas.74 In contrast to the changes in the legislative branch, the reform in the judiciary certainly offered some potential for the transformation of relations between the political and social order, as subjects would have more freedom from the political intervention that came from a strong control of state bureaucracy. As for the executive power, Speransky’s intentions for reforming it was in line with his vision of government having unity, coherence and responsibility. While the ultimate political responsibility remained firmly in the hands of the tsar, unity and coherence was to be achieved by a proper distribution of tasks amongst governmental functions (police, finance, external security, justice and economy). Ministers would not be politically responsible because they executed the will of the emperor, however they would be accountable administratively. The Council

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of Ministers was to oversee the implementation of the respective ministerial competences, and to report its activities to the State Duma.75 As a final step in overhauling the political system, Speransky proposed the creation of the Council of State with advisory and preparatory capacities to provide unity and legislative form to the activities of the Senate, State Duma and Ministries, which would assist the emperor, who sat on the top of Russia’s political hierarchy.76 Thus, rather than calling for the separation of three branches, working independently, he recommended their coordination through the Council of State77 – a crucial institution for helping the emperor with the problematic legislative process. Indeed, Speransky made a strong case as to why this new institution, the Council of State, was of the outmost importance. It was because the Council of State would become the most optimal venue for general deliberation on state affairs from a legislative perspective, it would bring order and unity to all parts of administration, and because its existence was proof that Russia was a great state governed by means of institutions.78 Convinced by it, the tsar approved the creation of the Council of State in the decree in 1810, though making sure to underscore that, ‘No law, statute, or institution can be issued by the Council and none can obtain its full execution without the approval of the Sovereign Power.’79 The Draft did have the substance of his notion of ‘True Monarchy’ but it did not go beyond what Speransky had earlier suggested – setting in place the edifices of the ‘external government’ – and in particular the legislative branch, which was tasked to advise and inform the emperor rather than legislate in his stead, was not even considered. As with regard to the reform of the ‘internal constitution’ – having argued that without social reform, most importantly abolishing serfdom, the rest of political reforms would not make sense – he also did not go that far in the 1809 Draft Statute. Conceiving the Russian nation as an organic whole, he championed the preservation of the existing hierarchy of estates, but with some added flexibility, so that over time there would be the possibility for people to move from one estate to the other – a similar reasoning to that in his earlier writings. In similar terms, he saw the function of laws in relation to bettering the societal fabric. Earlier, as now in the Draft, Speransky upheld the need to guarantee the ‘general conditions’ of the imperial subjects: security of person, and guarantee of property in the given social bond. However, these ‘general conditions’ were not completely inalienable as the content of these rights had to be determined. If a person’s rights were to be infringed, they had to be done so within the established laws. A person could only be inflicted a punishment, or be deprived of his property, after a fair trial. Also, a person was not forced to perform services or pay dues unless

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it was established by, or in agreement with, the law. Since serfdom was still legal, this meant that the services and obligations in the system of serfdom could still be demanded by one individual from another as long as the procedures established by the law were met.80 Thus, his conception of law and social order was that each individual was equal before the particular law of the estate one belonged to – while no one could have their civil rights infringed, these rights could not be the same for everyone. In this regard, then unlike Speransky’s legal reform project on Russia society, Reshid Pasha’s on the Ottoman society offered equal rights to all its subjects. This was the case even when his principle of flexibility would be put to the test. ‘It would be strange’, Speransky observed, ‘if a serf who has become rich by chance buys a village populated with peasants like himself and governs in accordance with the law, while, unprepared by education, he is unable to acquire the knowledge of the law or secure the moral respect for his power.’81 Clearly, the vocabulary of legality and rights employed in the Draft was not about radically altering the existing social order and consequently the political order. Nobility’s existing political, civil and property rights would be preserved. The second estate – in which Speransky did not include the clergy – was comprised of merchants, townspeople and free peasants with a certain quantity of land, where there would be civil rights and some unspecified political rights. Meanwhile, within the third estate – largely referring to workers, craftsmen in town as well as peasants in the countryside – there would be no political rights. However, were any of the members from this estate able to possess some immovable property and to fulfil the obligations of their status (which mostly involved doing personal services, payment of dues in kind and money), then they could move to the middle estate.82 Thus he saw this social order as based on the preservation of hierarchy and with a timid encouragement of social mobility. The latter would be based on property qualifications as the backbone for participation in his proposed legislative (or rather advisory), juridical and executive institutions. With the backdrop of imminent internal and external political and social pressures, this was the path to changing, as well as preserving, the empire through which the monarchy reclaimed its moral high ground.

Revitalizing an indebted empire and Speransky’s fall Aside from the new vocabularies of new permanent laws and institutions, Speransky made the idiom of political economy part of the language of political reform of the Russian Empire, which had been facing an ongoing internal

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economic (monetary) crisis, indebtedness and economic pressures from the Napoleonic Continental System since Alexander I had joined through the Treaty of Tilsit signed with Napoleon on 7 July 1807. Reinvigorating the empire required not only the making of a desirable community and reconsideration of the nature of political order – which, as we saw, he thought could be solved by establishing new permanent and immutable laws and institutions – but also seriously thinking and doing something about its economic wealth. While in the Ministry of Internal Affairs he wrote many reports arguing for the state to play a greater role in generating imperial economic wealth. This new vocabulary and discipline of political economy – mostly referring to liberal economic ideas of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, who were highly reputed among contemporary intellectual circles83 – was the trendy political move to pursue in the economic realm. However, for Speransky, the Smithian vocabulary could not be applied without considering the Russian economic context. In one of these reports, which reached Alexander I, while generally agreeing that ‘the government should be only a spectator of private efforts in this field of industry and economy’, he added that, But in Russia, perhaps, some qualifications should be made to it [principle of free economic activity, (sic)]. When the national industry, strengthened by time and conditions, will have reached, so to say its full maturity, it can and must be allowed to proceed alone. . . . But in its early beginnings . . . the government has the obligation to guide it [the nation’s industry, sic], to show where its advantages lie, to promote it through encouragement and even – where there is lack of capital – to give it subsidies.84

Thus for him, Smithian economics made sense in the long run, but in the immediate and intermediate phases, fostering and protecting the state was needed. Preceding by some decades German political economist Friedrich List’s doctrine of national system of political economy,85 Speransky thought individual initiative and free economic activity could develop under the shadow of a powerful bureaucratic state.86 Advocating for the contradictory positions of free trade and state protectionism made sense to him in the economic and geopolitical context of Russia being part of the Continental Blockade,87 which sought to shield the continent from British, and its ally Sweden’s, exports which were hurting economic interests of the Russian landed nobility, most notably of the grain exporters.88 The tsar’s controversial alliance with Napoleon against Britain and the Ottoman Empire led Speransky and the tsar to also consider preparations of a potential war against France. In reports he wrote in 1810, he urged the tsar

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to make secret preparations for it, among others to seal a secret deal to end the ongoing conflict with the Ottoman Empire – achieved in the Treaty of Bucharest in 181289 with the recently enthroned Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) who would engage in large-scale centralizing, military, administrative and fiscal reforms of his own. Speransky convinced the emperor, using a Smithian free trade argument, to leave the Continental Blockade – which obliged Russia to prohibit grain trade from Odessa through the Black Sea.90 This led to the approval of the 1810 Tariff, which allowed the resumption of exports of Russian goods and imports of essential manufactured goods with Britain – a reason for reviving Russian trade and economy91 but also of deteriorating relations with France, in fact a major reason for the Patriotic War/the Russian Campaign of 1812 between the two.92 Although not known as an open and trading empire, Russia had slowly made international trade a reason of state.93 But rather than expanding and developing the national economy, it used trade to forge allies in the European inter-state order. Certainly, before and throughout Tsar Alexander’s reign the imperial state had been heavily indebted to domestic and foreign creditors – facing complete bankruptcy by the year 1825. As such it could resort to reform in trade tariffs and financial and monetary policies. Regarding tariffs, Alexander I’s policy had vacillated between free trade from 1803 and 1807 to protectionism between 1810 and 1815. Interestingly, following the declaration of the Holy Alliance in 1815 (discussed at length in the second part of this chapter), the Russian state had the lowest (thus the most liberal) tariff conventions with its allies Austria and Prussia, and only from 1821 did it move to a strict protectionist policy. Thus, in the ongoing debate within imperial bureaucratic and intellectual circles, those in support of free trade and those for protectionist policies – a fluctuation reflected on the state’s trade policy – Speransky would give the impression of belonging to the first camp,94 though he certainly was in favour of both. As for the other financial reforms – following a persistent monetary instability of the Russian ruble and the general unsustainable national debt – Speransky responded to the necessity of financial reforms95 with Plan Finansov (the Financial Plan) in 1810. Given that the negotiation of ballooning foreign debt (initially incurred during the reign of Catherine the Great) had proved unsuccessful and that the disaster of the Russian experiment with the Revolutionary French assignats (paper money, which as he argued was debt rather than real money),96 in his financial plan Speransky sought to put the national economy on a sound footing. This entailed discarding the assignats and establishing of a bank based on silver, monetizing the economy, taxation of

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profitable labour, and creation of a new land tax, as opposed to the existing inefficient poll tax, that initially would come from the state selling land to the peasants.97 Thus, be it the Smithian economic doctrine with its policy instruments, or monetary policy and particularly the issue of the assignats, the crucial point for Speransky was that in order to secure imperial economic welfare, the state had to have a guiding, almost pedagogical role. For him, as Raeff put it, ‘the road that led to freedom and individualism in economic life had to be travelled in the conveyances provided and administered by the state’.98 The political fallout from these attempts to ensure economic (monetary) stabilization and welfare through these new vocabularies was great, for while monetary stabilization and sorting out the debt would be a long-term issue, the proposal for a new taxation infuriated the landed nobility. For them, Speransky’s new tax99 was an added irritant to his contentious constitutional proposal. The constitutional reform, a ‘playing with forms’ as Karamzin referred to it in 1811,100 was a demonstration of Speransky’s pro-French stance within imperial government. Having assumed the role as the mouthpiece of large segments of the landowning nobility101 dissatisfied with the loss of pride in the tsar’s military defeats and subsequent alliance with Napoleon I – Karamzin, in a letter submitted to the tsar in 1812 titled ‘Of Old and New Russia’, strongly objected to the already approved Council of State.102 Considered as one of the first articulators of Russian conservatism, historian Karamzin represented one of the conservative trends in Russian intellectual milieu of the time, namely romantic nationalism, the others being gentry conservatism and religious conservatism.103 The latter, most colourfully represented by Alexander Sturdza, Emperor Alexander’s diplomatic adviser at the height of the Holy Alliance project,104 will be discussed further below. For Karamzin, this new institution was a mere mirror of the French institutions, products of the loathsome French Revolution and its usurper, Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite being designed to provide advice to the monarch, Karamzin found it repulsive not only because it was against the Russian tradition but also because in accepting its formula, ‘vniav mneniiu soveta’ (having heard the opinion of the council) – used in all laws created during the Napoleonic Constitutional Monarchy – the Council was undermining the nature of the tsar’s power.105 Interestingly, if Speransky had used Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws to make the case for constitutional limitations on autocracy, Karamzin used the same text to argue the opposite, that such limitations were not useful in the Russian context.106 The landed nobility had been even more upset with Speransky’s attempts at reforming their relations to the state service. They were still reeling from

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Speransky’s prepared Decree of April 1809, which required that those holding titles, such as Kamerger (Gentleman of the Chamber), either performed their duties accordingly or moved to other services, otherwise they would lose them, and the Decree of August 1809 that tested general knowledge of Russian, mathematics, Latin and modern language of the nobility who sought rank advancement in state administration. Particularly inflamed by the latter decree was the small nobility, which had little education in their youth, and who had made it to the upper ranks by virtue of length in service.107 Despite concurring with Speransky’s proposal that the only way to improve the workings of the administration was to select through merit, Karamzin still argued that: ‘Noble status should not depend on rank but rank on noble status; that is the attainment of certain ranks should be made unconditionally dependent on the condition of being a gentlemen.’108 There was a greater issue at stake that touched at the core of the idea of political reform, namely, Speransky’s strategy to political and societal change in general. As Raeff pointed out, it was Speransky’s method of external coercion – rules and decrees – through which he hoped to educate Russian society for responsibility and self-government. He did not have faith in society, nobility and bourgeoisie, as it had seemed to have been the case with the Prussian reformer and now an exile in Tsar Alexander I’s court, Baron vom Karl Stein (1757– 1831).109 In fact, in the 1809 Draft Statute, Speransky saw nobility as a ‘handful of idlers who, God knows why and to what end, have grabbed all the rights and advantages’;110 while for Karamzin the rise of Speransky signified the advent of ‘insignificant officials’ dominating bureaucracy. Speransky and people like him were not the agents of change for the better. To him, Speransky lacked nobility’s sense of responsibility and brought more ‘utter impunity’. Instead of rooting out despotism and arbitrariness, he epitomized the incarnation of the absolutist state, filling important posts in the Ministry of Internal Affairs with his protégés.111 Karamzin’s and much of nobility’s bitter anti-bureaucratic sentiment and hostility towards chinovniki (bureaucrats) was to remain part of the political scene prior and after the abolition of serfdom in 1861.112 The recurring efforts of political reform which started with the Unofficial Committee and continued with Speransky’s constitutional and economic projects, were seen by the nobility as intentional moves to destroy the political, social and economic influence of Russia’s old families. These old families resided mostly in the old capital, Moscow. It seemed that the political and social rivalry between the bureaucrat and the noble was perhaps as old as the decision of Peter the Great to move the capital of the empire to St Petersburg. The apparent

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differences between hedonistic Muscovite high nobility – still enjoying ‘the good old days’ of hospitalities and parties – and the suspicious and intruding Petersburgian high bureaucracy and Tsar Alexander I, himself,113 were even more reinforced. For the Muscovite nobility, Alexander I’s unsuccessful wars against Napoleon and the subsequent forced participation in the Continental System (a huge economic price for them to pay) were a far cry from the imperial glory enjoyed during the reign of Catherine the Great. To them, even the Tariff of 1810, which Speransky thought would alleviate this burden by reopening grain trade with Britain, was a real economic disaster to be blamed on the government’s (hence Speransky’s) pro-French policy.114 Karamzin’s attacks on Speransky’s politics, however, paled in contrast to those by powerful people such as the Governor-General for Moscow, Count Fyodor Rostopchin (1763–1826). The ‘genius evil’, he called Speransky on the eve of the 1812 French invasion of Russia, was a traitor to the French. He found Speransky to be on a Jacobinian mission to replace the tsar’s absolutism and paternalism and destroy Russian nobility and serfdom through French tyranny of revolution. Not only this, Rostopchin continued, but as a leader among the Free Masons, Illuminati and Martinists, who with their new religious teachings were dangerously corrupting the Russian soul and religious life, he was busy propagating revolutionary ideas.115 The Emperor’s sister, Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna (1788–1819), had also been bitter after Speransky failed to take into consideration her husband’s desire for a governmental position against Speransky’s own candidate,116 and so to avenge this she had become the political sponsor of Karamzin’s attacks on Speransky. Adding to the drama, the hostility towards Speransky had acquired an international dimension. Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna (1759–1828), Tsar Alexander’s mother, who had kept the highest female position in the imperial court, had been critical of her son’s Franco-Russian alliance. In fact, she surrounded herself with numerous foreign residents very popular and influential in St Petersburg society – most notably the exiled Prussian statesman who introduced the Prussian reforms, Baron Karl vom Stein; the would-be French restoration Prime-Minister Duke de Richelieu (1766–1822); and the CounterEnlightenment figure of the Sardinian ambassador Count Joseph de Maistre – who actively worked to break it up. A plot had been cooked up towards this goal by less reputable foreigners, such as Chevalier de Vernegèu and Count Gustav M. Armfelt (1757–1814) that planned Speransky’s involvement against Alexander I’s reign. With Speransky refusing to get involved but failing to report the matter to the tsar who in turn was informed by the plotters, an infuriated tsar – seeing

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attacks coming from all sides and a looming war – dismissed and exiled him,117 to relieve the pressure. Tsar Alexander I did not believe the talk of Speransky being a traitor. Still, for all his good talk about a constitutional monarchy in Russia, Speransky’s sarcastic comments that ‘he [Alexander I] is too weak to rule and too strong for being ruled’, cast a shadow of doubt on the tsar. Then there was the question of war and peace; even whilst in an alliance with Napoleon I since the Treaty of Tilsit, the tsar had been working on an all-European coalition to defeat him. His secret understandings with Austria, peace treaties with Turkey and Sweden, negotiations with England, offering asylum to Baron vom Stein, and conducting secret correspondence with the French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand through the new Russian diplomat Karl von Nesselrode’s mission to Paris, were a series of actions in this direction. However, Speransky’s apparent careless handling of the undisclosed correspondence with Paris worried Alexander that all these dealings would become public. Speransky had become the magnet of inter-state and domestic pressures which, conveniently, it served Alexander well to deflect from himself. The latter could then demonstrate to the nobility (as he could not afford to lose their support)118 that Russia was not a French satellite. At the same time, the tsar could remove any suspicions of Napoleon about these secret negotiations. And thus, in a rather dramatic fashion, the tsar dismissed Speransky from his duties on 5 March 1812. Soon after, Speransky was to face his future fate – exile in Siberia. It was telling of Speransky’s isolation in government and society that except for his close colleague Admiral Nikolai Mordvinov (1754–1845) – who resigned from the Council of State in protest at his dismissal119 – no one else came to his aide. In exile, he wrote the emperor a letter reflecting on, and defending, his reform projects, suggesting that the politics of change that he pursued were nothing more than what the Tsar had requested. ‘All year 1809’, he noted, [W]as wholly devoted at bringing together the dispersed ideas of reform into a general plan. This was nothing more but the logical development of all that was conceived, reflected and, in part, and executed by the Emperor of the year 1801. It was all based on the same principle, to regulate the powers through the laws and to ensure the administration through rules and institutions [the italics are Speransky’s].120

For Speransky, the general plan for the essence of his ‘True Monarchy’ was the regeneration of the empire, whereby new and permanent laws and institutions were the means to achieve it, yet it seemed to the disgraced statesman as distant

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as ever. The once powerful statesman was writing to still the most powerful man in the empire on their inability to meet their own expectations for fundamental change. As it was, their constitutional conception, contested from the outset, did not come to fruition. His enthusiastic but cautious embrace of political economy backfired in a tense international environment in which war and peace were, and remained, two faces of the same coin. Were these efforts for political change for the empire genuine, as Speransky wanted, or a mere and continual struggle between the state and its powerful groups whereby the state under the language of reform diminished their political, economic privileges, to aggrandize its own? It seemed that in the age of political projects, which the nineteenth century was rapidly setting itself as, genuine efforts (for the general good) and power struggles (personal interests) remained blurred, resulting in this contest. This was even more so for political projects such as the Holy Alliance – a Russian project for ordering the inter-European and world peace, proclaimed months after the silencing of the drumbeats of the Napoleonic wars, and three years after Speransky’s exile to Siberia.

Tsar Alexander I’s Holy Alliance: Common faith, congresses, constitutions and collective intervention For a ‘durable peace’ in Europe And so with the heavy dust of the Napoleonic Wars seeming to settle, the victorious anti-Napoleonic coalition, comprised of Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia, signed the Treaty of Chaumont on 10 March 1814. The treaty was a deal entailing concerted action for containing a militarily aggressive France. With the success of the Great Patriotic war against the French Army (1812–1814), and an unshakeable presence in the post-Napoleonic European order, Emperor Alexander I could finally show to the Russian nobility that he lived up to his grandmother’s grandeur in foreign affairs. And even more than that he could embark on a rather ambitious course of reforming, making a new European and an even more ambitiously, a world order. Thus, the Chaumont Treaty – which nearly a year later led to the establishment of the Quadruple Alliance – sought ‘to insure the future tranquillity of Europe by re-establishing a just equilibrium of the powers’.121 Yet Napoleon’s return from the island of Elba for another 100 days, yet again disturbing the ‘tranquillity’ of Europe (only to be decisively defeated at Waterloo), convinced Tsar Alexander

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I that efforts for restoration and stability through a just equilibrium of powers were not enough for a vision of a future on which European peace could rest. With the view that his country had contributed the most in defeating Napoleonic France – and in the process accrued greater political clout than the rest of the allies, causing worries amongst them about its amassed ‘enormous power’122 – he sought a new European reordering and peace arrangement based on the principles of the Gospel.123 This was the way to solve future wars and instability, and achieve a ‘durable peace’ in Europe.124 Already in December 1814, nearly ten months after the Treaty of Chaumont, the tsar had sent a note to plenipotentiaries of the Allied Powers trying to convince them of the need to reform the alliance based on ‘the immutable principles of Christian religion’ as the ‘only foundation of the political and social order with which the sovereigns, making common cause, will refine their principles of state and guarantee the relations between the peoples entrusted to them by Providence’.125 And as it happened, he was able to materialize this vision in the project of the Holy Alliance when, together with the Austrian Monarch Francis I and the Prussian King Fredrick William III , he signed it in Paris on 14 September 1815. From the outset, the Holy Alliance as the one and only project for a European peace on the continent, premised upon Christian religious precepts (shortly following the early nineteenth-century Vienna Congress settlement in 1815), was paradoxical and highly contested by contemporaries. It was paradoxical because European historical experience had been scarred by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion. But the tsar was convinced that a European peace on religious (Christian) unity was possible at the turn of the century because the secular notions of European peace after the impact of the ‘ungodly events’ of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had been undermined, whereas Christian (particularly Protestant) movements in the continent had been given a strong boost.‘Europe,’ he had declared on the eve of the proclamation of the Holy Alliance, ‘despite its territorial divisions, because it is Christian, together constitutes a nation and a family.’126 While the reception of this project of peace – fusing a seemingly religious fever that had captivated Alexander I with European high politics – was, in the centres of European political power (as we will see below), less than congenial, the Holy Alliance got the support of many contemporary European intellectuals, especially some of those from German-speaking milieus. As a potential reincarnation of the Res-publica Christiana, they welcomed and cherished the possibility for peace in a federation of European peoples in which politics and Christianity were bound together. Prominent German publicist and economic

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theorist Adam Müller (1779–1829) had already proposed in his work Die Elemente der Staatskunst (1809) that Christianity had to be the binding element for a conceivable European federation.127 During the still fluid period of 1814 and 1815, the tsar received memoranda from a German Catholic theologian, Franz Xavier von Baader (1765–1841), who advocated the establishment of Christian theocracy and a European Union.128 In one of his memoranda submitted in July 1815, titled ‘Sur le nécessité créée par la Révolution française d’une nouvelle et plus étroite union de la religion avec la politique’ [On the Necessity Created by the French Revolution for a New and Closer Union of Religion with Politics], Baader asserted that the legacy of a loveless, despotic and ‘devilish’ French Revolution could be erased by the organization of a counterrevolution: combining the notion of love in Christianity and European politics.129 More importantly, Alexander I who, in his youth, was taught both political liberalism as well as the doctrines of Orthodox Christianity in how to rule the empire, came himself under the influences of unorthodox Christian doctrines – Protestant religious movements and mysticism began to spring up in his realm, particularly at the end of the Great Patriotic war.130 The relevant literature on this theme also draws attention to the impact of religious meetings with mystic Madame Barbara Julie de Krüdener (1764–1824), both during and after the second campaign against Napoleon in 1815, on Emperor Alexander’s conception of the Holy Alliance.131 However, as historian Stella Ghervas showed, it was Tsar Alexander I who, right after the Congress of Vienna – which he saw as a vindication of State Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Clemens von Metternich’s (1773–1859) conception of European order – in a memo to all Russian legations, demanded a search for a religious principle for European order, on Russian terms nonetheless, as to avoid another European war by considering a pact between the Great Powers on the basis of Christianity.132 The paradox also cannot be understood without taking into consideration the context and the people with which Tsar Alexander I conducted his foreign policy, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, where the goal was to assert and reassert Russia as the Great Power in the continent by attempting to reconcile Russian and wider European political concerns. In pursing this reformist religious approach for European order in his foreign policy, the tsar would rely on the input of his diplomatic adviser – later Orthodox Christian philosopher of Romanian origin Alexander Sturdza, ‘a privileged witness of the European history between 1814–1822’133 – as well as the joint efforts of his two foreign ministers: Karl von Nesselrode (1780–1862), whose ideas were closer to Metternich; and the would be first head of the modern Greek state,

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John Capodistrias (1776–1931), who subscribed to the liberal cannon of the time.134 The Holy Alliance, as we will see, represented yet another talking point for the Russian vision of peace for and control of Europe and the world – the first, broadly conceived in the vocabulary of the European Law of Nations, having failed to materialize. Following this was a contestation to the project coming from nearly all sides of the political spectrum in Europe. The Holy Alliance raised doubts amongst European monarchical circles, for it was read as an unlikely proposition of religious and liberal vocabularies for a post-Napoleonic European restoration. Other sceptics could not help but see it as an intermediate camouflaging of Russian expansionary imperial ambitions in the continent. Also, it never really convinced those voices who suspected it of being an illiberal and reactionary platform for suppressing a growing liberal consciousness in the continent. These contestations are somewhat reflected in the historiography of the subject. On the one hand, there are those accounts, especially in the Soviet literature, which characterized the Holy Alliance as a reactionary, religious and conservative tool for legitimizing European monarchical order.135 Post-Soviet historical scholarship seems to indicate a departure from the Soviet interpretation – instead reading it as a vision for a ‘United Europe’.136 On the other hand there were others, particularly in Western European literature, who largely viewed it as setting the tone and stage for inter-state cooperation, as with major international peace organizations in the twentieth-century.137 It has long been noted in the literature that this new geopolitical reordering – envisioning settling existing or potential European inter-state conflict and avoiding war by observing Christian precepts – did not impress the other ally in the Chaumont Treaty, namely Britain. With the British government having refused to sign it, British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) dismissed it as a ‘piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’ and referred to the tsar as someone whose ‘mind is not completely sound’.138 Even though his emperor was signatory to it, Metternich was not lauding it, instead referring to it as ‘this loud sounding nothing’ and a mere ‘union of religious and politicalliberal ideas’.139 For him, the Holy Alliance was ‘only the overflow of the pietistic feeling of the Emperor Alexander, and the application of Christian principles to politics’.140 It was not only the seemingly political liberalism confounded with religion that disturbed Metternich but also a realization that this Alliance was a useless tool for dealing with present and future European affairs. In words less stronger than Castlereagh, he confided that ‘the paper was nothing more than a philanthropic aspiration clothed in a religious garb, which supplied no material

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for a treaty between the monarchs, and which contained many phrases that might even have given occasion to religious misconstructions’.141 Yet in spite of these strong reservations – and in all probabilities the Holy Alliance was and served as a platform of all these intentions and reactions: liberal, reactionary, secular, religious, peaceful (through constitutionalism) and militaristic (through collective interventions),142 for reforming the European inter-state order – before the signing of the document, Metternich contributed to the modification of these ‘misconstructions’. His emperor and the Prussian king wanted to include their opinions as a condition for their agreement with Alexander I, and so, in turn, the latter had to accept them. Metternich noted that ‘the Emperor Francis, although he did not approve the project even when modified, agreed to sign it, for reasons which I for my part could not oppose’.143 Entities probably keenest, at least in principle, of taming politics to Christian tenets (namely the Vatican), also refused to sign it. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Sultan, Mahmud II , who would come to depend on British and Russian military support in the mid-1830s to centralize imperial political power, was not invited.144 In fact Tsar Alexander I already had a sense of military superiority vis-à-vis Mahmud II ’s army because just after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 – without engaging in a military campaign against it – he forced the Sultan to agree on Serbia becoming an autonomous vassal principality.145 Soon after its declaration, the Alliance was joined by France, Sweden, Spain and the Kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia,146 a process which some contemporaries viewed as the pleasing of Russia (or for fear of it and its allies), rather than subscribing to its religious principles.147 Thus, having questioned its practical values, it was the response to the ‘impulse to subdue’ of Russia to which Metternich was probably insinuating when commenting on his emperor’s reasoning for signing the document. While sympathy for his project abroad was restricted to the non-political domain – it befell on Sturdza (with his two memoirs, ‘Considerations on the Act of Christian and Brotherly Alliance of 14/26 September 1815’ and ‘On the Holy Alliance’, particularly in the first advancing the idea of ‘European Christian alliance’ as the basis of Russian politics and new European order) to make the case to a European public opinion for its political viability beyond romanticism148 – at home the tsar made sure that great support was generated in the political realm as well as with his subjects. Soon after his return to St Petersburg from his long stay in the German states and France, Alexander proclaimed his oeuvre throughout the Empire on 25 December 1815 of the Julian calendar, in a symbolic move to coincide with the birth of Jesus Christ. Publicized as a manifesto, the text was kept in its original version prior to Metternich’s

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modifications. It contained the core ideas of Christian solidarity of European monarchies and justice, including the point of the necessity of having peace as a way of ensuring the well-being of the people.149 Lastly, an order was issued in it for copies to be printed and read in all churches of the empire.150 The tsar’s decision to make the document public embarrassed his Austrian and Prussian counterparts, who were used to a protocol of secrecy beyond the realm of cabinet. Nonetheless, it proved effective in the Russian context. Speransky, writing from exile to a friend soon after its declaration, was filled with extreme joy; considering it the coming to life of his conception of the spiritual function of the kingship. Before joining the ranks of the government, Speransky had shown equal interest in philosophy and mystical faith. In sermons delivered as a student at the theological seminary in St Petersburg, he touched on the question of the kingship and the role of government in society in which he preached that political rule had to be ethical and religious – governments rest on laws, but these laws are only the outcome of the moral needs of men.151 As mentioned earlier and will be elaborated later, on the Ottoman side, particularly Reshid Pasha sought to do the opposite, namely, keep religious doctrine away from influencing imperial inter-state and public affairs. If ‘True Monarchy’ had failed to materialize as he had expected, the Holy Alliance was the dawning of great expectations for Russia and Europe. ‘Finally,’ he wrote to a friend of his, [A] great light clears away all my uncertainties. It is the manifesto of 25th December. For now I can open up all my ideas, or dare I say with my inspiration, and help the Emperor on the only subject worth of his attention . . . I propose to send to the Emperor a book that contains a complete prophecy of the manifesto, with maxims that show what to do with regards to this union. Oh, sacred union! . . . [This book] is part of my dreams for the perfectibility of governments and the application of the doctrine of Our Lord on public affairs.152

Ecstatically, he also wrote the emperor a letter where he stated that the Holy Alliance would confirm that ‘the true aim of human societies is to lead men to the union in Christ’.153 Like Speransky, the Russian political establishment was gripped by a sense that the country was moving towards a new political path, almost apocalyptical, ruled by a Theologico-Patriarchal monarchy, though the Russian Orthodox Church found less appealing the fact that the Holy Alliance opened up the religious space in Russia, allowing freedom, plurality and equality for Christian denominations and a number of Christian mystic groups through the ‘Constitution of the Churches’ Decree of 8 March 1817.154

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The failure of the ‘Grand Design’ and the Holy Alliance as a second attempt Regardless of whether the Tsar’s intentions were genuine in upholding Christian solidarity for conducting European inter-state relations through the Holy Alliance, he sought to provide an ideological momentum to the new but rather laconic and dry principle of ‘concerted action’ set out in Article V of the Treaty of Chaumont. This Article had laid out the terms for the conclusion of a general peace with France – establishing that: ‘The contracting parties will agree after the conclusion of the peace with France . . . to take defensive measures for the protection of their respective territories in Europe against all attempts on the part of France to trouble the result of this pacification.’155 In retrospect, this also served as the foundation of the ‘system’, or the Concert of Europe, which Metternich developed – the European Restoration – whereby the European inter-state order moved from a competitive to a consensus-based balance of power.156 European diplomacy operated through it until 1848 when it came to be undermined by the 1848 revolutions, the Crimean War (1853–1856), Italian (1861) and German (1871) unifications and the ‘Great Eastern Question’ (1877–1878). The defeat of Napoleonic France by the four powers, Russia, Britain, Austria and Prussia, had created a great void at the centre of European geopolitical order, leaving Britain and Russia – two peripheral empires on the continent – as the strongest contestants for filling that vacuum. Preceding the declaration of the Holy Alliance, the Congress of Vienna held between September 1814 and June 1815 – having thus institutionalized the balance of power and just equilibrium, ‘providing the basic “constitution” for the nineteenth century international system’157 – together with earlier meetings arranged on the eve of the French defeat by the allied forces, had given the allies a positivity about consulting in regular meetings on the preservation of European peace.158 However, from the outset of the post-Napoleonic European inter-state political reality two alternative platforms emerged. On the one hand, there was the Holy Alliance, in which Britain, by excluding itself (in order to have a free hand in its foreign policy on the continent), gave Russia the leading role. While on the other hand, soon afterwards (on 8 November 1815), there was the Quadruple Alliance that reconfirmed the alliance of the Treaty of Chaumont, in which the rivalry between Russian and Britain was played out. For the tsar neither the Treaty of Chaumont nor the Congress of Vienna’s diplomatic arrangements offered a proactive ideological edge in making

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a bid for future peace in Europe, now that there was no longer a threat from Napoleon I. For his part, Napoleon I had wrought havoc and destabilized the continent with a series of war campaigns. At the same time, however, he had projected a vision of peace in which a liberal European federation of national states came together under the principle of civil equality as well as a less ‘dignified’ programme for a self-sufficient European continent dominated by French merchants and manufacturers159 – as the Continental System of 1806 to 1814 had demonstrated. Thus Alexander’s response to Napoleon’s vision – which would ‘re-haunt’ the continent in the years to come – was a geopolitical arrangement for a European confederation based on voluntary association of nations and monarchies following the precepts of religion. With the Holy Alliance as a foregone reality, the three contracting parties – the Russian, Austrian and Prussian monarchs, joined later by other European monarchs – had pledged their unbreakable bonds of brotherhood and promised to give support and assistance to each other whenever and wherever required. This document was indeed vague enough; the text did not specify how the monarchs could support and assist each other in suppressing possible rebellions of their own subjects or, crucially, how to intervene in the internal affairs of other states.160 Championing a ‘durable peace’ in Europe based on the protection of three universal notions, religion, peace and justice, the hegemon (the tsar) had yet to determine how to achieve it and with what means – a no less controversial exercise. But as much as its ideological thrust could be impressive and controversial, in terms of Russian attempts to reform the mores of European inter-state relations at the onset of the nineteenth century (as mentioned), the Holy Alliance represented nothing new. In his youth, Alexander I had contemplated the possibility of establishing of a liberal regime in his empire – granting a constitution and even relinquishing the absolute power his predecessors had enjoyed – while as a newly crowned emperor, he had envisaged an image for himself as a reformer of European inter-state politics.161 That vision was first conceptualized as the Grand Design162 – an idea discussed163 with his friend of Polish origin and Minister of Foreign Affairs Adam G. Czartoryski in 1804 as preparations for a third anti-French coalition were underway. In the Grand Design, peace was conceived in the vocabulary of international law, a concept recently coined by British jurist Jeremy Bentham:164 equality, sovereignty, federalism and diplomacy, as opposed to that of Christian solidarity. The Grand Design was to be a ‘pact of a permanent alliance’ between Russia and Britain that would ‘guarantee the tranquillity of the whole world’,165 laid out in the famous

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Instructions, which the tsar and Czartoryski gave in September 1804 to their plenipotentiaries Simon Vorontzov and Nikolai Novosiltsev in London, with the aim of forging this alliance. The Grand Design would set the stage, as Czartoryski elaborated, for a league of European nations whose peace treaty was to serve as the foundation of a ‘new code of the law of nations’. This was a new European political system premised upon the ‘principles of equity’ as well as the ‘law of nations’ in which the tsar was to play a leading role as ‘an arbiter of peace for the civilised world . . . the protector of the weak and oppressed, the guardian of justice among nations’.166 He was to open a ‘new era in European international relations . . . based upon the general good and the rights of each nations’.167 Like the Holy Alliance, it was a positive as opposed to a negative initiative for peace. The tsar reasoned that a permanent alliance, an ‘indissoluble union’, between Britain and Russia had to be forged on ‘the highest principles of justice and love of humanity’, as opposed to coming together over a common hatred for Napoleon’s tyranny.168 The tsar and Czartoryski were familiar with the idea of ‘perpetual peace’, most famously put, ironically but also programmatically, to European states by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his essay ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795).169 Yet both considered it an unrealistic dream; ‘It is not at all a question of realizing the dream of perpetual peace,’ they wrote in the Instructions, ‘one can reasonably hope that Europe would enjoy a longer period of peace and prosperity than she had ever known before.’170 In addition to this alliance, which was key to the liberation of Europe and forcing France back to its just limits, a new league of European states was needed with a treaty based on clear and precise principles guided by the precept of the ‘rights of people’. These precise principles entailed submission to the ‘positive rights of the nation’, assuring the privileges of the neutrality, inserting in the treaty the obligation of not starting a war until all the means of negotiation were exhausted through the mediation of a third party.171 This new league of constitutional and liberal states – who would sign up to these principles – would live in peace under benign protection and arbitration of Russia and Britain.172 These principles would become, without any sanctions involved, the ‘immutable rules’ of European governments’ conduct. Governments that would violate them, however, faced the full force of this new union.173 British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806) was puzzled and irritated by what he considered moralistic phrases of the text.174 The British responded with a counter-proposal suggesting sending a draft treaty as an ultimatum to Napoleon I to withdraw his troops to French pre-war borders, which was signed by the British and Austrian as well as

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Russian representatives in St Petersburg. It was to be the basis for the Third Coalition, which on 28 July 1805 ratified the Anglo-Russian Alliance. It was not the ‘permanent alliance’ as conceived in the Grand Design, however. Rather, stripped of any grand standing, it entailed upon Britain to have to subsidize annually one and a half million British pounds, in exchange for every one hundred thousand Russian troops in the field.175 The tsar’s Grand Design failed to convince the British government in negotiating a geopolitical arrangement – the two empires co-operating under a European legal framework – that could lead, in his understanding, to a lasting peace in the continent.176 Nevertheless, it became a stepping-stone in Russia’s quest (which Britain opted out of) for altering the terms of European inter-state politics, and to make her weight felt. As such, the document of the Holy Alliance can be seen as a revisiting, so as to establish a new order in Europe and beyond. The difference this time, as noted, was that a new vocabulary was activated – which nonetheless accommodated some of the terms from the Grand Design – and in a new context. By mustering a coalition under the umbrella of the Holy Alliance, the tsar could then envisage a primary position for Russia not only in the European equilibrium but crucially also in a new system of universal equilibrium. The geopolitical rationale behind the Holy Alliance entailed a scenario in which Austria was tied to the Holy Alliance, and isolated in Europe through a concord with Prussia, the Netherlands and France. If he could manage this, the Habsburg Empire would be obliged to follow Russian policy; and furthermore it would have been easier for the tsar to challenge any British ambitions in Europe, and elsewhere in the world.177 From a Russian imperial historical perspective, Alexander I was reinvigorating a doctrine in foreign policy established by Peter the Great: namely, dominating through the ‘protection’ of neighbours. His grandmother, Catherine the Great, had shown herself a real virtuoso in carrying this out in the expansion of the empire in the south, at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, and southwest. Alexander I’s innovation, in these terms, had been that he created the vocabulary, ‘the template for Russian imperial engagement in Europe’.178 Thus the Vienna Congress post-war settlement was for a lasting peace deal between the great powers whose interests took precedence over any smaller nation. This was a change that Alexander brought about discursively, regardless of how controversial it might have been for the wider European context, for this morally imbued vocabulary gave him quite an envious stature as a divinely ordained king to administer God’s rule on earth, dealing with any political issues emerging among the sovereigns who signed in to respect the principles of the Christian religion.179

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In this way, all local tensions had the potential to be treated as inter-state problems that needed to be addressed. It seemed that the more European territories that came under Russian control under the Holy Alliance the better secured Russia would be. The humiliation caused by Napoleon’s Grande Armée penetrating right into the core of the Empire, the old capital, would not be allowed. The main task for Alexander I was to bring as many countries, even forcibly, under the new system.180 Something much easier said than done.

Calling for and enforcing ‘joint moral actions’ To make the Holy Alliance work, and the project of peace a reality – Metternich had been sceptical of its practicality from the very outset – Tsar Alexander I would employ two instruments from two uncommon origins: the convening of congresses (a recent legacy of anti-Napoleonic coalitions) and granting of written constitutions (a powerful symbol of the French and American revolutions). While congresses were a venue for monarchs and statesmen to maintain the balance of power, as well as include new members in line with the spirit of the Holy Alliance, the granting of constitutions was seen by the tsar as a way of pacifying internal political struggles in countries and territories that he sought to befriend or include under his dominating empire. In the assumed role of a continental hegemon, he agreed to, and saw through, the establishment of constitutional regimes in many German states; in France through the Charte constitutionnelle of 1814 (earlier in 1809 he had allowed the recently incorporated Duchy of Finland to maintain its Constitution, prepared by Speransky); and in Congress Poland through Konstytucja Królestwa Polskiego (The Constitution of the Polish Kingdom), on 27 November 1815, which he considered to be the most liberal political document of the time.181 This was his policy of Sage Libéralisme182 (cautious liberalism) advocated by one of his main foreign policy advisers, John Capodistria. Earlier, the granting of the French Charte had come about because of the tsar’s personal dislike towards the wouldbe restored French Bourbon King Louis XVIII . In allowing the restoration of the Bourbon kingdom, King Louis XVIII had to agree to the tsar’s condition to assume power not as an absolute monarch but as a constitutional one by accepting the Charte, of which Alexander I not only approved,183 but was also to some extent influential in its making.184 As for the Sage Libéralisme within the imperial realm – besides setting up constitutional frameworks, of different nature, in the Duchy of Finland and Congress of Poland – the many attempts had yet to materialize.

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In 1814 Emperor Alexander I tasked a Baltic German Baron Rosenkampf to write a constitution, and made a similar offer to Baron vom Stein, who rejected the proposal (we have discussed at length Speransky’s proposed constitution of 1809) – none of which thus came to fruition. As Raeff noted, the emperor’s quest for a constitutional Russia did not subside in the so-called ‘reactionary period’ of Alexander’s reign, that is after 1812 and the Congress of Vienna. Indeed, when the tsar spoke at the opening of the Polish Sejm (Diet) in 1818 he raised hopes for a constitution for the Russian lands. In 1820 there came the project of Novosiltsev’s Charte Constitutionelle for Russia185 – drawing heavily on the Polish Constitution, and significant for its principle of federalism186 – which also did not materialize.187 Peace manifested in these ways, however, still seemed to the rest of the European states to be as a Russian drive to subdue European affairs to its will – backed by the threat of its military might. Fully aware of this, Alexander I – in an exchange with his ambassador in France on 18 March 1816 – nonetheless emphasized ‘the peaceful seduction’, that is consent, that Christian nations would enjoy from adhering to Christian precepts embraced the Holy Alliance, dismissing the possibility of its becoming a project of conquest, and the use of force or weapons.188 With the Holy Alliance having been proclaimed in the wake of European settlement of the French question, France achieving internal stability and peaceful conduct with other European states would be the first test of success for his peace project. On 3 November 1818 at the opening day of the Congress of Aix-la Chapelle, the first for the Holy Alliance, Alexander I expressed his enthusiasm in a letter circulated before the proceedings about the stability and new reality brought about by the alliance in re-integrating a pacified France in a brotherly union, with the sovereigns presiding over such complicated affairs. This was a system of intimate union that had increasingly accrued new elements of stability – the foremost being the establishment of the ‘unanimity of intentions’ amongst the respective governments. The letter provided a historical evaluation of recent accomplishments of this alliance, advancing a projection of stability that encompassed the continent, and would stretch beyond it. A fragment of it read: This close system of union based on treaties is not therefore a work of the moment, a resource created by the immediacy of a universal danger. It is more than this. It has and it will acquire more in the days to come new elements of stability; it will strengthen and ameliorate thanks to human prudence in graciously keeping with religion and as the Providence wills, against all odds, to dispense it in Europe and the universe.189

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Tsar Alexander’s high-spiritedness was noted by Metternich’s adviser, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), present at the event, who gave a rosy depiction of his enthusiasm and confidence. To him, both the tsar and his project enjoyed a spell of grandeur in the Congress. His charisma exhibited no falsity, and in spite of his duality of images – protector of the oppressed versus that of conqueror – the Russian Emperor appeared true to his sentiments, with the religious being paramount, and most sincere. Gentz also emphasized Alexander I’s seriousness in maintaining political equilibrium in Europe by living up to his pledges, as he was the architect of European stability – the soul, the leading thinker and the hero.190 The outcome of this Congress had been the peaceful reintegration of France in the Quintuple Alliance – uncontested by Austria, Prussia and Britain – but there was a more controversial issue that Alexander could no longer postpone. This issue concerned ‘giving teeth to’ the vague notion of ‘Christian solidarity of monarchs’. Articulating it as a call for ‘joint moral actions’ – collective intervention in a ‘religious garb’ – it was met with fierce opposition by the allies.191 It was in this shift – from a notion of peace, coated in religious vocabulary, as self-preservation to that of subduing and controlling – that the image of the Holy Alliance took a new meaning as a vehicle for conservative and reactionary politics as opposed to Metternich’s depiction of it as a bizarre confluence of mystic religiosity and political liberalism. This shift became even more tangible as a series of national, liberal political events in the continent, including in Russia, which put to the test the solidarity of Christian monarchs. The rest of the story of the Holy Alliance, to the death of Alexander I in 1825, was a heated contention between Alexander I and Metternich – played out both in and outside the venues of congresses – about using the ‘joint moral actions’ as these liberal uprisings unfolding in German states, Spain, Italy and Greece. Indeed, the assassination of the German Conservative writer August Kotzebue on 23 March 1819 and its aftermath192 was the first instance of this contention. As a representative of the Habsburg Monarchy, Metternich convened a ‘restricted’ conference at Carlsbad in August 1819, where representatives from nine main states of the German Confederation agreed to quell the explosive situation.193 It was restricted in that it was outside the political frame of the Holy Alliance: a cause for dismay for the tsar, as he could not intervene in German affairs. In a memoir to the British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh on 21 November 1819, titled ‘Emperor’s Views on the German Affairs’, Alexander called for a joint action with Britain against what he saw as Metternich’s reactionary tendencies. For him, this event and the ensuing series of liberal revolutionary eruptions in

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southern Europe in the early 1820194 powerfully illustrated the need to agree on ‘joint moral actions’ among the allies. This agreement would happen at the second congress of the alliance held in the small town of Troppau in Silesia from 23 October to 19 November 1820. This time, it was the Italian question that was on the table. Metternich was keen to intervene unilaterally by military means and restore the King of Two Sicilies with the prerogatives of an absolute monarch. Tsar Alexander I, on the other hand, argued for negotiations; the king would have to grant constitutional guarantees to his people, with failure of these options opening the way for collective intervention – meanwhile Britain and France decided to observe rather than participate.195 This contention between the two was resolved thanks to emerging events in the Russian Empire, disturbances in the Polish Diet and the revolt of the Semovnovsky Guards.196 The preliminary protocol of the congress thus made a reality the right of intervention in internal affairs of other states to suppress revolutionary movements without the consent or request of their governments.197 The tsar’s two-pronged approach to European peace – granting constitutions and convening congresses – was being radically transformed. His lack of enthusiasm for constitutionalism at home was soon followed by an abandonment of Sage Libéralisme in Europe. Sage Libéralisme had always promoted a particular sort of constitutionalism, which became even more evident as the revolutionary demands for liberal constitutions increased. His response to these demands was sharply negative, noting disapprovingly that ‘[l]egitimate sovereigns were forced to give in to revolutionary demands by reinstating or granting liberal constitutions’.198 The policy reports of the tsar’s main diplomatic adviser, Sturdza, while away in his native Bessarabia from 1819 to 1822 – involved with preparing a civil code there – to Alexander I through his two foreign ministers, Capodistria and von Nesselrode, underscored this. Sturdza, who had influence on Alexander’s foreign policy, underscored the ‘danger that liberal and constitutional ideas represented for social and political stability of Europe’.199 This was unacceptable because the granting of constitutions in certain parts of the continent would happen only with his approval – whenever and wherever he deemed it appropriate and not through revolutionary means from below. He had become convinced that, after all, not all nations of Europe, including Russia, were predisposed to a constitutional government. In a letter to French Ambassador Count Ferronays considering the events in the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, he wrote, ‘I love constitutional institutions and think that every decent man should love them, but can they be introduced indiscriminately for all peoples? Not all peoples are ready to the same degree for their acceptance.

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Of course, freedom and law which can be enjoyed by an enlightened nation such as yours, it does not suit to ignorant peoples of both peninsulas.’200 In the final protocol of the congress, the Holy Alliance gave its collective ‘blessing’ to Austria to intervene unilaterally in restoring royal power, in its absolutist form, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The declared aim of intervention was to ‘liberate the King and the Nation’. For Alexander I, this congress was a triumph of his ‘collective action’,201 and a complete abandonment of the problematic Sage Libéralisme. Having put into practice the concept of ‘joint moral actions’ by agreeing for Austria to intervene in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies he, however, would not succeed in making use of it when more historical and direct Russian imperial ambitions seemed to be at stake. In the third Congress of the Alliance, convened in January 1821 in Laibach (Ljubljana) to discuss the modalities of Austrian intervention in the Italian peninsula, Metternich had expressed satisfaction with the ‘European character of restoration’202 – meaning that Austrian troops were given the right to intervene, and in case of resistance Russian troops would join them. But while this was being agreed upon, a Greek insurgency led by nationalist Alexander Ypsilanti against the Ottoman state erupted on 25 February 1821, which tempted the tsar who, in using this cause, could resurrect his grandmother’s ‘grand project’ of opening Russia’s route into the Mediterranean Sea. For his part, taking the tsar on his principles of the Holy Alliance, Yspilanti called on Alexander I ‘to save the Greek Orthodox religion from its persecutors . . . [and] clean Europe from this sanguine monster [the Ottoman Empire]’.203 Yet the tsar found himself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand Capodistria, a native of Corfu, advised him to intervene to advance Russian interests there as well as protect the religious rights of Ottoman Greeks.204 On the other hand, Metternich reminded him of the mission of the Holy Alliance as a platform for thwarting revolutionary movements that undermined monarchical legitimacy (which the Ottoman Empire also had) in the continent. As it happened, he chose Metternich’s path, who had called for negotiation with the Ottoman Empire. Yet he was still bitter because, as he told Castlereagh, the Ottoman Empire was not part of the Vienna system and thus not legally protected by it, and hence represented fair game for an intervention – a view that Castlereagh did not share.205 Even more disappointing was the outcome from the last congress of the Holy Alliance, the Congress of Verona (October–December 1822), concerned with the question of the Spanish revolution and political emancipation of its colonies in the New World.206 The tsar had suggested a real diplomatic offensive against

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revolutionaries in Madrid, strongly backed up by collective and vigorous use of force.207 He was against the recognition of the independence of colonies as they threatened the European equilibrium. With these colonies being inspired by American political institutions he considered them as new and independent states, in opposition to the political institutions of countries like Russia, and therefore advocated their ‘pacification’ under the Vienna and Paris agreements of 1815. For all these efforts, he did not manage to gain any support for his proposals, while France got her way to intervene in Spain.208 This last congress made clear to him that the congress system was heading towards collapse.209 There was an unbridgeable gap between the optimistic declaration at the Aix-laChapelle Congress of the first ‘unanimity of intentions’ of the allies, and their insurmountable contradictions210 following the last congress, especially in the light of the ongoing Greek–Ottoman crisis. Several attempts were made to solve this diplomatically,211 with Russia organizing two conferences in St Petersburg, in 1824 and 1825. In the second conference, Britain did not participate, whereas France and Austria expressed themselves against any intervention, neither collective nor unilateral. Frustrated by Metternich’s attitude, the tsar confided to his Chancellor, Count von Nesselrode, how this crisis had isolated him at home and abroad and was intending to deal directly with Britain, as opposed to continuing with the format of the Holy Alliance. The Turkish power is crumbling; the agony is more or less long, but is stricken with death. I am still here, armed with all my power, but strong in my known principles of moderation and disinterestedness. How will it not profit me, with my aversion from any project of conquest to reach a solution of the question which is incessantly disturbing Europe? . . . My people demand war; my armies are full of ardour to make it, perhaps I could not long resist them. My Allies have abandoned me. Compare my conduct to theirs. Everyone has intrigued in Greece. I alone have remained pure. I have pushed scruples so far as not to have a single wretched agent in Greece, not an intelligence agent even, and I have to be content with the scraps that fall from the table of my Allies. Let England think of that. If they grasp hands [with us] we are sure of controlling events and establishing in the East an order of things conformable to the interests of Europe and to the laws of religion and humanity.212

By early 1825, lonely and depressed at home – having caved in to pressures by Russian Orthodox clergy to clamp down on religious freedom by making illegal the activities of religious mystics and secret societies in 1822213 – and isolated and frustrated by his allies abroad, the tsar was witnessing the unravelling and collapse of his life’s work.214 His perseverance and enthusiasm about the Holy

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Alliance was waning as he was already thinking of relapsing into a unilateral intervention policy that promoted Russian’s own geopolitical ambitions. As he left St Petersburg for what was to be his last journey south to the Crimea in September 1825, his armies began to concentrate on the borders of Moldavia and Wallachia. No war was started however, because the tsar was officially pronounced dead in December 1825 in the Russian Black Sea town of Taganrog.215

Shared delusions Just before Tsar Alexander I’s death Pavel Pestel (1793–1826), the leader of the Southern Society – who was, however, very unlikely to be welcomed – had secretly expressed to one of his close collaborators the intention of going down to Taganrog and meeting with the emperor. He wanted to appeal to the emperor about the necessity of granting Russia all the reforms which so far it had not undergone. Pestel, in a letter to his collaborator, no longer wanted to keep the goals of the Society secret. ‘I have determined,’ he noted, ‘to wait till 1825, go down to Taganrog, and appeal to the Emperor to listen to the urgent necessity of granting Russia all reforms.’216 Pestel, unlike the other members of the Society, or the members of the Northern Society, led by Nikita Muraviev (1796–1843), seemed to believe that the tsar would listen to his bonne cause. Whether this was an act of naiveté or desperation, the point remained that the tsar still generated a sense of hope and frustration for the national and spiritual regeneration of Russia, and its standing in Europe, among young army officers in the imperial guard. In their anti-Napoleonic campaigns, they had seen first-hand the relative prosperity in Germany and France in contrast to Russia’s political, economic and societal conditions. Their frustration and call to action culminated with the Northern Society’s unsuccessful Decembrist Revolt (Movement) of 14 December 1825 in the Senate Square in St Petersburg, triggered by Alexander’s sudden death, the confusion as to his successor (whether it would be the more ‘liberal’ brother Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich (1779–1831) or ‘the conservative’ Nicholas (1796–1855)), and the Society’s defiance not to pledge allegiance to the latter as Nicholas I (r. 1826–1855), the Autocrat of all Russians.217 The event itself did not cause a serious threat to the imperial regime.218 However, it exposed another level of a search for fundamental changes that had been simmering below the imperially and bureaucratically led quests for political reform. And on a closer look, both societies – drawing on visions and tactics from other European secret societies, especially the German League of Virtue (Tugenbund) and Russian predecessors, the Union of Salvation (established in

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1816), Romanticism, the French and American Revolutions – searched for fundamental changes and debated constitutional, governmental and societal reform. But particularly the Northern Society sought to avoid revolution that involved the masses, civil war, anarchy and general chaos.219 In fact, their vision for change, like Speransky but with some variations, sought to achieve personal security, political participation, reforming the branches of the government (particularly the judiciary) and improving the conditions of the peasants. Unlike Speransky’s however, their vision for rejuvenating Russia entailed re-instituting some of the old Russian institutions and combining them with progressive notions from Western European civilization and liberalism.220 Indeed, Muraviev, who led the Northern Society from 1822, had wanted the tsar to replicate in Russia proper what he had granted to the Poles of the empire, the Polish Constitution in 1815. For this, he and his Society had prepared their project for a constitutional monarchy, whereby serfdom was abolished – land would be in the hands of the landlords, but all items used by peasant were to be theirs – freedom of speech and press was allowed, religious tolerance was sanctioned, and trial by jury to be assured. Muraviev’s project, like Speransky’s, planned for political participation based on property qualifications. Unlike Speransky, he sought to establish a federal system of thirteen states and two provinces, along the lines of the American Constitution, with a bicameral legislative branch and an executive branch commanded by the constitutional monarch.221 And thus if Muraviev envisaged a constitutional and federalised monarchy, with the Tsar still the head of the empire, Pestel’s alternative project – and this was the reason for the split of the societies – which he laid out in his treatise Russian Justice, or The Instructions to the Supreme Provisional Government (1821–1825), envisaged a republican, unitary form of government achieved through revolution and, if needed, regicide, an overthrow of the Russian monarchical order.222 Indeed, his Russian Justice was a more radical political and economic project aimed at destroying the ‘old feudal order’ and ‘aristocracy’ and create anew a state based on the principle of ‘welfare for all, not for a few but for the majority’. Thus, Pestel’s desirable political community was for a unitary state: one nation, one government and one language; one political and economic order for the entire country in which there was legal equality, universal suffrage, abolished serfdom, all land as state property, and a physiocratic political economy based on agriculture, relying on prosperous peasants rather than being dominated by industrial magnates.223 The failure on the part of the tsar to genuinely materialize Speransky’s efforts for a ‘True Monarchy’ greatly disappointed the Decembrists – a sentiment

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undoubtedly shared by Speransky. No less deluded were they with the way in which the Holy Alliance’s Christian solidarity had worked for Russia’s national interests, for while other European states (France, many German states and the Congress of Poland) were granted constitutions, Russia was not. Furthermore, free trade agreements with Prussia, Austria and Poland in 1816, under the umbrella of the Holy Alliance, and the inconsistency of this policy, were seen as devastating for Russian merchants and industrialists.224 Moreover, they saw with great frustration Alexander I’s subordination of Russia’s national interests to Metternich’s reactionary policy, and in general to the interests of foreigners. A sense of xenophobia grew among them, as illustrated in a propaganda poem by one of the Decembrist leaders, Kondraty Ryleev, a member of the Northern Society, titled ‘Our Tsar – a Russian Foreigner.’225 Clearly, they were little aware of the tsar’s frustrations with Metternich and the overall project of Holy Alliance at the end of his life. Meanwhile, Speransky had been unaware of the Decembrists plans that in the event of an overthrow of the monarchical regime, and prior to the constitution of the National Assembly, he and Admiral Mordvinov were singled out as potential candidates of running the Directorate (this to be appointed by the Senate). This, in fact, was Muraviev’s plan, for Pestel had considered the establishment of a dictatorship of a Provisional Government, which was rejected by the Northern Society. The failed uprising and the ensuing trial of the Decembrists in the Winter Palace – which the new Emperor Nicholas I himself led as a general prosecutor of the investigation – brought to the political spotlight Speransky (years after his exile), because of the implications by the Decembrist but also to assist the tsar with setting up the procedures of the trial. The tsar sought to test Speransky’ loyalty to the monarchy, for Speransky had known some members of the Northern Society. It turned out there was nothing to implicate him in the affair; it was simply wishful thinking on the side of the Decembrists who thought that with his attempts of fundamental changes in the empire, they could enlist him on political actions regardless of the visions and means. Nicholas I was pleased with Speransky’s contribution, who helped him write the manifesto of the Decembrist trial, announcing the sentences of the court, in which five of its leaders, among them Pestel and Ryleev, received capital punishment, made public in July 1826. Unlike his colleague Admiral Mordvinov, who spoke for mercy and moral justice, Speransky did not utter a word.226 Having gained the full confidence of the tsar, Speransky convinced Nicholas I to revive the work on the codification of law which, as mentioned earlier, led him to head a special commission that on 20 March 1830 produced the First Series of

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the Complete Code of Russian Law, in forty-five volumes, followed by the Second Series in six volumes two years later.227 ‘Change nothing of what was done by our dear, excellent and adorable, deceased brother,’ was the advice of Grand Duke Constantine to Nicholas on 8 December 1825 in the confusion of interregnum, ‘neither in most important affairs nor in trivial ones.’228 The way Nicholas I understood the preservation of these changes was by consolidating the Holy Alliance so as to thwart any further revolutionary outbreaks abroad and at home, and closing the empire off from the constant political fermentation in the other parts of the continent,229 quite in the same manner as his father Emperor Paul I had sought to do it. The time for fundamental changes seemed to have been exhausted.

2

‘Alternation and Complete Renewal of Ancient Custom’: An Unattainable Pledge

Renewal through new laws and permanent institutions Hatt-ı Hümâyun of Gülhane: the dawning of good administration or constitutionalism? It was hardly the time for reciting poems1 for Mustafa Reshid Pasha (1800–1858) on 3 November 1839. In a highly remarkable public gesture unravelling that day in Constantinople, at the Gülhane (Rose Chamber) gardens near the wall of the sultan’s Topkapı Sarayı, the Ottoman Foreign Minister stood up in front of his arch-rival Grand Vizier Koca Hüsrev Mehmet Pasha (1769–1855), under the watchful eyes of the sixteen-year-old Sultan Abdülmecid I (r.  1839–1861), looking on from a window of the Gülhane kiosk. Also surrounded by high dignitaries of the palace and Porte, foreign envoys accredited to the Sublime Porte, he promulgated in a high voice2 the Hatt-ı Hümâyun (the Imperial Decree).3 ‘The Rose Chamber Edict’, commented historian M. Shukru Hanioğlu, ‘was like nothing seen before in Ottoman history’, and was aimed at pleasing the ears of the Europeans.4 The latter point is one of dispute among other scholars of nineteenth-century Ottoman history. Kemal H. Karpat viewed it as driven by internal needs for change. In this light, it was a ‘turning point in the transformation of the Ottoman state . . . instrumental chiefly in accelerating the centralisation and bureaucratisation of the Ottoman Empire’.5 For the nineteenthcentury official Ottoman historian Ahmet Lutfi, however, as pointed out in his book Tarih-i Lutfi (1885), Reshid Pasha, the edict’s main architect, used it to get the attention of European statesmen in order to secure the Ottoman accession to the Concert of Europe. Nonetheless, ‘the edict was directed both inward and outward, at once a serious commitment to reform out of self-interests, and an appeasing gesture directed at Europe’.6 What was undisputed, however, was that its main sponsor, Reshid Pasha, in combining the ideas developed in the past 61

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with new ones was ‘in many ways the real architect of the nineteenth century reforms.’7 The decree was unique in that, for the first time, similar to what Speransky sought to devise in the Russian reforms, new guarantees were promised – security of life, honour and property for all the subjects of the empire – by a young monarch, whose position largely had symbolized the old and absolute. ‘The edict was due to the sole power of the Sultan. The sheikh-ul-islam, the representative of religion, and Reschid [sic], the representative of enlightenment,’ noted early twentieth-century British historian Harold Temperley, ‘had both bowed in dust before him like slaves. The power of the Sultan remained as absolute as ever, indeed was more absolute than before. What he had given, he could take away.’8 Not long after, the young Sultan sought to ensure that ‘this alteration and complete renewal of ancient custom [was] solely for the purpose of reviving religion, government and the Empire’, and that ‘we engage not to do anything that is contrary thereto’.9 The Hatt-ı Hümâyun (hereafter, the Hatti) was a formal pledge for a new perspective in conducting reforms10 that would ensure political and administrative unity of the empire11 – departing from previous despotism with which the sultan’s father, Sultan Mahmud II , had carried out his reforms. Most certainly, change and reform were not alien ideas for the Ottoman political realm. Historian of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ottoman history Virginia Aksan pointed to a whole body of advice literature written by scribal Ottomans who, from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, offered advice on reform for rulers. They, however, evoked the traditional concepts in the Ottoman political theory, daire-i adliye12 (the circle of equity or justice) – each of the four classes (military, religious/intellectual, merchant and peasant) depending upon the justice of the sultan for its political wellbeing – and that of strengthening din-ü-devlet (religion and state), only with the latter concept gaining more significance by the end of the eighteenth century.13 In its more recent history, political reform was understood as the re-establishing or reordering of imperial affairs. Recent history had also shown that in these efforts experiences had turned out to be extreme and violent – either the reforming monarch met with tragic consequences and hence the reforms were abolished, or he succeeded but then accrued despotic powers, deemed repulsive by many of his subjects. Sultan Selim III (r.  1789–1807) was an example of the first case. He had sought to shift the Ottoman politics from a traditional, or in a Weberian sense, from a patrimonial order towards a rational-legal one. His attempt for Nizam-ı Cedid (New Order), entailing a series of military14 and financial reforms,15 was resisted by those who saw it as based on foreign rather than traditional precepts.

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This resistance was manifested through the declaration of a fetva (religious decree), by Şeyhülislam16 and the subsequent revolt of janissaries17 in 1807 because the sultan had ‘introduce[d] among the Moslems the manners of the infidels and show[ed] an intention to suppress the janissaries’.18 Ultimately, it led to his dethronement and imprisonment. The royal intrigues by his succeeding cousin, the new Sultan Mustafa IV (r. 1807–1808), cost him his life and caused the abolition of the New Order. Sultan Mahmud II , who in nineteenth-century reforms was often compared to Peter the Great, but whose guiding example was his predecessor Selim III and whose projects he wanted to complete,19 was an example of the second scenario. He survived an assassination attempt by his brother, and in turn ordered the assassination of his deposed sibling. Mahmud II carried on with the reformist impulse20 – the most fundamental of which being the abolition of the janissary corps in 1826 – moving towards the strengthening of central government and amassing what was seen as despotic powers. But contrary to the main intention that guided Sultan Mahmud II ’s reforms – that is, ensuring stability through the centralization of political and military powers – instability also persisted. This was not only due to the frequency of wars – against the semi-autonomous Albanian Pashalik of Janina run by Ottoman-Albanian ruler Ali Pasha Tepelena (1822); the Greek Revolution (1821–1832); against Russia in (1828–1829) triggered by the Greek Revolution and concluded with the Treaty of Adrianople (1829); and the two campaigns against the Ottoman-Albanian ruler of the eyalet (province) of Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha (1833 and 1839) – but importantly also because of a perceived internal tension and disharmony between law and politics. This deplorable state of affairs was noted in the opening paragraph of the Hatti. The early glory of the Ottoman Monarchy was derived from its honouring of both sources of law in the empire: the precepts of the Koran and the secular laws, Kanun.21 It was by observing these sources that the empire had enjoyed strength and greatness, allowing its subjects to live at ease and in prosperity. Yet over the last one hundred and fifty years, a combination of a ‘succession of accidents and diverse causes’, had brought about disregard for the sacred code of laws and the regulations that derived from it. The former strength and prosperity had turned into weakness and poverty. The text further elaborated: ‘An Empire, in fact, loses all its stability so soon as it ceases to observe its laws. . . . In short,’ it continued, ‘without the several laws, the necessity for which has just been described, there can be neither strength, nor riches, nor happiness, nor tranquillity for the Empire; it must, on the contrary, look for them in the existence of these new laws.22 Therefore, there was an urgent need for new laws and ‘new institutions to give to the Provinces comprising the Ottoman Empire the benefit of a good Administration’.23

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In many ways the Hatti represented a new vision, a remarkable compromise between the old and the new – fresh beginnings with a return to the happiness and prosperity of ‘early times of the Ottoman monarchy’.24 Revitalizing the empire called for the observation of the sacred law as well as embracing the new laws and ‘new institutions’ – an ‘alternation and complete renovation of the ancient usages’.25 This vocabulary, however, was and would remain extremely incendiary to those upholding the Ottoman and Islamic tradition of government and reform, whereby direct reference of the Rescript to ‘new rules’ meant introducing Bidat (innovation), which in turn was loaded with the pejorative meaning of heresy. In the Koran, noted the prominent British-American historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis, there is an insert on innovation which says that ‘every innovation leads to err, every err leads to hell-fire’. In spite of evoking religion and the glorious past, Lewis further commented, the decree ‘talked frankly about “new institutions” to ensure the empire had good administration’.26 Thus, while it claimed to abide by the sacred law, it also upheld the new idea of equality before the law of all imperial subjects and pledged security of life, honour and property – an unprecedented departure from the notion of ‘the circle of equity’ with which its ideologues justified and promoted the stratification of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. As already mentioned, while in the Russian context the contention in domestic legal and institutional reforms was between tradition and new legal rationality and codes, in the Ottoman setting, to that contention was to be added the religious law. Nevertheless, in both contexts, Speransky and Reshid Pasha articulated it in similar manner, namely as a permanent set of rules and regulations that guaranteed basic rights for imperial subjects, and more ambitiously for legally framing imperial politics. Reshid Pasha’s27 undertaking, unlike Speransky’s, envisaged general guarantees and equal protection under law for all imperial Muslim and Reaya (Zimmi subjects) subjects. His rationale for this, as elaborated further below, was personal as well as ‘statist’; he believed that in providing these guarantees, particularly those subjects who could embark on separatist and nationalist tendencies would become loyal towards the empire, hence secure its independence and integrity.28 The general guarantees of the Hatti would be the basis on which the Ottoman state’s ideology of Osmanlilik (Ottomanism) would be articulated, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, an ideology that would ‘remain at the core of central and peripheral discussions of reform and of future’.29 Most certainly, for all its new vision, the Hatti divided Ottoman scholars on a crucial point – whether it introduced a new relationship between the sovereign and the state. To begin with, it certainly did, but not in terms of the modern notion of the separation of powers. For those agreeing with it, the Hatti was

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indeed a watershed moment in the nineteenth-century Ottoman constitutionalism that culminated with the Western European-style, short-lived constitution of 1876 and its re-instatement in 1908.30 To historian Niyazi Berkes, who sought to apply the modernization thesis to Ottoman nineteenth-century history, it was the evidence of the earliest constitutional document in any Islamic country – an organic law sanctioning the making of a new political organization despite the fact that its protocol did not form a constitution in itself.31 Lacking any evidence on the separation of powers or popular representation, the Hatti, Berkes went on, nonetheless limited the arbitrary executive powers of the sultan. These powers were enshrined in the medieval Ottoman conception of sovereignty, which allowed the ruler to exercise his irade (will) for the enactment of Kanun in the areas that were left free by the Şeriat. By contrast, Russian emperors’ political will was not constrained by the religious law, in this case the tenets of Christian Orthodoxy, even though the claim to be a divinely-ordained monarch was the same for both emperors (Russian and Ottoman). The key fundamental change that happened with Hatti regarding the monarchical prerogative of legislating – which as we saw in the Russian case became contested and ultimately left in the hands of the monarch – was the emergence of new institutions, based on the principle of Meşveret (consultation). They, for Berkes, became the new source of legislation, because even though the sultan chose its members to serve as advisory bodies they became empowered in making laws by majority decision, the legality of which was sanctioned by the sultan’s ratification. The Hatti did not have much to say on the separation of powers, and particularly the judiciary power, which remained in its customary notion of Kadi (the judge) as the delegate of the ruler prevailed.32 French historian Abdolonyme Ubicini, who visited Constantinople a little more than a decade after the promulgation of the decree, argued that the empire already had a constitution, albeit an unwritten one, consisting of a body of dispositions deriving from Sultan Suleiman’s Kanun. The Hatti simply upgraded them for a new modern administration. In arguing such ‘constitutional continuity’, Ubicini pointed out that both the old code and the Hatti preserved the prerogative of the sultan to regulate, if he deemed it so, in the omissions or gaps of the Shariah.33 It was historian Sherif Madin, however, who in the Hatti’s guarantees of civil rights of the subjects went so far as to read it as a semi-constitutional pledge to building the foundation for an Ottoman nation.34 But other authors held different views, for British historian Frank E. Bailey, the Hatti was neither a constitution, nor did it provide a basis for one. The only restriction it imposed on the sultan’s arbitrary powers, he noted, was that of

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ending the old and hereditary power of life and death over every subject by guaranteeing security of life.35 True, Nicholas Milev pointed out, aside from announcing military and financial reforms, the Hatti sanctioned the abandonment by the sultan of his discretionary power regarding the workings of the Porte. This was a de facto constitutional victory for the Ottoman bureaucracy, whereby the act of the Hatti was ‘like a conquest by the civil servants in Turkey’.36 For the prominent Ottoman historian Halil Inalcik, there had been an enduring attempt by bureaucracy to define its autonomy under the kanun as to bring about rationality and objectivity to the running of governmental affairs, which in turn attacked the clientelism, favouritism and bribery of institutions that were the defining features of a patrimonial system of government.37 But as far as seeing the Hatti in the language of constitutionalism was concerned, for Reshid Pasha (who Milev also described as the greatest Ottoman reform figure in the nineteenth century) it was simply a farfetched one.38 To Milev, Reshid’s own paternalistic words in a memorandum written two years before its promulgation were enough proof of it. ‘It would be quite impossible’, Reshid stated, with the same logic as Tsar Alexander I, who we saw had toyed with this idea for the Russian people several times, ‘to govern by constitutional methods a people as ignorant and as incapable of understanding its true interests as ours.’39 Reshid’s paternalism, thus a parallel feature with that of the tsar, but a more fundamentally common theme shared and articulated as ‘conservative reform’ by most of the top-down, change-from-within, nineteenth-century reformers in both empires, echoed that of the long-serving and shaper of British foreign policy, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), who asserted that the Hatti was nothing more than an attempt to preserve the traditional order. It had nothing to do with constitutionalism, but rather with – in a phrasing like the Hatti’s text – ‘progressive improvement and development of old Institutions . . . and in truth bringing them back to their ancient purity’.40 While supporting administrative and economic reforms, Palmerston argued against an Ottoman constitutional reform, convinced that enlightened despotism rather than parliamentary government was the optimal option for the empire. The Ottomans, he thought, neither had honest, fearless and capable political leaders, nor an intelligent public opinion that would support them for a functioning parliamentary government.41 Metternich, whose oppressive Austrian bureaucracy Reshid and subsequently Ali and Fuad Pasha took as source of inspiration for top-down ‘conservative reform’,42 pointed out that Hatti’s reforms were not about imitating European political systems. Any attempt to do so was bound to fail because of the stark civilizational (religious) differences between Europe and the

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Ottoman Empire, meaning the former operating under Christian laws whereas in the latter under Islamic laws. Metternich had warned to, ‘not borrow from European civilization institutions that do not agree with your institutions, because Western institutions are based on principles that are different from those forming the bases of your empire. The bases of the West are Christian laws. Restez turcs: mais alors consultez la loi musulmane [sic] (Remain Turks: and consult the Islamic Law).’43 The mere but apparent gap between the utterances of contemporaries and scholars puts into question the claim of many Ottoman scholars that the Hatti marked the end of the Ancient Regime, leading towards the westernization of the empire – secularization and modernization – and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey.44 Rather, as the account based on Reshid Pasha’s role in Ottoman politics – first by instigating the dawning of the Tanzimat (from Arabic, meaning reorganization, reordering) era – attempts to show, these goals for change were informed by more immediate internal and international concerns, unresolved tensions threatening imperial stability, and retrospectively undermined by their unintentionality.45 They were part of a new language that mediated immediate and internal political struggles in a changing geopolitical environment.

The coupling of reform with a strong alliance with Britain: an Ottoman gesture When the Hatti was proclaimed, the Ottoman Empire was engulfed in a second military and diplomatic war with its vassal province of Egypt. Largely spearheaded by its drive to centralize its political power, the Ottoman state sought to bring under its full weight this province that was under the control of Mehmet Ali Pasha (1769–1849). Unlike in the first crisis (1831–1833) triggered by Mehmet Ali’s demand for compensation in the form of the possession of Syria for services rendered to the Ottoman state during the Greek War of Independence, but still pledging his loyalty to Mahmud II , this time Mehmet Ali sought Egypt’s independence from the empire. The first crisis dissipated thanks to the brief rapprochement with Russia – which was weary of the sultan’s army collapsing and with the prospect of Mehmed Ali Pasha occupying all of Asia Minor and even establishing an Arabic Empire instead of the Ottoman one – that promised to militarily intervene on Mahmud’s side. Nonetheless, it was more the British and French than Russian pressures on Mehmed Ali that saved the day for Mahmud II .46 The second crisis, however, rendered the need for a European intervention more pressing to the

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Sultan and his government (the Porte). In this context, when Reshid read the Hatti on 3 November he was poised to address the concerns of internal allies and their positions in opposing political factions around the Porte (vying as always for political power, influence and control) as well as representatives of European powers,47 particularly Britain, offering thanks for the support of Ottoman territorial integrity. Allying with a European power and joining the European diplomatic system was a position that was close to Reshid Pasha’s thinking, but not for most of the Ottoman politicians. Indeed, this position had been contemplated in an anonymous political treatise titled ‘An Explanation of the Balance of Foreign Affairs Relating to Europe’. Written around 1774 at the request of the newly enthroned Sultan Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–1789) who demanded to know which European state could mediate for a peace treaty with Empress Catherine II if Russia – following the long war of 1768–1774 fought over Ottoman territorial possessions in Crimea and the northern Caucasus, the result being the Peace Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774) – the advice was no one, the empire had to negotiate on its own.48 With the strategic calculations having been made, Austria and Prussia were dismissed on the grounds of conspiring in the breakdown of the negotiations, whereas Britain and France had been deemed as unreliable in the past, whereas in the present their trade interests in the Black Sea were seen unfavourably. The greatest shock for most of the Ottoman elite, as the war against Russia was ending, was the realization that their empire was no longer considered an existential threat to Christian Europe. This was also the moment when the European states began to contemplate and strategize, the whole process articulated as the ‘Eastern Question’, on the implications to them of an Ottoman decline.49 While some of the Ottoman elite were in denial about this, others, who lined up as reformers, sought to deal with the new reality by seeking to become part of the European diplomatic system. But joining the European diplomatic system, as the treatise pointed out, represented a dilemma for any Ottoman reformer in favour of it. Most notably, the European terms of war and peace had to be accepted, which meant discarding corresponding Islamic ones that had been essential in the making of the Ottoman Empire.50 These terms rigidly divided the world between Dar al-Harb (Territory of War) and Dar al-Islam (Territory of Islam), whereby negotiations or wars with non-Muslim nations were conducted based on moral and religious superiority. On closer inspection, however, this division and superiority within the Islamic Law of Nations was no different from that of medieval Christendom in its idea of universal monarchy; being ruled by one law and one ruler, and where the need to covert the unconverted featured prominently.51 Moreover, while readers of the

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nineteenth-century ‘international law’ understood this concept, i.e. international law as being comprised of the ‘European Law’ (a guide to Christendom only) and Islamic Law (for the Muslim world) – this division based on religious markers – there had been a closer, practical, interaction between the European Law of Nations and particularly the Ottoman Law of War and Peace. This was especially the case in how the Ottoman state had conducted itself with its non-Muslim subjects in the east Mediterranean Sea regions and the Balkans. Insightfully, the less powerful the empire became vis-à-vis other European powers, the more necessary it became for Muslims to operate with Occidental states’ terms, without, however, ‘adopting inner European international law’. It would be much later, in the 1856 Peace Treaty of Paris, thanks to the diplomatic efforts of Reshid and Ali Pasha, that the empire in becoming part of the Concert of Europe formally gave up practicing ‘the rules of her canonical laws as regards to her relations with her non-Muslim neighbours, as least as far as the Christian Occident was concerned’.52 The European state system was appealing to Reshid Pasha because, contrary to the Islamic terms, it had created a formal setting with negotiations and alliances that controlled one another’s power,53 and added to that was the Metternichian novelty of a concerted balance of powers. By contrast, as we saw with the Holy Alliance project, Emperor Alexander I sought to do the opposite, revert to the vocabulary of religion, or rather combine the European Law of Nations with Christian precepts of solidarity among European states. Reshid was very much aware of this dilemma but he went even further than his predecessors and contemporaries.54 He offered a new geopolitical vision, linking wide internal reforms with external support as a way of ensuring the survival and the general stability of the empire. This stability was to be achieved through a series of reforms based upon administering law and justice, whereas territorial integrity was to be preserved through a genuine alliance, initially with Britain, and as it happened later after the Crimean War and the Paris Peace Treaty (1856) with the Concert of Europe. The alliance with Britain was against a shared enemy, Russia, rather than based on common values, even though Reshid and other Ottoman political figures would use the concept of civilization and justify reforms and participation in the European states system in civilizational terms. In so doing, Reshid Pasha set the foundations for most of the nineteenth-century Ottoman foreign policy of an ‘informal alliance with Britain based on shared interest and a common enemy Russia’.55 This certainly had its rationale. While ambassador in London in 1838, Reshid worked on the idea of a strong alliance between the two states56 to counter

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Russia’s growing influence in Constantinople. Growing Russophobia in the British press in the 1830s, fuelled by an accelerated Anglo-Russian political rivalry in the continent and imperial expansion in Central Asia, as well as rising British economic and strategic interests in Levant coupled with the struggle for naval supremacy with Russia, were all inducing elements for this new orientation. The Ottoman Empire could benefit by getting support for its territorial integrity, which in turn was the best option for the British aim of halting the Russian expansionism south of its borders.57 But in this new alliance, Britain was replacing France as its historical ally. Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic France had become a formidable threat to Ottoman integrity, the two powers once tied in a long-standing alliance that was first shattered by the Napoleonic invasions of Egypt and Syria during 1798 and 1801, and then by the French capture of Ottoman Algeria in 1830.58 Britain only took serious notice of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the first Ottoman Egyptian crisis, in which Mehmet Ali sought to control the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine and Syria, and particularly after the signing of the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi between the Russian and Ottoman empires in July 1833.59 Comprised of six articles, this treaty formalized a defensive alliance between the two, declaring their perpetual peace and amity as well as mutual assistance if there was a threat to each other’s independence. This treaty was one of their first rapprochements of this kind, even though in August 1800 a treaty had been concluded between Sultan Selim III and Tsar Paul I (following a successful offensive, a military alliance between the two against Napoleon’s control of the previously Venetian-controlled Ionian islands had been forged) that agreed on the establishment of an independent Septinsular Republic.60 The military and diplomatic manoeuvring on the first Egyptian crisis has been covered above,61 suffice to say that the uncoordinated actions between Russia and Britain – so much for the consensus-led Concert of Europe in this crisis – had forced the hand of Mehmet Ali Pasha to conclude the Peace Agreement of Kutahya in May 1833 with Sultan Mahmud II ; a peace agreement in which Resid Pasha had assisted. The Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi, concluded two months after the Kutahya Agreement, was unproblematic from a British perspective except for a secret article that only became known on 16 January 1834. The treaty relinquished the Ottomans from providing Russia with troops or arms in case Russia was attacked. Instead the article granted the Russian tsar the right to command the sultan to close the Turkish Straights at his request,62 effectively, in the view of Britain and France, handing him a strategic advantage in the region and the potential for political interference in the internal affairs of the Ottoman

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Empire. But the Russian side had its own interpretation. In response to a letter of protest sent by the French government, the long-serving Russian Foreign Affairs Minister, Count von Nesselrode, responded that it was ‘purely defensive: it [had] been concluded between two independent powers, exercising the plenitude of their rights, and it [did] no prejudice to the interest of any state whatever’.63 Echoing a language of Russian political conservatism in inter-state relations, recently (April 1833) sanctioned domestically by Tsar Nicholas II under Sergey Uvarov’s motto Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost’ (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality),64 Count von Nesselrode in his reply underscored the shared values between the Russian and Ottoman empires under which the treaty was conducted, namely, in ‘a spirit as pacific as it is conservative’. Recognizing that the nature of the relations between the two empires had, for a long time, been characterized by enmity, he stated that the treaty had changed nothing in terms of dynamics in the Concert of Europe, but gave guarantees about the stability and the preservation of the Ottoman Empire. ‘The Turkish Government will henceforth find a guarantee of stability,’ he concluded, ‘and if need be, means of defence calculated to ensure its preservation.’65 While Count von Nesselrode seemingly offered guarantees of stability for the Ottoman Empire, Lord Palmerston rushed in to provide something more – stability and what would seem to the Ottomans, independence and territorial integrity. On 19 December 1833, Lord Palmerston instructed his ambassador in Constantinople, John Ponsonby (1770–1855), to convince Sultan Mahmud II that, unlike Russia, Britain was his friend and it did not entertain territorial ambitions against his empire. The key to that guarantee was that secret article. ‘Conveniences and dangers might be avoided by reverting to the ancient policy of the Porte [i.e. keeping the straights open]’, was Palmerston’s message to the Sultan, ‘by looking for aid to England, instead of leaning upon a powerful and systematically encroaching neighbour [Russia].’66 In his address at the opening of the British Parliament in 1834 the British Monarch William IV spoke against the ‘change in the relations of that Empire (Turkey) with other powers, which might affect its future stability and independence.’67 And Palmerston replied to this address by stating that ‘it was . . . of the outmost importance to the interest of this country, and to the preservation of the balance of powers in Europe, that the Turkish Empire should be maintained in its integrity and independence’.68 Palmerston did not recognize the treaty and made it clear to Russia that any aggressive acts would be resisted by force if necessary. Thus, by now the Ottoman Empire had become an explicit European diplomatic question, or what later Midhat Pasha (1822–1883) during the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–1878) would

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recognize as part of the European interest. It was an interest though that kept the Concert of Europe divided. On the one hand, Tsar Nicholas I sought to reconfirm the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi with Austria and Prussia through the Holy Alliance at the Münchengrätz Convention in September 1833.69 On the other hand, Palmerston brought together the Quadruple Alliance in 1834 – seen as an alliance among the constitutional governments of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal against the autocrats of Russia, Austria and Prussia70 – to oppose it. By 1834, Britain had given secret assurance to the Ottoman Empire that in case of a Russian attack on Constantinople, it would assist them if they requested. Emperor Nicholas I did not initiate such moves to avoid potential confrontation with other European powers and pursued a policy of ‘peaceful penetration’.71 But Sultan Mahmud II was keen to play this British–Russian discord to his own advantage by accepting the British offer, while whenever Russia pressed hard, Reshid Pasha – the sultan’s key foreign policy adviser in the late 1830s – would sound the alarm to the British of the inevitable collapse of the empire.72 This certainly was not a sign of strength on the Ottoman side, having been the ‘scourge’ of Christian Europe in the previous centuries. However, Sultan Mahmud II and Reshid Pasha had already accepted the reality that their empire found itself in a defensive rather than offensive position in the European continent. Nevertheless, British assurances emboldened Mahmud II to, at least, pursue offensive military policies (the on-going process of centralization of political power) within his imperial realm, particularly against his disobedient and rebellious vassal Mehmet Ali Pasha. In fact, the second Egyptian crisis that began in April 1839, when the Ottoman army crossed the Euphrates river to reclaim Syria from Egyptian control, came from Lord Palmerston’s assurances in July 1838 to Mahmud II that Britain would defend the Ottoman Empire against Mehmet Ali even if it would have to do it alone. The sultan, however, wanted to forge a formal alliance with Britain to also attack the eyalet of Egypt. It was with this goal in mind that Mahmud II sent Reshid Pasha to London in November 1838.73 The British side, meanwhile, sought to reach an accord with the sultan that would render the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi, ‘void in fact’.74 Reshid Pasha was not successful, for what he obtained from Lord Palmerston was only assurances for the ‘maintenance and improvement of the alliance’75 and a draft for a formal treaty, which would have constrained the sultan from attacking Egypt when the chance arose.76 As a result, on 21 April 1839, acting Ottoman Foreign Minister Nouri broke off the negotiations for a formal alliance with Britain because ‘he was convinced that no Treaty would be any use to the interest of the Porte which

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had not for its object the destruction of Mehemet Ali [sic], and the Porte ought not to make any Treaty’.77 On the same day, the Ottoman army began its offensive towards Syria. It was not until early June 1839, when the war began with the offensive of the Egyptian army under the command of Mehmet Ali’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, seeking to clear the Ottoman army out of Syria, that the European powers would begin to reconsider their positions on this crisis and to determine the diplomatic outcome from the war. While Metternich offered the preparations of an informal conference in Vienna, Britain and France joined forces against a possible Russian intervention in Constantinople. Austria’s unclear positioning in this matter isolated Russia, and hence made them reluctant to take any decisive action in this war, particularly given the new Anglo-French opposition. With Mehmet Ali’s victory at Nezib on 25 June 1839 and the surrender of the Ottoman fleet to the Egyptians, followed by the death of Sultan Mahmud II on 1 July, the Ottoman Empire risked disintegration. But the European powers – Tsar Nicholas I keen to intervene unilaterally but stopped by Count von Nesselrode on financial grounds – agreed to mediate in the war. A Conference of Ambassadors of the European Powers in Constantinople held on 27 July 1839 unanimously declared in favour of Ottoman independence and territorial integrity,78 all measuring the impact that a new Egypt would have for their respective interests in the region.79 The offer to settle the crisis was good news and an opportune time for Reshid Pasha who was on his way from London to Constantinople. That the solution against imperial disintegration came from the Concert of Europe, somehow gave him the upper hand, through a reform agenda, to position himself in the Ottoman polity and to influence the new and young Sultan Abdülmecid I, enthroned on 17 July 1839.80 Nevertheless, internal reforms expressed in the Hatti were not only gestures of gratitude to the Great Powers, particularly to Britain, for settling the second Egyptian crisis, they came about also because of internal pressures. Not only had Mehmed Ali’s Egypt proven to be a formidable military power against the imperial centre, it had also become a model of a successfully modernizing Ottoman province. Because of the latter, Mehmet Ali Pasha had come to enjoy a favourable image in liberal opinion in Western Europe.81 He had sought to use this as political capital to require from the new incoming sultan to appoint him as grand vizier instead of the newly appointed head of the Porte, Hüsrev Pasha. Had Mehmet Ali had his way, most likely he would have introduced a new concept of justice with the French Civil Code82 for the whole empire, as he had recently done in Syria, in which there was legal equality between Christians and Muslims.

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British historian Harold Temperley read Mehmet Ali Pasha’s drive to grant the Code as a way of ‘contrasting Egyptian light with Turkish darkness’ as well as Reshid Pasha would also want to do it, i.e. ‘to impress Europe’.83 Indeed, both arch-rivals, Grand Vizier Hüsrev Pasha and Reshid Pasha, sought to win back those subjects who believed that Mehmet Ali could regenerate their communities and the Ottoman state84 and very briefly agreed on a reform scheme of their own, that was Hatti, praising the young sultan (who backed it) for being the most liberal of the reformers.85 Of the two though, Reshid and Hüsrev, the former had a closer, working relation with the British government which since the first Egyptian crisis had become a backer of Ottoman territorial integrity and on the eve of the Second Egyptian crisis also of the reform agenda in terms of establishing new laws and state institutions. Lord Palmerston, in his frequent meetings with Reshid Pasha in the 1830s, had insisted on military (army and navy) reforms. But with the Second Ottoman–Egyptian war on the way he spoke of fundamental reforms in administration and finance. On 25 August 1839, in a private letter to Lord Beauvale, the British Ambassador to Austria, Palmerston wrote that it was timely that a rational system of administration and finance was in place in the Ottoman Empire. That system would make it possible to pay the state functionaries and ensure revenue coming into the public treasury, as opposed to the current practice of purchasing and selling all employment. Also for him it was important to establish laws guaranteeing life and property. Accordingly, these moves ‘in a very few years [would] get Turkey into a condition of progressive improvement and there would be an end to this nonsense which people talk about Turkey being in decay and falling into pieces’.86 Thus, Reshid Pasha and Lord Palmerston concurred that a strong alliance with Britain and fundamental reforms would be the cure for the renewal of the Ottoman Empire.87 But this only emerged at the outset of the Second Egyptian crisis, and after a continued geopolitical pressure pursued by Tsar Nicholas I, who, left unchecked by Britain and Russian financial constraints, could have fundamentally undermined the Ottoman Empire. Though it became clear that the first rapprochement between the two empires was a result of Russia’s fear of a complete collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which apparently, it did not want especially if it was reconstituted as an Arabic/Islamic Empire under the rule of Mehmed Ali Pasha. Otherwise, even though the language of political reform, as the argument of the book is, that came to be articulated as a search for stability and renewal through new institutions and new permanent laws, and despite Count von Nesselrode describing the rapprochement between the two empires as one between those sharing a ‘conservative spirit’, there was no direct

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exchange between the two on this matter. This most likely was because of a continued mistrust that could be overcome temporarily by an ad-hoc matching of geopolitical interests.

Reform for the unity of empire and against tyrannical rule: new and permanent laws and institutions Seemingly, impressing Britain, deflecting Egyptian pressure, coping with Russia’s ‘peaceful penetration’ as well as changing the status quo of the imperial politics were Reshid Pasha’s motivations behind the promulgation of the Hatti. Thanks to the British-led European diplomatic intervention, he could take a deep breath and a sigh of relief that the empire had shielded itself from what had turned out to be an exclusive Russian protectorate and ensured its territorial integrity and independence. Thus, if for Speransky the motivation for reform had been predicated upon the necessity of Russia to move with the processes of change as in the rest of the continent, for Reshid Pasha it was those ascribed above as well as that of synchronizing with similar processes taking place in Europe. Both however subscribed to a reform that ensured certain legal guarantees against despotic and arbitrary rule. Reshid Pasha, unlike Speransky, was also motivated by the need to forge a new unity among the peoples of the empire. And so, as the European powers settled the Egyptian affair – driven by the imperatives of maintaining political equilibrium among themselves and as a positive consequence providing external peace and stability – it befell to the Porte to succeed in reaffirming the internal peace and ensuring the wellbeing of the empire. But if the Porte failed to embrace the necessary principles for a good government, Reshid Pasha warned of its downfall – creating a great embarrassment to the friendly European powers and even more spark a general war.88 Such a view he outlined in a memorandum, presented to Lord Parlmerston on 12 August 1839, just before leaving London for Constantinople.89 In it, he pointed to the imminent danger facing the empire and the need for reform, the ideas of which would be borrowed from Western practices. There was nothing negative and objectionable with reform when it was for the prosperity of the people. He also welcomed the involvement of the Great Powers in the internal affairs of the empire, which, as friendly powers, served as an affectionate and sincere guide for the new sultan. In the memorandum, he went on at great lengths anticipating the reaction of what he called the ‘fanatical’ Muslim population of the empire to the reform process, fearing that instead of fixing the wrongs of the empire it would lead to its invasion by the Great Powers. This

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would not be the case with the Ottomans, he seemingly naively assured, for such conduct ‘runs against the respective rights of the nations’.90 In this memorandum, Reshid Pasha tackled the most important question of where would arise the ideological resistance to introducing reform in the empire. It was of course, as mentioned, from the ‘fanatical’ part of the population, but more crucially from the high representatives of the Ulema. On the latter, however, he was certain that not all of them would reject reforms, simply because his political experience had shown him how all the main institutions representing Ottoman political power (the Palace, the Porte, and the Ulema) had all discredited themselves by abusing the Koran. The Porte, he maintained, had resorted to the Koran to deflect direct criticism or avoid solving important questions, as for instance, during the not-so-distant Greek crisis. Meanwhile, Sultan Mahmud II had invoked it anytime he sought to refuse any proposition challenging his will, but pretended to forget it when his actions required complying with its precepts.91 The reason why there was such abuse with the Shariah was that the law itself allowed for great flexibility, hence abuse. ‘In short, the sultans, do not worry about the religious law on the matters that suit them, but they use it to prevent things that they do not like’.92 An abusive relationship had thus emerged between the sultan and the Ulema whereby the former sought to control the latter while the latter, wanting to feel needed and important, flattered the sultan to adopt their tastes and bias with the precepts of the Koran.93 It was precisely this flexibility in interpreting the Islamic law that had led to serious abuses. In Reshid Pasha’s analysis, then, it was not that there were no laws to deal with the abuses, the issue was that powerful people bent the religious law or even acted outside laws altogether. Thus, his solution to abusive imperial politics, which bent the religious law to its will, was to make use of new European laws and institutions. They purportedly had precision and permanence. Establishing European-type new permanent laws and institutions would come with political guarantees of life and property for all imperial subjects. He assured, though, that such guarantees were not to be understood as liberties, as they were in some corners of the European continent. To see them as such, which he strongly disapproved of, would run against not only the Ottoman understanding but also against the positions of absolutist governments in the continent. Firmly positioning his ideal of reform within an absolutist government model, he reiterated that such guarantees concerned only those of life and property and nothing beyond that. Such positions he put in the following: These proposals that would be put forward to the Divan [The Privy Council] must not be understood as liberties which would not give any motive or

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objection to Powers whose governments are absolutists because they have nothing to do with obtaining liberties but solely with guaranties of life and property. . . . Spilling the blood of men and destroying their livelihood without any motivation but hate or revenge is a crime not tolerated by any absolutist state in Europe. Any nation and government supports such a human question.94

His justifications for upholding these guarantees were twofold. The first had not only to do with the geopolitical dimension and the preservation of the integrity of the empire from resistance of Muslim peoples, but also from a growing nationalist strife within. So long as these guarantees offered real advantages to the Muslim peoples then the Sublime Porte would receive their general and complete consent. The recent experiences of resistance in Bosnia, Albania and Kurdistan against the new institutions (referring to those that were set-up during Sultan Mahmud’s reign) were not an illustration of their religious fanaticism but that there was nothing positive in them. Moreover, these peoples feared that the new changes would be a new source of persecution.95 Another important segment of the populace from which consent was needed was the Christian subjects. In extending these guarantees to them, he sought to resolve the most cardinal question that threatened the future of the Empire – the relations between the dominant nation and the conquered peoples. He thought there was an apparent moral superiority of Christian subjects vis-à-vis Muslims. They were more civilized and hence more sensible to the oppression of their political masters. But if the Ottoman government did not address their discontents through reasonable reforms and give legitimate concessions, grave perils were to be expected. If it did, and this was certainly his expectation, he expressed his conviction that every European power was going to appreciate it greatly. Indeed, his rationale for reform – which had a large dose of conditionality packaged into it – was simply this, that in adopting and extending these guarantees, the empire would be able to guarantee its independence and territorial integrity, and crucially become part of the political community of Europe, the Concert of Europe and part ‘dans le droit Européen’,96 i.e. of the European Law of Nations. In this respect, Greece had become independent – setting the precedent not only regarding the contestation of European public opinion versus the strategic position of European states, but also for other Christian people of the Empire, who sought to internationalize their local disputes97 – and Wallachia, Moldavia and Serbia had all received substantial autonomy because they responded to this lack of guarantee of life and property. In guaranteeing them, injustices conducted by Ottoman pashas in Wallachia,

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Moldavia and Serbia, which could look to other independent states, would be redressed, and the excuses by the Great Powers to intervene would also be thwarted. What had been possible for the Porte – namely, hiding the secrets of crimes of its provincial governors ‘spilling blood’ of people or killing of prominent statesmen at the heart of imperial politics, like Pertev Pasha and his son – would no longer be possible.98 ‘These crimes’, he wrote, ‘are to be disposed of and not part of the lives of all peoples of Europe.’99 And in extending these rights to all, it was of the outmost importance that tyrannical rule100 no longer reigned in the imperial domains. This was his second justification. He had a strong repugnance for tyranny (despotism) stemming from general as well as personal motivations. It was tyrannical [despotic] rule that had taken the life of his mentor and protector Pertev Pasha, to whom he owed a lot. Born in Constantinople in 1800, the son of an honourable Efendi (master, lord) who ran the pious foundation of Sultan Bayazid, Reshid was raised in the family and received distinguished education – considered rare for his time and place – and would come in contact with Pertev Pasha by the early 1820s. Reshid’s rise to the higher echelons of Ottoman power, like many others to follow, was one based on skills and patronage. With one of his sisters marrying Silihdar Ali Pasha, the governor of Morea (present-day central Greece), who in March 1823 became Grand Vizier, Reshid came under the protection of Ali, becoming his Katib (secretary).101 Following his brother-in-law in the military expeditions of his government gave him a sense of the affairs of imperial war, politics and administration. With his brother-in-law’s injury (in the Greek resistance for independence) and sudden death, whereby his grand vizierate was cut short to a ten-month tenure, Reshid nonetheless was able to remain connected to the Porte’s administration. From here, he would establish close relations with Pertev Pasha who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Thanks to this friendship – brought closer by a common appreciation for poetry – Reshid participated in some of the most important diplomatic events during Mahmud II ’s rule, assisting Pertev Pasha in the negotiations with Russia in the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829, as a rapporteur of the Divan. In this function he also participated in the mission to Egypt in 1833 and negotiated the terms in the Peace Agreement of Kutahya in May 1833.102 When Sultan Mahmud II decided to establish permanent embassies in some European capitals, Reshid became the Porte’s first diplomatic representative at the Tuileries (Paris) in 1834 and then at the Court of St James (London) in 1836.103 For this, he also had to undergo the latest Ottoman diplomatic training at the Bab-i Âli Tercüme Odası (Translation Office of the Sublime Porte) where he obtained a good knowledge of the French language.104

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The prestige must have been considerable, given the reputation that these two states had come to enjoy among the Ottoman elite, as the vanguard of the ‘European civilization’ – France a military and artistic power, and Britain a maritime and industrial power. The opportunity to compare the experiences of the two states, while having in mind what aspects could be emulated in the empire,105 was certainly there for him. Reshid Pasha returned to Constantinople in 1837 but to his horror his patron, Pertev Pasha – one of the first statesmen to be vilified as excessively frengmeşreb (Europeanized, or literally, with disposition towards French) – who had hoped to become the next grand vizier, had fallen victim to the Porte’s intrigues and the sultan’s despotism. Reportedly, Pertev Pasha had infuriated Sultan Mahmud II when pointing out that his subjects were ‘equally possessed of all human rights’.106 The pro-European and anti-European reform factions in Ottoman politics of Reshid’s generation had now formed, with Hüsrev Pasha, the Minister of War, as the anti-reform leader entrenching his position in Ottoman politics. Shortly after, Reshid would return to his ambassadorial post in London, on his way detouring to Vienna, Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart and later to Rome, where he was received warmly by the Pope.107 Surprisingly, Pertev’s death did not negatively affect his political and diplomatic career, which was on the ascent. Projecting the image of a shrewd and honest statesman tackling the problems arising in the Porte as well as conveying openmindedness, Reshid became popular among some of the Ottoman statesmen and foreign representatives in Constantinople. British Ambassador Ponsonby described him to Palmerston as ‘a just, though severe man . . . highly respected’, further stating that although Sultan Mahmud II did not always agree with Reshid’s policies, he never questioned his fidelity.108 Pertev’s death however did entrench his resolve to affect change in the existing traditional political culture of the palace and the Porte marred by corruption, arbitrariness and despotism, which he was able to see differently, having worked for a number of years in Paris and London. He came to deplore, particularly, Sultan Mahmud II ’s ‘unbearable tyranny’ – this was an impression shared by the Austrian Ambassador Baron de Stürmer in Constantinople who on the day after the promulgation of the Hatti wrote to Metternich that, ‘No excess of arbitrariness had ever been brought before to such level than during the reign of the deceased sultan’109 – generating insecurity and instability and a stalling of the reform process. Most certainly, Reshid had come to admire the energy and the authority with which the sultan brought about some changes. But he strongly disapproved, after the sultan’s death that is, of the harsh ways the sultan treated those who disagreed

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with policies, as his mentor and protector Pertev Pasha – the architect behind the decree abolishing Janissaries in 1826, thus opening the way to modernizing the Ottoman army – had fatally done. It was not as if Sultan Mahmud II was acting outside any political tradition. In fact, as prominent historian Kemal Karpat pointed out, Mahmud II was practicing the old political tradition of örf (custom) and hüküm (statute), which allowed him to exercise an absolute executive authority. As such, he did not have to re-interpret the Islamic law, but simply declare that he was acting in accordance with it.110 But that was the past. Looking towards the future, he saw the opportunity in Sultan Mahmud II ’s young offspring Abdülmecid I who, enthroned at a young age, would be more prone to real reforms and because of his inexperience it would be easier to steer him towards a good path.111 In his memorandum, in a language thus like Speransky’s, he wrote of the need to establish new institutions which would ensure basic guarantees against the unchecked and at times tyrannical [despotic] will of the monarch. He envisaged that these institutions would be run with sagacity and judgement as a prerequisite for diminishing the tyranny of the past experience and creating un système immuablement établi (a permanently established system), the outcome of which would be then heartily embraced by imperial subjects. This vision of an uplifting future of a reformed empire came clearly in his memorandum: ‘When the new institutions will be run with prudence and judgement everyone will experience the real advantages of un système immuablement établi (a permanently established system), which will diminish the tyranny, increase the affection for the government with the peoples supporting with all their hearts useful and beneficiary innovations.’ Then he continued, ‘the impetus coming from the love of people will lead to a rapid progress of a real reform, which in turn would lead to the inevitable regeneration of the powers of the Ottoman Empire’.112 During his ambassadorship in Britain and especially in France, he had become familiar with the other ways of governing, favouring a political arrangement in which monarchical rule was checked in certain areas, especially on financial prerogatives and importantly on deciding on the political fate of viziers. He became fond of the phrase, ‘Le Roi règne et ne gouverne pas’113 [the king reigns but does not govern]. Convinced of the primacy of a legal government, he was optimistic that a return to despotism, while possible in the short term, would be impossible in the long run. The times have gone, he noted in the memorandum, ‘where the entire world blindly supported the whims of a repressive regime. The absence of enlightenment among Muslims could again support such kinds of regime, but it is true also that some troubles erupted in different parts of the empire.’114

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With the new institutions, he thus sought to move away from the politics of restoring the authority of the sovereign and the force of the state, by the means of crushing power against rebels or only negotiating with them with the secret desire of later annihilating them. He thought to pave the path for more solid ground in the relations between the monarch and his subjects, between the central government and its branches in the provinces, fixing by law the prerogatives of the former and the responsibilities of the latter.115 As such, it was crucial that these new institutions were proposed with energy and supported with threats in order to be accepted; otherwise, very soon they would be discarded as he did not see any other mechanism of resistance.116 Further below in this memorandum, Reshid expressed the conviction that the personal and mutual hatred between the Sultan Mahmud II and Mehmet Ali Pasha, which had grown into large-scale antagonism between the imperial centre and Egypt, would come to an end with the enthronement of the new sultan. Now, both could abandon these negative emotions, allowing for the possible reconciliation of the Sublime Porte with Egypt.117 Egypt, he thought, could play a positive role in this new relation since they had provided the very pressure for reform. Having established a strong army and a functioning administration – Egypt’s take on ‘European civilization’ could also be the catalyst of that reconciliation. There were positive elements invested in this notion that captured the imagination of many in the Ottoman domains of the 1830s, such as progress, and with that also came a sense of superiority and inferiority. For Mehmet Ali’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, who led the Egyptian army against the Ottomans in both wars, the military and political success of Egyptian rulers was explainable by their having pursued the right course to ‘civilization’ – schools and the enlightening of the minds. Sultan Mahmud II , on the other hand, had ‘taken civilization by the wrong side’. On March 1833, he declared that: Turkey still possesses in itself seeds of improvement and strength, but they must be well directed. The Porte have taken civilisation by the wrong side; – it is not by giving epaulettes and tight trousers to a nation that you begin the task of regeneration; – instead of beginning by their dress, and dress will never make a straight man of one who is lame, they should endeavour to enlighten the minds of their people. Look at us – we have schools of every description – we send our young man to be educated in Europe. – We are also Turks [sic], but we defer to the opinions of those who are capable of directing our own, – whereas no regard is paid by the Porte to advice that it not their own.118

Enlightened minds and schools were all well and good, but of primary importance was creating this permanent system of institutions and the sultan abiding by the

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guarantees pledged – including listening to good advice. For Reshid, these were the novelties, part of the ‘way of civilization’ entailing ‘observance of laws’, but organic statute law, rather than the law of the Koran.119

The domain of civilization Were Reshid’s ideas of reform inspired by Western or Ottoman political ways of thinking? Because he did not leave much written down, except for the memoranda analysed above and some diplomatic exchanges,120 scholars remain divided on the main influences in his political thinking. Those claiming that they were rooted in the Ottoman traditional state philosophy refer to the main principles of legislation, which were not based on natural rights but rather on a practical need for the renewal of the empire.121 In this vein, one did not need to pay much attention to his exposure to French and British political systems and philosophies but consider the influence of his mentor and protector Pertev Pasha. The assumption was that because his mentor – even though as mentioned Pertev Pasha was the first one to be pejoratively referred to by his opponents as Europeanized – was a strong adherent of Sunni-Orthodox teachings and exerted a great influence over him, Reshid’s ideas were based on this tradition. Otherwise, the ideas in the Hatti, which were discussed before its final drafting by the members of the Ottoman political and religious elite, would have seemed alien to them and hence would not have been accepted.122 However, those pointing to European influences on his political thought123 highlighted a close correspondence between Reshid and his colleague, and later political rival, Mehmed Sadik Rifat Pasha (1807–1856). The truth lies somewhere in between, as was the case with Speransky who drew from many figures in the currents of European and Russian Enlightenments. Reshid also surrounded himself with personnel such as Ahmet Vekif Pasha, who was immersed in Western political thought, including political economy. The latter, who had been his staff member when ambassador in Paris – a neighbour of the French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan with whom he often discussed questions of religion – had intensively debated in the 1830s with members of the British embassy while a young bureaucrat in Constantinople the pros and cons of Adam Smith and David Ricardo Ricardo’s political economy in general and free trade and protectionism in particular.124 As to his relation with Rifat Pasha, the two knew each other for quite some time. They shared rather similar diplomatic trajectories – same mentor and patron, Pertev Pasha, and same workplaces, the Translation Office and the Foreign Office Department. While Reshid was appointed ambassador to Paris

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and then London in 1837, Rifat got his ambassadorship in Vienna. In fact, it was around this time that both started their cooperation on reform, a year and half before the proclamation of the Hatti. Yet, they also differed in that while Reshid could be characterized more as a statesman, Rifat would be more of a political thinker. Indeed, their collaboration on reform contained these features. In Vienna, Rifat drafted a report on reform – from which other drafts on reform would be based, most of them compiled in his later published Selected Works – which he handed to Reshid while he was on a visit as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Habsburg capital.125 Furthermore, although in contact with both of them, Metternich would exert significant influence on Rifat Pasha’s understanding of reform – suggesting undertaking reform policies that were beneficial as opposed to unadvisable or dangerous ones. They had to secure ‘efficiency’ as opposed to abstract ‘liberty’ and ‘excessive’ freedom.126 These were some features of a larger concept with which Rifat engaged: namely, civilization. In fact, he was the first Ottoman thinker to introduce this concept into the Ottoman language, un-translated and in its French form127 to ‘explain the political, economic, and social secrets of European power and superiority’.128 But to some extent, expectedly, the content of this concept truly had the flavours of post-Napoleonic restoration ideas. Rifat’s main contention was that a new system had come into force in Europe, under the European Great Powers with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which Ottomans could emulate. This new system, or civilization as he referred to it, had two crucial principles: maintaining peaceful and friendly relations between the states by avoiding wars and their causes, and ensuring the well-being of its subjects129 as peace led to prosperity. The prosperity of individuals, he believed, was achieved through their own labour, and was possible when there was no arbitrary rule interfering in their lives and with their agriculture and commerce. The strength of the state was not measurable by the extent of its territory but rather on being able to guarantee prosperity against arbitrary rule.130 By embracing and upholding the principles of civilization, stability was surely achievable. In his essay titled ‘Essay Concerning European Affairs’, he drew a distinction between European governments that had civilization as opposed to those that did not; implying the Ottoman government fell into the latter category. ‘There,’ he noted, ‘the governments are for the welfare of the citizens – and not the citizens for the sake of the governments. It is because of this that the governments are run according to the rights of millet (community) and according to law.’131 But while civilization might have been a new concept, its attributes were not completely unfamiliar to the Ottoman political understanding,132 particularly the second principle. Surely,

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peace equalling prosperity was nothing more than a recourse to the ‘circle of justice’ – meaning the state had a primary function of providing justice to its peoples and in doing so the country enjoyed prosperity and stability. The insecurity felt by imperial subjects meant that they would be less likely to engage in productive activities and therefore thwart the accumulation of wealth. In turn, this would be detrimental to the government service because its officials, insecure of their tenure, would try to cheat the state, take care of their interests and take bribes, and hence abuse the administration of the empire.133 With this insight, like Reshid, he referred to the same culprit of imperial instability: tyrannical [despotic] and arbitrary rule. While in the first essay he provided the general contours of the concept of civilization, which, for its familiarity with the Ottoman political thinking, could be emulated in the empire, in another essay titled ‘On the Reform Conditions in the Ottoman State’ Rifat had a more pragmatic approach, outlining principles and a series of actions that would appear in the text of the Hatti. Thus, in spite of his introduction of new entries from the European Enlightenment lexicon into the Ottoman vocabulary besides ‘Western civilization’, ‘freedom’, ‘people’, ‘the rights of man’ – there is a parallel to be drawn here also with Speransky’s thinking – he was more lucid in his call for the abolition of arbitrary rule, the codification of juridical and administrative laws, and the laying out of norms for regulating people’s obligations, i.e. paying taxes and performing military services. The list of suggestions further included the need for education, the organization of the army and navy, the following of a continuous peace policy, the training of honest government functionaries and guaranteeing them security and stability, and the protection and encouragement of industry.134 Like Speransky and Reshid Pasha, he was convinced that the empire could therefore be strengthened by relying on ‘rules and regulations’ as opposed to ‘personal factors’. Rules and regulations, a new system of laws, would be able to ‘determine the limits of the permissible in a way that would preclude the exercise of personal whims’.135 Like Speransky also, he thought that in the Ottoman context, their source of legitimacy would be the sultan’s Irade, the secular law of decrees in the tradition of örf, as opposed to the şeriat. But how to resolve the crucial issue of arbitrariness and tyranny, when the new sets of law came from the same source of power that had behaved in such ways? Rifat’s answer was twofold and it did not contain the Montesqueian insight, which Speransky had discussed, that force must be checked by force. One was moral, based on precedence set by other European states. As such, it was desirable that the sultan did not stand above these new sets of fundamental statutes and principles because this was the growing trend

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in European monarchies.136 The other had a legal-technical, quasi-constitutional measure, arguing for the granting of extensive powers to the newly established institution, the Council of Judicial Ordinances. Hence, the Council could reject all legislative proposals that did not conform to the principles laid out in the Hatti.137 Both Rifat and Reshid agreed that despotic rule generated not only insecurity but also anarchy and revolution. Thus, observing just laws was essential, the golden medium, as it redressed injustices emerging from the relationship between the state and the people. It also pre-empted people’s revolutionary impulse. ‘Tyrannical rule sows the seeds of enmity and reaps the harvest of revolution and anarchy’, Rifat warned, but ‘the state can guard itself against the evil wrought by agitators only through just conduct’ and that a government ‘which enforces its rule by tyranny must heed its own subjects more than its enemies’.138 Reshid Pasha, just after the promulgation of the Hatti, had characterized the Decree as ‘a legal force of nature to contain people as well as to end all acts of injustice’.139 It seemed that Rifat Pasha had a more heightened sense, even fear, about the dangers of popular revolutions than did Reshid Pasha. He wrestled more with the problems of tyranny and revolution. Just before his recall to Constantinople in 1839, following the death of Mahmud II , Rifat Pasha had an audience with Metternich in which the latter listed the many necessary points for a manageable change. ‘The establishment of necessary regulations and the carrying out of the latter, and, again, since in all nations, force and vitality,’ Metternich had said, ‘originate in the comfort and ease of the subjects, never causing any action that would cause [international] order to be disrupted.’140 While championing the view that ‘governments are created for the people and not the people for the governments’,141 Rifat Pasha nonetheless, while recognizing it, was not prepared to idealize people’s public opinion and their inclinations. He did not see it, as Speransky did, as a sign of progress of society. They are, Rifat noted, ‘like an overflowing river, and there are two situations which are impossible to overcome, one of them being religious belief and the other public opinion. Since to oppose them is dangerous and difficult, in the case of uprising and stirrings of public opinion, the state should act accordingly to the currents of nature.’142 And the Ottoman state would want to do just that, act accordingly to the currents of nature.

Moving fast: legal reform, corruption and reaction In the late summer of 1839, just as a prelude to the promulgation of the Hatti, the new Sultan Abdülmecid I, described as gentle, timid and weak, possessing more

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power and less capacity than any previous sultan,143 issued an irade. It was to be read to the ministers of the Porte, sitting in the office of şeyhülislam, urging them to ‘follow the law of justice and equity in all matters’ and continually live up to the ‘application of the honoured sharia in all the affairs of the exalted sultanate’. A strong emphasis was put on fighting corruption, calling on all the officials ‘not to deviate from the ways of uprightness and honesty’ and hence not to engage in ‘bribery . . . and repugnant and oppressive acts . . . [and] to be extremely careful not to give rise . . . of unacceptable methods’.144 Some of the principles of the Hatti were already expressed in it, such as the desire that all the inhabitants of the protected lands, rich and poor, should enjoy ‘tranquillity and repose’. It was the special imperial desire that property, soul, dwelling and place should be secure and safe from offence and aggression.145 After discussing the implication of the irade, a petition was submitted to the sultan which contained the seals of thirty-eight dignitaries attending the meeting. Serving as proof of the general consent that the Hatti would receive on its day of promulgation, the petition was headed by the Grand Vizier Hüsrev Pasha followed, among others, by Reshid Pasha, listed seventh.146 It seemed that the Hatti was a brief formal interlude for the two hostile camps within the Porte: that between a military constellation led by Hüsrev and that of diplomats, in which Reshid was the most prominent. Indeed, the former was the strongest opponent of ‘civil bureaucratic reformers’, was minister of war between 1927 and 1937 and grand vizier, after the death of Mahmud II , who because of his large political network could not be easily undermined politically. Ultimately, Reshid Pasha would be able to do so with the influence of Britain in the Ottoman–Egyptian crisis.147 But for the moment, Reshid Pasha could put aside the strong personal grievances against his arch-enemy – their apparent long relationship had vacillated from friendship to jealousy148 and revenge – and focus, with the conciliatory language of a diplomat, in accruing political influence to sway the young sultan, as well as the main imperial Muslim cleric, Mustafa Asim Efendi, on a path to reform.149 It was important to have the latter on his side because the division between the two camps was also about the reform. For, while both parties supported Sultan Mahmud’s previous reforms, the Hüsrev camp argued for continuing reform following the precepts of the Koran, whereas Reshid sought to separate religious and civil questions in his efforts to establish European institutions.150 This political antagonism was reflected in the language of the Hatti with its unmistakable duality of visions for reform – the call to the old and new – theologico-political on the one hand and ethico-legal on the other. Thus, it did not take much time for the formal consent – which the Hatti

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was – between political factions running the palace and the Porte, briefly reached at a time of a major imperial crisis and in need of external support,151 to be unravelling. Certainly, the Hatti raised expectations, no matter whether the change would be positive or negative. At its core would be a uniform and centralized administration working under the principles of justice applicable to all subjects – a move aiming to mobilize the subjects behind the state and against the local notables, to show a sign of appreciation towards the European powers for their support towards Ottoman territorial integrity.152 Reshid Pasha had envisaged and hoped that now with the Hatti being made public, Ottoman subjects would identify with their state, not revolt, and hence the economy would start to move upwards filling up the state’s coffers.153 Yet he needed to put these pledges into action and fast, aware that the young and inexperienced sultan still represented the final authority – holding both legislative and executive powers. He had convinced him of the necessity for change, but at the same time he was aware that his political foes could do the opposite, and therefore render his grip on power uncertain.154 In December 1839, a decree was issued by the Divan to come into effect on 1 March 1840 that vali (governors) of the eyalets would receive fixed salaries and collect only established taxes – thus abolishing itlizam (sale to the governor of the revenue levied within his government) and Haraç (head tax on Christians) – and that promotion into higher state positions would be based on merit.155 Importantly, Reshid introduced significant changes in bureaucracy, particularly implementing the principle that pashas could be brought to trial and be punished for maladministration in the provinces.156 For a while, it seemed that the reaction of the population was positive – seeing it as an enhancement of the security of their property they hence started to cultivate the land157 – but the local farmers and military governors began to fiercely push back.158 He also moved quickly in the legislative arena by establishing a new institution, Mecli-i Ali (the Supreme Council of State and Justice) in December 1839. Tasked with drafting laws, which had to be agreed by majority voting before being decreed by the sultan, the new institution turned into an investigating and drafting committee. The final authority of the Supreme Council was the sultan assisted by the Privy Council, which Reshid Pasha controlled by now.159 These actions impressed Lord Palmerston who had congratulatory remarks for him. [The British government] takes the deepest interest in the regeneration of Turkey, are delighted to find that Reschid Pasha is going to work in this so wise and judicious manner; and that instead of endeavouring to set up prematurely new Institutions, which would be repugnant to the habits and prejudices of the

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Most certainly Reshid would push for the revision of old codes – the intention being to separate the civil and criminal codes from the religious and moral ones – so as to materialize the Hatti’s pledge of guaranteeing life, honour and property for all subjects regardless of race and faith. In fact, in February 1840, this newly established Supreme Council of State and Justice completed this task and by May 1840 a new kanunı ceraim (penal code) came into force. Indeed, the code made references to the Hatti and pledges given by the sultan, particularly that His Highness the Sultan ‘had already bound himself not to put to death publicly or secretly either by poison or otherwise’ anyone without trial and that the monarch had ‘abstained from usurping the goods or property of any private individual’.161 The code sanctioned that all trials terminating in capital punishment had to be considered by the Supreme Council of State and Justice, and only then could it come into force with the sultan’s signature.162 This new institution and new law (code) came into existence six months after the promulgation of the Hatti; quite an achievement for Reshid Pasha. Having repeatedly made the point that the Ottoman peoples were not ready for representative government, he nonetheless experimented with the idea, but on the provincial rather than the central level of the empire. The intentions of this endeavour – whether it was another gesture to please European states or indeed a genuine desire to transform Ottoman politics from below – were not clear. However, he instituted the local parliaments, the so-called meclis, Elected Council, whereby each council was associated with a pasha (rich and landed proprietors), usually governors, appointed by the Porte. Representatives of reaya (Christian, Jewish tax-paying subjects) could also be elected to the councils. The council was elected by different communities where Muslims usually held the majority. But this institutional innovation had its difficulties in terms of pressures from this majority (mainly of the pashas) and language barrier (proceedings were conducted in Turkish, of which the reaya did not have a good command but were formally obliged to follow for fear of persecution).163 Another element of this reform intended for local communities, through this council, to express their will to the central government was mazbata (protocol) – a legal document signed by all members of a council and sent to the Porte. In practice, mazbatta became a venue for the pashas to declare whatever they wanted.

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Indeed, early experiences with this reform pointed to the opposite results to the intentions of instituting local representative governance. As a leading member of mejliss at Antioch, in the sanjak of Ískanderun (Alexandretta), put it cynically, these councils were about keeping ‘people ignorant and oppressed, in order to be able to govern them, for otherwise how could we govern them’.164 And certainly, countless abuses and mismanagement were reported in the following years. The blame for this was addressed towards Reshid Pasha, who even though he was not the grand vizier, just Minister of Foreign Affairs, was de facto responsible for the appointments of new governors. For Reshid though, such abuses and mismanagement were because real supervision or control by the central government of provincial governors was not yet in place. Another element of local reform, which was linked to the 1841 general reorganization of the army, Asakir-i Nizamiye-i Şahane (The Ordered Soldiers of the Sultan), was that of stripping the governors of their prerogative of controlling the military within their territory. This, as we will see with the case of Midhat Pasha in the 1870s, was partially rescinded for some provinces after the Vilayet Law of 1864. Nevertheless, this reorganization kept the army in provincial units, but instead of being commanded by governors, they were now under the command of a müshir (marshal) appointed from and responsible to the serasker (Ministry of War).165 Needless to say, Reshid’s wide-ranging reforms not only did not win the hearts of the opposing factions but he also lost their minds. Armed with new tools of law, he sought to make the state’s new structures of justice, through due process, persue high officials with corruption charges, the highest being none other than the Grand Vizier in power, Hüsrev Pasha.166 In an unprecedented move for the time, the Grand Vizier was charged with abusing public money and ousted from power on 29 May 1840, replaced by Raouf Pasha (1780–1859), closer to Reshid’s views, who had served twice as grand vizier under Mahmud II and would do so for three times (1841, 1842–1846, 1852) under the new sultan. This move, particularly, boosted the anti-reform feeling, articulated in religious rhetoric, anti-Christian, anti-European and anti-legalistic vocabulary, and for a strictly Turkish and gradual reform. Hüsrev Pasha rallied moderates and Turcophils around himself to oppose these reforms, painting Reshid Pasha as sold to the infidels, a ‘wretched giaour’167 (a derogatory expression). As mentioned earlier, such internal polarization that undermined the brief interlude of consensus on Hatti could be tolerated, but the threat to the empire from Mehmet Ali Pasha had not dissipated by the end of 1840.168 The Concert of Europe came to a resolution on the Ottoman–Egyptian Crisis, particularly after

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Britain and Russia began to warm up towards each other.169 They agreed, in the London Straights Convention, signed on 13 July 1841, that the province of Syria would not be divided or handed over to Egypt but remain under Ottoman direct control. Meanwhile, Mehmet Ali Pasha was given hereditary rule over Egypt and Sudan for life. Crucially as well, the Turkish Straights (Bosphorus and Dardanelles) were not to be closed when the sultan was not at war.170 The settling of this crisis also affected the attitude of the young monarch on reform, as Reshid pointed out to the Austrian Ambassador Baron de Stürmer in Constantinople, adding that the sultan began to behave like his father, ‘little by little he got a taste of doing all he willed without reflecting and without consulting anyone’ except from ulema,171 which opposed his reforms. Lacking any other basis of support for reforms – as we saw earlier, Speransky reflected on the need to have ‘internal’ constitution that backed reforms – Reshid sought to involve friendly European Powers in internal Ottoman politics, placing himself as the pillar of Ottoman reforms, which risked stalling if he was dismissed. He suggested that the powers organized a conference to discuss the process of reform in the empire. But Palmerston discouraged this on the basis that it would mean interfering in the domestic affairs of the sultan. In February 1841, as his political future at the Porte became precarious, in a discussion with the Austrian diplomat Reshid wondered that ‘without the support of an outside power we would fall back on barbarity and ignorance’.172 Certainly, Reshid sought to position himself as the promoter of civilization in the empire. But even the most eloquent Ottoman conversant of this idiom, Rifat Pasha, saw the limits of its political use by Reshid Pasha. When, for instance, the new commercial code, prepared by Reshid, came to be discussed in the Imperial Council, Rifat questioned the code’s compatibility with the Holy Law. Dismissing the implication of the question as irrelevant, in fact stating ‘The Holy Law has nothing to do with such matters’, Reshid Pasha was attacked by attending ulema for blasphemy, a reaction that made the young sultan dismiss him from his post on 29 March 1841,173 replaced by Rifat Pasha, while the commercial code was suspended. Reshid would retake his ambassadorial position in Paris, serving there until 1843. Meanwhile, an influential Rifat Pasha,174 in a conversation with the Austrian Ambasador in Constantinople, questioned the success of Reshid’s strategy in using Great Powers to pressure the Ottoman state and the sultan towards reform, asserting also that: ‘We will voluntarily receive all the advice from outside, but we will oppose all interference in our internal affairs.’175 Rifat also was sceptical about the readiness of a public support for the main piece of reform, namely, an

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indigenous Christian population being equal before the law like their Muslim counterparts. This was because ‘we do not have neither political opinion, nor nobility, or any other powerful body of the State that can impose itself against the sultan . . . to succeed in Turkey one needs to remain a Turk’.176 With Reshid now out of the political scene, most of the reform plans stalled and some were even reversed. Reaction returned in full swing when Topal Izzet Mehmet Pasha – showing complete disregard for the Hatti by conducting actions without observing the law – became grand vizier in 1841 for a second term. The Grand Vizier, who had served his first term after the signing of the Treaty of Adrianople with Russia in September 1829, removed from the office personnel who knew a Western language, re-instated torture in judicial procedure, brought in a different and previous dress code for both the Christians and Muslims, and haraç and corruption – cheating by government – became normalized.177 That Reshid, having already assumed the image of the main leader of European-style reforms in Ottoman politics, was sidelined from Ottoman politics did mean that he had been unfairly deposed from the moral high ground. If political corruption (briberies and more) was one of the criteria upon which Ottoman political reforms and the attitudes of Ottoman officials were now to be judged then surely Reshid Pasha would not occupy that high ground. For having shown determination in the fight against corruption, disgracing a high-ranking official for accepting a bribe (more impressively bringing charges against Hüsrev Pasha) and not accepting a present of £500 from British Ambassador Ponsonby, Reshid had also shown on what grounds he was bringing to life the Ottoman reforms. British Ambassador Ponsonby had in fact been impressed by Reshid’s act of not accepting his gift in 1839, expressing his satisfaction on ‘how superior Reschid [sic] [was] to other Turkish ministers’. But then, eighteen months later, as Reshid was dismissed from his post, the Ambassador, who by now must have known him better – after all they spent time preparing the 1838 Baltalimanı (Balta-Limanı) Commercial Treaty – dismayingly would write that: ‘I am furious against Reschid [sic] Pasha who seems on all occasions to have selected the greatest scoundrels in the Empire for employment in the offices of trust and honour. He is a fool.’178 For all the new political language of reform and good administration – new and permanent laws and institutions – as a means to strengthening the imperial state and ending political abuse by the state vis-à-vis a multi-confessional and multi-ethnic society, some old habits died hard even for Reshid Pasha. In Harold Temperley’s reading of Reshid Pasha, ‘the new reformer proved the old corrupter, writ large’. If there was a parallel to be drawn, Temperley continued, between

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them as reformers, i.e. Reshid and Mahmud II , the latter had a real disgust of corruption whereas the former talked the talk publicly, but privately fully supported it.179

From state monopoly to free trade: outside pressures and opening up an indebted empire Reshid Pasha came to be resented by opposing factions not only because of the legal and administrative reforms (not to mention his hypocritical attitude towards corruption), but also because of being an ardent supporter of economic liberalization, which would further open up the Ottoman economy to the world. But this adherence to the modern notion of political economy had begun under Mahmud II , who felt obliged to do so due to a combination of factors: international trade and geopolitical considerations. Internal pressures were significant, too. As we saw in the Russian case, similar concerns had come into play. The geopolitical and geoeconomic lockdown the Continental System had forced upon Russia a closure of its trade with Britain, which in turn, had led Alexander I and Speransky to a search for a new political realignment that was resolved through the war against France. Then a new geopolitical and geo-economic rearrangement ensued with the Holy Alliance, with Russia pursuing free trade, i.e. lower tariffs, with its Prussian and Austrian allies. The slight but significant structural difference that the two empires had in this discursive and economic policy shift from state protectionism towards free trade – at least until the end of the Crimean War from which the vocabulary of political economy (particularly structural economic reforms geared towards economic growth and development) and political representation (a move from provincial to national/imperial level) would be the driving forces for political reform – was that whereas Russia had the flexibility to use free trade, the Ottoman Empire did not. In fact, to a large extent, the survival of the Ottoman Empire had been renegotiated by acceptance of open commercial relations with Britain and other European states. From a British (who became the main sponsor of the preservation of Ottoman territorial integrity in Europe) perspective, it made sense to support Ottoman integrity not only in terms of a balance of powers, but also in encouraging the strengthening of central institutions (this was certainly not an issue in the Russian case, quite the contrary), it made economic sense, too. It would allow Britain to have greater access and more privileges in a larger and integrated Ottoman market, which had fragmented during the eighteenth century.180 Meanwhile, for the Porte, by connecting the imperial economic space to the world market, the primarily aim, in its drive to extend its control over the

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imperial territory, was to undercut the power of provincial groups, merchants and the big landowners. Also, in its aim of surviving in the European inter-state political order, entering the European/international trade had less to do with economic rationality (maximization of utility) than playing on the European rivalry to survive.181 Thus, irrespective of the differences highlighted, for both the Russian and Ottoman empires, at least until the end of the Crimean War, maintaining or linking the respective economic spaces to European trade had to do more about geopolitics than geo-economics. Certainly, it had been the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century interstate wars against Russia (1771–1774, 1806–1812 and 1828–1829) and Iran (1820–1828), as well as intra-imperial uprisings in the Balkans (Albania, Serbia, Greece) and wars against Egypt (1831–1833, 1839), followed by territorial losses, that had indebted the empire. By defeating the Ottoman army and extending its territory at the Ottoman expense, Russia, before Britain, had coerced the Ottoman state to open its economic space, initially in the Black Sea area through the Treaty of Küçük Kajnarca, then with trade in land following the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829.182 Because of these treaties, however, Sultan Mahmud II ’s economic approach to increasing state revenues had been a protectionist one, until the Balta-Liman Treaty of 1838 with Britain: increasing export/import tariffs, depreciation of currency, monopolizing some kinds of exports.183 When it came to currency devaluation, the imperial economy would witness the highest rates of debasement – reducing the quantity of either gold or silver in a coin – in its financial history.184 In a more bureaucratic way, his administration followed the strategy of centralizing the finances.185 Like Speransky had sought to pursue ‘monetization’ of the economy in Russia, similar steps were taken in Constantinople whereby new standards of gold and silver coins were introduced, foreign currencies were banned from circulation and a single budget system as opposed to many existing ones was put in place. As intended, Mahmud’s centralizing reforms were cutting through a political nerve, disrupting an existing powerful alliance between the high-level bureaucrats and financiers in Constantinople and the notables in the provinces. In its goal of regulating the ‘economy . . . by decree’, which as an Ottoman scholar put it, ‘proved ineffective in the long run’,186 economic and social stability unravelled, particularly in the imperial capital of the mid-1820s. Inflation, loss of confidence in the currency and counterfeiting were followed by reactions from urban groups: guild members, shopkeepers, small merchants and all who received fixed state salaries, the bureaucracy, the ulema and the Janissaries187 – groups that had mitigated the arbitrary, centralizing and intrusive power of the monarch which became the

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feature in the reign of Mahmud II . In Russia, this had been a feature since Emperor Peter the Great. Indeed, the abolition of the military structure of the Janissaries in 1826, the ‘Auspicious Event’, to make way for the Asakiri- Mansure-i Muhammediyye (The Victorious Army of Muhammad), had had tremendous socio-economic impact on Ottoman economic policy. With their large presence in the urban economy, mainly as artisans and guildsmen, the Janissaries as an organized military structure – with a history of frequent intervention in imperial politics – supported protectionist measures. But their dismantling meant that real political support for such policies vanished, too.188 Thus from 1826, slowly but surely the solidarity and egalitarianism that the guild system had produced,189 which the Janissaries came to dominate, gave way to the practice of an open economy without any viable, organized groups in society to resist it. By the mid-1830s, Mahmud’s centralized state exercised control over its territory (except for Egypt and Syria) and domestic affairs, recruited more soldiers and collected more taxes. But it could not fully control the smuggling of items from Europe and Russia. Cheaper items such as silk, opium, cotton and wheat eroded existing monopolies on such items, thus Ottoman markets were flooded by agricultural as well as manufactured goods. In this changing context, Mahmud II ’s economic policy shifted towards abolishing monopolies and lowering its trade tariffs, a move that had as an immediate result reduced productivity in manufacturing and in the overall economy.190 Mahmud II ’s policy shift towards free trade certainly was informed by such structural realities, pressures from Russian and later (1838) British economic interest.191 But it was also informed discursively. Just as it had made great inroads in the Russian political disourse during Alexander I’s reign, the idiom of free trade also got traction during Mahmud II ’s reign. In fact, in 1831 Mahmud II commissioned French journalist Alexandre Blacque (1794–1837) to promote a French perspective of free trade, the laissez faire discourse, in the newly established official newspaper called Le Moniteur Ottoman.192 Also, contributing in the Le Moniteur Ottoman, Scottish diplomat David Urquhart (1805–1877), who was close to Reshid Pasha and would be very instrumental in the preparation of the Balta-Liman Treaty of 1838 (more on this below), promoted the Smithian discourse about the benefits of state non-intervention in the economic realm and free trade for the empire193 – a discourse sanctioned in the Hatti of 1839, and later the Hatt-i Hümayun of 1856,194 although one to which not all subscribed to, including Rifat Pasha.195 As an advisor to Mahmud II , Reshid Pasha had been very much involved in this discourse and policy. With trade being under the auspices of the Ministry of

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Foreign Affairs,196 in 1837 the sultan tasked Reshid Pasha to draft commercial treaty with Britain, which he negotiated with the British Ambassador Ponsonby. The negotiating points and strategies had been rather straightforward. If Britain wanted to satisfy its traders by sorting out their complaints about Ottoman high tariff rates and monopolies, and whereas Mahmud II sought to deal with a simmering Egypt crisis by having British backing, then a deal was possible. A year earlier, Lord Palmerston, through Ambassador Ponsonby, had made the case to the sultan for a commercial treaty by arguing that the dismantling of state monopolies would elevate poverty, increase the wealth of the empire, and importantly undermine the power of Egypt vis-à-vis Constantinople. The latter point seemed to have made most impact. The removal of monopolies had thus been Ponsonby’s argument so as to ‘cut up by the roots the power of Mehemet Ali [sic] in Egypt and Syria’, without Mahmud or Reshid Pasha realizing that it would increase the power of Britain – because Britain would request its implementation in Egypt, as part of the empire. Hence the sultan would ruin Mehmet Ali financially and assert his power over the province. Then, in the geopolitical scheme of things, this commercial treaty appeared a winning strategy for both Britain and the Ottoman Empire, whereby the latter no longer needed the military support that Mahmud received from Russia, agreed in the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi.197 A year later the sultan agreed to ‘abandon the Russian Tariff, and to content himself with the same Tariff as shall be agreed upon between Turkey and the other Great European Powers’.198 The result of the treaty was that some monopolies were to be removed, although state monopolies on corn and opium would be kept. British traders were to be charged three per cent of duty on imports and export tax was limited to nine per cent ad valorem.199 For the prominent Ottoman historian Donald Quataert, the Commercial Treaty of 1838 and the Hatti a year later acknowledged rather than created the premise of free trade. They represented formal confirmations by the Ottoman state to end its industrial, commercial and agricultural monopolies, rendering one of the most liberal economic regimes in the world of that time.200 Meanwhile, as the fulcrum of the reforms, Reshid Pasha sought to accelerate the liberalization of the economy, which as soon as it started generated negative reactions among the population. The openness of the economy created uneven results (but not an overall decline as is generally discussed in Ottoman literature) – internal winners and losers – that would accentuate divisions along ethno-religious lines. For instance, such openness was positive in the areas of the empire such as Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki), especially for the guilds of Christian and Jewish merchants. But it proved disadvantageous for others in

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Western Anatolia,201 the heartland of the Muslim Turks. The fall in revenues from opening up the economy and the abolishing of monopolies constrained Reshid to put more taxes on the exports of Ottoman subjects than on the British importers, whom the treaty protected from further rises. Higher taxes, as Speransky had come to realize in Russia, caused resentment and hardship among the Ottoman subjects, although some contemporary experts thought that it was better than the previous tax.202 Reshid’s plans to introduce kaime (paper money), carrying interest, which was intended to relieve the treasury crisis of 1839–1840, did not materialize. Such was the case with the 1840 plan to monetize the economy, even though it was successful in Constantinople and Izmir.203 Reaction to reform was the strongest in the regulation of taxation with the appointment of state tax collectors who, with the help of local authorities, would have the sole authority to obtain the tax, replacing the previous practice of tax farming. There was strong resistance from the propertied class, which resented the survey of land for fear of uncovering hidden assets and revenue sources. The first two years following the promulgation of the Hatti had created a reaction among many.204 The ensuing government of Topal Izzet Pasha accommodated such opposition by abandoning this policy during 1841 and 1842.205 What continued was the currency reform that sought to end Mahmud II ’s unprecedented currency depreciation by adopting a bimetallist (gold and silver) coinage system. This proved a popular policy among state officials for it was seen as the most modern financial instrument to achieve fiscal stability and to bring the budget under control.206 In the course of five years between Reshid Pasha’s departure as Foreign Minister and his first return as a Grand Vizier in July of 1846, the attempts to increase state efficiency continued together with a sway of unsuccessful protectionist measures by the Ottoman state and treasury. Such measures were intended to increase industrial production, internal commercial exchange, and replace the traditional money-lenders with a banking system, as was the case in 1845–1846 when the government and two local bankers established the first, short-lived Ottoman bank, called Banque de Constantinople.207 Unpopular, corrupt and lacking a political base, Reshid Pasha’s return to high politics would have seemed unimaginable had it not been for the efforts of the British Ambassador Stratford Canning (1786–1880), who had replaced Ponsonby in 1841. Canning had in fact been ambassador to Constantinople for the first time in 1825, only to leave it two years later during the Battle of Navarino in 1827.208 Depicted as the ‘guardian angel of the declining Ottoman Empire’,209 Canning was to exert immense influence on the highest circles of the Ottoman politics and on the idea of reform as such. ‘He has more pluck in his little finger’,

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Reshid said about him, ‘than the whole Divan put together.’210 Surprisingly, irrespective of the reasons for the departure of Reshid, Canning put all the ‘eggs of the reform in one basket’ by still supporting him. For Canning, Reshid remained the only prominent Ottoman figure capable, and the most willing to continue, with the stalled reforms. By aiming and subsequently succeeding in reinstating him as the main reference point for reforms, Canning, during his long-serving position of seventeen years as ambassador in Constantinople, would significantly alter the dynamics and perception on reform within and without the empire. Thus, rather than reflecting an internal drive coupled with advice of ‘friendly nations’ to rejuvenate the empire, Canning’s (and by extension the British government’s) vigorous backing of Reshid Pasha would come to signify foreign intervention in its internal affairs. This made it lose what there initially was, a sense of a genuine internal support for reform, helped but not pressured by such a strong ally as Britain. In comparison to the Russian case – where we also saw competing forces and interests from other states vying to stir the Russian foreign policy as was the case between a pro-French or pro-British orientation on the eve of the Great War – this represented for the contemporaries and subsequently in the analytical literature a qualitative difference, of continuous Ottoman political decline. This change in the British policy had to do with the coming onto the scene between 1841 and 1846 of the new British Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen (1784–1860), who had a strong inclination towards foreign policy – it was he, as Prime Minister (1852–1855), who led Britain into the Crimean War.211 He was close to Canning and made reform the essential objective in creating stability in the Ottoman Empire. In a letter to Canning, Lord Aberdeen wrote that: ‘Promoting judicious and well considered reform [was crucial in order to achieve] some degree of consistency and stability to the government which is threatened by so many causes of dissolution.’212 For Canning, the sultan had ‘more goodness than strength’ in the face of the ongoing internal political intrigues and rampant corruption. As early as 1843, Canning tried to re-instate Reshid, managing to get the sultan to call Reshid back to Constantinople but without giving him an important post. Reshid had to return to Paris as ambassador there, while his political opponent Rifat Pasha maintained his position as the Foreign Minister.213 The latter, as an Ottoman Foreign Minister, made it clear to Canning that he was overreaching his position vis-à-vis the sultan when, in an incident involving the deaths of several Ottoman Armenians and Greeks on charges of apostasy, Canning intervened by having an audience with the sultan to get assurances to end this practice. For Rifat Pasha, Canning

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forced the sultan to face a ‘heavy, perhaps even to a dangerous, responsibility’ as it was not a matter of ‘neither of policy nor of administration . . . it concerns religion. If we refuse we lose the friendship of Europe; if we consent we hazard the peace of Empire’.214 Ultimately, Canning got from the sultan what he wished for, the return of Reshid at the helm of the Porte. In another audience with him, the monarch admitted that there was a lack of progress in reforms. This, the monarch went on, was not because of Ottoman politics but because of the population, which could not understand such changes. The only way to stir them towards change was through education.215 So much had been Canning’s overreach that not only did he manage to return Reshid Pasha to power in July of 1846 as grand vizier, with Reshid’s new protégé Mehmet Emin Ali Pasha (1815–1871) as Foreign Minister, but earlier, in August 1845, he secured the dismissal of the Minister of Finance for embezzling millions of Ottoman liras. Meanwhile, Reshid’s return, discursively, was marked by a change. He spoke of pursuing a traditional rather than a European way of change, following the ‘old, pure and tolerant spirit of Islam’. His political opponents could not be fooled, though, seeing ‘the Tanzimat [as being] launched on its course with Reschid [sic] as captain and Stratford as pilot’.216 In 1848 both Canning and Lord Palmerston (Foreign Secretary again 1846–1851) put their hopes on Reshid as the only enlightened minister who could make the empire independent and prosperous.217 The latter delivered by passing the stalled Commercial Code – a copy of the French commercial laws, concerning partnerships, bankruptcies and the bills of exchange – that came into force in 1850.218 The Code allowed for the setting up of a mixed Commercial Tribunal that offered judgements without discriminating on the basis of religious difference.219 The problem with this institution, as also with other new ones, was a lack of qualified appointees.220 The lack of qualified personnel, generally, was not articulated in the Russian context, hence a major structural difference between the two settings221 created specific dynamic and practice of reforms. On the one hand, Ottomans appointed what European ambassadors considered as either corrupt or unqualified candidates, on the other hand, by criticizing such choices on the basis of merit, ambassadors certainly intervened,222 particulary in the Commercial Tribunal, which was supposed to be an Ottoman internal matter. Reshid Pasha appeared to be altering his discourse on Tanzimat reforms to entrench his position in Ottoman politics, Canning thought. He pointed out in his correspondence with Palmerston in a letter in 1850, that progress on reform a decade from the promulgation of the Hatti remained limited: the army was weak, revenues were small and the frontier provinces were unruly. He was of the

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view that Britain neeed to remain committed to Ottoman independence and territorial integrity, particularly in the context of the 1848 Revolutions in the continent, whereby Russia’s support of Austria with its troops in crushing the Hungarian uprising had made possible for these Russian troops to enter the Danubian Principalities223 that were under Ottoman suzerainty. Yet increasingly, comminting to imperial reforms was appearing to be a British project rather than an Ottoman one for, according to Canning, the sultan worried about his brother Abdülaziz (whom he kept in captivity) challenging his position by tapping into a persistent anti-reform mood in the empire, whereas Reshid Pasha could not command unanimity in the Porte and influence the palace. Canning, in another correspondence in 1851, thought that he could not further push these two figures towards reform because it was going to be counter-productive,224 also finding Reshid Pasha unfaithful to the cause of reform and as someone who had issues with gambling. But what took Canning by surprise was a discovery that Reshid Pasha, the architect of the British–Ottoman alliance, was now making secret deals with Russia.225 Such concerns made both Canning and Palmerston agree that momentarily they should not push for reforms. In their correspondence, Palmerston considered there was no possibility for ‘great or aggregate system of reform’, whereas Canning noted privately that, ‘The great [sic] game of improvement is altogether up for the present.’226

A new path to change? Same ambitions, new faces This was how Canning saw the unravelling of the more recent British-led push for wider reforms in the Ottoman Empire. In June 1852, prior to the beginning of the Crimean War, he left Constantinople. Meanwhile, Reshid Pasha managed to make himself an indispensable colossus of Ottoman politics. Given the nature of Ottoman politics, where uncertainty of remaining in power as foreign minister or grand vizier was a prerogative and a whim of the monarch, Reshid seemed to find his way of staying afloat. As the main Ottoman architect of the British– Ottoman alliance, Reshid Pasha found a way of playing on the Russo-British rivalry by becoming Foreign Minister in May 1853 thanks to Russian influence on the sultan, just as the Crimean War was about to begin. But, in a timely manner, as Canning returned to Constantinople, Reshid would use Canning’s influence to become grand vizier in November 1854227 and again in November 1856, six months after the conclusion of the war. Having made up, Canning had called on the sultan to dismiss Grand Vizier Ali Pasha and his Foreign Minister Fuad Pasha (1815–1869) – both Reshid’s protégés – from their posts because of

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their pro-French orientation and replace them with ‘personalities who would not be affected by French policies and would lean toward Great Britain’.228 These personalities were Reshid Pasha – once again becoming grand vizier – and his son Ali Galib Pasha who was married to the sultan’s eldest daughter and who was appointed foreign minister in the spring of 1857.229 On Reshid’s son becoming foreign minister, Fuad Pasha ironically remarked that, ‘We too have the Holy Trinity. Reshid Pasha is the Father, Ali Galib Pasha is the son and Lord Stratford [Canning] is the Holy Ghost.’230 Certainly, despite the fragility of the internal political base (aside from an external British backing on which Reshid Pasha’s language of political reform rested), a closed, self-serving ‘political system’ – as Reshid’s protégé at the Foreign Ministry (an Ottoman Greek Phanariot named Stephanos Vogorides) described in a letter in January 1844 to his own protégé – had emerged in which Resid Pasha, at its helm, was poised to offer a ‘brilliant future’ in Turkey.231 Others, such as the contemporary British naval officer Adolphe Slade (1804–1877), had a more ironic take on how this path to change had led to the emergence of a ‘new nobility’ – as opposed to the ‘old nobility’ in the provinces – in which the ‘the State was [their] estate’. For Slade, ‘Reschid Pasha inspired their policy; and on his return in 1846 from his second mission in Paris – an ostracism to allow time for jealousies to subside – he became their leader, retaining that post with intermission until his death in 1858 . . . [and] [e] veryman in his shadow . . . became rich.’232 Many things had changed: the monarch’s despotism had been tamed but was being replaced by that of the Porte with its still shaky ‘permanent institutions’, the new laws providing equality before the law for all had been instituted but the unity of the empire and its subjects’ loyalty was far from assured, while the Ottoman state joined the BritishFrance alliance in a war against Russia after it was unprovokedly attacked by Russia in 1853. As far as Russia was concerned, the Crimean War began because the Ottoman state could not guarantee the rights of the Christian (Orthodox) population. Accordingly, they had been further undermined by Sultan Abdülmecid’s decision – under a resurgent France of Emperor Napoleon III , which the sultan had initially resisted – to make France, as opposed to Russia, the protector of all Ottoman Christians and the Catholic Church, as opposed to the Greek Orthodox Church, the holder of the keys of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.233 Though, as prominent British historian A. J. P. Taylor, pointed out, it was mutual fear rather than aggression – Nicholas I needed a submissive Ottoman Empire, and not a dismantled one, for its own security; Napoleon III sought a successful outcome to justify his 1851 coup d’état in France; whereas Britain defended an

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independent empire to secure its routes in the Eastern Mediterranean – that caused this war.234 Russia would be defeated in 1856 against the coalition that the Ottoman Empire had joined – the last Ottoman direct victory having been in 1711 against Peter the Great’s coalition – and would enter a path of great reforms to save its status as a great power and from financial bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire joined the Concert of Europe – on the condition that reforms continued – to further ensure its territorial sovereignity, though in the decades to come this became increasingly elusive.235 Most certainly the impact of the Crimean War forced the two empires to embark on major political and economic reform processes. That said, no exchange of experience and knowledge on reform was shared between the two sides, and by contrast also Russian state actors would geo-politicize the notion of reform vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire. In the latter, the post-Reshid Pasha reform period would be dominated by Reshid’s estranged protégés, Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha (who brought a more French touch to it), and subsequently by Midhat Pasha who sought to reorient the empire towards Britain and to venture its most ambitious project for political reform: a constitutional empire.

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Part Two

Managing the Future: From Law to Political Economy and Political Representation Preface To a large extent, the main questions for both empires in the first half of the century were how to better stabilize internal order and constrain monarchical absolutism – which in turn was answered through projects of establishing new institutions, permanent laws and expansion of central bureaucratic control in the respective societies. Also, what means to use to enter or dominate (in the Russian case) European inter-state order as to ensure their security interests – and in which the responses entailed forging alliances based either in the withdrawal (the Ottoman case) or advancement (the Russian case) of religious precepts. The conclusion of the Crimean War brought to the fore other fundamental questions, responses to which this second part of the book contextualizes. One of them was what form of government was better suited for these empires in managing successful major economic reforms which were seen as vital in either bouncing back the empire in the European order (the Russian case) or preserving its standing and even surviving in it (the Ottoman case). As the Hungarian-born British historian of economics and political thought Istvan Hont pointed out, the question of the intersections of politics and economy (commerce) had long been a concern for eighteenth-century political economists, who saw them ‘as proximate causes of the modern civilizing process’, being divided though on whether some of them led to corruption while some others to progress. The state form of modernity, he went on, namely the republic, came about as a result of considerations of whether good government was compatible with a profitable economy (trade). As such, Hont asserted, what made a modern state viable in a modern order was its ability to deal with questions of war 103

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and commerce.1 Neither in the Russian political context nor in the Ottoman one, was the proposition for a republican form of government seriously considered throughout the nineteenth century, save for the Pestel plan in the early 1820s. There was no clear idea of what was the best economic model that suited these empires. Nevertheless, the more the attention of the respective imperial states was directed towards making their economies more viable to withstand internal and external political and economic pressures, over time, the more it became apparent to some reformers that there were different ways of thinking about political-economic alternatives and about good forms of government; the best possible, and conceivable alternative becoming constitutional monarchy. Certainly, the link between war and commerce had been present in the interaction of these empires between each other and with other states. In restoring or renewing peaceful relations among European states on Christian precepts ‘or civilisational underpinnings, including the Ottoman Empire, there was also a search for a new political economy’.2 As already mentioned, when the Holy Alliance was at the peak of its activities, i.e. from 1815 to 1821, Tsar Alexander I maintained the most liberal tariffs ever vis-à-vis its two key allies, the Austrian Empire and the Prussian Kingdom: thereafter having to resort to heavy protectionism on internal calls to defend national industry.3 The nexus between economic imperatives and power politics had been one of the causes of the Great Russo-French war in 1812, after the tsar decided to abandon Napoleon’s protectionist Continental System. Controversially, he had signed up to it at the Treaty of Tilsit. But the 1810 Tariff, which Speransky pushed for to alleviate the economic pressure of the Continental System by reopening free trade (grain exports) with Britain,4 had been instrumental in instigating the war. Similarly, with the Ottoman Empire there was a direct link between the search for peace and the political economy. As mentioned, the basis of the 1838 Commercial Treaty of the empire with Britain had been the latter’s geopolitical support for better access to its market. Meanwhile, the Paris Treaty, which officially made the empire a member of the Concert of Europe, in its Article  7, guaranteed independence and territorial integrity in exchange for further liberalization and access to its economic space through the institutionalization of capitulations and extraterritoriality. That is, guaranteeing Western merchants legal and commercial rights, in turn, becoming the most animating issue for the Young Ottoman and Young Turk movements later in the century.5 But besides the questions of international trade, for which the role of the state in navigating alliances was unquestionable, the Ottoman and Russian states had to proactively manage and intervene in the restructuring of their economies (in agricultural, fiscal and

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industrial development), with implications for internal politics most directly articulated through the notion of political representation, so as to gain a wider political oversight of these processes. As mentioned earlier, these processes of reforms of planning and managing a new economic and political future for the respective empires from the second half of the nineteenth century were bureaucratically generated projects. More concretely, on the Ottoman side, they were largely instigated by political figures such as Reshid Pasha, Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha, who with the exception of Midhat Pasha, all ran the Ottoman Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They managed governmental institutions that dealt directly with the question of political, legal, institutional and economic reforms and most importantly were all grand viziers. By contrast, in the Russian case, most of the civil reforms, say for those that dealt with questions of European inter-state order, were planned and managed through the Ministry of Internal Affairs; Speransky, and as we will see Nikolai Miliutin and Peter A.Valuev, had been part of it. Such structural differences, notwithstanding the similarities of the language of reform, were significant for two reasons. Firstly, it pointed to the level of control internal actors had in the reform projects. With the Ministry of Foreign Affairs being the locus of the exchange of the ideas of reform in the Ottoman case, the nature of these reforms having external and domestic dimensions was clearer than in the Russian case. In the Russian case, with these reforms generated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, their policestate nature was certainly undeniable. Secondly, it pointed to a stark difference, particularly from the second half of the century, regarding de-facto and de jure powers of autocracy and its role in reform. Whereas in the Ottoman case, reforms could be pushed through or not in accordance with the jostling for power between the two existing poles of political authority, the Porte and palace, in which an external actor, mostly Britain, had an influential role, in the Russian case the success of reform depended on the undivided and unrestrained authority of autocracy and how the latter balanced the property rights of the landed nobility with the new civil and economic rights of an emancipated peasantry.

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3

Empire and Progress

‘Desire for better order’ and a civilized empire abroad The trodden path The prospects did not seem high for Nikolai Miliutin (1818–1872)1 in the summer of 1834. Unlike his elder brother Dmitry (1816–1912) – who as a diligent student indulging in learning physics, mathematics and mechanics could look forward to a promising career as an artillery officer in the military – his deep passions for French theatre and romantic literature had not spearheaded similar sentiments in his other studies.2 Sad, depressed, in a melancholic and extremely agitated state of mind, stirred by ‘poetic thoughts’, the sixteen-year-old did poorly in the final examinations at the Boarding School for the Sons of the Nobility in Moscow. It was quite a disappointment for his financially ruined noble father, probably even more for his mother who came from one of the most powerful and wealthy land-owning families in Russia, the Kisselevs. A year later, nonetheless, he decided to leave school and enter the civil service in St Petersburg at the twelve civil rank, which was the second lowest in the overall bureaucratic ranking.3 Distracted by the northern capital’s glitter of high society, to which his brother introduced him when they met there, and vast assortments of goods and the impressive facades of majestic buildings, Nikolai’s stay and work there were not assured. In a culture where either excellent results from prestigious schools or the support of a powerful ‘patron’ could jumpstart a career in the civil service, he relied on the help of his powerful uncle Pavel D. Kisselev (1788–1872), the most important reformer during Tsar Nicholas II ’s period. By lucky coincidence, perhaps, his uncle had just returned there and was to become the Head of the Fifth Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancery, otherwise known as the Minister of State Domains, which dealt with the administration of the tsar’s serfs. In October 1835, Kisselev arranged for Nikolai a position as a provincial secretary at the Economic Department in the Ministry of the Interior.4 107

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Miliutin joined St Petersburgian bureaucracy and swiftly had to adjust to its world of, ‘a corrupt, inert, stultifying milieu overlain by an elegant and proper veneer of petitions, applications, inquires and reports’.5 It could still have been quite a contrast to the ‘sickening servility of its lower ranks . . . the soul-destroying monotony of work for untold thousands of lesser clerks’, the so called chernilny narod (inky folk)6 so powerfully depicted in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). But his uncle would not push anything for the advancement of his career; not until he had proved his worth. Now, the nineteen-year-old was determined to ‘produce something’ to escape his ‘monotonous’ daily routine and ‘disorderly’ spiritual life and become visible in the grey and monolithic structure he had become part of. Realizing quickly that the best way to do so was by becoming a specialist in a particular field – especially detailed and accurate data on local conditions of the empire were in high demand by his ministry’s high officials – he abandoned his literary aspirations for statistical studies and work. Alas, the passions of his mid-teenage years were not leading him anywhere! Completing a series of assignments, alongside other colleagues, that involved compiling statistics on Russia’s cities and ports, surveying foreign settlements and state properties in provincial Russia, increasingly he became obsessive about dealing with the economic and administrative problems of the empire and overly unnerved about the country’s omnipresent and overwhelming bureaucratic formalism. Yet it would not be until the early 1840s when his bureaucratic career began to move upwards that he started to take a stand against deplorable socio-economic conditions in the empire and to consider alternatives for change. His role involved conducting analysis and writing reports on deficient governmental responses on several famines in provincial Russia, one not far from St Petersburg. The reports gained him the trust of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Count A. G. Stroganov (1795–1891), who elevated him to the higher ranks within the central bureaucracy. It was an assignment in 1841 – ordered to evaluate the benefits of constructing the Moscow–St Petersburg railway – in which he realized, like others before him, that serfdom impeded national welfare and progress. Indeed, he opposed construction of the railway on the grounds that it was too expensive for the state and that it would be a heavy burden for Russian serfs. For him, progress was about the interests of the empire and national welfare and, conversely, had nothing to do with personal interest or personal gain.7 Yet, how new this vision was can be answered by a typical statement of Peter the Great, whose own political model was that of the patrimonial, absolutist ‘police’ state. As a justification for bringing forward legislation and hence extending his own authority to regulate state and society, Peter the Great would resort to the assertion that he had ‘to

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labour for the general welfare and profit’.8 Nonetheless, the difference here was between the proclivity of a monarch and the realization of a young bureaucrat from a new generation whose expectation for betterment arouse from that limited bureaucratic experience in the imperial Nicholean Russia. As in the Ottoman case, the discourse on change and reform, of course, had been around for quite some time within different realms of the empire. In Russia, it evolved around the domestic issues of constitution and serfdom. But the Decembrist Uprising had been a turning point. It had introduced a much-feared element at the heart of empire; namely, revolution. And from then on it had transformed thinking on the method of change among the Russian polity. Some could contemplate and envisage a revolutionary course to change – making a new political system and a new society – which had a greater sense of a break with the imperial regime of the past. Some others, meanwhile, could put their effort for change in a path much trodden by other earlier reformers; that is, reforming the political structure from the inside and being careful not to cause great and uncontrollable eruptions of social violence and upheaval.9 At best, the intentions for reform in this trodden path of ‘the rationalist police state’ had been threefold: a drive to forge continuous and functioning means of communication between the government and population; a need to create an efficient government; and, finally, to establish a relationship between the government and the governed in which the former guaranteed the security of the person and property of the latter.10 These were, and remained, the two possible alternatives. Both directed towards the future, yet engaging with different registers of change. Of course, the first alternative was inconceivable and out of the question during the rule of Emperor Nicholas I. The tsar’s answer to this had been aggressive suppression. As to the second alternative, the tsar found comfort in continuing with the model of a rationalist police state,11 adding into the mix his strong militaristic inclinations. Except for the notion of ‘unlimited monarchy’, this had been the model that Speransky sought to emulate in Imperial Russia. Indeed, thanks to Speransky’s laborious work in codifying Russian customary law, the Svod Zakonov (Digest of Laws) – divided as zakony gosurdarstvennye (public law) and zakony grazdanskie (private law) – was promulgated by the emperor in 1835 as the law of the land. That Speransky went for the concept of svod (digest) – which itself was a semantic innovation used by Karamzin – as opposed to ulozhenie (code) illustrated his shift from rational to Russian historical (traditional) legal reasoning, much debated at the beginning of Tsar Alexander’s reign.12 Article 1 of Svod confirmed what was to be expected; the monarch’s power was unlimited and as a divinely-ordained authority it was to be

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obeyed because of fear and consciousness. Meanwhile, Article 47 kept the most prized monarchical prerogative – the monopoly on the process of legislation – firmly in the tsar’s hands. The Russian Empire, as Speransky had hoped, now came under the firm rule of law and zakonnost’ (legality), meaning conforming with the state’s positive laws, statutes and establishments.13 Thus, instead of placing autocratic power under the rule of law, it became sanctioned that the latter would not restrain the tsar’s personal whim or will.14 And to counter the rise of the alternative of national sovereignty and constitutional aspirations – rejecting, thus, the institutional (constitutional) arrangements that would have been beneficial to the general welfare15 – Tsar Nicholas I commissioned a topdown project of a kind of ‘cultural nationalism’, developed by Count Uvarov, ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality’, in 1833, a response to the French revolutionary triad, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. On the Ottoman side, as mentioned, the state ideology would be articulated as Ottomanism in which legal equality was the main idea. Nicholas I’s imperial, cultural nationalism, meanwhile, did not have legal equality as in the French and Ottoman case, but by the early 1840s ‘the concept of zakonnia narodnia monarkhiia (lawful people’s monarchy), had taken shape in the works of Uvarov, Karamzin and Speransky’.16 From this perspective then, constitutional arrangements, as in other Western European states, were no longer necessary. An older generation of juridical experts, who consulted and appreciated European legal traditions, subscribed to this. In fact, as a historian of nineteenth-century Russian legal thought, Richard Wortman asserted: ‘Russia adopts Western forms of legality, but without the legal institution of Western monarchy.’17 Meanwhile, daily newspapers pointed to how contemporary French and German debates on institutions and principles were about decline, and therefore useless, whereas in Russia, ‘there exists everything necessary for national welfare’.18 Outside the official circles, however, the recently splintered intellectual nobility salons of St Petersburg and Moscow, the ‘Slavophiles’ and ‘Westerners’, did not subscribe to the official line. The Slavophiles had an inkling for the ideas of the French utopians, political and economic theorist Count Henry de SaintSimon (1760–1825) and philosopher Auguste Comte (1898–1857). They paid much more attention to the scholars of the Roman legal tradition and preferred to discuss the principles of civil life, religious and communal, of the model of Muscovy, rather than any practical administrative or political arrangements deriving from them – this would only become relevant in the early 1860s. As for the other cluster of opposing views, the utopian zapadniks, it was the ‘scientific’ values in Saint-Simon or Comte, or ‘Communitarianism’ in the light of Charles

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Fourier’s (1772–1837) thinking, that stimulated their views.19 That both evolutionary, but certainly revolutionary political change was strongly suppressed, did not mean that other aspects of change, social and economic, were not discussed and thought about. The next in throne, Grand Duke Alexander (1818–1881), in a meeting in Darmstadt with his tutor, the romantic Russian poet Vassily A. Zhukovsky (1783–1852) in December 1843, was one of those. In this exchange, he recognized the appalling economic conditions in the empire, the widespread illiteracies of the masses and the ineptitude of the government. And in so doing, he made change the key word when he told Zhukovsky that: ‘Much must be done. . . . Much must be changed. . . . I will talk to Kisselev when I get back. . . . So much must be changed. . . . The penal system alone . . . .’20

Secret committees and salons of social change: bureaucracy and serfdom By the mid-1840s Miliutin had joined the trendy and discreet Petersburgian salons in which friends, colleagues and intellectuals engaged in discussions and debates on the need for change and on potential reform projects. A recurring theme in these debates was the pervasive formalism and incompetence of imperial bureaucracy. Entering these discreet debating scenes as a konstantinovsky,21 was Peter A. Valuev (1815–1890). Alongside his career in the bureaucratic ladder, from the 1860s becoming a leading statesman, since moving in 1834 from Moscow to St Petersburg he had become acquainted with two of the most prominent poets of the time, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and Peter Vyiazemsky (1792–1878), marrying the daughter of the latter.22 Valuev came to be a fierce critic of the failures of the Russian bureaucracy. ‘All the centralisation and formalism of administration, all the measures of legislative precaution, hierarchical surveillance,’ he painfully remarked – attacking in fact the outcome from Speransky’s vision of change, ‘display their impotence daily . . . [while] increasingly mechanistic deloproizvodstvo more and more prevents us from achieving results in various areas of state administration. . . . All governmental agencies nowadays are more occupied with each other than with the essence of those matters for which they are responsible.’23 In these private evening gatherings in N. I. Nadezhdin’s and I. I. Panev’s circles, Miliutin conversed with leading figures, such as the historian and jurist Konstantin D. Kavelin (1818–1885), who ran the journal Sovremennik, seen as a progressive platform, and prominent jurist and philosopher Boris Chicherin (1828–1904). Increasingly, however, in their frequent gatherings their awareness

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of the need for reform went beyond that of the bureaucratic realm. A general feeling was amassing among them that translated into a ‘desire for a better order’.24 But who was to carry this out? Chicherin was of the view that to embark on liberal reforms, a strong and authoritative government was needed.25 This authoritative government was beyond defence, however, following the 1848 reactions to the revolutions happening elsewhere in the European continent. Suffocating state censorship in the St Petersburg of 1848 found Kavelin in grave despair. ‘Indeed,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend and former colleague at the Moscow University, ‘only here does one fully feel the disgrace, the humiliation, and the shameful slavery in which this egotistic, degenerate, Prussian-militaristic foreign dynasty . . . holds us . . . This type of absolutism which we have only kills the embryo of independent national life.’26 Miliutin in fact shared Chicherin’s view. Irrespective that the initial motive for reform was the deplorable state of central bureaucracy, Miliutin believed that it would be through it, and its reform-minded bureaucrats advising the autocrat, that change for a better order could happen. This remained an unresolved tension, however. How could such a bureaucracy, in dire need of fundamental change, transform the socio-economic landscape and bring about economic and industrial progress? There was not much choice, according to Valuev. Writing in 1845, he asserted that, ‘the well-being and domestic success of any state depends in large measure on the activities of those individuals to whom the more important areas of state administration are entrusted’. Due to the autocratic nature of the state, its officials had more responsibilities because ‘public opinion stands mute [and] . . . citizens are not summoned to participate in discussions of public affairs’.27 But these officials had to shift their attention from a crippling formalism to dealing with the real substance of the issues. And for Miliutin, they had to engage in reform which was to be gradual, coming and directed from above. Its language would be law and legality but not constitutionalism, adding a serious reflection on the political-economic future of the empire; namely economic development in agriculture and industrialization of the imperial economy. As will be elaborated in the Ottoman side in the next chapter, this was the essence of political reform pursued by Fuad Pasha and Midhat Pasha. And whereas Valuev would push without success for a kind of constitutionalism, political representation at the imperial level, Midhat Pasha, later in his bureaucratic career, would embrace constitutionalism and succeed in making a constitution. But for Miliutin, the desire for better order could only start by tackling the question of serfdom, which he began to seriously consider in the late 1840s. ‘Serfdom serves as the main – perhaps even the only – hindrance to any

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development in Russia at the present time’, he declared.‘No amount of government solicitude, no efforts by private individuals, can improve it. . . . Only with the emancipation of the serfs will the betterment of our rural economy become possible.’28 The emancipation of the serfs would serve the purpose of ameliorating agriculture as a crucial step in accumulating the capital necessary for the industrialization of the empire.29 This seriousness was encouraged in the salon of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (1807–1873). Married in 1823 to Nicholas I’s younger brother, Mikhail Pavlovich (1798–1849), the Grand Duchess was highly aware of the intellectual ferment in other circles and had become exceedingly engaged with the issue of reform. Gaining fame for her beauty and ‘stormy nature and passion for intellectual debate’,30 in the two ensuing decades after her marriage she sought to learn the state of affairs of the empire, drawing on the knowledge of prominent imperial statesmen who attended her salon gatherings. She had come to believe that the ultimate goal of all governments was liberty – a Hegelian notion – no longer promoted in the Russian context of the time. As expressed in her diary in 1849, liberty could be found not only in democracy and republic but also in the monarchical system. What she meant by it though was the liberty of the Russian peasantry. Indeed, after her husband’s death that year, she sought to be more active in the affairs of the empire. One way to pursue this was by altering the profile of the guests in her famous salon – from a ‘circle’ of imperial court figures and senior statesmen to that of younger officials displaying impressive administrative abilities and sympathy for change, among them being the brothers Nikolai and Dmitry Miliutin.31 Intending to show by example, the Grand Duchess sought to free the peasants on her estate and was in search of able people to assist her. Miliutin gained her confidence and thus she asked him to provide a reform proposal for her Karlova estate on the eve of the Crimean War – engaging him seriously on the issue of emancipation.32 As Miliutin dug deeper into this matter, two alternatives became obvious. Between the choices of a free-market alternative, which meant emancipating Russian peasants without land, and a solidarity approach that entailed emancipation with land, he preferred the latter. It was not an entirely new position, however. His uncle, Kisselev, who had been working on the peasant question for many years, had strongly pushed this view in the numerous neglássniye comitéty (secret committees), eight in fact, that Tsar Nicholas – who sided fully with pomeshchiki (the owners of an estate with serfs) – had requested to improve, particularly, the state peasants, rather than abolish serfdom.33 Earlier, in 1816, Kisselev had written and shown to Alexander I a memorandum titled ‘On the Gradual Extirpation of

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Slavery in Russia’, making arguments about the unlawfulness of serfdom and, as with the Grand Duchess, about liberty, how ‘civil liberty is the foundation of national prosperity’.34 Certainly, Russian peasants had lost their liberty – put under landlord authority with their mobility confined to owner’s land, unless temporally permitted – with the 1649 Ulozhenie (Land Code). In the early nineteenth century, the 1812 Law allowed peasants to engage in commercial activity, while an 1827 Law restricted the lords’ authority over these serfs doing these kinds of activities.35 Kisselev had presided over the landless emancipation (paying money rent instead of labour rent to landowners)36 of state peasants in the Baltic guberniyas (contemporary Estonia and Latvia) in 1816 and 1819.37 By the late 1830s, being a member of the Committee on Dues in Treasury Estates in the Western Provinces (1839–1842),38 he had come to realize that the option of voluntary and landless emancipation had to be avoided. It threatened state security and its revenues as well as having proven financially catastrophic for the peasants.39 And although Nicholas I did not approve of emancipation altogether, Kisselev could at least boast that the government’s including Speransky’s, long-held view of landless emancipation was no longer accepted by the tsar.40 As for the secret committees, they had revealed time and again how autocracy was tightly interlocked with the pomeshchiki. ‘It was at once’, as historian Daniel Field noted on the institution of autocracy, a ‘patron and client to nobility, dependent upon it and supportive of it. Under Nicholas I, no reform plan was pushed far enough to show which aspect of the relationship was paramount.’41 Indeed, at a plenary sitting of the Council of State in 1846, the emperor made a speech in which he declared that serfdom was evil. Yet he added that, ‘to interfere with it in any way would result in a worse evil. At the moment any thought of emancipation would be a criminal attempt against the tranquillity and the well being of the State.’42 As for Miliutin, unlike the Grand Duchess or his uncle, he did not engage with the question of social change from the principle of liberty, a concern with private property, or even the principles of solidarity. Rather, like his uncle much later on, he contemplated the highly expected and worrying political implications of a landless emancipation and hence state security and economic sustainability. In the final analysis, it was a balancing act between change and stability, and so he was prepared to take on change to ensure more stability. Therefore, by engaging with the Karlova project he sought to solve the issue of serfdom gradually by proposing that the gentry’s serfs would come under the control of the state treasury to sever the oppressive relation between serfs and their masters. This was much more than his uncle had considered, but the emancipation would not be immediate. In so doing, the serfs would be able to buy their personal freedom in

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thirty-seven years and change their residence, when they would pay their redemption obligation. What was also important to him, the powerful presence that the local nobility had in the countryside, would be diminished in favour of the central authority in St Petersburg.43 In the summer of 1856 he worked with Kavelin, who was also the tsarevich’s tutor in Russian law, and by October concluded a study titled ‘Preliminary Ideas on the Organisation of Relationships between the Gentry and their Peasants’. In it, Kavelin argued for a transformation of the legal relations between nobility and peasants; as the practice in the Russian courts had shown, there was no impartiality between the two groups.44 Miliutin suggested adding to Karlova’s scheme – the essence of which was to become zemstvo reform (more on this below) – that the nobility would be represented in the provincial committees in an advisory role, as a source of information on local conditions. However, he did not recommend giving them a decisive voice in the ultimate deal on the emancipation.45 For Miliutin, these were the technicalities that, hopefully, would gradually lead to the achievement of the ‘desired order’.

For or against change The status of the Great Power: from reality to almost a dream In 1843 the twenty-five-year-old Grand Duke Alexander, the would-be Emperor Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), had deplored to his tutor the existence of serfdom in Russia. A sense of helplessness could have overtaken him on this matter, for a year earlier, as a newly appointed chair of the very secret committee on the peasant question, he had not been able to agree on anything substantial about it. In fact, in its opening session, he had underscored that the committee’s goal was ‘to bring about certain changes in the existing conditions of serfdom’. But even his articulation of the notion of peremiéna provoked great resistance among most of the committee members. A certain Count Chernishev pointed out to him that change meant freedom (a foreign concept) for the peasants, a move that would undermine the imperial state: ‘the plan of introducing any changes . . . is a short step to consequences certain to shake the edifice of the State’. Taking on the Grand Duke’s articulation of reform in the speech, Chernishev retorted that: ‘We are not in need of any reforms. Our sole duty is to preserve and to perfect the tradition we have inherited.’46 Quite a reminder to Alexander of what to expect if the idea of change and reforms was seriously pursued by the autocratic government.47

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Scholars of the Great Reforms remain puzzled with Tsar Alexander II , asking how could he, a ruler as conservative as his father, be so inconsistent and undecided in the face of liberal and conservative forces, yet embark on a series of reforms that were ‘quite remarkable for their breath, comprehensiveness, and daring’?48 Soviet scholar Larissa Zakharova read him as less liberal than his younger brother, Grand Duke Konstantin (1827–1892), who, prior to enthronement, chaired the ‘most reactionary of the secret committees on the peasant question, those of 1846 and 1848, and took part in the establishment of the so-called Buturlin Committee on censorship’ and did not talk about change in his speech to the Council of State on the day of his accession in 1856. Nonetheless, what saved him were his common-sense qualities in handling complex domestic and inter-state issues as well as not being fanatical. His tutor Zhukovsky had advised him to value humane and humanitarian principles as opposed to divisive features of ideologies,49 and to be aware of a delusion that ‘you can shape your own future and the future of your nation according to your own will’. Zhukovsky also advised him to avoid ‘the dangerous principle . . . that all individual good should be set aside for the good of the state, or even more vaguely, for the general good’.50 For the American historian Alfred Rieber, who recognized a propensity towards paternalism in Alexander – a persistent feature of the Russian autocracy,51 of the Ottoman monarchy as well – the Tsar was also stubborn, suspicious, devoted to duty and a cunning statesman having to deal with an empire constantly on the edge and who did not think highly of the human race in general. How could he? The groups of people who demanded that he introduced any type of constitutionalism did not understand his point of view. It was not about him jealously guarding his prerogative but rather about preserving the integrity and stability of the empire. It was only him who could see the bigger picture and for that the rest of the social and ethnic groups were not worthy of his trust. There was the nobility’s perennial stubbornness to reform, there were the annoying peasants with their naiveté and rebelliousness, and, surprisingly, the Poles who did not want to remain within the empire. What kind of future could he envisage for the empire when there was an untrustworthy intelligentsia; a new generation of youth corrupted by the press and willing to overthrow any authority? How could the economy and state progress when merchants lacked initiative and relapsed into corruption, while the bureaucrats schemed against each other? For Rieber, these were some of the anxieties and questions that Alexander revealed in his attitudes during his rule. The only way the tsar could rule was by applying the old Roman dictum, divide et impera, and rather than reconciling conflicting interests within the government and country

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he would exploit them. Therefore, Rieber maintained, the tsar’s political positions shifted on many issues, as long as they moved around him.52 As to the question above on what motivated such a staunch conservative to reform, the answer was the scale of the need for change,53 triggered by defeat in the Crimean War – a defeat that undermined Russia’s Great Power status in Europe. Most certainly, Grand Duke Alexander did not want Russia to go into a war against the Ottomans and the Franco-British alliance in 1853. As he had told the British Ambassador in St Petersburg prior to the commencement of the hostilities, he did not believe that his father, Nicholas I, would start the war.54 But once Russia had entered the war and after he took the reins of the empire, following his father’s death in March 1855, he stubbornly sought victory despite the looming threat of virtual European isolation. From the British and French perspectives, the war effort was not about occupying St Petersburg or Moscow. Rather, they fought to stop Russia’s move onto the Ottoman Empire.55 What made the tsar, however, rethink the continuation of the war was the stance of two Holy Alliance members, Austria and Prussia. Neither of them had been involved in the war. But by early 1855 Austria had guaranteed Britain and France that it would side with them, which materialized by December when it submitted an ultimatum for peace, while Prussia remained aloof.56 The Holy Alliance, in all practicality had become defunct.57 This virtual isolation by all the other Great Powers could be lifted provided that the tsar accepted new peace terms on 23 December 1855, which as he told Alexander Gorchakov (1798–1883) – the Russian envoy in Vienna, who would replace Count von Nesselrode as Foreign Minister in 1856 and hold the office until 1882 – had to be ‘compatible with Russia’s honour’ otherwise the war would continue. 58 Adding to the isolation, there was, as Kisselev kept reminding him during the war, an empire on the brink of financial disaster, sustaining its expenditure on unsustainable foreign borrowing. ‘We live on loans,’ he warned, ‘every eight years or so we turn to foreign banks for help, and we borrow – to cover a four-year deficit.’59 Indeed, looming isolation and financial disaster were transforming Russia’s reality of enjoying a Great Power status – achieved first by Peter the Great’s defeat of the Swedish armies in 170960 – into a distant dream. The defeat from war, which as an expression of the day had it, revealed a colossus with feet of clay,61 left Alexander with two options in the inter-state power game. One option was to withdraw from both continents, Asia and Europe, in order to build up the required military resources – and Miliutin’s brother, Dmitry, as Minister of War (1861–1881) would oversee major transformations in the imperial army. Most certainly, Dmitry Miliutin’s military

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reforms overhauled the Petrine military system by introducing Napoleonic-style compulsory military conscription of six, as opposed to twenty-five years, military education, and military districts in the whole empire – reforms that were essential in the country’s twentieth-century history.62 The other was to remain in by bluffing and being deceitful about Russia’s real strengths, hoping that its great weaknesses would not be exposed. Here then, the second option was taken, a relaunching of Russia as a great and imperialist power, though the prospects for Alexander II to reform the European inter-state order, in a normative way, as his uncle Alexander I had done, appeared far from possible. Like the Ottoman Empire seeking to enter the Concert of Europe, which became a reality with the Treaty of Paris in 1856, Russia, because of its defeat, could not re-join it on its own terms. Nevertheless, as to be discussed below, initially an academic effort, the Russian foreign policy sought to play a similar role through the vocabulary of international law. What mattered now for the tsar, months after the Treaty of Paris in 1856, was the country’s diplomatic re-alignment. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gorchakov, exhibited confidence about the Russian diplomacy to do so, as he later remarked, ‘Even when dump, [Russian diplomacy] did not remain deaf.’ But the reality was that neither Alexander II nor Gorchakov had any clear idea about a decisive future alignment: the long-time ally, Austria, could no longer be trusted. And with Russophobia running high in Britain and Anglophobia in Russia, there seemed not to be any chance for any real relations between Britain and Russia.63 The Tsar believed that Prussia was Russia’s only friend, at least it had remained neutral in the war, as opposed to building on French overtures – during the Paris Treaty negotiations, Napoleon III had been particularly welcoming to the main Russian plenipotentiary, Count Alexey F. Orlov (1787–1862).64 Meanwhile, Gorchakov – a school fellow of Alexander Pushkin and strong supporter of emancipation and idea of progress65 – thought that Prussia was still ‘the weakest among the strong’, whereas France was a Great Power.66 What was needed, Gorchakov sought to convince the tsar, was an alliance between Russia, France and Prussia that would help preserve peace in Europe by checking the Austrian interference in the German states and in the Balkans – recognizing that France would be an irritant about ‘la question polonaise’ (the Polish question). Moreover, Napoleon III seemed to have prioritized a Franco-British alliance67 as opposed to a Franco-Russian one. In addition to the diplomatic efforts, the Russian government sought to mount a campaign of convincing European public opinion about a different Russia. In 1855, it established in Belgium the newspaper Le Nord which in the words of the newly-appointed Minister of Internal Affairs Sergey Lanskoy (in office 1855–

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1861), sought to ‘acquaint Europe with the real situation in Russia’ and ‘to attempt to destroy baseless and false views about our fatherland’. These efforts, scholar Zakharova argued, gave the impression of a Russian turn towards liberalism.68 Ten days before the declaration of the Treaty of Paris on 30 March 1856, the tsar issued the Imperial Manifesto on the conclusion of the war. The Manifesto pointed to the unfavourable terms in the upcoming treaty as well as it underscored the tsar’s resolve to strengthen the imperial army and to preserve the empire’s status as a Great Power.69 It also called for fundamental reforms that entailed strengthening and perfecting Russia’s domestic order, emphasizing – as in Reshid Pasha’s Hatti – the vision of imperial renewal through equality of law for all. ‘May each,’ a passage from it read, ‘under the canopy of laws equally just for all, equally protective of all, enjoy the fruits of honest labour in peace.’70 In fact, the fallout from the Crimean War for Russia, as on the Ottoman side, now much more directly pointed to the connection of reform with external and domestic pressures for change. With all the early nineteenth century political-economic efforts, discursive and policy-wise, the reality was that Russia continued to have an underdeveloped industrial base, except for its cotton textile industry, and a stagnant and backward economy.71 The war had exacerbated these, in fact in the words of the Minister of Finance, M. Kh. Reutern (1820–1890), it had led to the insolvency of ‘all Russia’. Emperor Alexander II and Grand Duke Konstantin recognized this – in the exchange of letters in 1857 – as a fiscal and banking crisis of ‘catastrophic’72 proportions. The way out of this was once again fundamental reforms, as in the Ottoman case, this entailed not only legal ones, but also political-economic and what would re-emerge as constitutional ones. In so doing, the traditional arrangement of the Russian political, economic and social life – the hierarchical order of autocracy, aristocracy and serfdom – had to be dismantled. The tsar had become aware that a freed peasantry, thus hired labour, was more profitable than compulsory labour and with it the servile structure that retarded commodity production of grain and the development of agriculture in general.73 But he also was highly conscious that abolishing serfdom would be met with hostility by most of the landed gentry, a dangerous prospect that could undermine autocracy.74

From muddling through to outside of the ordinary Expectations were running high following Alexander II ’s formal accession to the throne in August 1855. New directions were anticipated on a raft of issues: serfdom, the ongoing Crimean War, censorship, bureaucratic stagnation and

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oppression, the soulless reign of repression, and thirty years of corrupt police government. What was unexpected, though, was that while the new emperor hinted at domestic reforms, he did not have any plan of action, no clear sense of direction, for the empire. Nor did he have any close counsellors except for his brother, Grand Duke Konstantin, and Kisselev, who could help him on this potentially new course. The only friend he knew very well and who would be leading the preliminary work on emancipation was Jakob Rostovtsev, his adjutant-general.75 Irrespective of their antagonistic predisposition on the question of serfdom, on 30 March 1856 the emperor appealed to the Moscow nobility, telling them of his intentions of abolishing it. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above,’ he is recorded to have said, ‘than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below’ asking them ‘to give some thought to how this can be accomplished’.76 But their reaction to his speech was apathetic. A little before the end of 1856 Minister Lanskoy, who nonetheless had already begun to study the material on serfdom kept in the archives, wrote to Alexander, ‘. . . landowners will not make a start. They allege that they are being kept in the dark about the intentions of the Government and that they are unable to formulate any independent plan of their own.’77 Still, the tsar was muddling through and stepping on a well-trodden path – reacting to the apathy of the local nobility by yet again establishing neglássny komitét in January 1857. Comprised of the old guard senior statesmen – Count Alexey F. Orlov as Chairman, Count Alderberg, General Paskiewicz, General Mouraviev and others – fierce defenders of the old positions,78 this move depressed both the ‘dreamers’ and the ‘realists’ of emancipation. As a matter of fact, a sharp division had emerged between the imperial government and intellectual groups, which the exiled Russian thinker Alexander Herzen (1812– 1870) called ‘the planters’ and ‘abolitionists’.79 The sway of the ‘planters’, the old guard, seemed stronger, while the ‘realists’ of emancipation – Count Kisselev, sent as ambassador to Paris with Minister of Interior Lanskoy and Baron Korff, Count Bludov and Rostovtsev – were few in numbers. Important, however, was who would have the attention of the emperor, considering that he had already made clear his determination for the peasant emancipation.80 Unsurprisingly, neglássny komitét produced no results.81 Meanwhile, Lanskoy sent the emperor a memorandum, persuading him to accept Nikolai Miliutin and Soloviev82 in this endeavour. In an unprecedented move, in November 1857 the tsar allowed for discussion and debates on reform to take place outside the confines of the St Petersburg bureaucracy and in the public realm. This was the dawning of glasnost’ (wide publicity and debate). Yet he faced a dilemma over

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the extent the press could exercise public scrutiny on policy decisions. The tsar revealed this dilemma very early on when he commented that it was important to continue with the censorship and maintain a ‘judicious vigilance’ over the press to the extent that did not ‘inhibit thinking’.83 This, nonetheless, led to an outpouring of opinions and writings in newspapers and journals. Publicists started to discuss the experiences in the Austrian Empire (which had just recently, in 1849, emancipated its peasants) and Prussia for possible directions. The Prussian example well suited some segments of the Russian nobility, including Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna who promoted Baron von Stein’s Prussian reforms as opposed to Miliutin, because it was seen as successful emancipation.84 Prussia’s example was appealing because, Slavophile-like publicist and one of the main contributors to the emancipation reform, Yuri Samarin (1819–1876), could draw historical parallels between Prussia being overrun by Napoleonic France and Russia defeated by the British–French Alliance. As he put it, ‘[b]eaten and humiliated [by France], she [Prussia] set about internal reform at the very time that French garrisons occupied her fortress’.85 Yet despite the similarities that were drawn with the Austrian and Prussian examples, still French and British experiences on reform provoked reformers’ imagination. This was because, as Reshid Pasha and Rifat Pasha also saw it, from their Ottoman perspective, as Arseny, the Bishop of Kiev put it, these two countries were ‘the ideals of contemporary civilisation’.86 The focus on these two examples was reflected in an amazing mixing of the vocabulary of debates that emerged – debates that were certainly linked to the salon discussions of the mid–1840s. Keen to capture a new process of reform in which there would be public involvement in local government that would also express a direct opposition to this bureaucratic rule, reformers appropriated the English term ‘self-government’, which was literally translated as samo-upravlenie. From the French experience, that was seen as more centralized than England, they took the notion of centralization which was equated with bureaucracy. Hence, the rationale was that if bureaucracy had its opposite alternative in samo-upravlenie then its analogous pair in French vocabulary was centralization and decentralization, whereby the latter term was incorporated from the French décentralisation as detsentralizatsiia. Thus, both samo-upravlenie and detsentralizatsiia and their counter-concepts, whose meanings were strictly confined in the administrative domain, began to be used interchangeably and to attack the old bureaucratic centralization and claim that the future of Russia was in embracing the ‘new principles of decentralization and self-government’.87 Within this borrowed French vocabulary of reform, the work by French statesman and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime and la révolution,

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first appearing in Russia in 1856, had a significant impact on the debates. In it, Tocqueville argued that even though the French revolutionaries’ discourse had been about fundamental change, breaking with the past and the autocratic old regime, they still preserved the old regime’s strong and central form of government. Also, he pointed out, that when political freedom was not an end in itself but a means to achieve material gains, there was a greater likelihood that people would choose the latter. Another thesis that Tocqueville advanced here was that economically and politically active people need not rely on the central power of the state and its bureaucratic machine.88 Kavelin drew attention to the stark parallels between pre-revolutionary France and contemporary Russia, and Grand Duke Konstantin talked about its ‘awful lessons’. At the same time, Prince Vladimir Cherkassky (1824–1878), a Slavophile nobleman, when reviewing Tocqueville’s book in 1857 in Russkaia Beseda, came to the conclusion that a federative local union of property owners and emancipated peasants, as communal property owners, could serve as a bulwark against bureaucracy.89 Notwithstanding this, the origins of Russian reform concepts were bureaucratic, concepts that increasingly became charged with meanings of transformative goals for the imperial state and society – namely, progress. When reforming the Naval Ministry in 1857, Grand Duke Konstantin emphasized substance rather than form, delegated more power to the subordinate levels and was first to make use of the notions of glastnost’ and zakonnost’ (respect for the rule of law and following established procedures) against the abuse of what had become a counter-concept, proizvol (arbitrary powers). Glastnost’ (artificial publicity) was initially used by bureaucratic reformers to check abuses and corruption of the proizvol in the administration and hold publicly responsible those who served the state and the public. The Grand Duke had realized that in order to create legislative work it was necessary to provide for glastnost’ to elicit disputes and arguments about different views from all soslovie (class(es)) which the law would affect.90 Yet, after the war, its meaning became contested. It expanded to one in which it would serve as a guarantee of zakonnost’ and referring to wide, open public debate about the country’s needs. Nikolai Miliutin believed that, with his reforms in the Naval Ministry, the Grand Duke had created a model that could also be used in the relation between the landed nobility and the serfs, which he sought to resolve. Like Alexander II , he considered that glasnost’ had to happen but within reasonable limits. Crucially also, to Miluitin bureaucratic proizvol was regressive to reform. However, he deemed the preservation of autocrat’s proizvol essential because an autocrat with unlimited powers, willing to listen to good advice, meant broadening the spectrum of reform.

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Thus, for bureaucratic reformers this new vocabulary created space to engage with change. Through zakonnost’ they could claim, with their expert knowledge, to be pursuing their visions of reform within the lawful realm for the benefit of Russia, while glasnost’ allowed for the engagement of other actors, beyond the bureaucratic realm, just to recall the secrecy with which Speransky prepared his reform projects, and the reaction he received from nobility about it. The bureaucratic proizvol of the state officials had to come to an end, whereas the system of administrative nadzor (surveillance) was to be legally clarified. The latter used by high-ranking officials against their subordinates could now be applied to change the system of estates dominated by the privileged nobility, whereas zakonnost’ could promise a future in which all were equal before the law.91

From committee to commissions (redaktsionnye komissii): power, law and land In the summer of 1857, the emperor met Kisselev at Kissingen, a famous Bavarian spa resort. Both were concerned with the uselessness of the recently established neglássny komitét and the lack of progress on emancipation. During their conversations, the emperor made his determination clear to proceed with the emancipation. ‘It must be resolved,’ he told Kisselev, ‘I am determined to do it, and I am resolved that peasants should have some land given to them with their freedom.’ But he also reminded Kisselev that, ‘I have nobody to help me in this important business. . . . The question is how to avoid putting too great burden on the landowners. Even now they are quarrelling among themselves. They will never stand together.’92 For his part, Kisselev told him about the gifts of his nephew that could be very useful to him on this matter. On his return, the tsar asked his brother to become a formal member of the Secret Committee, so that the ‘planters’ would not argue against the Grand Duke but would, more importantly, accelerate the process. The ‘planters’, meanwhile, kept doing just the opposite, urging the emperor not to give any important work to Miliutin, whom they considered a revolutionary. The Grand Duchess Elena, however, managed to set a meeting between the emperor and Miliutin.93 Aware by now that the nobility would not organize to come up with an initiative that suited his idea of emancipation with land, Alexander II ordered Lanskoy to take effective control over the legislative preparations for emancipation as well as other reforms that could follow,94 thus fulfilling the prophecy of Miliutin and Kavelin that only central bureaucracy could lead the way to change. Interestingly, it was a state-led – more exactly instigated by the Ministry of

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Internal Affairs and then supported by the members of the Secret Committee – petition in November 1857 by the Governor-General of Lithuania Nazimov calling for landless emancipation of their peasants, that finally killed off the idea of a landless emancipation. This became final with the tsar’s response – following long consultations with Rostovtsev and Konstantin – on 20 November 1857, the so-called Nazimov Rescript, in which he declared categorically that landless emancipation was not acceptable. Instead, he promoted the new approach, emancipation with land, previously untested in Russia or in the rest of the continent95 – except for the Austrian Empire in 1849.96 Importantly, in the Rescript was demanded the establishment of local committees that would produce draft projects97 – to be based, soon, on principles that Miliutin had dwelled upon for some time. Things were about to move fast and on a new course. Within a week of its declaration, the Rescript became known to the population. The local nobility in European Russia started to establish provincial committees to come up with proposals. Importantly, the expected work would now not be carried out in secret, but in the Main Committee on Peasant Affairs – the renamed Secret Committee – from January 1858. As a proof of glasnost’, any sign of progress was to be printed in newspapers and periodicals.98 Two weeks after the declaration of the Rescript, at the wedding ball of his younger brother Michael, organized in the Winter Palace, Alexander II told his guests, ‘And now, gentlemen, we must get busy in earnest. You know my wishes about the great peasant reform. We cannot put it off any longer, and I rely on your active help.’99 For all the things happening around 1856, the year had been an auspicious one for Nikolai Miliutin, though what was to come, on the question of reform, was to be a tough uphill battle. He was offered and took the position of Director of the Economic Department in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, also becoming an important member of numerous governmental commissions on reform. A sense of self-importance, coupled with credentials accrued on the way, gave him confidence in voicing criticism against other high officials opposing the terms of emancipation he subscribed to. As expressed in a letter to his uncle, these nobility bureaucrats were the epitome of selfish reaction and regress. ‘The nobility is selfinterested, unprepared, underdeveloped,’ thus, he noted, ‘I cannot tell you what will come out of all this, without leadership and direction, faced with the crudest opposition from the highest officials.’ But, luckily, there was a force to counter them steadfastly – the emperor, ‘who alone curbs the present reaction and forces of inertia’.100 For him the whole matter boiled down to three concepts: power, law and land. Whoever had the power to influence legislation could decide on the fate of the land. In a letter to his brother Dmitry on 19 April 1858, he wrote:

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The land question is at the root of this discord. Reactionaries of all types and colourings have concentrated all their bellicose force on this point. From the first, the Tsar firmly demanded [that the peasants be given their] garden plots and invited to compromise on [the question of] the remaining peasant lands. But already there is vacillation [on this point]. Furthermore, there are now ideas of giving the serfowners some sort of droits seigneuriaux (a phrase which one cannot even translate into Russian) [sic]. . . . It is hard to say what will come out of all this, but one cannot be optimistic. Twenty million peasants will hardly be satisfied with phrases which will subject them to new obligations and juridical oppressions.101

As expected, the struggle was hard fought within the high echelons of the Russian government. Keen to progress with the drafting of legislation, Miliutin and others in the ministry met fierce resistance from the Minister of State Domains, M. N. Murav’ev, the latter having replaced Miliutin’s uncle, Kisselev. In a bureaucratic move, Murav’ev employed the notion of detsentralizatsiia and sought to weaken the powers of the Ministry of Interior Affairs and to sideline provincial governors supportive of reform by proposing in debates in the Main Committee the appointment of governors-general as superiors to provincial governors. While the tsar, surprisingly, agreed with Murav’ev, the Grand Duke, Milutin and Lanskoy rejected it on the grounds it undermined zakonnost’ and the proper administrative order. This particular matter was resolved on the reformers’ side when Lanskoy threatened resignation, hence the tsar withdrew his support for this kind of decentralizatsiia.102 But other disagreements made whatever relations existed between the tsar and Miliutin extremely tense. Another case in point had been the role of Rostovtsev – the Tsar’s closest confidant and member of the Main Committee. Because Rostovtsev, contradicting the tsar’s position – was for landless emancipation and the preservation of the nobility’s patrimonial power over peasants – Miliutin sought to undermine Rostovtsev’s position vis-à-vis Alexander II by leaking information in Alexander Herzen’s journal in London, Kolokol (The Bell), about his past as a Decembrist conspirator to Nicholas I. This infuriated the tsar, who started to think of Miliutin ‘as a “red” and a dangerous man’.103 In fact, Miliutin was preparing his resignation from his position, having not been for the encouragement of the Grand Duchess and Minister Lanskoy to stay in. Finally, such initial political convulsions within reformers were overcome, and based on recommendations from the Ministry of Internal Affairs – to which Miliutin had contributed greatly – the tsar ordered the establishment of Redaktsionniye komissy (the Editing Commissions) on 17 February 1859. He

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tasked Rostovtsev to direct the legislative work for the emancipation, whereas Miliutin was appointed deputy Minister of Internal Affairs. Together with Kavelin and Solov’ev, he recommended that all legislation prepared by local committees of serf-owning lords would constitute the raw material for the drafting of a single, comprehensive emancipation statute. This single statute, valid for the whole empire, was to be prepared by a commission of experts and enlightened bureaucrats, and it was to be comprised of separate sections: legal, administrative and economic.104 The Editing Commissions were to be a piece of extra-bureaucratic ingenuity. Given a timeframe of a year and half, from March 1859 to October 1860 – six months for the preparation and a year to defend it against the attacks of the serf-owners105 – they were expected to draft the emancipation statute. Politically intended to collapse the monopoly and resistance of the nobility in the Main Committee,106 administratively, they were to centralize the much-proclaimed liberalization and participation of local nobility in this process of high stakes. They were to propose changes to the millions of serfs as well as the lives and fortunes of more than one hundred thousand serf-owning families. While Miliutin, Solov’ev, Samarin, Cherkassky and many others – altogether eighteen appointees – controlled emancipation debates in the particular commissions, Rostovtsev coordinated their work, kept the tsar informed and ensured his committees were in discussions with representatives of the nobility.107 Miliutin played out all his expert knowledge of what he thought was the Russian reality. Heading the financial and economic sections of the commissions, these sections were to recommend legislation on how to enact the freeing of the serfs with land. In addition, Lanskoy recommended Miliutin to head the newly restablished Commission on Provincial and District Institutions on 27 March 1859 that came to be known as zemstvo (establishment of new local institutions), which the tsar tasked to prepare legislation for changing Russia’s local administration. The purpose of these new institutions, which, as mentioned earlier, was something that Miliutin had worked on for some time and that would come into being after the Emancipation Acts, was to replace the serf-owner administration in the villages and reform the police forces. In comparison with the other commissions, this moved at a much slower pace, as the administrative and political considerations were more complex – its success depended on the future of Russia’s provincial development and the relationship between a new central administration and the regions.108 Returning to the two sections in his proposals, it was agreed that instead of giving serfs land in freehold at the time of emancipation, they would get the permanent right to rent their present holding from their former masters until they

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could buy it with the financial help of the state, through a redemption plan for a much longer period than earlier anticipated. When arguments would break out in the commissions, Miliutin would tell his allies, ‘This is no time for disagreement. It will be well if we manage to sow some seeds.’109 Another fundamental matter revealed what principles were at work in this process, namely complete or shared land emancipation, as they decided not to give peasants individual titles on the land but rather the landed communes as juridical units. This was a decision based on the considerations of the Russian rural situation, in which seventy-five per cent of peasants lived and worked in obshchina (a communal type setting). The commune was to be kept for the time being, but not for ever. Indeed, it would be the third prime minister of imperial constitutional Russia, Peter A. Stolypin, who with his 1906 land reform ended obshchina by giving individual titles to peasants on plots from the communal land.110 A final crucial point was the size of the land to be allotted to the peasants; despite the objections of Semenov and Cherkassky, Miliutin’s proposal to give them the amount of plowlands and household plots in use at the time of emancipation was accepted. Enjoying majority support at the general meetings of the commissions, as opposed to the individual sections, Miliutin and the rest of his associates were able to push through their legislative principles and recommendations.111 In so doing, they were thus able to take a political position in a heated debate on the future of imperial economic order among liberal economists, Slavophiles and socialists that had begun in 1855. Could this economic order be based purely on the principles of individual property, as liberal economists believed, or could such principles be undermined when they, as Slavophiles and with socialists thought, contradicted the demands of reason?112 The demands were certainly tied in to the state’s security, stability and its survival. For his part, Rostovtsev was highly aware of the conflict between the reason of state and the new economic order (which promoted solidarity at the expense of private property), and was not sure that this state-led reform would reconcile the tensions between the nobility’s juridical right to private property and state law. Ultimately, as Miliutin also thought, it was state law and the emperor’s desire to save Russia and to free the peasants that triumphed over private property rights. Explaining how he sought to achieve a certain balance on this dilemma and to counter political attacks that their commissions aimed at ruining landlords and introducing anarchy, Rostovtsev wrote to the emperor in October 1859 that: ‘Juridically [sic] speaking, the Reform is unjust because it violates the rights of private property, but the Reform is nonetheless legal and inevitable . . . as a necessity of State to be based on State law.’113 But six months after the beginning of the commissions’

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work, Rostovtsev could inform the tsar that the draft on emancipation was finished. What the Russian government had not been able to do for the last half century, they had managed to do in just half a year.114 The next and final step of defending the draft had calculated political manoeuvring as well as unexpected drama. With the backing of Rostovtsev and the tsar, Lanskoy set up a secret meeting between Miliutin, Solov’ev, Samarin and few members of the Editing Commissions where they decided to show only selected portions of the draft proposals. After this, Rostovtsev would present them to the members of the nobility for comments. Despite Samarin and Semenov’s requests, members of the nobility were not allowed to present counter-proposals, or to get official status as a group.115 Such tensions in Miliutin’s group over the plan of action paled in comparison to the problems that arose by Rostovtsev’s illness and then his sudden death in February 1860. Only then did it became painfully apparent to reformers and the emperor of Rostovtsev’s invaluable position; Miliutin had ultimately found a strong supporter of the process, who crucially provided a direct line of communication with the tsar – who was updated daily on the process – whereas the reformers saw him as shield against the nobility’s opposition (their anger manifested in memoranda and petitions) which increased over time. Thus, with no apparent direct communication between Miliutin and the emperor, the former called on the support of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna to facilitate it, while the latter gave Rostovtsev’s position to the Minister of Justice Count V. N. Panin (1801–1862). Miliutin had no qualms about Panin’s reactionary and conservative views on the reform – Panin was a great serfowner himself – but wondered about the emperor’s intentions with such a conservative appointment.116 The tsar’s choice, however, made sense when considering that Miliutin had once thought of Rostovtsev in similar terms as Panin or if the emperor had actually followed the advice of his Russian law tutor, Speransky, of being the fulcrum that mediated between competing groups. As such, Miliutin could not expect someone who held similar views. The way out for Miliutin in succeeding with the draft against attacks from the nobility in the Editorial Commissions was to close the matter before Panin assumed office on 28 February 1860, by bypassing the general meetings of the commissions where he knew that he could get blocked. Indeed, in April 1860, Panin unsuccessfully attempted to undermine the work of Miliutin’s group by challenging the main principles that the commissions had worked with. By September 1860, Miliutin and his associates’ works were completed and so were those in the Editorial Commissions.117 Up to this level of reform, it seemed that the process of completing a single legislative act, which would avoid a feared

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revolution and liberate with land peasants from personal bondage, was set into motion without major convulsion, at least from the side of the nobility that was to lose from this process. For Miliutin and collaborators, their political-economic reasoning on imperial/national economic development had clarified and been materialized in the Emancipation Act: the liberated peasants would become small-holding proprietors, while preserving, of course, gentry landholding, and large-scale ownership.118 Ultimately, Miliutin’s piece drew from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary French experience in agrarian reform (the creation of small peasant proprietorship) and the Prussian redemption method,119 combining it with the Russian case of preserving obshchina (the commune) and communal landownership while allowing better-off peasants to leave it. Thanks to state/bureaucratic intervention and mediation, the Russian economy was now envisaged in terms of solidarity and a shared future: peasant small-holding and large scale gentry agriculture all in the name of preventing peasantry’s dispossession and proletarianization and revolutionary upheavals,120 and crucially of the progress of the empire. The final stages of the making of the Emancipation Act – quite a long and difficult process in comparison to how Midhat and Fuad Pasha would bring to life their 1864 Vilayet Law but no less complicated than Midhat Pasha’s 1876 Constitutional project – were it going through the Main Committee, the Council of State and the emperor. Two days after it passed through the Main Committee, on 2 January 1861, the reform bill reached the Council of State. Chairing the Council, Alexander II – acknowledging the nobility’s ‘sacrifices’ for the sake of ‘the improvement of the peasants’ lot’ – urged them to help in making these improvements ‘factual’ rather than leaving them as just words on paper. He demanded that, ‘I want you to be statesmen and not landowners. I want you to think of the reform and to lay aside all personal interest. . . . I feel sure that we are engaged in a holy matter and that God will bless our efforts unto the very end. . . . Now, with his help, let us do business’.121 The Council of State approved his appeal and demand and on 7 February 1861 – after final touches to the draft were added by Miliutin and Samarin and a last revision conducted by the Metropolitan of Moscow, Philaret – the emperor signed the Liberation Manifesto. The Manifesto was made public throughout the empire on 5 March.122 This date coincided with the Orthodox religious day of Pardon Sunday in mid-Lent, which allowed for some laxity for people throughout the country, heavy drinking included. People in the capital, St Petersburg, were jubilant, a reaction that Alexander II noticed as he returned to his palace after a visit to a school in the city, and reciprocated. ‘Today is the happiest day of my life’, he told his young

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daughter back in the palace. But it was not only enthusiasm that followed, immediate confusion and unchallenging peasant rebellions were also part of this scene in numerous provinces.123 Miliutin, meanwhile, would have mixed feelings after the proclamation of the Emancipation Manifesto. Instead of high praise and gratitude from the emperor, he and Lanskoy were dismissed from the ministry. On 21 April 1861, Alexander II appointed him Senator – a position which meant that the tsar no longer needed his advice and counsel. For the tsar, as he told Miliutin’s brother, Dmitry – who was to become the Minister of War one month after Nikolai’s dismissal – ‘their work was simply finished there’. Miliutin would not have an administrative position until his appointment to the Council of State in 1865, just a year before he was paralysed by a stroke.124 But Miliutin knew why he was dismissed but did not bemoan. ‘Lanskoy and I have been dismissed from the ministry,’ he told his friend and colleague Prince Cherkassky, ‘to gratify the nobility. To think that such modest victims could give them satisfaction.’125 At least now he had time to take a rest, which he did with a long vacation in Western Europe that he began in June 1861 in Paris. There he met his uncle, who had been in Paris as a Russian Plenipotentiary since 1855,126 the latter noting a bittersweet finale for his nephew. ‘One cannot say that the work fallen to his lot,’ Kisselev remarked, ‘at which he laboured so hard, has finished happily for him. It is hard to bear, but he bears it with a dignity which increases his merit.’127 Probably, it was all for the better, health-wise, that the tsar dismissed Miliutin from further engagement with his second brainchild, political reform at the provincial level, ‘zemstva in plural’ (local institutions) and police reform. These aspects were managed by Solov’ev until 9 March 1862 when he handed them over to Valuev, who had been appointed the new Minister of Internal Affairs128 on 23 April 1861.

Constitutionalist dreams Domesticating European civilization In many ways Miliutin and Valuev shared similar perspectives. They were both strong supporters of change and reform in the Russian bureaucracy and certainly beyond it. In the 1840s and 1850s, Vaulev had been highly vocal against Russian bureaucratic failures and the lack of trust people had about central administration. In 1855, as the governor-general of Courland (part of present-day Latvia) between 1855 and 1858, he wrote that,‘the distinctive nature of our governmental

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system consists in a ubiquitous absence of truth; in the government’s lack of faith in its own weapons and the scorn for everything else. The multiplicity of forms that crush the meaning of administrative activity, and ensure a universal official falsehood.’ It was because of this, he continued that ‘what is real from what is merely apparent, justice from injustice, or half justice’, became impossible to figure out, ‘even the law is often branded with untruthfulness. Taking little care for distinct clarity of expression and practical application of rules, it boldly and consciously demands the impossible. . . . On the surface there is glitter, beneath, rot.’129 What had become clear to both of them was the need for reform: ‘A desire for a better order of things.’ Nicholas I’s political system had become unsustainable.130 And like Nikolai Miliutin, Vaulev had gained the attention of Grand Duke Konstantin and Grand Duchess Elena131 for his sharp criticism of the state of affairs in his 1855 article titled ‘Thoughts of a Russian’. There, he put forward a point which many shared; ‘during our gigantic struggles with half of Europe, it could no longer be concealed under the canopy of official self-praise how much we have fallen behind our enemies.’132 Furthermore, both Valuev and Miliutin believed that to engineer change it was crucial to get the political backing of the monarch. The tsar needed to place all his confidence in a single minister who, in turn, would set the aims of action for the whole government. A ministerial power base was fundamental in autocratic politics. It could not be otherwise for Valuev who characterized Russian autocracy as a ‘ministerial oligarchy’.133 And to fend off opposition, Miliutin would employ the tactic of regarding his opponents’ use of institutions and forums that the autocracy itself had provided a stepping stone to the autocrat’s prerogative.134 This appeared more cost effective than that pursued by Grand Duke Konstantin and Count Peter Shuvalov. They, in turn, sought to construct a factional base in the bureaucracy, get the support of the press and extend their influence in other government departments to replace their ‘enemies’ with their trustworthy allies.135 Where Miliutin and Valuev differed, though, was on the question of what was to replace the bureaucratic system and the old order they sought so much to overhaul. Settling this question would be a source of tension, as the latter took the post of Minister of Internal Affairs in 1861, holding it until 1868.136 That tension had also been playing out at a personal level. In 1858, both had competed for the post of deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, only for it to be accorded a year later by the tsar to Miliutin on a temporary basis.137 As a well-educated hereditary bureaucrat without landed estates, and without strong connections to the court entourage or high officials, Valuev made it due to his administrative abilities and political views on emancipation and the

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nobility.138 He sought to combine the European political experience with the Russian one as the way forward. ‘The institutions without which Europe cannot exist are not alien to Russia’, he would argue much later, in 1881, just before another vague attempt for constitutional reform would be endeavoured by Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov (1822–1888), ‘Russia cannot go back and must follow the path predestined for all nations in the history of mankind. But if we aim to domesticate European civilisation among us, we must not take as a model the despotism of the Orient, but European institutions.’139 This was a position that he had maintained since his replacement of Lanskoy in 1861, when he put forward the idea of introducing representatives of the clergy and the Holy Synod into the Council of State.140 Moreover, he envisaged a national representative body to reconcile the nobility in the political process and limit the ‘expressions of imperial will’, improving the legislative process and resolving the nationalities issue. Indeed, on the last point Valuev would be one of the first Russian statesmen to react to the emerging question of nationalities in the empire – one of the major points to which Russia would link its discourse about reform in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the 1870s – by issuing on a decree 18 July 1863 that came to be known as the Valuyevskiy tsirkulyar (Valuev Circular). Responding to the Polish January Uprising of 1863 (by Polish and some Little Russians) in which an unplanned protest of young Pole conscripts against a reforming imperial army led to serious but unsuccessful insurrection by Polish-Lithuanian officers and politicians – Alexander II ’s post-Crimean diplomatic dilemma of forging alliances with France or Prussia crystalized with the latter on this uprising when Gorchakov signed the Alvensleben Convention on 8 February with Bismarck’s government to help each other supress Polish revolutionaries141 – Valuev’s decree banned the publication in Ukrainian (Little Russian) of religious and educational texts, except for those of literature.142 Returning to the question of reform as opposed to repression, Valuev believed that the nobility was still the estate closest to the throne and most willing to defend its interests to great lengths.143 Certainly, he was not original with his preference and idealization of the British political system and especially of its parliament. But what was interesting here was the extent to which he could materialize his vision of political reform, given the opportunity provided by the emperor who offered him the important position of the Minister of Internal Affairs. Could he completely undermine or further the reform of zemstva which Miliutin had begun parallel to the preparations of the emancipation draft?

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Contested visions on the politics of representation and property: from zemstvo towards constitution? The very attempt to change the formal ways in which the central government and zemstva interacted, was a symbolically charged experiment. Not least because it would be an indication of whether the Russian autocracy could indeed transform itself, but also whether a new spirit could take off within the political culture of the empire. For Miliutin and Solov’ev – who continued the work in zemstva after Miliutin’s unwanted departure – this experiment, as they positioned themselves in 1859, had a double function. One was administrative – zemstva would replace the previous manorial structures by administering provincial society and economy. The other one was political – they would be there for the central government to control and to thwart the political aspirations of the local nobility. In their final analysis, these institutions would be local and limited and without any right to engage in matters of national significance.144 The tsar assigned the implementation of the emancipation and continuation of local political and judiciary reforms to Valuev, someone acceptable to the nobility as compensation to them for being left without a say in the legislative process on emancipation. Valuev was confused, however, as to where the tsar specifically stood on these processes. ‘The general impression is,’ he noted in his diary on 13 April 1861 after a meeting of the Council of State, ‘as in the previous session, most sad. We are as if in a dead-end with no way out in sight. The Emperor does not see that there lies before him the dilemma: Either to guide affairs along the new path, or not to guide them at all. His advisors either do not see these themselves, or have not the spirit to tell him.’145 But soon after this, at his first meeting as Minister of Internal Affairs with the emperor, in which Alexander II expressed his desire for ‘order and improvements which will not alter the foundations of the government’,146 Valuev had a better impression of his attitude. ‘The Emperor not only does not venture to show agreement to the gradual development of constitutional forms,’ he wrote, ‘but has even decisively spoken out in the opposite sense not long ago, and had not, evidently, changed his view on this question.’147 In 1863, Valuev approached the tsar with a new zemstvo proposal, which at its core envisaged limited political participation from the nobility – sixteen deputies who partook in the sessions of the Council of State – on legislation and main state financial affairs. Valuev did not consider this a radical political reform. Rather this fitted well with his vision of ‘domesticating European civilization’ that in turn was in line with ‘conservative

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reformism’, as applied for instance in the Austrian Empire, which in 1861 had established Reichsrat (a bicameral legislative body). He saw it as the best way of institutionally channelling social participation in the legislative process, noting, however, in his diary, that the tsar – on the counsel of advisors opposed to this idea – rejected it.148 Subscribing to a path to progress for the empire and concerned as Valuev was about the impact of these major reforms on the imperial state, Miliutin however did not think that an expected political fermentation of the Russian society could be solved through Valuev’s vision. After a relaxing and health-recovering trip to Western European countries (having met in Paris his old friends Chicherin and the novelist Ivan Turgenev in the summer of 1861) then in the early autumn in Swiss and German spas (meeting with the Grand Duchess Elena at BadenBaden), he wrote a long letter in November from Rome to his brother, the newly appointed Minister of War.149 In it, Nikolai suggested that political violence, or ‘revolutionary agitation’, coming either from nobility or peasantry, would be insignificant if people in power were smart about what concerned society and – Speransky would subscribe to this – with their actions did not undermine ‘the moral force of the government’. But Nikolai acknowledged – what Speransky would have recognized as ‘internal constitution’ – a ‘Russian opposition’, permeating ‘all of society’, which had two characteristics. One feature was that of an opposition of ‘extremist opinions’. ‘To use an analogy with the West, one could’, he continued, ‘use the terms extreme droite (extreme right) and extrême gauche (extreme left) [sic].’ Another kind of opposition was that of ‘liberal tendencies have not yet assumed a definite form; everything is vague, confused, vacillating, and filled with contradictions’. Nikolai was convinced that especially the opposition of ‘extreme opinions’ had nothing positive to offer ‘but it can unquestionably become a negative force’.150 His alternative – and this was a first in the Russian context – was to establish a political party, ‘a middle-of-the-road party (in parliamentary terms, a centre party)’ which, comprised ‘of welleducated society’, would support government ‘in making timely concessions’ to society. Straightforwardly, for Nikolai, government concessions, in this case ‘broad development of the elective principle for local administration (excluding police officials), and in doubling the budget for education’, was what the meaning of reform was all about. ‘In all probability such reforms’, he continued, would get the support of the country’s elite, raise the moral profile of the government while rendering extremist parties impotent and insignificant.151 But again, unlike Valuev, irrespective of how limited this political representation would be, he did not want to extend the elective principle to the imperial/national level. Miliutin

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found parliamentary government chaotic – having attended a session of the newly established Italian Parliament in Turin in 1861. He remained a firm believer in the status quo option in which the initiative of legislation remained the autocrat’s prerogative. The autocrat received advice and counsel from progressive experts and then charted the path of reform, whereas the middle-ofthe-road party would be there to support government in implementing reforms (government concessions) rather than initiate them.152 Outside of the exchanges among government ‘insiders’, vibrant reactions emerged among representatives of the nobility as well as opinions of intellectual currents inside and outside the empire, just as the Emancipation Manifesto began to take effect. Indeed, between 1861 and 1862, local nobility representatives, who as Rostovtsev had noted earlier did not represent a unified body of opinion on emancipation, kept petitioning the tsar with constitutional projects (thus being closer to Valuev’s views), opposing increasing the state’s interference in economic and social spheres, while seeking its financial support.153 Slavophiles, like A. I. Koshelev, in a similar move as the Young Ottomans, such as Namik Kemal would, in the late 1860s (more on this later), seek to recover traditional concepts to make a case for a constitutional change particularly in reforming central bureaucracy, as opposed to limiting the powers of the monarch. For Koshelev, the alternative was in fact an early French Revolutionary solution, namely King Louis XVI ’s convening of the Estates-General in May 1789 (without the expected results), i.e. the re-establishment of sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Muscovite zemskie sobory (land assemblies).154 Considering the postemancipation time as one ‘of great problems’, Koshelev drew a historical parallel with the solution of earlier times, namely, the summoning of the State Duma, with the necessity of doing the same now.155 He was keen to emphasise that this representative body would not be of a European-like parliament which limited the powers of the monarch. Rather, it would have a konsul’tativnyi (consultative) function – like the concept of meshveret articulated by Namik Kemal in the Ottoman context – because, Koshelev asserted, in Russia ‘we will never have’ (for it is undesirable) a constitution that establishes an ‘artificial balance of powers’ and turns ‘the Sovereign into a reigning puppet’. What he sought from the emperor was that he granted Russia a ‘a state charter [gosudarstvennaia ustanaia gramota] that will guarantee us all those rights which are crucial for the individual citizens, and which in other lands have been gained by struggles and force’.156 Alexander Herzen and his friend Nikolai Ogarev, also called for a duma or zemsky sobor. In an article titled ‘Letters to a Compatriot’, published in August 1860 in their weekly newspaper Kolokol – in print between 1857 and 1867 in

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London and Geneva – they both argued that a zemsky sobor would help with emancipation and the reforming of the central bureaucracy. In another article in July 1861, Ogarev elaborated that a system of self-government making an assembly of elected representatives from all the provinces was needed to make decisions on peoples’ obligations and taxes with regard to the needs of the state.157 Their newspaper would find itself at the intersection between the reformist drives and revolutionary impulses (what Miliutin referred to as political fermentation) in Russia. In fact from the 1860s and with an increasing number of publications, that of readership and the role of journalists in both Russian and Ottoman contexts would be crucial for the reformist as well as revolutionary movements. As mentioned earlier, Miliutin had used Kolokol to undermine Rostovtsev. Meanwhile, others like the young intellectual Nikolai Chernishevsky (1828–1889) or the young aristocratic student Peter Zaichnevsky (1842–1896) had initially been inspired by Herzen’s notions of ‘to the people’, ‘land and liberty’ and ‘socialism’. But they soon, especially Zaichnevsky, viewed Herzen and Ogarev’s dabbling with reformism and liberalism as an abandonment of radical transformation, of a socialist revolutionary path. For Zaichnevsky this kind of change, even combined with revolutionary terrorism, was the only possible alternative, as he made known in May 1862 through a manifesto titled Young Russia – a Giuseppe Mazzini concept of Young as in Young Europe or Young Italy that did not get much traction in Russia but it did in the Ottoman Empire with the Young Ottomans. In the manifesto, he called on journalists to become leaders of a ‘revolutionary party’ against the ‘imperial party’.158 Most certainly by the middle of 1862, a number of fires had been lit around St Petersburg and Zaichnevsky’s call in his Young Russia for destroying ‘the emperor’s party by “axe and fire” ’ had put Alexander’s government on alert to deal with this home-grown radical revolutionary organization.159 Most scholars of this period consider this rise of political fermentation (violence from both social groups: peasantry and nobility) and the 1863 Polish Uprising as reasons for reformers losing their influence on imperial politics160 and for Alexander II ’s reign being categorized as one period of reform followed by that of reaction.161 However, this consideration needs to be seen in the context in which, while discursively the idea of having a political platform for political representation and society’s participation in the legislative process went under the carpet, it nevertheless did not die out.162 Significant institutional reforms kept apace after 1866, such as the 1870 municipal reform and Dmitry Miliutin’s 1874 military reform.163 As historian Daniel Orlovsky argued, ministerial bureaucracy kept its momentum despite the weakening of the official discourse on reform. This was

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not to say that lack of cooperation among policy makers and institutions did not exist. In fact, it was increasingly manifested among others as a ‘dysfunctional legislative process’.164 The emperor – who by not being entirely certain about having a ‘constitutional government’, a ‘cabinetlike’ executive, and an efficient political-economic approach in tax policy and all-estate income tax – stalled and even blocked such political reforms. Having institutional and ideological infighting and structural weaknesses within his government165 well suited his desire to remain the ultimate political authority in the empire. But, again, the tsar did not bury the notion of political representation or representative government as a future possibility from the imperial discourse.166 Earlier, to the expressed confusion of Valuev, he had commented positively on the latter’s projects stating their aims were ‘above all, for the governmental authority to continue to represent authority and not allow any weakening and for anyone to fulfil his sacred obligation’. Like Valuev he saw such political reforms as a means to correct the problems related to an expanded role of the central imperial administration but that did touch on ‘the basic foundations of monarchical and autocratic government’.167 In a conversation in November 1861 with then Prussian Ambassador, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the tsar told Bismarck that the mystical and supreme authority of the Russian emperor, which is enjoyed among the Russian people, would be diminished ‘if I recognized any participation of the representatives of nobility or people. God knows what the business between nobles and peasants would come to if the power of the emperor is not full enough to realize unconditional supremacy.’168 It was the conviction of the tsar – who unlike his Prussian equivalent who had forged a powerful alliance with the conservative nobility – that the Russian nobility was less trustful than peasantry and the former did not have ‘that level of education necessary for representative government’.169 Even though – as Valuev noted in a number of editorials he wrote for the newspaper Servernaia Pochta in 1862 on the eve of celebrating the millennium of the beginning of the Russian state, through the establishment of the Kievean Rus in 862 – there was a sense of reconciliation between the monarch and state with the nobility.170 Indeed, there was a sense of confidence in Tsar Alexander II following the implementation of the new court system (independent courts, open and adversarial system of justice, professional bar) and zemstvo, the local self-government reforms of 1864. The result from the new institution of zemstva assemblies in the districts and provinces of the empire, with elected representatives from all estates, tasked to deal with local ‘economic needs’, allowed for the development of education, medicine and agricultural expertise in rural areas.171 But again, for Alexander II this did not

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mean moving towards the next step of agreeing on what many local assemblies began to ask in 1865 and 1866, namely, ‘crowning the edifice’ of these new assemblies with a national one. To the demands of the Moscow gentry in January 1865 for the establishing of dual assemblies, one elected by zemstvo and the other by the nobility so that they could discuss ‘the common needs of the entire state’,172 the tsar responded with the January Rescript (1865) by dissolving the Moscow zemstvo, while declaring that the initiative to reform remained his exclusive prerogative, which was part of his divinely ordained autocratic power. In a letter to his son Nicholas Aleksandrovich – the last emperor of Russia – who was visiting some European countries, he revealed his true conviction that the survival of the empire could only by guaranteed by preserving the absolute monarchy because constitutional forms weakened the initiative of the government towards ‘the gradual development and prosperity of our Mother Russia’. As he put it, ‘constitutional forms on the European model would be the greatest misfortune here and would have as their first consequence, not the unity of the State but the disintegration of the Empire into pieces [sic]’.173 More than doubts about constitutional reform, Valuev had concerns about the ability of the state’s administration and its institutions, and in particular of its provincial, self-government ones (zemstva), to handle the transfer of responsibility from the nobility to twenty million people who were to be emancipated. In fact, there is an argument that such inadequacies in the provincial administration played a major role in the collapse of state authority in the two revolutions in the early twentieth century.174 Valuev noted that in addition to the excessive formalism, which he had criticized from the outset, there was institutional disunity within the provincial institutions that needed to be streamlined. Just before his dismissal as Minister of Internal Affairs in February 1868, Valuev wrote a memorandum, which he gave to Tsar Alexander II , titled ‘On the Conditions of the Provincial Institutions’, arguing that governors in provincial governments needed more direct authority on financial and fiscal matters of the province and close coordination with his ministry, otherwise the existing institutional provincial disunity would continue and radical movements would grow. This idea, a ‘kind of gubernatorial dictatorship in the province’, was supported by Valuev’s successor, Alexander Timashev,175 in power between 1868 and 1878. But again, Valuev sought to combine this bureaucratic overreach and coordination between the central government and local institutions with more political say from different social groups in the province. This was the essence of a proposal in 1864 for a new institution, which he named vyt’, an all-estate canton aimed at levelling off artificial economic and administrative barriers

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between the various social strata in the countryside, whereby a member of the nobility would become the chief of vyt’. At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the last reformers, Stolypin, gave serious thought to Valuev’s concept. And in fact, it became a reality with the short-lived 1917 Provisional Government when universal suffrage was legalized.176 Thus, unlike Miliutin who envisaged zemstva only as a governmental tool for monitoring the provincial nobility’s political opinion as well as educating them and their future generations on matters of public concern, Valuev thought that through the social groups the provincial nobility could participate in national politics. To do that, the Council of State had to turn into a quasi-parliament – in the Ottoman case the Council of State, as we will see, acquired such a feature – that would be based on a total sum of all zemstva and not that of corporate bodies of nobility.177 This was an innovation for it was even more radical than what the Grand Duke’s 1866 constitutional plan considered as the basis of representation, namely, both the estates and zemstva. But the emperor – as he put it in a meeting of the Council of Ministers in January 1867 – would not concede to these ‘constitutional aspirations’; not even later, when the most traditionalist supporter of autocratic rule Peter A. Shuvalov (1827–1889) attempted to introduce zemstva in tax-reform deliberations in the Council of State between 1870 and 1874.178 The late 1870s however, with increased political activities by revolutionary leftists, who in the light of economic deterioration in the country after the 1877– 1878 Russo-Turkish War, not only agitated the peasantry and but also carried out targetted assassinations of officials, put the tsar in front of a real but familiar dilemma. Should he seriously embark on the path of constitutionalism or resort to political repressions as his late father, Nicholas I, had done after the 1825 December uprising? That dilemma became even more present when a bomb, unsuccessfully targeting him, exploded in his Winter Palace in early February 1880. His initial and immediate response then was to establish, through an ukaz, a temporary, extra-institutional body called the Supreme Executive Commission. This new body that was given both civilian and military powers was indeed aimed at providing unity to the state, or rather to the government – which Alexander II had not seen as the most important issue earlier – so that it could restore public order, fight terrorism and revolutionary activity that had come close and become so personal to him. Though in doing so, he side-lined existing and competing centres of police authority such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Nicholas I’s infamous Third Section. They had failed to provide for the safety of the emperor.179 As the chair of this commission, the Tsar appointed general officer Mikhail Loris-Melikov (1822–1888) – the charismatic war hero

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in the recent Russo-Turkish war. Loris-Melikov, thanks to the recently established (1879) posts of temporary governor-general, had experienced military and civil authority, operating first in St Petersburg and then in Odessa and Kharkov, and had successfully dealt with the rise of political terrorism of nihilist and anarchist movements in Kharkov, now also a reality for St Petersburg.180 He, like Speransky at the turn of the century, and Miliutin recently,181 had sought to revive the moral ground of the state, but this time against the ‘revolutionary evil’ that was encroaching on the imperial core. And as we will see later in the Ottoman case with Midhat Pasha in the early 1860s in the Ottoman Balkans and early 1870s in the Ottoman Bagdad, Loris-Melikov sought to do that by pursuing a twopronged approach: prosecuting within the imperial law what they considered political and common criminals, while seeking to understand the root causes for such revolutionary activity and attempting to find social and economic solutions to them. In fact, for Loris-Melikov, this was the basis of what he called the ‘system’ for reforming the empire, for which he had the support of the tsar, whereby a governor-general with far-reaching coordinating powers in policing matters also led the way into forging positive interaction between the state and society.182 For Valuev, commenting after a Committee of Ministers meeting in February 1880, Loris-Melikov, instead of realizing that his position was temporary and jurisdictionally restricted to St Petersburg, saw himself in the role of an ‘organizer of all branches of the state administration’.183 Most certainly, though, LorisMelikov’s ‘system’ was not a reform device for establishing political representation in similar terms as the Grand Duke Konstantin and Valuev had considered. Loris-Melikov also believed that at present this was not possible because ‘[t]he people do not think of them and would not understand them, and the government is not yet ready to answer the criticism that representation would express’.184 What was significant, though, in the months between becoming Minister of Internal Affairs, 6 August 1880 – after which the Supreme Executive Commission was abolished – and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March 1881 by Ignacy Hriniewiecki (1856–1881), a member of the populist-socialist political organisation of Narodnaia volya (People’s Will), was that Count Loris-Melikov, like no other minister in nineteenth-century Russian political history, ‘gathered so much power and so much monarchical support for a massive state-directed reform program’.185 His reform project – authored by his assistant minister M. S. Kakhanov on 28 January 1881186 – which some scholars read as ‘constitutional’, at its core was about creating a ministerial system that months before his assassination Tsar Alexander II had approved. However, even this crucial but not wholesale political reform was discarded following the enthronement of the new

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emperor Alexander III (1881–1894). What was kept running by Loris-Melikov’s successor Nikolai Ignatyev – who had made a name for himself internationally as the powerful Panslavist Russian Ambassador in Constantinople and the architect behind the short-lived Russo-Turkish San-Stefano Treaty of 1878 – was the project of enhancing local self-government rule.

Creating the Community of Civilized States rather than domesticating European civilization Thus, in the context of the fallout from defeat in the Crimean War and the subsequent grand political project of liberating the Russian peasantry, Tsar Alexander II ’s concept of political reform, more specifically that of political representation, for the reasons given above, remained at the provincial level without moving to what Valuev had hoped would be ‘domesticating European civilization’. The fears of losing the Great Power status had pushed him into embarking on the Great Reforms. But he repeatedly resisted widespread and growing calls for putting into place constitutional projects, European or ‘nativist’ types, as the way for Russia to re-establish itself firmly within the European civilization. Being part of the European civilizational space and actually influencing it could be attempted in a similar fashion as his uncle, Tsar Alexander I, had done – by seeking to reform it by coming up with an ideological platform as the Holy Alliance had been. But Alexander I’s Russia had been a major victorious military power in early nineteenth-century Europe, whereas Alexander II ’s empire was not so in the middle of the century. Instead of focusing on the idiom of religion in conducting European and inter-state relations, during Alexander II ’s reign Russian foreign policy in addition to diplomatic realignment concentrated on that of international law. It was under his rule that Russia played a ‘preeminent – indeed, a precocious – role in the codification and extension of international law’.187 If until the late second-half of the nineteenth century, international law (that which came to replace the European Law of Nations, as we saw it in the context of the Ottoman Empire seeking to become part of it) had meant the use of customary law and bilateral agreements, then later it also came to mean codification of state relations particularly with regard to the conduct of interstate wars. Such a position had Alexander II ’s and later at the turn of the twentieth century Nicholas II ’s backing as well as of the ministries of War and of Foreign Affairs, amidst a vibrant community of Russian international law scholars. Some of these Russian scholars were part of what prominent international lawyer

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Martti Koskennimi saw as the rise in the late 1860s and the beginnings of 1870s of professional associations of activist lawyers. They, through international law, or as he metaphorically put it ‘the Gentle Civilizer of Nations’, commented on contemporary international politics and propagated ‘liberal legislative change across the continent’.188 For historian Peter Holquist – who in this phenomenon singled out the role of Russia’s most prominent and influential thinker on international law, Feodor Martens (1845–1909) – the reason why paradoxically autocracy remained outside the realm of law while this community promoted law within it, was to make the point that regardless of such a paradox, they wanted the empire to excel in a discipline that was reserved for ‘civilized nations’.189 In fact, it was Nikolai Miliutin’s brother, Dmitry, who as Minister of War convened and chaired the 1868 Petersburg Convention, aimed at regulating rather than preventing wars among states. This convention formally confirmed that while states had the right to start wars, the warring parties no longer were permitted to engage in ‘gratuitous violence’. Russia also became the main sponsor and organizer of the 1874 Brussels Conference that unsuccessfully sought to regulate war by a code. Also, it sponsored and organized, during the reign of Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), the two conferences in The Hague, 1899 and 1907, conferences in which Martens as its main speaker attempted to find common ground on the specific theme of how occupying powers ought to behave vis-àvis an occupied population. Germany sought to establish in international law that occupying powers could expect total obedience from an occupied population, while Holland and Belgium demanded legal limitations on the occupying powers.190 Thus, in contrast to the religiously imbued vocabulary that Tsar Alexander I deployed when seeking to reform the inter-state relations in the post-Napoleonic European order, the language and the discipline of international law – for which Martens made the case for Russia to reform the inter-state order at the turn of twentieth century – no longer drew on its traditional sources of legitimating natural (divine) or positive (treaties) laws. Instead, Martens sought to base it on what he called an ‘expression of cultural life and recognition of law by the peoples of civilized Europe’. He was a Universalist who believed that there could be a ‘community of civilized states’ larger than the Great Powers and wider than the political space occupied by Christian peoples if these other states could meet the standard of ‘European civilization’ – of legal norms, in this case. He was convinced that humanity shared a common perspective on legal norms if laws were based on the notions of truth and justice. The Russian state, then, applied Martens’ perspective against other states, which it did not consider part of ‘the community

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of civilized states’, particularly against those it fought wars with, namely the Ottoman Empire in 1877–1878 and China in 1900–1901.191 With Reshid Pasha’s vision of the Ottoman Empire becoming part of the European inter-state order and its legal norms after the Crimean War, thus part of the European civilization, Martens could claim (as he did on the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish war) at least that Russia’s conduct had been deserving, in his newly-minted vocabulary, of ‘ “the first place” among civilized states’.192

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Towards new politics and political economy Bottom-up politics? Unlike in the Russian Empire, the economic ordering of the Ottoman Empire visà-vis other European states had been forged within more clear-cut liberal economic principles. Underneath the much-professed need for establishing permanent institutions and finding a modus operandi between the old and new laws, there was a strong undercurrent of geopolitical alignment and economic re-ordering of the empire. This was first confirmed in its relations with the British Empire in the 1838 Balta-Liman Treaty, and more widely reconfirmed with other Great Powers in the 1856 Islahat Fermanı (Reform Edict).1 This undercurrent increasingly came to the fore, especially with the Crimean War, and together with tensions growing from legal and bureaucratic transformations tilted the empire towards the verge of instability and dissolution but also towards imagining a new politics. Although perhaps with much greater drama than in Russia, the Ottoman post-Crimean world was a similar account of onerous state-led efforts to re-organize and revitalize the empire amidst multiple and growing domestic and external pressures. Similarly also, the question of how better to manage the economic welfare of the empire became entangled with that of whether having a wider political access in the process was necessary. This chapter offers a multiple account on trajectories of prominent Ottoman statesmen Ali Pasha, Fuad Pasha and particularly Midhat Pasha from the post-Crimean period up to the so-called first Constitutional Era (1876–1877) and the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish war. This was a particular timeframe for the Ottoman Empire whereby questions of political economy (economic development, financial bankruptcy and corruption) collided with those of geopolitics (territorial integrity and war) provoking constitutional aspirations and their subsequent realization. Certainly, like most of the previous generation of reformers, Midhat Pasha was steeped in the language of reform. Underpinned, as elaborated in the above 145

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chapters, by the notions of new and permanent institutions, laws and regulations, the monarch’s reformers (the diplomatic elite) articulated it in interactions with representatives of European states and domestically to compete for political dominance vis-à-vis the monarch himself.2 Because the House of Osman would not be able to have a politically capable ruler until the enthronement of Sultan Abdülhamid (r. 1876–1909) in 1876, the source of Ottoman politics remained the Porte. The latter, after Reshid Pasha’s departure, would be mostly dominated by the duumvirate of Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha. Ali Pasha had been aware of this from the outset of his career. Commenting on the post of grand vizier during his second time as such, he saw himself in it as being the ‘alter ego of the sultan’. Quite a stark difference from power relations between the tsar and his ministers, Ali described how he was able to consult Sultan Abdülmecid not only on the choices of ministers and secretaries for the Porte, but also of attendants of the Palace. Indeed, like no equivalent Russian statesmen of the time could envisage their political prowess vis-à-vis their tsar, Ali Pasha boasted about his authority extending over every department of the state.3 Midhat Pasha would seek to formalize such an authority with his project for a constitutional monarchy, but in the early 1860s – when he was under the direct authority of Ali and Fuad Pasha – he would distinguish himself by pursuing a new kind of reform; one that combined the idioms and practices of political representation and of protectionist political economy, though first at the provincial level. Ali and Fuad Pasha, well placed at the helm of imperial politics, were no radical reformers, at least not in terms of opening up the imperial political space, as Midhat Pasha would later do. Quite the contrary, their tight control of this space throughout the 1860s would trigger the rise of a small group of intellectuals and political activists who came to be referred to as Young Ottomans. What connected these ‘Men of Tanzimat’ was indeed the language of reform, in which Midhat Pasha would be ‘in some ways the most courageous and far sighted, in others the most foolhardy, and certainly the most tragic’.4 What distinguished them, especially in the duumvirate, from Midhat Pasha was the latter’s advancement of the notion of constitutional monarchy which rather than a telos of his came about as a result of internal and external circumstance and contingency. This point seemed to have been missed out from the multi-perspectival scholarship on him, which instead offers accounts of duality of his historical figure. On the one hand, there is Midhat Pasha, the successful reformer-administrator of the Ottoman provinces whose greatest achievement was the Ottoman constitution; while on the other, there is the scheming and ruthless reformer-politician who would embark on anything to pursue his career ambitions.5 And if Ali and Fuad Pasha

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would pursue a similar career path as Reshid Pasha, namely, starting in the Translation Office and Ottoman Embassy secretariat, Midhat Pasha did not. The three men, though, had as their political patron Reshid Pasha and all would and had made it to the helm of Ottoman politics thanks to this political patronage as well as also for their personal talents in which knowing a European language, English or French, was decisive. Ali and Fuad were born in the same year, 1815, and in the same city, Constantinople. But unlike Fuad, Ali came from a modest social background. He was the son of a shopkeeper, who chose to study French. This ultimately landed him in a diplomatic career that culminated with his ambassadorship in London. Then, his path to controlling the Porte as grand vizier would be briefly realized in 1852, a position that he would subsequently dominate, interchangeably with Fuad, in the next twenty years, until his death in 1871.6 Fuad Pasha, meanwhile, was son of the famous poet Keçecizade Izzet Molla. He attended the recently established medical school in Constantinople and then practiced medicine for a while. It is not clear why he stopped, but what was certain was that his proficient knowledge of French secured him the post of First Translator of the Porte, and under the patronage of both Reshid and Ali Pasha, he held this position from 1838 until 1852, from which then his career would take off with him briefly holding the post of foreign minister under the first grand viziership of Ali Pasha. Of the two, Fuad appeared to be the ‘intellectual’ one, completing a full diplomatic career, studying international law, political economy, history and modern languages.7 In 1851, together with prominent Ottoman historian and statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (1822–1895), who would run the commission that codified the Islamic Law (the Mecelle) from 1869 to 1876, he published the first book on Turkish grammar titled Kavaid-i Osmaniye – considered a landmark in linguistic reform.8 Well into his career as an expert on Ottoman provincial affairs, Midhat Pasha had neither French nor English as his first foreign language. In fact, he would introduce himself to the French language only after 1858 when Grand Vizier Ali Pasha gave him permission to leave for six months to visit some European capitals. Then, Midhat had sought to let the steam off after Sultan Abdülmecid declined to take any action against abuse of power by provincial governors, whom Midhat had investigated and reported. Born also in Constantinople in 1822, he was the son of a judge from a well-established family of Muslim scholars from Ruse9 – a small town in Ottoman Bulgaria, the future capital of the new province of Danube (he would run as a new vali), which he and Fuad would outline in the Vilayet Law of 1864. Unlike Ali and Fuad, due to his father’s job that required moving frequently to different parts of the Ottoman Balkans, Midhat got exposed from an early age to the

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cultural and linguistic diversity of the empire. He distinguished himself in the traditional school, the medrese, by memorizing the Koran at the age of ten – an impressive feat for the time. And as a young fellow in the 1830s, he began working for the state on provincial matters and soon was appointed in high positions in the eyalets (provinces) of Damascus and Konia forging a reputation as an expert on provincial affairs, acquiring knowledge of Arabic and Persian in the meantime. Grand Vizier Reshid Pasha paid attention to his abilities and in 1852 gave him an important position at the High Council of the State, which incidentally brought him to witness the failed negotiation in 1852 in Constantinople between the Ottoman Foreign Minister Rifat Pasha and the special envoy of Russian Emperor Nicholas I, Prince Menchikov – a failure that led to the start of the Crimean War.10 But again, it would be on questions related to provincial affairs that Midhat would make strong impressions and contributions. Indeed, during his first term as grand vizier (1848–1852), Reshid Pasha sent him to some provinces to assess the conditions there, such as that of Aleppo, from which he came with damning reports on the corruptive practices of its governor in 1850 and 1851, Kıbrılısı Mehmet Pasha (1813–1871). The latter would seek to punish him for that when he briefly became the grand vizier in 1854 amidst the Crimean War by sending Midhat to the toughest areas then, the rebellious provinces of Vidin, Ruse and Nish in the Ottoman Balkans. Instead of failure though, the thirty-two-year-old Midhat showed his duality of character in action in similar manner as LorisMelikov would do in the late 1870s in imperial Russia. He crushed the rebellions there, arresting and putting on trial 300 political activists, of which four were found guilty and executed. And at the same time, he produced a report where he pointed out that the real answer to existing and future rebellions was to open the political space by giving more voice to the provinces. More concretely, he suggested the establishment of a Meclis-i Muvakkat (Temporary Council) for the provincial administration. Reshid and Ali Pasha gave their backing to his plan and even began drawing regulations to support it.11 Midhat’s suggestion incidentally fitted well with Reshid, Ali and Fuad Pasha’s larger plan who together with the French and British allies set up the Meclis-i Ali-i Tanzimat (High Council of Reform) that from 1854 to 1861 was tasked with overseeing the whole reform program.12 Seen as ‘new phase of reform’13 by Bernard Lewis, it was British and French allies, and particularly as we saw earlier Ambassador Canning, who persuaded the sultan to reinstate Reshid Pasha as grand vizier in 1854, thus dismissing Kibrisli Mehmet Pasha, while Ali Pasha took the reins of the new High Council of Reform.14 The ensuing imperial Islahat of 18 February 1856, which committed the empire to a whole range of reforms, unlike the Hatti, had been drafted entirely by European

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ambassadors, British, French and Austrian, in Constantinople and confirmed by the Ottoman government. There had been nothing new to add though in the demands towards the empire to join the European state system in the Paris Peace Treaty but to realistically commit itself to the promises of the Hatti. These commitments entailed further modernization of the economy – more specifically monetizing it; establishing banks, as well as strictly observing annual budgets – and ensuring the legal equality to all its subjects (removal of poll-tax, right to bear arms and to serve in the army for the non-Muslim subjects, employment in the government).15 It befell on Ali and Fuad Pasha to introduce them, against the resistance of leaders in the provinces who would attempt to reject them for being reforms imposed from the outside.16 It was remarkable though that the Rescript did not lay out anything particular on political representation at the provincial level. So how was it that Reshid, Ali and Fuad Pasha would take on board Midhat Pasha’s suggestion for putting a representative element in the empire’s provincial politics? Part of the explanation rests on that the thirty-year centralization efforts instigated by Sultan Mahmud II had made it possible for the imperial bureaucracy to extend its control over its heartlands, otherwise referred to as the ‘well-protected domains’.17 As such, the Porte felt confident enough to undertake a new path towards decentralization, which manifested itself also through political participation in representative councils.18 In this Ottoman effort for reform in the provinces, i.e. decentralization, we can also easily draw a parallel with the Russian side in which shared features were the impact of centralization in the first half of the nineteenth century and the fallout from the Crimean War. Midhat would exemplify this internal drive for reform, gathering experience and being innovative in his first post as governor of the eyalet of Nish between 1861 and 1863. This followed his climb in the ranks to vizier, with the title of Pasha, which Kıbrılısı Mehmet Pasha gave him in his last term as grand vizier19 (this being more to keep him away from the good impressions he was getting from the sultan). Indeed, it would be from his time as governor of Nish that Midhat would use his experience to realize his first co-project with Fuad Pasha for imperial reform, the Vilayet Law of 1864,20 as well as experiment with other approaches to economic development in the Ottoman province.

The Vilayet Law of 1864: the province with Councils of Deliberation and as a Unit of Economic Development The Vilayet Law of 1864 sought to answer the question of how to reconcile the centralizing efforts of the state with a degree of autonomy for local authorities

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with a diverse population and how to further develop the concept of Osmanlılık and representative institutions21 at the provincial level. In the Russian case, decentralization and the establishment of new local institutions was the bureaucratic solution to the emerging questions (justice, policing, education, the economy) regarding the dismantling of serfdom. The Ottoman side, most certainly was well ahead in trying to give answers to such questions. Indeed, Fuad Pasha had attempted to address them earlier in two ways, political and economic, in the Provincial Regulation approved in 1858. At the political level, this new regulation combined central government control with popular participation at local government, placing more emphasis on giving more powers to the vali and making him the only representative and actor of the central government in the province. More practically, the vali would have the support of the military (army commanders) and treasury personnel who in turn would be responsible to both the governor and central government. As to the crucial point of representation, the regulation resuscitated administrative councils that Reshid Pasha had instituted earlier, in all the levels of the provincial government, assigning them only an advisory role to governors. The second dimension of the Regulation concerned the economic side that provincial administration had to engage with, namely, measuring and controlling provincial wealth (property) by conducting cadastral surveys and well as counting the population. By doing so, the provincial administration would be able to place progressive taxation on land income and profit. Fuad’s politicaleconomic thinking, however, despite being versed in modern political economy – the vocabulary of which had made inroads in the Ottoman political discourse only in the 1830s22 – framed the law in the traditional economic thinking. The latter was a carbon copy of the Iranian traditional economic thought, emphasizing the growth of public revenues for other than economic purposes – strengthening state revenues and hoarding as much gold as possible.23 With the Ottoman Empire having survived a major war against Russia thanks to the Western European coalition, Fuad Pasha still considered the role of the economy as that of supporting imperial war efforts and ongoing reform in the Ottoman army.24 In this regard, rather than developing the Ottoman economy per se, the new economic tools were there to provide accurate information on wealth and manpower for a new military conscription system – the change here entailed mainly soldiers serving five years plus seven as reserve instead of serving for life (quite similar to Dmitry Miliutin’s Russian conscription reform) – which now with this information sought to take into consideration the population and agricultural needs of a province. It did not take much for the central government

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to gain considerable financial benefits from their use in particular and of the new regulations in general. This new Regulation had some positive side effects for Midhat too. Two years after it was passed – during the viziership of Kibrilisi Mehmed Pasha – the governors received rank and salary increase. This made it appealing for rising political figures such as Midhat Pasha and historian and Islamic jurist Ahmet Cevdet Pasha (1822–1895) to agree on taking posts as provincial governors. However, mostly the Regulation and the institutional basis that Fuad Pasha sought to put in place generated more confusion than clarity. Finding a way to resolve this led Fuad Pasha to undertake several investigations in the provinces and enlist Midhat Pasha, who had impressed with his governorship of Nish, in the framing of the Vilayet Law of 1864.25 What both Fuad and Midhat came to realize was that to make the provincial reform more effective they needed to fully introduce the element of holding elections for the provincial administrative council, meclis. This certainly was not an entirely new idea, for as mentioned Reshid Pasha had tried this earlier. Midhat had been thinking about this since the beginning of the Crimean War, whereas Fuad Pasha since his chairing of the High Council of Reform. There was also a drive from below building momentum towards it whereby success stories were emerging. For instance, the so-called Statute of Lebanon (1861) had increased the local powers of the vali of Lebanon, while the meclis there had become more inclusive to the other religious groups; weakening the power of the Muslim clergy. Fuad Pasha had reasoned reform for stability, in similar ways as Speransky and Miliutin, that by creating a stronger local government (through more powers to the governor) and more equitable (inclusive of all religious groups and elections), it would be able to better deal with growing local unrests, some of which were boiling to the point of separatism.26 Midhat Pasha could not agree more. By now, he had nearly twenty years of dealing with such unrest, some of which he, like Fuad, faced during inspections tours in the Asian provinces and in the Balkans.27 As the governor of Nish, he, as already mentioned, had applied a two-pronged (stick and carrot) approach; strictly suppressing the brigandage troubling the province, while introducing, aside from infrastructure development, innovative tools for real economic development (such as banks) and a new judicial administrative office the merkez odası (Central Office) that made possible resolving property and debt disputes of the local population. Such tools would become increasingly popular in the new province of Danube,28 which would become the first test model for the Vilayet Law. When Fuad and Midhat Pasha met in November 1864 in Constantinople to draft the new law, the former was already a well-respected statesman in Europe

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and the grand vizier of the empire, serving his second term (1863–1866) in office. Midhat, meanwhile, had forged a reputation as a new generation of reformer: full of energy, with a ‘brusque speech and decisive action, inclination towards westernisation, Ottoman patriotism and suppression of separatism, but just treatment of minorities within the Ottoman framework’.29 The mundane manner of drafting the new law – they spent a number of sleepless nights, consulting with the French Departmental of Regulations (on key documents in French provincial reform or a summary of them), though they did not take any cues, through governmental exchanges, from the similar zemstva reform under way in Tsarist Russia – and getting the approval by the sultan paled in contrast to the reform process in Russia at that time. Strikingly, the law was impressive. Its head title, vilayet, an older term conveying two meanings: province and ‘native country’, came to replace eyalet, straightforwardly meaning province.30 This did not set the grounds for a federal empire – this would become an option only for one of the strands of the Young Turk movement in the late 1890s,31 and moreover Midhat Pasha would reject the suggestion made by Ottoman Bulgarians to reconstitute their relations with the sultan in a similar fashion to the 1867 AustroHungarian model of Dual Monarchy. Nonetheless, the mere fact that aside from the goal of making the provinces more manageable from above – by decreasing their overall number, hence redrawing their borders and increasing their size (territory and population), and dividing it into, in diminishing size, sancak (district), kaza (town with its rural population), kariye (communes, town quarters) and nahiye (rural hamlets), whereby the appointments of the heads of vilayet, sancak and kaza came from the centre – the Vilayet Law created a position of a functionary, appointed by the foreign minister in Constantinople for each province, who would deal with its ‘foreign affairs’: implementing treaties and interacting with foreign consuls. They invested the governor, who was appointed and dismissed by the sultan, with all-encompassing powers over police, finances, political affairs and the execution of judicial verdicts and imperial laws in the province. Provincial population got the right of voting directly on the head only at the communal level – kariye (which had to be two, from each ‘class of people’, meaning different millets [i.e. confessional communities]). Most importantly, Fuad and Midhat Pasha put into law the principle of political representation, more concretely, the meclis-i idare (administrative council), applicable to all levels of this new administrative hierarchy. What Reshid Pasha failed to accomplish in 1844 and Fuad Pasha sought to put in place in his 1858 Provincial Regulation, they now established that each council had to have two elected members (Muslim and non-Muslim) at the

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sancak level and three at the kaza level to serve alongside the state bureaucrats.32 Being concerned more with the streamlining of workings of the imperial structures at the provincial level rather than implementing a principle of separation of powers, the law did not endow these administrative councils with real powers; simply that of deliberating on financial, political and economic issues.33 It was a role they transplanted from the French model and borrowed from the traditional concept of meşveret. Such a synthesis would be crucial in drafting and promoting the constitution of 1876. As was the case with the Russian zemsvto, political representation was a restricted one, done in two major ways. They provided for an electoral law that established indirect rather than popular representation in these councils thanks to its indirect and cumbersome election process. Also, the law assigned the imperial administration with preparing the list of candidates, at each administrative level, and especially at the provincial level. Ultimately, it was the Porte which decided on the members of the council based on political alliances, professional merits, and the ability to pay a yearly tax. From a wider comparative perspective, in most of the contemporary European electoral systems34 including the Russian one, the eligibility of being able to participate depended on property qualifications rather than this yearly tax. Nonetheless, both Fuad and Midhat Pasha saw their work as an innovation in the Ottoman political system, whereby like no time before a provincial meclis-i umumî (general assembly) would come together annually to deliberate on whole range of issues – even petitions to the governor – except for military and foreign affairs. Twenty years later, Midhat Pasha, in his memoirs, considered the new vilayet system to being conceived by Ali and Fuad as a ‘preface to chamber of deputies (meclis-i meb’usan)’ and that it ‘had for some time been taking shape in their minds’ as a justification35 for his project of constitutional empire. Historian Roderic Davison had serious reservations about Midhat’s retrospective simply because they never articulated such a notion. As far as Ali, Fuad and even Midhat were concerned at this point in time was seeing through the implementation and extension of this law in other parts of the empire, tasks for which Midhat would be at the forefront.

Testing the new law in two new provinces Reconstructing an account of Midhat Pasha’s political trajectory – as with the other Ottoman and Russian statesmen here – combined with his interactions, including Fuad and Ali Pasha, has its merits for understanding the historical meanings behind the concept of political reform, including its potential

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achievements and limits. The essence of it was being primarily a tool for strengthening and stabilizing the imperial state internally from the country notables (ayans and beylerbey) in the Ottoman case and from the high nobility in the Russian case, who in both cases stood to lose political and legal power but not necessarily economically from such processes. Externally, the reform was to protect from European inter-state rivalry. Especially regarding the limits, by this time, on the Russian side, Miliutin was seriously thinking about the need of creating a political party that supported the implementation of these reforms. Milutin’s concern had been Speransky’s problem, too. One could invest much on the idea that major political reforms could take place only if the reformers were able to rely on the goodwill of an enlightened autocrat. But one needed a political and economic base to support this programme which in both imperial settings did not extend beyond some sections of imperial bureaucracy at the central and provincial level. On the Ottoman side, political support for such top-down reforms came from proreform sultans and grand viziers as well as from some representatives of Western powers, most notably Britain and France, but also the Austrian Empire. Midhat’s trajectory, especially after the deaths of Fuad and Ali Pasha, is insightful because, on the one hand, support for reform from traditional sources of power, the sultan and Western powers, would become unstable. On the other hand, by making of the provinces of Danube and Bagdad success stories, a ‘nümûne’ (model),36 as discussed below, he came to represent an unusual case for the time of a reformer receiving wide support from the population in the provinces as well as from an emerging ‘national’ intellectual elite at the centre. The unpredictability of monarchical support to reform became apparent when the new Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–1876) sought to nullify the Vilayet Law had it not been for the persistence of Ali and Fuad Pasha.37 This meant that unlike his brother Abdülmecid who died in 1861, seen by the Porte and Western powers as ‘prone to reform and a well-intentioned ruler’, the new sultan tended to be distrustful of reformers. But he could also consider the advice of a reformer such as Midhat, when the latter made the case in mid–1872 that the then Grand Vizier, Mahmud Nadim Pasha (1818–1883), was running the empire into the ground,38 and in fact would appoint him as new grand vizier. And if the monarch had become unpredictable, the opposition by the highest religious body, the ulema, remained a constant. For instance, when it came to the question of Midhat’s appointment as the new governor of the recently established province of Danube, their highest representatives in the central government strongly argued against it, but again Ali and Fuad Pasha succeeded in appointing him. For them, Midhat’s

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reform vocabulary, which was certainly Ali and Fuad’s vocabulary – legal equality and access to state structures for all imperial subjects, namely Osmanlılık’s cultural and religious plurality – undermined the very basis of state’s regime and traditional ideology.39 Thus when Midhat took on the new assignment in late 1864, he had the strong backing from Ali and Fuad Pasha as well as others in the government who saw him as a ‘rising star’ of Ottoman politics. He also had the expectations from the population in the new capital in the new province, Ruse, of what could the ‘indefatigable man’ do. Little could they expect the rather ‘mythological status’ he would get across ethnic, religious, and ideological lines of the provincial population. At the time of his arrival in the newly delineated province, the politics of this administrative unit was dominated by a deepening Bulgarian–Greek religious dispute over the establishment of an autonomous Bulgarian Church,40 important to most of the Orthodox Bulgarian population there. For Midhat, however, what mattered was how to turn this new province – with a mixed population of two million and a comparatively expanding economy, the ideal place for implementing the Vilayet Law41 – into a successful experiment. For as Roderic Davison put it, ultimately, the province was ‘the key area in which to try out a system designed to hold the empire together’.42 Now more than before, it had become obvious to Midhat that the future of imperial unity rested in reform. To achieve that, one had to govern and reform by combining planned projects with valuable insights gathered from local knowledge and old Ottoman traditions. This was different from Reshid Pasha’s entirely top-down approach and reliance on the modern vocabulary of new and permanent laws and institutions. In fact, Midhat was closer to Fuad’s approach which sought to reconcile the exigencies of the new forms of administration ‘to the needs of the country’ and ‘the customs of population’.43 Fuad did this by making inspection tours or sending mufettish (imperial inspectors) to find out what provincial populations thought. Inspecting the mood and the thinking in the provinces during the 1850s, or the ‘humble travels’ as Midhat called them, had been the way that he generated extremely detail-oriented memoranda and policy proposals.44 Indeed, Midhat had much more in common with Russian ‘reformist conservatives’ rather than with liberals. The former placed much value in drawing on local knowledge and tradition when designing ‘plans for state controlled social change’.45 Thus, the reason why he could make changes in the new province boiled down to him being knowledgeable about its political, economic and social conditions as well as being extremely familiar with the law, having been one of its drafters. Midhat Pasha thus knew vali’s rights and responsibilities on a wide range of

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issues, particularly economic ones. Such freedoms allowed him to experiment with economic projects that ran counter to the liberal economic positions taken by the Porte since 1839, though there was no resistance from imperial government on this matter. In fact, his political-economic practice in the province appeared to be as if taken from Friedrich List’s national economy doctrine – which most likely Midhat was not familiar with – namely, encouraging provincial entrepreneurial initiatives and developing local industries. One of the first and more visible moves he made as governor in this regard was that of banning provincial administration staff, at all levels, from wearing clothes made from imported fabrics – himself leading the way by wearing sayak (homespun clothes), winning much praise at that time.46 He ordered shoe-sellers not to sell imported shoes. He also signed exclusive governmental contracts (clothes for army uniforms) with local textile factories, a move that led to the development of the textile industry in the 1860s.47 Furthermore, Midhat initiated and oversaw the making of several infrastructural projects: road construction (improvements) of 3,000 km of roads and 1,420 bridges; completion of one the first railways in the empire, Ruse–Varna – important for economic and strategic reasons;48 encouraged internal trade through the establishment of panayır (fairs); whereas urban centres of the province became modernized, hence ‘de-orientalised’.49 Yet the most impressive contribution he made to the provincial and later to the larger Ottoman economic development was the establishment of menafi umumi sandıkları (the agricultural banks). This would win him the reputation of the ‘father of the agricultural banks in Turkey’ and the ‘founder of the best-developed credit cooperatives in the Balkans’.50 As briefly mentioned earlier, Midhat had already begun experimenting with such an idea in 1863 while still a governor of Nish – a recent practice also for other European states, such as Prussia and France – and the idea of which he most likely got during his six months visit of some European capitals in 1858. The novelty that he brought, again combining already existing experience – for previous Tanzimat statesmen had experimented with agricultural credit cooperatives – with new ideas was that these new banking institutions raised capital and allocated cheap credit on a local basis, making them more consumer friendly. What this did, in turn, was to sideline corrupt murabahacı (money lenders), became highly popular among the population and as a result hundreds of thousands of Ottoman lira was raised,51 which was a substantial sum. The goal of these banks was to encourage the growth of agricultural production through peasants borrowing so that they could buy new machines.52 Midhat’s relative success in making the new province a viable economic unit, geared towards economic growth, did not go hand in hand with its expected

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political reform. He had the freedom to experiment with economic affairs and hence its success could be measured by an increase or decrease of the economic welfare in the province. This was not so in the political ones because to a great extent the new provincial law, in codifying the political relations within and without the province, served as a marker as to whether its political provisions, such as setting up a functioning provincial assembly or providing equal access of the population to the provincial administration, were actually met. It appeared that, aside from an ideological position of forging a new sense of legal equality among Ottoman subjects, Midhat’s support of political representation at all the levels of the province – particularly the annual meetings of the provincial general assembly – had a pragmatic goal. Such meetings were a valuable opportunity for collecting local knowledge and hearing local policy proposals. So important was this aspect to him that when he took charge of the governorship in Syria in 1878 one of the very first things he called for was to take on ‘one of the most essential provisions of the Provincial Law’, provincial general assembly, and establish it. As one of its designers, Midhat knew that the general assembly’s real political powers were weak: it could not set up its agenda, or block governor’s proposals and it was closed to the public. For him, however, provincial assembly served as a venue for hearing critical perspectives on local affairs as well as a place for the central government to put across its agenda of standardizing and harmonizing its ‘order’ so that the existing diversity was overcome and ultimately the intended change was achieved. Midhat had a strong penchant for rules and tâlimatnâmes (detailed regulations). It was what was lacking and what hindered change, as he put it in a memorandum in March 1866. Indeed, having described the many traditional methods of collecting taxes in the provincial marketplace, he wrote that ‘there are not clear rules for collecting taxes . . . and that gives much confusion and difficulty’, ordering then the making of tâlimatnâmes for a number of activities.53 Thus, what helped him was the freedom, thus authority, to cover all matters concerning the province as well as choose his own administration.54 On the latter point, he brought in professionals from different ethnic backgrounds who shared his commitment to reform and Ottomanism. For instance, an Armenian, Odiyan Effendi, one of the authors of the ‘Armenian constitution’ – the organic law of 1863 regulating the administration of the Armenian religious community, alongside the Orthodox Greek (1862) and Jewish religious communities (1865)55 – became his ‘minister’ for the province’s foreign affairs and represented him in Constantinople. Also, the main editor of the first provincial newspaper Tuna was Ismail bey Qemali, an Albanian notable who would proclaim Albania’s independence from the empire nearly half a century

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later, who also directed the official record office. Midhat Pasha employed Polish émigrés as civil and military engineers. They and, ‘all the vilayet officials, big and small, were’ for Midhat, ‘united like the members of a family’. But what helped him also was his efficiency in regularly paying his administration.56 The whole mixture seemed to have a positive effect when Ismail bey Qemal, generally a great admirer of Midhat, joined in May 1866 in Ruse, and recalled in his memoirs, ‘Midhat Pasha . . . an absolute genius for administration.’ In less than two years from his governorship, the province had become orderly, prosperous and civilized thanks to economic and infrastructural reforms.57 What could make Midhat Pasha successful in the newly created province of Danube – which Ali and Fuad sought to replicate in other parts of the empire – was his ability to strengthen local government and modernize the province by entrenching the central authority and by weakening whenever possible elements which had nationalist proclivities in the province as well as resistance to reform from the imperial centre and Russia. The centre, in this case Ottoman ministers not operating within a cabinet style executive, individually had the power to nominate and appoint high-ranking military officers and officials in the province. They could appoint provincial personnel that could stall the reforms there. In Midhat’s case, when that happened Fuad Pasha was there to back him by reappointing the anti-reformists to lower positions in provincial government. Or when his ‘political backers’ would be dismissed by the sultan from running the Porte, as was the case with Fuad Pasha being replaced in 1866 by the new Grand Vizier, Mütercim Mehmet Rüshdi Pasha (1811–1882) – opposition ministers would undermine the work of reform ‘to check the spirit and the élan of Midhat Pasha’.58 But Midhat’s provincial reform agenda would be back on track when in 1867 Ali Pasha returned to power as the grand vizier and Fuad Pasha as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The apparent success on reforms received the due attention from multiple directions. Sultan Abdülaziz decided at the end of his first and last European tour in mid-1867 to visit the province of Danube. As Ismail bey Qemali recalled, ‘the Ministers showed such satisfaction with the administrative work that had been accomplished by Midhat Pasha that they left him free to approach his Majesty and place various suggestions before him without ministerial intervention, which was a great mark of confidence and approval’.59 Later, the newly appointed British Ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Henry Eliot (1817–1907) – who would forge close contacts with Midhat Pasha during the making of the first Ottoman constitution – would pass through and stop by Ruse to meet with him. As a diligent administrator, Midhat seemed to be demonstrating beyond any

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expectations that there was an alternative that the empire could embark on in its near future: local political representation and development of the economic welfare for its whole parts. It was a good point of reference that Fuad Pasha could now make, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the European Powers given the international dimension of the Ottoman reforms. Indeed, in a memorandum he wrote to his French and Russian counterparts on 11 May 1867 – prior to the sultan’s tour of the main European capitals – he praised Midhat’s achievement as the ultimate model for the empire. The Ottoman Empire, he declared, had ‘found a form of administration altogether corresponding to the needs of the country, to the custom of populations, and to the demands of the concept of civilisation which presses upon the empire on all directions’.60 Praise aside, Fuad meant this, for he used Midhat’s experience in the Danube province to upgrade the Vilayet Law in 1867.61 Positive recognition for the reforms also came from a Bulgarian radical nationalist weekly, Svoboda. Two years after Midhat’s departure from the province, the weekly noted, values of justice, incorruptibility and meritocracy, but particularly ‘the equality that Midhat Pasha had brought to Tuna vilayeti a couple of years ago’, had all but evaporated.62 For the pro-reformist supporters, such as Ismail bey Qemali, Midhat’s success meant that reforms worked, generating thus positive political and economic outcomes for the provincial and central governments. This was a showcase for the European states, too. It also strongly implied, from a geopolitical perspective, that such improvements and the ‘prestige and glory of Midhat Pasha’ would be a deterrent, a ‘check’ on Russia’s expansive Panslavist policy pursued vigorously by its Ambassador in Constantinople general Nikolai Ignatyev; as mentioned in 1881 he would become the new Minister of Internal Affairs following the coronation of the new Tsar, Alexander III . It was no secret, Qemali recalled, that the Ambassador held ‘hostile views on Midhat’.63 The latter fought every plan Midhat envisaged and materialized, as for instance, the establishment of technical schools for both Bulgarian Christians and Muslims (they had been studying in Russian universities) in the province. Such an institution meant a struggle for the minds of Ottoman Bulgarians students. The reasoning behind it was simply that if they studied in these schools they could be subscribing more to the idea of being Ottoman citizens, whereas if they did that in Russian universities, they were more likely to become Panslavist supporters, hence Bulgarian nationalist and even separatists. What Ignatyev had, which Midhat did not, was more access to the sultan. He could and would play to the latter’s strongest fears by arguing that Midhat’s provincial reform, particularly its political dimension – the local councils – undermined the spirit of absolutism. They would lead to more calls

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for independence, as Egypt had shown. In fact, the sultan seemed to have been dismayed by the use of the term ‘deputies’ in the pages of the newspaper Tuna to describe the members of the council of the province.64 Most certainly, aside from Ignatyev’s hostility and the sultan’s trepidations, there were others who did not react positively to Midhat and Fuad Pasha’s provincial reform in the province of Danube; criticizing it on its own terms. For one, the implementation of the policy of Ottomanism – legal equality and access to state institutions to all Ottoman subjects – remained questionable. Surely, the Vilayet Law had passed the test in reducing the power of the Muslim clergy in the administrative councils and the arbitrariness of local authorities.65 But a ‘Turkish’ bias remained, particularly for a Christian-majority province such as that of the Danube, because more Turkish officials were appointed directly from the central government. And when it came to provincial electoral law (by being indirect), subjects could not make their own choices.66 Moreover, the manner with which Midhat handled the rise of Bulgarian nationalism was far from uninviting trouble. On the one hand, he applied direct policy of suppression to those Ottoman Bulgarian subjects he categorized as ‘revolutionary and seditious’. On the other hand, he did not allow for much Bulgarian representation in his administration because, as he confessed to a Bulgarian while in exile in Napoli in 1877, ‘Among the Bulgarians I have seen only one intelligent person – Chomakov . . . All other Bulgarians are ready to become servants or slaves to Russia.’67 Also, when it came to ‘moderate’ Bulgarians’ demand for constitutional reform, inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 – entailing a Bulgarian national assembly with the sultan becoming the Tsar of Bulgaria – he flatly rejected it on grounds that the empire’s federalization went against his understanding of Osmanlılık. Midhat would be recalled to Constantinople in 1868 where he would stay for a year. The reasons for his recall remained disputed; varying from the sultan’s concerns about reforms’ implications to imperial integrity, to Grand Vizier Ali Pasha’s attempt to avoid diplomatic escalations with Russian and AustroHungarian empires – he was blamed by both of them for some mishandlings of the affairs in the Danube province – to have him run the new Council of State and thus drawn him into more mundane work so as ‘to kill’ his popularity with reform,68 and to personal fears of being shot by Serbian nationalists.69 Whatever the motivations, a year later, in 1869, after Fuad Pasha’s death, Ali Pasha – becoming also the Minister of Foreign Affairs – with the final approval by the sultan, appointed Midhat governor of Bagdad province, in a new and different – the majority of its population was Muslim Arabs – testing ground for his reform agenda. More than immediate geopolitical, irredentist and religious

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disputes that defined his work in the province of Danube, here he had to deal with internal security issues concerning rebellious tribes and Persian border incursions. Being energetic and having been allowed to bring to Bagdad his handpicked team from the Danube administration, he was ready to apply his toolkit of reforms: efficient administration, new provincial politics and a developmental political economy. As in the case of the province of Danube, he unleashed several projects that later would earn him the name, ‘founder of modern Iraq’, establishing a new tax system, distributing land to peasants and creating dams for irrigation and navigation.70 During a brief three years (1869– 1871) his administration opened public works, established mixed schools as well as technical school for orphans, setup social welfare programmes and civil hospitals and published the first newspaper, Zaura. He applied the same economic approach, setting up savings and loan banks with the aim of unleashing local economic development: establishing wool and cotton mills, factories for military clothing and promoting shipping in the Persian Gulf.71 Indeed, for an imperial economy based on agriculture, Midhat had reasoned that the imperial state’s financial troubles would not be properly dealt with unless the economic conditions of the population, and in the case of the province of Bagdad, of the Arab tribes with regard to land tenure, was not solved. The harsh reality was that the state charged the local population on the rent for its land use at a rate of seventy-five percent of the produce. The new economic model that he sought to put in place would rely on the privatization of the state land – already codified in the Arazi Kanunu (Land Law) of 1858 – by parcelling into smaller plots and selling it to them at affordable terms while giving them the rights to proprietorship. Such an easing in land privatization and redistribution was inconceivable in the Russian case. And indeed, it did not take much for the results to show: government revenues increased, agricultural surplus generated new industries for processing them and new markets for selling them. And these new outlets became possible thanks to the rivers Tigris and Euphrates becoming navigable and used by vessels flying the Ottoman flag and the opportunity, for the first time, to travel by boat between Basra and Constantinople via Suez (officially opened in 1869).72 As in the case of the Danube province, for Midhat Pasha economic development went hand in hand with political change. But unlike in the Danube province, here he was endowed with a double authority, as was Loris-Melikov on the Russian side: civil and military. Midhat Pasha was the governor of the province as well as the military commander of the Sixth Battalion of the Ottoman army corps stationed there. As such, he could deal with the nomadic tribes – unsettled by the politics of the previous Ottoman authorities – in two ways:

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enlisting them in the army, but more importantly settling them through giving them lands and registering the land titles under state rather than tribal control.73 His administration consulted religious leaders and respected local customs as well as it collected taxes based on local conditions as opposed to strict city or village models. Midhat applied the Vilayet Law, as he knew it, by organizing administrative councils and courts. What he did differently in the Bagdad province was to employ far more local people in high governmental posts. And in nearly three years there, Midhat gained a reputation as ‘an enlightened administrator.’74 But not all was met with praise, internally or externally. Internal resistance, even though he sought to consider customs and traditions of the province – Midhat spoke Arabic – was articulated in rather muted religious terms bidat.75 External opposition to his activities in the province, not political but military, came from the empire’s principal backer, Britain. Midhat Pasha had demonstrated impressive skills in commanding the Sixth Battalion of the Ottoman army in re-conquering territories of Kuwait and Nadjed in the Arabian Peninsula. Operating under the authorization of Grand Vizier Ali Pasha, Midhat had sought to bring under Ottoman control the Saudis. But this policy ran into British opposition for they came to support the Saudis’ independence from the empire.76

Political reform moves to the imperial centre: from rules and regulations toward a constitution The Council of State as a proto-parliament? Reform as equality versus justice If such kinds of reforms as political, economic and administrative could be pursued, as Midhat had arguably demonstrated in a successful manner in these two cultural and economically different provinces, was it possible to make similar changes, i.e. political representation, at the level of imperial government? Prominent Ottoman historian Carter V. Findley would think so. For him, Tanzimat reforms ‘logically contributed’ to general demands for constitutional government not the least because by the 1860s many parts of the empire had implicit and explicit constitutions. Findley enlisted as such the tributary principalities of Romania in 1866, Tunisia in the early 1860s, as well as Serbia and Egypt that had quasi-parliamentary bodies, while also organic statutes were in place in Lebanon and Crete for the non-Muslim communities.77

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That said, though, neither the duumvirate nor Midhat Pasha had clearly articulated a view on the need to establish a constitutional government; the telos of a constitutional empire was not apparent. What became apparent to them was that the survival and future of the empire was not ensured only by simply applying reforms, uniform rules, throughout the imperial space. On 3 January 1869, only months before his death, Fuad Pasha wrote a letter from Nice, France, addressed to the Sultan Abdülaziz in which he advised the monarch to continue with reforms. By so doing, he argued, the empire was sure to survive in Europe and to strengthen the security of Islam.78 For him the idea of reforms, European-style that is, was part of the broader future-oriented concept of progress. To ‘revive’ the empire, he continued, one had to look forward and not fall back to the ‘old style reforms’. ‘Our neighbours’, he pointed out, ‘have improved themselves much more compared to their situation two hundred years ago and all of them have left us behind.’79 And thanks to these forward-looking reforms, which the empire had already opened itself to and by extension to Europe, it had enjoyed its share of progress and development. But he warned that progress remained ‘pale in comparison to the requirements of our century’. A fully accomplished Ottoman Empire for him was if and when it would have ‘money like England [tellingly, not interested in its form of state: constitutional monarchy and parliamentary system], Enlightenment like France and troops like Russia’.80 Such a scenario was possible by continuing to reform ‘all of the political and administrative institutions’ and of ‘many codes (statute, law) and regulations’, without undermining the security of Islam and Islamic tradition of the state – noting that he was a true Muslim and unfortunately a bigoted discourse of ‘our Muslims’ could not ‘understand neither my feelings nor my language’.81 More importantly, however, it was essential to create a ‘big union’ of the nationalities – which admittedly ran against the traditional view that the sultan was the unifying symbol for the nationalities – whereby the governing elite and the sultan recognized that ‘this great Empire cannot belong to just Rums, Slavs or one religion, one nation’.82 Falling short of suggesting establishing a formal constitutional regime, Fuad reiterated the Ottomanist formula of opening the imperial state and public services to all nationalities without discrimination on racial and religious basis and reforming the judicial system so that even those nationalities such as Ottoman Armenians – whom he saw as displaying an ‘aggressive attitude’ – would then ‘adopt unionist principles of our country’.83 Similarly, Ali Pasha, in his political testament to the sultan – the authenticity of which has been questioned84 – did not foresee a constitutional path for the empire. For him, the main goal in governing was to ‘build a stable government without disorder . . . [and]

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animosity’.85 But unlike Fuad, he held a more critical view on reforms. Since joining the European state system, he pointed out, the empire had been decentred and destabilized by them, most notably by that the other European Powers had instrumentalized them, i.e. reforms, as pretexts to intervene in its internal affairs.86 Reforms had been destabilizing also for reasons that had to do with their very nature as such. Being about methods and rules based on efficiency and uniformity, thus ‘governing by the same method and style’, they drove imperial politics towards an unworkable goal of uniformity. Ali did not suggest either backtracking on reforms or returning to Ottoman types of reform. Rather he urged Ottoman politics in general and the sultan in particular, since it was addressed to him, to consider and define what the ‘common interests’ of the ‘Ottoman Nations’ were. A dialogue and hierarchy had to be put in place between the people’s ‘private interests’ and ‘common interests’. This was essential, he cautioned, in an increasingly dangerous geopolitical situation whereby emerging national rebellions in the empire – that had to be dealt without resorting to state repression and violence – could be instrumentalized by an emboldened and resurgent Russia that sought to undermine the empire and other European states on the ‘Eastern Question’.87 Ali Pasha would live until he could witness the French defeat in the Franco-German war of 1870 and 1871, in the meantime sensing dire consequences from Russia, namely, a military aggression that would trash the Treaty of Paris and bring about an imperial disaster.88 Midhat Pasha – considered the ‘founding father’ of the constitution by the Turkish historiography89 – also until his return from the governorship in Bagdad in 1871 did not articulate any ideas for a constitutional empire. Nineteenth-century French historian Engelhardt even questioned the ability of Midhat Pasha, despite his resourcefulness of political and economic ideas and experiences in the drafting of the Vilayet Law, to come up with any general political ideas on grounds that unlike Fuad Pasha or Ali Pasha he did not have the kind of formal education which would have allowed him to do so.90 Ali Pasha did not foresee what would happen with the Council of State, which together with the Divan of Judicial Ordinances (the precursor to the Ministry of Justice), came about in 1868 as part of his reorganization of the Meclis-i Vala (the High Council), particularly with it falling into the hands of Midhat Pasha.91 Indeed, in his brief, one-year tenure of it, Midhat Pasha used its consultative and quasi-legislative responsibilities – which Ali had adopted from the French legislation – to their fullest legal provisions. This new body, aside from the specializations of tasks – five specialized departments with their own secretariat – applied the principle of representation, which as we saw in the Russian case,

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had been very much sought after by Valuev. It was within the statute of the Council that of the fifty members of which it was comprised, some were chosen from the non-Muslim community and moreover it met on a yearly basis with delegates from elected general assemblies of the provinces.92 For Ottoman historians, Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel K. Shaw, the Council was a precursor to the national parliament.93 Intended by Ali Pasha as a governmental body to handle what the Council of Ministers offered them to consider, or to submit legislation upon request, but not to control the state budget and or questions the ministers – these prerogatives, while existing, were exercised at an annual meeting between the ministers and notables meclis-i umumî under the control of the grand vizier – during Midhat’s control of the council, it did pursue those prerogatives. These were in addition to preparing legislation on a host of political-economic questions, affecting not only the provincial but also the ‘national’ economic life: revising the land tax system, new regulation on mines and establishing low interest credit banks for cultivators, as well as regulation to encourage working people to open savings accounts – called Emniet Sandiğı (Safety Funds)94 – by using interest earnings as incentives.95 Finding himself in a rather familiar place in the sense that he had the legal prerogatives in the Council of the State as when being a governor of the province to fully pursue them, Midhat Pasha would clash with his superior, Ali Pasha. In such a close encounter at the core of imperial politics, Ali Pasha who ‘had expected his protégé to accept his will’ realized that Midhat Pasha found it ‘difficult to defer’ to him,96 by which Ali then dismissed Midhat from the Council of State and appointed him the governor of Bagdad.97 Their open rivalry, however, would not be as damaging as to derail the course of reform. That would be more the case when, by the end of 1871 thanks to a combination of events: the deaths of Fuad and Ali Pasha, a deepening financial crisis and loss of French prestige in the Franco-German war, all altered the attitudes to reforms. ‘The reformers were dead,’ noted Bernard Lewis, ‘France their patron and guide, was defeated, and a mood of reaction set in against any foreign intervention.’98 To a large extent, the face of this counter-reformist mode became Mahmud Nedim Pasha (1818–1883), part of a pro-Russian faction in the Ottoman government – he was given the nickname ‘Nadimov’ from the Muslim population for being under the influence of Ambassador Ignatyev who was posted to Constantinople between 1871 and 1875.99 For his part, Nedim Pasha, who succeeded Ali Pasha as grand vizier, had once belonged to Reshid Pasha’s ‘circle of protégés’, serving as his secretary – though unable to command the French language – between 1842 and 1854. Nedim Pasha would distinguish

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himself as one of the most critical voices against the Tanzimat reforms of the current generation and Reshid’s time. Just as Sultan Abdülaziz took the reins of the empire in 1861, he wrote a 65-page treatise titled Ayine-yi Devlet (The Mirror of State). In it, he argued that the sultan had to have a direct involvement in reform and in day-to-day politics. This meant first of all that he had to restore his absolute power as a monarch and also that instead of a reform based on the prevailing Ottomanist ideology of legal equality, the traditional concept of justice had to be applied. In so doing, he firmly laid the ideological basis for Sultan Abdülhamid II ’s politics when the Palace won the political fight against the Porte100 after 1876. Nedim’s position vis-à-vis politics and reform was no different from Slavophile or Panslavist voices regarding Russian reform and autocracy; Nedim and Ignatyev’s proximity could have had this ideological connection. Indeed, Nedim Pasha deplored Tanzimat reformers’ obsession with translating and adapting paragraphs of the European law into the Ottoman context, and their instrumentalization of it to further the interests of what he considered a venal bureaucratic class, while discarding the Islamic concept of justice and traditional Ottoman statecraft. Ultimately, he was convinced that the Empire would have no future unless the monarch’s absolute will was restored, justice rather than equality was pursued, and reliance on the Muslim community alone and its Islamic traditions were affirmed. As grand vizier (September 1871 to July 1872), then, pursuant of his ideological convictions and a loyal monarchist – having declared that ‘happiness and peace in the affairs of the state derive from loyalty’ to the monarch – while working to dismantle Ali’s protégé system, Nedim Pasha encouraged Sultan Abdülaziz to exercise his full will.101 Surely, this became markedly different to the previous time of Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha, whereby the sultan ‘had been almost a constitutional monarch, reigning but not governing’102 – certainly this had been Resid Pasha’s political ideal in the late 1830s. For the British and French ambassadors in Constantinople, Nedim Pasha represented a quintessential figure of the ‘Old Turkey’. But for the new grand vizier their countries, being post-Crimean allies, with their instrumentalization of reform policy, instead of supporting the empire’s integrity and stability had stirred ethnic resentment within it – for instance allowing the unification of Moldova and Wallachia, which happened in 1862 – and generated an unprecedented economic (debt) crisis through their financial loans.103 Certainly with Midhat Pasha having been part of Fuad and Ali’s political circle, and highly active, even for Ali’s liking, in the Council of the State, Nedim Pasha stripped the Council off its administrative and judicial powers, and purged out Midhat’s supporters.104 Midhat would

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reciprocate when he shortly became grand vizier (July–October 1872) – managing to add to the Council separate departments to deal with public works, education, war and provincial administration. The struggle for the Council seemed worth it for this body continued to serve as the main legislative body during the period of the Ottoman Parliament (1876–1878) and afterwards.105 But an even bigger struggle opposed Midhat Pasha against Nedim Pasha and the political faction that he represented, creating the premises for the former to embark on a path to the making of the first Ottoman constitution. If for Nedim Pasha the key to reviving the empire was that of restoring the monarch’s absolute will, for Midhat that constituted the problem. The newly-found, unrestrained exercise of monarchical will – after the tutelage of Fuad and Ali Pasha had been dismantled – had not led to the noble goals of restoring the ancient Ottoman glory. Indeed, Midhat found Sultan Abdülaziz’s behaviour ‘impatient of contradiction and advice’106 and more immediately and pressingly troubling had been the monarch’s abuse of this unrestrained power to financially squander the resources of the budget on extravagant spending on private and public matters. These resources, he thought, were taken away from public works or provinces. Equally damaging were the sultan’s interventions with the appointments of incompetent favourites in his provincial administration in Bagdad that Midhat was painstakingly building. Unlike the controversial departure from the governorship of Danube, Midhat resigned his post in Bagdad in a sign of protest and set out for Constantinople.107 Midhat Pasha would, nevertheless, be privileged enough to have an audience with the sultan and even convince the latter to appoint him as successor to Nedim Pasha. Midhat’s convincing argument had been that the current grand vizier had proved himself incapable of handling growing economic and ethnic crises facing the empire. For his part, the sultan, who according to Ismail bey Qemali, was a very capricious, and extravagant man, with different tastes in music, sports and architecture, did not forgive Midhat Pasha for ‘offending his dignity, as he considered it, by coming into his presence wearing spectacles without having first obtained permission!’108 One of the first major moves Midhat undertook, as grand vizier, was to hire the most capable people who could investigate and deal with the finances of the state; an exercise that led to the conclusion that public accounts were forgeries and the enormous public debt incurred was also connected to the enormous expenses of the palace. As mentioned earlier, Midhat would be one of the rare statesmen of the time who would garner popular support – from the public in the capital and the provinces, including progressive religious leaders and students – during the time of the

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financial investigation. Midhat Pasha, too blunt in his dealings with the sultan, was soon dismissed on seeking to hold to account Nedim Pasha for a huge sum taken from the treasury; and for a baksheesh taken from Baron Hirsch who sought to modify his enterprise of Oriental Railways.109 In an unprecedented case for modern Ottoman history, he managed to force the sultan to return the money to the state budget – a move that would cost him his grand viziership. Midhat was exiled to govern the province of Salonica in October 1873.110

The crisis of economic liberalization, imperial debt and balanced budget Midhat did not last long in Salonica. In his February 1874 letter of resignation, he made clear his full intention for doing so; namely, to contribute to imperial politics – not from a provincial but from a central perspective – which he considered ‘delicate and complicated affairs’. The imperial elite had demonstrated its inability to manage the present and future of the empire with its mismanaging of the civil administration, the army and finances. And in so doing, it ‘compromised the security and the credit of our country’. If internally the Christian population was becoming more vocal in calling for foreign protection, he further reasoned in his letter, externally the empire’s allies were losing their ‘confidence in us’. But like Nedim Pasha, he also referred to the errors made twenty years ago that accordingly ‘prepared the way for the disasters which are now showing themselves in rapid succession’.111 Those errors continued, Midhat would lament a year later, whereby the imperial debt incurred twenty years ago was kept out of the public view. Meanwhile, the Ottoman state still lured in European and Ottoman investors with high rates of interest on the Turkish bonds and assurances that ‘Turkey has paid and will always pay’. This became untenable when Nedim Pasha, in his second term as grand vizier, suspended the payment of debt.112 It is not clear though if Midhat Pasha’s criticism to the imperial economic policy, as one of the triggers of imperial crisis, was because he fully rejected the idea of getting the economy connected to the European credit system or because he disliked the manner with which the debt was managed by the imperial government. Given his previous experiences in provincial and central government the answer was most likely the latter, for had the former been the case then he would be going entirely against the political economic approach maintained by Ali and Fuad Pasha as well as against the economic relations the empire had with its main allies, Britain and France. For once, despite having had occupied himself mostly with provincial politics and reforms, Midhat must have

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been aware that when the British and French gave their backing to Ottoman territorial integrity at the 1856 Paris Peace Congress, one of the main conditions had been an Ottoman acceptance of a greater British and French role in the economic modernization of the empire. As had been the case for the Ottoman Treasury of the time, unable to raise money internally to finance its war effort, reluctantly it had to borrow from its two war allies, Britain and France. Russia, meanwhile, as Kisselev reminded Alexander II , had also been doing so in the Crimean War, an event that threatened the imperial economy. The Porte knew even earlier what the consequences were for not meeting foreign debt obligations. In fact since 1851, British officials had warned their Ottoman counterparts that if they defaulted on its debt such an action would be met by a military intervention on their side.113 Certainly, but much later than in the Russian Empire, the national debt with its financial instruments (state bonds and domestic and external borrowing) became a new experiment for the Ottoman state.114 And an experiment it was, for first, when Ali Pasha signed the Paris Peace Treaty which guaranteed territorial integrity in exchange for borrowing loans, these loans were based on the wealth of some of the provinces that later ceded from the empire. Secondly, and this touches more on Ali’s and Fuad’s lack of understanding of the modern political economy, the loans, credited mainly by the French financial institutions, were not used to generate more wealth by encouraging economic development – which Midhat had applied in his role as governor – but rather used for paying for the previous debt. This led to higher state indebtedness; and while some politicians raised their voice against indebtedness, the majority did not.115 Overall, its foreign debt proved to be a double-edged sword for the Ottoman state because in the short term it helped to sustain its Crimean war effort. But in the long term it led the state to experience convulsive crises. From the outset, that is when Ali and Fuad began to take command of the Ottoman state in the second half of 1850s, measures were taken by them towards ‘legal reform . . . [and] a few steps further’116 aimed at improving the economic welfare of the empire. Such measures, which as mentioned were continuations of stalled reforms kick-started during Reshid Pasha’s control of the imperial government, included further monetization of the economy, and significantly, shifting the fiscal burden of taxation from land to urban wealth.117 In addition, they passed through land and new penal codes (1858), commercial tribunals with mixed courts (1860), commercial codes (1861) and maritime codes (1863) – all modelled after the French codes. The effects of these laws on the economic welfare of the population – like that of the Land Code, which as mentioned earlier abolished the old agrarian relationship by legalizing the right of use,

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possession and ownership of land – did not favour all subjects equally. Bernard Lewis pointed out that the rich and powerful (the leaseholders and tax-farmers) further increased their wealth because they had the means to get freehold ownership from the state. But the poor, meanwhile, remained poor because they could only be share-croppers and do hired labour. As a rare and small but illustratively significant comparison of the post-Crimean war in the Ottoman and Russian contexts, Lewis drew a contrast between the kind of economic liberalization pursued by Ali and Fuad with this law and the Russian Peasant Emancipation, whereby the former made the poor poorer, essentially landless, whereas their Russian counterparts – as we discussed at length Tsar Alexander II subscribed to Miliutin’s solidarity (with land) approach to peasant emancipation rather than to liberal (landless) land reform – had at least land in common ownership.118 Another sharp contrast could be added to this comparison in that while the political efforts in post-Crimean Russia to legislate on land reform, expropriating some portion of the nobility’s land to give to the peasants would create a ‘time bomb’ to the Russian political system, in the Ottoman case Fuad and Ali did it rather effortlessly, simply because most of the land had been a state domain. It thus required for the property law – whereby both cases, Russian and Ottoman, drew from the French Civil Code; the latter relying heavily on Roman law’s distinction between private property and public domain119 – to move the title of the state possessions to private ones. Other political-economic steps had been taken by the Ottoman state to revert to protectionist measures since economic liberalization had become part of the Ottoman economic discourse and practice. As noted earlier, already by the end of the Napoleonic Wars as a practice, the Ottoman lands had turned into an open market for Western goods – a phenomenon that had displaced the local industry, though some of it proved resilient, and had eroded Ottoman finances. As a discourse, it was strongly promoted by British and French ambassadors120 and accepted by Sultan Mahmud II and Reshid Pasha. Meeting resistance from the outset, the Ottoman government, mostly not during the direction of Reshid Pasha, would soon realize the disadvantages of a growing dependency on foreign industrial products. To counter this, between the early 1840s and the Crimean War, the government had unsuccessfully embarked on protectionist measures to create a ‘true industrial revolution’ in the industry sector, with a project for building an industrial centre (between Constantinople and Edirne, 1842) as well as a number of modern farms. The case in point had been the new industrial programme in which Sultan Abdülmecid had given extensive authority to an Ottoman Armenian businessman, Ohannes Dadian – a programme that was

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discontinued in 1848, just as Reshid Pasha returned as grand vizier, due to Dadian’s incompetence and mismanagement and a more general lack of skilled people.121 But even if Ali and Fuad had sought to build protectionist measures vis-à-vis the Western European economic pressures there was not much they could do. They would, but could not negotiate new terms on tariffs and extraterritoriality. As Ottoman Foreign Minister, Ali had negotiated hard to make the empire part of the European public law, which as Reshid Pasha saw it earlier would provide a shield to its independence and territorial integrity as well as importantly to making it an equal state, not inferior, to the rest of the European states. Ali Pasha also sought to free it from capitulations.122 The latter was a crucial aspect in reforming the empire for, as it was, it created ‘a multiplicity of governments within the Government, and consequently, an insuperable obstacle to all improvements’ at which the Ottoman reforms were aimed, but to no avail.123 Fuad Pasha, also two years after the Paris Peace Treaty, vented his frustration at the maintenance of the capitulations. To him, they were as ‘ostracism’ and an exclusion from the European Powers.124 The only way Fuad and Ali Pasha could undermine such political and economic pressures was then by simply postponing their implementation, starting with the Hatti of 1856, and at times they could afford it by playing on the allies’ disagreements. Where they could not do that was regarding banking and monetary policies. For these they had to rely entirely on the expertise of British and French economic actors. Their advice and efforts led to the decreeing in 1863 by Sultan Abdülaziz of the Imperial Ottoman Bank and its subsequent establishment as a limited joint stock company – with major shares and financial administrations held by the British and French, with a symbolic presence of the Ottoman state. With the privilege of a state bank, ‘recognised [as a] financial agent of the government within and without the Empire’,125 the Imperial Ottoman Bank was tasked to mint banknotes and transform the local loans into new ones,126 borrowing in the meantime from the French and British money markets. Imperial economy could always modernize, but the point was to what price. It did not help if the ‘ignorance of Turkish statesmen about modern economics’ was taken into account.127 Indeed, under his watch and by passing a law titled ‘General Debt of the Ottoman Empire’ in 1865, Fuad Pasha entrusted the Imperial Ottoman Bank with handling, that is reducing, the public debt. This did not happen. And worse, the first default crisis in 1866 fully showed its real impact in 1875, after the Ottoman public debt had been luring foreign and Ottoman investors as a rate of profit moving between 9 and 12 percent; way higher than the Russian one, which was 5 percent.128 Such debs had put a strain on the public finances, in fact permanently halting the

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number of new appointees in military and civil administration,129 which in turn undermined the Ottoman state’s credibility as being more open and inclusive to all Ottoman citizens, particularly after the promulgation of the Nationality Law in 1869.130 The advice of French and British bankers and ambassadors in Constantinople to the Ottoman statesmen had been to speed up political and financial reforms in order to deal with the ballooning of public borrowing. Ali Pasha’s concern had been that fast reforms were bound to trigger a revolution in the empire; reminding his Western interlocutors that ‘our speed is limited by the fear of having our boiler burst’.131 For Midhat, however, what ‘burst the boiler’ – with Midhat Pasha staging a coup to dethrone Abdülaziz in June 1876 – was not the speed of reforms but rather the kinds of economic choices made by previous and the current grand viziers. Midhat could agree that his predecessors probably would not have fully understood the intricacies of how national debt was dealt with. But surely they had to be aware that if all the foreign borrowing was used to pay old debt, including war debt, or remove worthless currency from the circulation or to finance the unaccounted sovereign’s Civil List, rather than use it for productive economic activities to further generate wealth, the empire would be in serious trouble. However, of all other predecessors of grand viziership, Midhat Pasha found Grand Vizier Nedim Pasha’s declaration of Ottoman bankruptcy in 1875 entirely misguided and unaware of consequences for the empire. This was because from the very outset when the first loans were given, Ottoman statesmen had been warned by British and French counterparts that failure to repay foreign debt would be met by severe consequences. Not long after the declaration of the bankruptcy and the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War, a British-Franco financial control to reimburse foreign loans would be placed firstly on the Ottoman provinces. Indeed, Britain would put under its control the Egyptian finances – which since the Ottoman takeover of Egypt in 1517, especially in the early decades, had been one the most important sources that kept imperial Ottoman finances in surplus132 – in 1878, while formally occupied Egypt in 1882. France would extend its protectorate over Tunisia in 1881 – this happened thanks to armed insurrection supported by French bankers and businessmen.133 Then, both states would impose a similar method to the core of the empire, when they established the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881.134 Financial failure – maybe expected from the British and French counterparts – greatly eroded the British commitment to the Ottoman territorial integrity. Thus, it was not only Russia that undermined the territorial integrity of the empire by means of war on claims of protecting the rights of Ottoman Christians, but Britain and France too through a more

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sophisticated, ‘modern’ approach, on claims to protect the financial interests of their respective subjects and citizens. Before that though, Midhat Pasha still hopeful that all could be saved if the state expenditure, including that of the Palace, thus a balanced budget, was supervised by a national parliament, a task to be enshrined in a new form of state, namely a constitutional monarchy.

The Young Ottomans’ political economy and constitutionalism: Namik Kemal and Ziya Pasha’s synthesis of equality and justice Until the early 1870s, Midhat Pasha did not articulate or push forward the idea of having a constitution for the Ottoman Empire. The same thing could not be said, however, about a small group of six, the so-called Young Ottomans, of which Midhat’s constitutionalist collaborator Namik Kemal (1840–1888) was a member. Calling itself Ittifak-ı Hamyiet (Patriotic Alliance), this small secret society, established in 1865, set as its main goal changing ‘the absolutist regime to constitutional regime.’135 To begin with, Midhat’s earlier connections with Namik Kemal and Ziya Pasha (1825–1880) are not known, but there is an interesting indirect and opposing link between them. This is because the Young Ottomans – ‘first modern Ottoman intellectual movement’ – built on some ideas from a previous group of conspiring individuals: military officers, ulema, medrese students, and intellectuals, whose political goals were those of having a representative government responsible to ümmeti (Muslim community), destruction of European reform and regicide – a group that was investigated (the so-called Kikeli incident) by Midhat Pasha in 1861.136 Thus if by 1861 Midhat Pasha had been against such a group, what Namik Kemal and others such as Ibrahim Shinasi (1826–1871) and Ziya Pasha, as well as others, had in common with the previous conspiratorial group were the vocabularies of nationalism, Islamism and political representation. However, the Young Ottomans were much clearer on their ideas of constitutionalism and Western Parliamentarism that nevertheless challenged the official cultural and political ideology of Ottomanism.137 They sought a ‘third way’ in the Ottoman politics that was different from Tanzimat’s political (authoritarianism), economic (the impact of free trade to the national welfare) and cultural (the undermining the role of Islam) crises, and on the other hand offered to combine the best of Western and traditional elements. Historians such as Kemal Karpat, but especially Niyazi Berkes, have interpreted the rise of the Young Ottomans, as ‘indigenous movement’ – uninfluenced by external powers (Britain did not encourage constitutionalism) – who with its constitutionalism, unlike Ottomanism, could better articulate the interests of a rising Ottoman middle class. Their political reform was a way to

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connect the institution of sovereignty with a concrete social foundation,138 which as underscored before was not the case neither in the Ottoman nor in the Russian empires. In this light, Karpat argued, Midhat’s embracing the constitutionalist project was equally a platform for putting under control the sultan’s arbitrariness and a balancing act of the political power of two socio-economic groups: the propertied group represented in local government and the bureaucratic group represented by the central administration. For Karpat, Midhat became the voice of a rising middle class, comprised of local elites and civil bureaucracy.139 As a young man who cultivated a strong penchant for poetry, Namik Kemal did have a close working experience in imperial government and what he thought to be Ali and Fuad Pasha’s political authoritarianism. In 1857 he worked in the prestigious Tercüme Odası until 1861 when Ali Pasha – during his fourth term as grand vizier – forced him to leave the office because of unacceptable political messages in his poetry. In his activism, two years after the creation of the Patriotic Alliance, Namik Kemal spread ideas and established contacts with hundreds of followers, including the two princes, (crown) Prince Murad and Prince Hamid.140 Yet before staging a coup d’état, which seemed to have been the goal, Namik Kemal and others in the group were forced by the Ottoman authorities into exile in Paris in 1867.141 Thus earlier than Midhat Pasha, Namik Kamal had been making the case for constitutional regime. But Namik Kemal’s goal, unlike Midhat’s, was to put under constitutional control the authority of the Porte for its autocratic politics and its uncritical positions towards Western policies, rather than that of the sultan, which he in fact idealized. What the Young Ottomans were after was a balance between the Palace and the Porte and a ‘more reflective approach to reform’.142 Publishing their political and economic views on reform in their newspapers, Hürriyet (Liberty) and Muhbir (Messenger), Namik and Ziya’s arguments were simple: the government had to be controlled by the people, the sultan could reign under the law, the economic bankruptcy of the population and of the state had to come to an end including the state’s political dependency on Western allies and particularly their interference.143 Like most sides of the Ottoman political spectra, Namik and Ziya did not reject the concept of reform. But for them the optimal approach to take on reform as a way of strengthening the empire was neither that of European-inspired reforms pursued by Reshid Pasha and his followers nor the reforms most recently put forward by Nedim Pasha. As Ziya put it in an article titled ‘Memory’ published in Hürriyet in February 1869, an ideal reform would be one in which imperial elites combined both alternatives: European and Islamic, while paying attention to the political choices made by reformers. Looking back, he thought that Sultan

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Mahmud II ’s statesmen, Hüsrev and Pertev Pasha, had been more concerned about personal political infighting than respectively thinking about strengthening the Ottoman army and trade.144 Meanwhile, he pointed out how Reshid Pasha – only to be continued by Ali and Fuad Pasha – had managed to sell to the Ottoman political elite and an emerging public opinion the narrative that only European reforms ensured rights for imperial subjects. But all was not lost, Ziya informed his readers, because there was Midhat Pasha who, through his successful reforms in the Danube province, had shown in practice that both traditions, European and Islamic, could be combined at an individual and state level. What Ziya found as Islamic in Midhat was the latter’s devoutness in Islam – Midhat was good at presenting himself as a secularist145 as well as a religious man – a proof that religion made good men.146 Also, Ziya’s political-economic discourse resonated with Midhat’s, namely, the misguided political economic choices, the opening up of the economic space in 1838 – accordingly making it possible for foreigners to gain control over Ottoman economic life – and incurring foreign loans and debt since 1854 that would spell disaster for the empire. If there was a rational argument in their choices, Ziya concluded in one of his writings, it was trading off domestic despotism for foreign economic exploitation,147 both of which he did not find appealing. Namik’s critique of Tanzimat’s free trade political economy was equally damning. Writing extensively in the newspapers Ibret (Lesson) and Basiret (Foresight), the latter becoming one of the mouthpieces for a rising Muslim middle class – indeed, as Turkish intellectual historian Hilmi Ziya Ülken pointed out, ‘in his articles on economy [Namik Kemal] spoke always about [the need for] Muslim banks, Muslim Corporations, and about protecting and supporting the Muslim merchants’148 – he argued that the state had to provide economic opportunities also for the disadvantaged Muslim merchants. The three sources for generating economic wealth, agriculture, industry and trade, Namik Kemal wrote in an article published in Hürriyet in 1868, had come under severe stress: agriculture was crushed by disastrous policies of military conscription and taxation; local industries were undermined by ‘the suicidal fiscal policy under the name of free trade’, whereas internal trade remained underdeveloped for lack of roads.149 But aside from a protectionist political economy, Namik’s more significant contribution to an emerging Ottoman public opinion of the late 1860s and early 1870s – this was the case, as we saw it, on the Russian side – was on the idiom of constitution. While in exile in Paris, Namik Kemal had been impressed by an open letter of Ottoman-Egyptian Prince Mustafa Fezil (1830–1875) to Sultan Abdülaziz in 1867. Ironically, the Prince had served as Ottoman Minister of

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Finance between 1864 and 1869 during which time, as mentioned earlier, the imperial finances had incurred a technical default on the foreign loans. Written in French, Lettre adressée à Sa Majesté le Sultan [A Letter to His Majesty, the Sultan] the Prince urged the monarch to tie the reforms to a constitutional regime whereby the government came to power by the people’s consent and to agree to the separation of state from religion. Namik subscribed to his first demand but did not to the second. Unlike the Prince he thought that Islam had a greater role to play in a future Ottoman constitutional monarchy. For him – in a similar vein to Ziya who had argued that Reshid Pasha’s Hatti had disregarded the Islamic tradition hence an unrepresentative government had been established – Islam and representative government were not incompatible. Because of such unrepresentative government there was an imperial decline obvious to all through economic deterioration and increase of foreign powers’ influence.150 What had to be done, as Namik elaborated in a number of articles titled ‘Letters on Constitutional Regime’, was to establish a constitutional regime based on popular sovereignty. On these notions, Namik Kemal sought to bring together the cannon of Western European liberal doctrine of popular consent (that entrusted rights and liberties to the state) and Islamic tradition of justice (the notion of good and bad), which he thought was important to providing legitimacy to a constitutional project. Moreover, in these letters, as many Russian Slavophile commentators who wrote about resurrecting the Muscovite zemskie sobory or duma in Russian politics, Namik Kemal pointed to the Islamic notions of representation: nezaret (supervision) and meşveret (consultation)151 that were familiar to both the governing and the governed. With this synthesis in mind, he in fact outlined a constitutional project that drew heavily on the 1814 French monarchical constitution – Tsar Alexander I had had a great say in its making – for a unitary and centralized political system. Already, the Ottoman new legislation and institutions drew on French legal codes. Namik Kemal, thus, envisaged a distribution of political power in this French-inspired, constitutional project – coated in Islamic tradition – into three assemblies: Şura-yi devlet (the Council of State, or government) to be comprised of fifty members responsible for drafting bills and regulations and implementing administrative laws. The second assembly, Şura-yi ümmet (National Assembly), was to legislate the bills and control the budget. The final assembly, meclis-i âyan (the Senate) would moderate between the executive and legislative bodies.152 In addition to a role for Islam in also creating loyalty towards the constitutional regime with its new institutions, he conceived the notion of vatan (fatherland) – so much for Ali and Fuad Pasha of going beyond uniform rules and regulations by thinking about ‘unions’ or

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‘common interests’ – which with its nationalist attributes could appeal to all Ottoman subjects. Vatan was not to replace but to add another layer to the existing notions of Ottomanism and Ottoman citizenship.153 Such crossing of ideas and critical positions were important in thinking about alternative ways of saving and modernizing the empire. But Namik Kemal was all too aware how the Young Ottomans’ secret plan for establishing a constitutional empire had been thwarted in 1865, hence their exile to Western Europe. He was also convinced that the ‘Ottoman nation’ was not prepared to undertake a constitutional revolutionary uprising, not the least because Ottoman subjects were loyal to the sultan. Ultimately, ‘nothing was done unless Padishah really wanted it’. Ziya, meanwhile, hoped that they could reconcile with the sultan and convince him about it in the meantime.154 Such an impasse came to be resolved when the paths of Midhat Pasha, Namık Kemal and Ziya Bey – ‘the intellectual cream of the Turkish middle class’ with ‘new views of the world and reforms’155 – crossed with each other in the early 1870s. That this was possible was the more surprising because, as already mentioned, Namik and Ziya built their constitutional visions not against the sultan per se, but against the Porte’s authoritarianism; its monopolization of power and control of the state’s high offices.156 Meanwhile, the Porte’s authoritarianism had not been Midhat’s concern during Fuad and Ali Pasha’s rule. But as noted, Nedim Pasha’s self-marginalization of the Porte, the reassertion of unconstrained monarchical authority, the undoing of some of the previous reforms, and the constant European pressure for pro-Christian reform157 had put Midhat on a constant move. Their coming together, though, was not a straightforward preposition. Two years after his return from exile in 1870 to Constantinople – prolifically writing on the compatibility of progress with Islam and Tanzimat’s failure to end Western political and economic influences158 – Namik would be exiled again for two and a half years, under house arrest at the small town of Gallipolis, not far from Constantinople. This time it would be Midhat Pasha who exiled him, during his first, short-lived tenure as grand vizier in 1872. The exile was given on grounds that Namik had criticized the governments, i.e. none other than Midhat’s, authoritarianism.159 If there must be an approximation as to when Midhat Pasha began to dabble in the project for a constitutional empire, then it should be during this short tenure as grand vizier during the late summer of 1872. Sultan Abdülaziz dismissed Midhat shortly from the post not only because of his investigation of the Civil List but also because of Ambassador Ignatyev’s constant pressure on the sultan to do so. Ignatyev did not hide his discontent for his archenemy, the ‘Young Turk’.160 The sultan did so also because Midhat, together with the Minister

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of Foreign Affairs, Halil Sherif Pasha (1831–1879), were caught planning for a federal constitution. There was no secret that the latter had nourished hopes for a constitution since his ambassadorship in Vienna in 1867. There, he had established contacts with the Young Ottomans,161 particularly with Prince Mustafa Fezil (family relations), who famously had written the letter directly to the sultan asking to turn the empire into a constitutional one. Interestingly, the Prince would also briefly become Minister of Justice in the government of Nedim Pasha. What seemed to have attracted Midhat to this federal constitutional model – earlier he had flatly rejected an Ottoman Bulgarian’s proposal of a federal project based on the Austro-Hungarian Compromise – was the newlyminted Imperial German Constitution of 1871. He considered – very likely impressed by the success of a strong German Empire, governed by its powerful Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck – that by applying this constitutional model in the empire two goals could be achieved: strengthening the Ottoman Empire militarily by forging constitutional links with its tributary states (such as Romania) and returning the power from the Palace back to the Porte.162 By late 1875, after returning from Salonica – a period packed with multiple economic crises: the peasant famine in Anatolia 1873 and 1874 (which increased tax rates in other regions that in turn led to the Herzegovina peasants revolt of 1875),163 and Nedim Pasha’s suspension of imperial debt, followed by an intellectual ferment in the capital – Midhat had become convinced that the mother of all solutions was that of obtaining a constitution. When Midhat met British Ambassador Elliot in late 1875 in Constantinople, he told him that he represented a constitutionalist group that sought a constitutional regime. Such a regime aimed at putting the sultan under the law, establishing parliamentarian oversight over ministers and the budget, making a National Assembly fully representative, without class and religious distinctions, and decentralizing the provinces164 in the mould of his experiences. The crisis in the empire had further escalated a year later when the ‘Bulgarian Massacre’ happened in April; tens of thousands of Christian peasants were killed by the Ottoman army – creating a ‘shock wave in Europe’ – though the killings of Muslims by Christians were largely ignored.165 The reputation of the empire in the wider European public opinion seemed permanently damaged, not only because of the imperial debt default, but also because of how horridly the state dealt with its subjects. External pressure aside, the British Ambassador noted in his diary in late May 1876 that ‘ “the word constitution” was in every mouth’ and that public pressure in Constantinople was so high that, ‘should the Sultan refuse to grant it, an attempt to depose him appeared almost inevitable’. It was not a spontaneous pressure, however, for as he

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further noted in his diary, ‘texts from the Koran were circulating proving to the faithful that the form of government sanctioned by it was properly democratic’,166 the political message that Namık Kemal, Ziya Pasha and Midhat Pasha and others sought to put across.

Midhat Pasha’s relentlessness for the constitution: constitutionalists versus anti-constitutionalists As Ambassador Elliot had predicted, Sultan Abdülaziz was deposed. It happened on 30 May 1876. Yet, the possibility of Midhat and his group of supporters pulling off the project of a constitutional empire was far from assured. This was especially so given that key figures in making the sultan’s dethronement happen, namely, the Minister of War Hüseyin Avni Pasha, and the Şeyhülislam Hayrulah Effendi who signed the fetva for the deposition on grounds of ‘ignorance of State matters, use of public fund to personal matters beyond what the state and nation could afford’,167 did not share the view for a constitutional monarchy. Also, the Grand Vizier in power, Mehmet Rüshdü Pasha, in whose government Midhat was serving as Minister without Portfolio, held an anti-constitutionalist position. Only the Director of the Military Academy Sülyeman Pasha and Midhat – his views on this crystallized just a few years earlier – held strong convictions about it. The matter would become even more complicated for Midhat when the newly enthroned Sultan Murad V (1840–1903), on the day of his enthronement on 1 June, backtracked on his promise to Midhat for upholding a constitution.168 The latter was swift, nonetheless, in making public his draft constitution. The draft had the imprints of the plan discussed earlier with Elliot: limiting royal prerogative, while recognizing the sultan as the protector of Islam, transfer of the power to the grand vizier office, cabinet responsibility, and a unicameral National Assembly of 120 members tasked to control the budget and supervise the implementation of the laws. The Porte would be invested also with the power of appointing a third of the Assembly’s members, the rest being elected. Midhat kept the public pressure high on anti-constitutionalists in the government by mobilizing the softas (religious students) who kept parading and chanting slogans, ‘Long live the Sultan’, ‘Long live Midhat’, ‘Long live Constitution’, when governmental (2 June) and Grand Council (8 June) meetings took place. Still, in these meetings Midhat was not even able to put to discussion his draft constitution. In fact, the grand vizier dominated the debates there, reiterating the argument that ‘people [were] not ready for such innovation’, and interestingly, like Miliutin was attacked politically during reform debates, he attacked the

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constitutionalists for being copycats of European radicalism, ‘reds,’ les rouges, followers of the 1871 Paris Commune. The grand vizier made it clear to Midhat and others, in a similar way that Alexander II kept telling Valuev and others, that reforms would continue but without establishing a parliament and a constitution.169 The new Sultan, whose private secretaries incidentally had become none other than Namik Kemal and Ziya Pasha, held the same line as the grand vizier. The sultan agreed that ‘public credit and confidence’ as well as ‘equilibrium of our finances’ had to be restored. As proof, he conceded to put the elusive Civil List under governmental control and hand over to the state some of the Palace’s property (coal mines and manufactories). Also, in terms of foreign policy, he pledged to steer the empire away from Russia and back to ‘a continuance of intimate relations with all the friendly Powers, by the strictest observance of treaty obligations’.170 What would tilt the balance in favour of constitutionalists, however, was a cocktail of fast moving internal and external events. The most significant internal events were the apparent suicide of Sultan Abdülaziz on 4 June and the killing of anti-constitutionalist Hüseyin Avni by a relative of the deposed Abdülaziz at Midhat’s house – Midhat’s opponents would point the finger at him.171 Of the external events, the 2 July full-scale Balkan insurrection of Serbia and Montenegro, backed by Russia, especially shocked the senses of the seventy-sixmember Grand Council to agree on 15 July to proclaim a constitution. Now it became possible for Midhat’s new draft constitution – which expanded on the nature of the composition of the National Assembly, legal equality between Muslims and non-Muslim and the right to serve in public office including the prime-minister’s office and tenure for judges – to be heard. After this, the grand vizier would declare that a ‘complete and radical internal reorganisation . . . a Constitution and representative system are necessary’.172 Much work was done in convincing the doubters and the public opinion at large. The British Ambassador worked on the ulema to persuade them that Ottoman Christians could be part of the National Assembly – it was already the case in the Council of State – the main tasks of which were oversight of the government’s financial policies and restoration of a balanced budget.173 Meanwhile, Namik Kemal and Ziya Pasha continued publishing in the press making the case for constitution and parliamentarism.174 Midhat’s relentlessness to the cause was not derailed even when the newly enthroned Sultan Murad V turned out to be mentally unstable – further aggravated by the death of his uncle, Abdülaziz – and in Midhat’s view, had to be dethroned. ‘The great poet [Namık] Kemal bey, one of the chiefs of the Young

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Turks, who was much attached to Murad,’ Ismail bey Qemali recalled in his memoirs, ‘came to supplicate Midhat Pasha, with tears in his eyes, to postpone the deposition of the Sultan’,175 but to no avail. The new situation led a desperate Midhat, eager to have a constitution in place, into the arms of an eager new Prince Hamit (1842–1918) desperate to be enthroned. A seasoned administrator and by now a skilled politician in dealing with the palace intrigue, Midhat, nonetheless, would be facing an equally strong personality when the two met on 27 August 1876 to make a deal of constitution for enthronement. Of the three preliminary conditions – promulgation of constitution without delay, seeking the advice of responsible ministers on state matters, and, interestingly, reappointing Ziya Pasha and Namik Kemal to their positions held during Murat V’s brief reign – the Prince would directly agree to uphold only the second demand. Even this was shaky, for he had told Ambassador Elliot that he would not ‘put himself in the hands of any Minister, and as soon as possible to get rid of those then in the office’.176 The soon-to-be monarch Abdülhamid II rejected Midhat’s draft constitution177 but not the idea of its promulgation.

From whether to what kind of constitution This pre-agreed deal of enthronement for constitution fundamentally changed the dynamics internally, while externally Russia, pursuing its Panslavist policy in the Ottoman Balkans – after the failure of Montenegrin and Serbian insurrections (crushed by the Ottoman army) focused its pressure on the Danubian Province – demanded wide ranging reforms and virtual autonomy for Ottoman Bulgarians. If by now Britain and France would use the notion of reform on the Ottomans to pursue their economic interests, Russia would use it on the Ottoman state to achieve its geopolitical ambitions, one of which was regaining its status as a great power. Certainly, as expected earlier by Ali Pasha, such a demand by Russia would be followed by war. Britain had sought to defuse it by proposing an international conference to be held on 23 December 1876.178 With Sultan Abdülhamid II enthroned – Murad V was deposed on 1 September – by early October a Constitutional Committee of twenty-eight members (comprised of Midhat and the sultan’s people) was established under the presidency of Midhat. Namık and Ziya were involved in the sub-committees. The main political question – to be answered by the Constitutional Committee – had shifted from whether to what kind of a constitution would be agreed upon. Now, as long as the sultan could have it tailor-made to his wishes – i.e. his powers not curbed, as Midhat and Namık sought to – on religious and caliphate grounds,179 and to have a provision

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in it that allowed him to exile ‘undesirable elements’180 from the country, he agreed to the prospect of a constitutional empire. The debates in the Committee, meanwhile, evolved around the questions of division of powers between the Palace and Porte as well as the nature of the state, whether it would be centralized or decentralized. For one, Namik Kemal sided with Abdülhamid II against decentralization, the argument being that this was a European Powers’ project to divide the empire into zones with economic, ethnic and religious boundaries. While both Midhat and Namik subscribed to Ottomanism, whereby a multiethnic and multi-religious ‘Ottoman nation’ would be underpinned by a constitutional regime, Kemal upheld the view of maintaining an Islamic rather than secular state but constitutional nonetheless. Unlike Midhat who took most of the advice from the architect of the Ottoman Armenian Constitution of 1863, Ottoman jurist Krikor Odian,181 Namik Kemal sought to entrench the rights of the sultan and the caliphate, rather than to secure the sovereignty of the people182 in the constitution. ‘Certain provisions . . . [in the draft]’, wrote the sultan to Midhat, ‘were not compatible with the established practices and inclinations of the country . . . Our best intention is to reconcile the needs of our subjects with the rights of sovereignty.’183 Outside the Committee’s debates, anti-constitutionalist and constitutionalist positions were dominated by an already vibrant Ottoman public opinion. The anti-constitutionalists reiterated how ‘in the name of progress and reform, they [constitutionalists] are doing their best to change our conditions and our morals’, the latter being defined by Koranic interpretations of justice rather than equality for the subjects.184 The constitutionalists, meanwhile, on 5 November 1876 published a booklet titled Usul-u Meşruta (Constitutional Principles) explaining that the future constitution relied on the Islamic law to temper governmental absolutism, adding also that a supreme authority – a representative assembly of people – was needed to check and supervise the government and the ruler on political, legal and economic matters. Ultimately, one of the most contentious points in the final draft became the so-called Article  113 that permitted the sultan to banish from the country anyone he deemed dangerous. Midhat and Namik resisted but then caved in after a lastminute reformulation of it which qualified that the sultan could only do so after a police report had been issued.185 In the end, the sultan proclaimed the constitution on 23 December. Four days earlier, Abdülhamid II , under British Foreign Minister Lord Derby’s pressure, had appointed Midhat Pasha as a Grand Vizier,186 now for a second time. Among other events that came to be known as the Great Eastern Crisis, Midhat had hoped that the new constitution would satisfy Russian demands for

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reforms: allowing for the Great Powers to supervise and Christian governors to administer the three Balkan provinces of Western Bulgaria, Eastern Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indeed, such demands had precipitated the most serious moment yet of the Eastern Question after the Crimean War. Britain sought to mediate it by calling the Tersane Konferansı (the Constantinople Conference) on 23 December 1876;187 the same day the Ottoman Constitution came to life. But it was not to be so. The sultan had instructed Midhat Pasha to maintain a flexible position towards these demands in the Conference. But he held an uncompromising stance. As the highest representative of the Ottoman state, Midhat asserted that the new constitution satisfied Russian demands, while claiming that Russia’s real intention behind these reform demands was to make ‘its dream of establishing small autonomic States’ on the Ottoman territory a fait accompli. British Ambassador Elliot, as he later wrote in his book, sided with Midhat when the Conference’s participants agreed to ignore the existence of the Constitution; discarding thus what this meant for the Ottoman reform movement.188 Midhat stuck to his position of no negotiated deal, demanding Russian acceptance of the constitutional reform as the sole solution to the crisis – a refusal that frustrated the sultan as well as the ambassadors and ended the Conference in failure on 20 January. This led to, on 24 April 1877, after nearly twenty years of peace, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878.189 Remarkably, it was to be the first war between the two empires to be fought on a contested reading of what political reform meant.

A National Assembly to be reckoned with and a union to be based on the Constitution The sultan had many reasons to resent Midhat Pasha. Earlier, he had frustrated him by rejecting what seemed to have been Nedim Pasha’s plan for refinancing the imperial debt, now most significantly, with his foreign policy move of circumventing a European consent in dealing with Russia that precipitated the Russo-Turkish War. The war ended with the unacceptable, even for Britain, Preliminary Treaty of San Stefano on 9 March 1878. The image of its signing – also serving as the cover image for this book – was sketched by the world’s first weekly news illustrated magazine, the Illustrated London News on 23 March 1878. The treaty was ‘rectified’ by the Treaty of Berlin, an outcome of the Congress of Berlin held in the summer of 1878. For Russia, the Treaty of San Stefano – which Ambassador Ignatyev and Alexander Nelidov negotiated on its behalf, whereas Sultan Abdülhamid II was represented by Foreign Minister Savfet

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Pasha and Ambassador to Germany Sadoullah Bey190 – and that of Berlin (despite changes between the two treaties, particularly on whether to have large or small Bulgarian principality, the latter being accepted), had been a vindication, long in the making. It was Russia’s return as a Great Power that now further extended its power in the Balkans. From an Ottoman imperial perspective, the outcome had been disastrous; almost all its Balkan dependencies, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro finally ceded – with their independence being recognized by the Great Powers in the Berlin Treaty – whereas Bulgaria was set into its path to independence, declaring it on 5 October 1908. But it was not only the sultan that held grudges. If most of the conservatives disliked Midhat’s new politics of reform altogether, some liberals saw it as insufficient.191 Liberals came to realize that his Kanun-ı Esasi (the Constitution) sanctioned the prerogatives to the sultan to dismiss the National Assembly and even to suspend the Kanun-ı Esasi, which he would subsequently do. The separations between the state and religion and of powers between the executive – the government remained in the hands of the sultan – and legislative were not instituted.192 Thus, from their perspective, Midhat Pasha, Turkish historiography’s ‘de facto broker in the empire in the critical period between May and December 1876’ and the maker of the Constitution193 had failed in the most crucial aspect of this reform: framing and curbing in law the political will of the monarch. For all these reasons and more, a month into the opening of the first Ottoman Parliament, on 19 March 1877, the sultan dismissed Midhat as grand vizier; charging him with high treason and banishing him to Western European states. Midhat would stay in Italy, France and then Britain194 for a year or so. True to his words, the sultan presided over the Council of Ministers, thus controlling directly the empire’s foreign affairs,195 the most immediate being negotiating a peace deal with Russia. If contemporaries felt so about the first constitutional experiment, Ottoman scholars most certainly did not; post-factum appreciating the extent of change it had brought about to the Ottoman state and society. Historian Nyiazi Berkes saw Kanun-ı Esasi – contrary to Midhat Pasha and Namik Kemal’s earlier contemplations, this constitution drew more from the Belgian (1831) and Prussian (1850) models196 – an innovation unprecedented for any Islamic state of the time, while underscoring how contemporary Russia had neither a constitution nor a parliament.197 True, the Ottoman constitution was granted rather than declared. But such had been the case for most of the nineteenthcentury European constitutions.198 And despite failing to put the powers of the monarch under the rule of law, thus put the tsar and the sultan on an equal

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standing vis-à-vis other segments of their respective societies, not all was lost for the Ottoman constitutional experiment. For a crucial prerogative of the National Assembly – for which Midhat had fought hard – was parliamentary oversight of the government and its administration, as well as crucially of the budget.199 Indeed, in his speech at the first session of Parliament, the sultan recognized this prerogative of the Assembly. He then called on the Parliament to work on a budget and other economic measures to restore ‘our credit’ and to make possible, ‘one of our greatest wants of our Empire and our subjects [which] is the development of agriculture and industry, and the progress of civilisation and of public wealth’.200 Historian Kemal Karpat suggested that the first Parliament was not as keen to initially undermine the powers of the monarch, but rather to constitute itself as a body – comprised of the upper social groups – with which the monarch then would have to reckon with later.201 And to be sure, as Findley pointed out, the National Assembly ‘displayed a level of independence, capability and procedural orderliness that astounded contemporary observers and subsequent observers’.202 What stood out was that as a ‘truly representative body’, most of the deputies (Muslim and non-Muslim), while pledging alliance to the sultan, nation, state, Islam and fatherland, strongly criticized the Ottoman central bureaucracy on a number of pressing issues. Such issues concerned having a fair tax system, freedom of the press, legal safeguards for private property, proper currency regulations, and freedom of enterprise (this mostly demanded from non-Muslim deputies), and on fighting corruption in administration and the courts.203 Midhat Pasha and the reforming party were absent, noted British Ambassador Elliot, but during its only two sessions, ‘the struggle of the people with the Palace and the Pashas had been carried on, and the weight of England, unfortunately . . . have been thrown in the scale of the Pashas, and against those who were labouring for the people’.204 The members of the Parliament held debates against the Palace and the sultan, noted Berkes, placing national interest above the religious feeling.205 They also discussed further provincial reform, contemplating whether to decrease the powers of the Porte appointees and increase popular rights206 in the provincial administrative councils. For certain the monarch had won the nineteenth-century reform struggle between the Palace and the Porte, but the new politics that Midhat Pasha introduced had rendered the Parliament a real political power to reckon with. This had been the case in the second and last session of the Parliament when discussing the war against Russia that had been raging for nearly a year, a deputy from a modest background criticized the sultan’s conduct of his foreign policy and particularly on the war. Too much for the sultan to tolerate, he initially threatened to dismiss

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the Parliament and restore autocratic rule of the kind Mahmud II exercised207 and then actually do so. And on 23 February 1878, two days before dismissing the Assembly, he told a delegation of deputies that he was not going to give up on reforms but on their methods. From now on, change through persuasion – which had been his father, Abdülmecid’s ‘reforms by persuading people and creating liberal institutions’ – was going to be replaced with his grandfather, Mahmud II ’s method of change by force.208 This indeed was materialized as heavy handed political repression in the country. Undoutedly, there was a principled difference between Abdülhamid II and Midhat Pasha on how change from above or within could be carried out for a very troubled empire. For Midhat Pasha it was the constitutional path, which he saw as being materialized in the workings of the first Parliament. Publishing his thoughts – for the first time in French – in the early summer of 1878 while in Paris just as the Congress of Berlin was proceeding with its decision on the Ottoman Balkans, in a booklet titled ‘The Past, Present, and the Future of Turkey’, he sought to convince the Great Powers about the importance of preserving the empire’s territorial integrity for two reasons. Firstly, the Great Powers had made the Russian and Ottoman ‘Eastern’ dispute part of the European interest – which for the Ottomans had always meant guaranteeing its territorial integrity – and it had to remain the same. Secondly, and this argument had been the same as in the failed Constantinople Conference, his constitution already addressed all the grievances in the Ottoman Balkans, adding that this project ‘sum[ed] up all progress possible for the East’.209 Such arguments were not new. But what was insightful in this booklet was a three-dimensional time account of the root causes for Ottoman political reform, in the context of the ongoing Ottoman Balkans crisis. Midhat offered an interpretation of the Ottoman state’s origins and its future as being defined by ‘democratic’ principles of justice and tolerance, as well as political choices made by Ottoman reformers. The Ottoman state had applied such principles, he went on, since its early times, i.e. from the fifteenth century when it ‘conquered Romelia’, the Ottoman Balkans that was under consideration at the Congress. Where it all went wrong – that is the main causes of the Ottoman crisis, which was some centuries later – was when the political choices made led to an unbridled autocracy and non-observation of these principles. And as Ali and Fuad Pasha’s final analyses, he found the late eighteenth century a missed opportunity for reforming and modifying the empire’s ancient institutions.210 Like Reshid, Ali and Fuad he thought that the political choice of adapting new laws and institutions, and ‘their efforts’ in restoring the splendour of the empire, and the ‘rapid transformation’ generated from them, was the right one. But such

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efforts were ‘not always crowned with success’ simply because of discontent of the Ottoman Christians. Pointing out that they in fact had enjoyed more liberty and opportunities than their Muslim counterparts, he criticized the other ‘Men of the Tanzimat’ (but not himself) for carrying out these reforms without a ‘vivifying and regenerative principle, which would have cemented their [peoples] union’. By that generative principle he meant constitutionalism and a constitutional regime. Exhibiting a sense of pride with how the new Ottoman Chamber of the Parliament had already demonstrated its ability to unite all these races into a common country, as the Ottoman Empire,211 he asserted that in the future, Turkey . . . ought to be governed by constitutional regime, if it is desired that serious reforms be carried out, that a fusion be effected of the different races, and that out of this fusion should spring the progressive development of the populations, to whatever nationality and whatever religion they may belong; it is the only remedy for our ills and the sole means we have of struggling with advantage against enemies at home and abroad.212

But even though the Ottoman Parliament had proven a body politik to be reckoned with, he still rested his hopes on the authority of the Concert of Europe to exert ‘an active superintendence over the enforcement of this charter’ because, aware of its weaknesses, he thought that the Ottoman constitution did have the strength and ‘the authority of the Old European Constitutions’.213 Midhat Pasha was certainly not pleased with the outcome of the Congress of Berlin. Still, thanks to British pressure over Sultan Abdülhamid II he returned from exile to become the governor of the vilayet of Syria in November 1878.214 But he no longer was interested in provincial politics for he saw his work in Syria – keeping in touch with opposition circles – as a ‘springboard to get back his influence in Constantinople and not to launch an attack to dismember the Empire’.215 He also thought that by rekindling his provincial reform agenda there, decentralization, making ‘the centre more responsive to the needs of the provinces’216 he would still have British backing. This was not to be so, though. A new British Ambassador, Henry Layard (1817–1894), while supportive on some of the reforms, clashed with him, for instance when it came to the choosing of new appointees, Europeans or Ottomans, to the new provincial institutions. Also, while the Ambassador pushed for an increase of European economic concessions and enterprises, Midhat countered them with his protectionism, criticizing the capitulations.217 By the early 1880s, Midhat found himself like a ‘fish out of water’. Lacking support from Britain on the one hand, he was attacked from the sultan for his

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support for British interference and for kindling secessionist sentiments in the region. Midhat did not dismiss the fact that such sentiments existed, but did not take responsibility for it. In a memorandum to the sultan, he warned that ‘the vilayet [sic] would not endure more than six months or a year and that internal strife would lead to foreign intervention’.218 Thus without any substantial political backing internally and externally, the sultan, having first transferred him as Governor of Smyrna in 1880, arrested him in 1881 and brought him to Constantinople on charges of assassinating Sultan Abdülaziz. The Constantinople court handed him a death sentence but thanks to British interference it was commuted to life in prison. He began serving it in Taif, present-day SaudiArabia, from where he was assassinated on 10 April 1883.219

Epilogue From Reform to Revolution: Imperial Core in Turmoil

The social order overthrown by a revolution is almost better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when its seek to mend its ways.1 Reflecting on his early 1830s explorations of North America, the historian of the old regime and the scholar of the modern government,2 Alexis de Tocqueville, engaged in a comparative exercise to understand the relationship between cultures and systems of government; an exercise that was published in the eight-volume 1864– 1866 first edition titled, Ouvres complétes de Alexis de Tocqueville [The Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville]. He analysed countries, most notably the United States and Mexico, then later he moved on to comparing others such Britain, and the Russian or the Ottoman empires.3 What he found astounding in all these countries was that the model of the modern, unitary and centralized state that emerged in Revolutionary France had begun to spread in some form or the other to these states, too. Tocqueville remained ambivalent about this model primarily because it ran the danger of generating despotism, its more contemporary equivalents being authoritarianism and dictatorship. ‘The full, unmediated force of the world’s most dangerous individual,’ who controlled this centralized state, Ariel Salzmann summarized Tocqueville’s thought on this, ‘was no longer blunted by the peculiar government–state relationship of the old regime or the aristocratic hierarchy.’ Admitting that despotism was in fact hardwired in the model of the modern state, thus part of the European legacy, Tocqueville, who did not lack a cultural or geographical bias towards both empires, saw the Ottoman and Russian empires as the extreme deviations of this model. Widely read by Russian reformers during the 1850s for the lessons on how Russia could avoid a French pre-revolutionary scenario,4 and re-read by Ottoman historians for his insights on understanding the eighteenth-century Ottoman old regime,5 Tocqueville thought, as relayed by 189

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Salzmann, that, ‘At one extreme the modern state could be a prison like Tsarist Russia, [whereas] in a country of pashas and paupers, like Mehmet Ali’s Egypt, the state could become a forced-labour factory.’6 But again being all too aware of recent history in Western European states, he did not exclude the possibility that despotism could wreak havoc on their established or newly established democratic systems. That possibility could manifest itself when extraordinary conditions, such as full anarchy or revolution, arose. Or, it could happen when these democratic governments increasingly came to depend on the role of the individual. This was possible even in the most liberal nineteenth-century state in Europe, Britain, which had shown how easily its political system was corrupted by the passivity of its citizenry or excessive influence of money in politics. But more strikingly and recently, his home country France had proven this point with the 1851 coup d’état, instigated by one man, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Louis-Napoleon had suspended the bourgeois constitution under which he had run France as the first president of the Second Republic (1848–1852), and came to power as Napoleon III the Emperor to reign the Second Empire between 1852 and 1870.7 In fact, the European Revolutions of 1848 and the putsch of 1851 made Tocqueville less confident about the internal regulating principles of European polity.8 Tocqueville’s historical and comparative insight that despotism or the unconstrained (by the rule of law) political power under one person does necessarily dissipate with the rise of new institutions and laws of the modern and centralized state, in fact it becomes even more possible and dangerous and it remains as relevant as ever.9 His mid-nineteenth-century pessimism about European polity’s internal regulating principles, nevertheless, had been the early nineteenth-century optimism of Russian and Ottoman statesmen, as comparatively discussed in Part I of this book, ‘Men versus Institutions’. They, Speransky with his project for a ‘True Monarchy’ and ‘Immutable laws’ and Reshid Pasha’s ‘Permanent Laws’ and ‘New Institutions’, despite the time gap and different cultural references between the two, drew on a similar language of political reform with its vocabularies of new and permanent laws and new institutions, and even religion in the Russian case. They, as agents of change from the above or from within, saw such projects as necessary concessions, for realizing the model of the modern and centralized (in the Russian case to upgrade the Petrine centralizing reforms) state in polyethnic and multiconfessional and dynastic imperial contexts. In both contexts, this language of concessionary change for control and stability had domestic and external dimensions. Speransky’s reform project for introducing a gradual but permanent legal framework to imperial politics and bureaucracy in what Tocqueville rightly

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called a ‘police state’, ultimately became a device to potentially provide efficiency in imperial bureaucratic structures and curb its arbitrariness while expanding its reach against the nobility and within society rather than regulate monarchical power. The latter goal was envisaged by him, and even a little by Tsar Alexander I, while more tragically some key members of the 1825 Decembrist Uprising failed, although they brought the fears of the revolution to the centre of the Empire failed. In the Ottoman case, after resolving the crisis with Egypt in 1839 and after repressive centralizing policies (repressive reforms pursued by Sultan Mahmud II ), Reshid Pasha’s political reform based on applying Western European laws and new institutions to the Ottoman context coincided with a de-facto shift of power from the Palace to the Porte. This, however, while formalizing the workings of a growing bureaucracy, did not necessitate a constitutional power struggle as would become apparent to Midhat Pasha in the mid-1870s. Thus, in what this book frames as the early nineteenth-century political reform, the struggle of ‘Men versus Institution’, the powerful men (the autocrats) stood above and beyond the reach of the permanent laws and institutions that proliferated in both settings – a point of reflection also on the state of domestic politics and international relations in contemporary Russia and Turkey. If that was not permitted at the domestic level for the reasons elaborated earlier, Tsar Alexander I, through his Holy Alliance project, tried to reform European inter-state relations on the basis of Christian religious precepts in addition to a rule-based order. Seeking to institutionalize collective interventions to suppress revolutionary movements across the European continent, Tsar Alexander I was no stranger to this concessionary change, granting constitutions to European states, though except for Russia. In the Ottoman case, Reshid Pasha connected even more directly internal reforms with participating in the Concert of Europe. What these Russian and Ottoman projects of political reform – mindful of the historical fact that they were not contiguous, particularly so in the Russian case – revealed by focusing on whose key reforming ideas they were, was simply that irrespective of their bureaucratic planning and determination (and notably they were projects emerging as responses to internal and external crises, rather than preparing the path to a determined future), these projects were bound by the contexts to which they were initially responding and the possibilities of success or failure of these key figures. This kind of political reform (wholesale, fundamental, top-down and change from within as well as bureaucratically-led) was geared first more towards state preservation and consolidation rather than transformation of society, was political, economic and cultural and in this sense

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it found resistance on these grounds. A new generation of reformers emerged from the second half of the century in both empires, framed here in Part II , ‘Managing the Future: From Law to Political Economy and Political Representation’. They included Alexander II , Miliutin, Valuev, and later LorisMelikov entering the fray of political reform with lingering problems further aggravated by a growing imperial centralizing power, by repressive domestic politics and the fallout from a humiliating defeat at the Crimean War. On the Ottoman side, Ali, Fuad and slightly later Midhat Pasha (who despite historiographical accounts representing them in the unified period of ‘the Tanzimat’ (1839–1876), had a fair share of reversals of reforms and repressive politics – on the latter point Midhat was not that shy either) had to deal with the consequences of those reversals, as well as the financial fallout of the Crimean War. Indeed, the financial fallout of the Crimean War is one of the most insightful parallels of external factors in both empires – they fought against each other on borrowed money from European money markets (this being a first for the Ottomans) – that pushed the reformers towards reform, conceived as macromanaging respective imperial economies and politics. Political economy and political representation became key concepts in this language of political reform. On both sides, a shift would take place, whereby while tenets of liberal economic doctrines held sway in reformers’ minds, the pressures for government to embrace a different kind of political economy (developmental and protectionist) increased. Some of these reformers thought that with all the structural socio-economic transformations, the ensuing pressures of change would be managed by this top-down, concessionary change approach, simply allowing a degree of political representation at the provincial level such as with Miliutin or Alexander II on the Russian side or Ali and Fuad Pasha on the Ottoman side. Moving towards a constitutional empire was the path for Valuev, which became a necessity for Midhat Pasha, while the inadequacy of technocratic solutions in solving vast political and economic problems remained a theme in both empires, a theme recognizable even to the highly informed contemporary critics of the European Union project (EU ).10 Contemporary Europe of the EU, for instance as mentioned in the introduction of this book, until the 2008 financial, Euro and Greek crises, as well as the 2015 Migration and 2016 Brexit ones, was riding the high tide of confidence in the teleological assumption of the Europeanization academic scholarship. This was in similar fashion to the much vaunted narratives of nineteenth-century westernization and modernization that Ottoman and Russian historiographical scholars heaped on these respective supra-national, multi-ethnic and centralizing entities. The fallout of these crises

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has fundamentally put to the question the existence of the EU, its institutions, laws and regulations. Can they exist as such to manage business cycles or whether leading EU leaders can reinvent it ideologically in the face of increasing centrifugal (nationalist and radical) forces in the continent and external geopolitical and economic pressures? Recovering meanings of political reform in the Ottoman and Russian empires as a device for strengthening the power of the state to deal with internal and external forces by reconstructing vignettes of trials and tribulations of such reformers and their reforming projects allows for more historical reflection as to why the language of political reform in the nineteenth century, non-liner as it was in both cases, was replaced by that of political revolution at the turn of the twentieth century. For Tocqueville, the pre- and post-revolutionary French historical experience, as he pointed out in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, illustrated that it was ‘the revolutionary changes in the administrative system that preceded the political revolution and their consequences,’11 thus again referring to the rise of the model of the modern state and the effects of a project that seeks to make one size fit all. In the Russian and Ottoman examples, political reform was considered by the reformers as the optimal path between the unwanted experience of the French Revolution and the undesirable reactionary mode that respective governments could easily fall back to. What changed for both imperial states was that this approach to change became nonresponsive to the intensification of internal socio-economic and ethnic crises by the late 1870s and the external financial, economic and technological changes of the first era of modern globalization, which lasted until the onset of the First World War. The spread of literacy, new media and means of communication led to the consolidation of a public opinion – that was even more connected within the respective imperial settings and with the political, economic and cultural thought of the rest of the European continent – that often raged against the inadequacies of these top-down reforms and more so against ensuing political repressions. Nevertheless, in both cases, despite that in the early 1880s the demise of Midhat Pasha and the subsequent control of Ottoman politics by Sultan Abdülhamid II , the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the replacement of his pro-reform statesmen, and the subsequent reactionary and repressive policies that ensued in both settings, the language of reform did not disappear from the political discourse. But the political crisis at the imperial centre became even more menacing. On the Russian side, the outsiders of the political system had assassinated the emperor. In the Ottoman Empire, insiders of the political system, none other than Midhat Pasha himself, had dethroned two sultans

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within months of one another. The post–1870s’ political response in both settings had been repression, which meant that the fate of political reform in terms of establishing and operating political representation – finding a balancing act between monarchical and popular sovereignties – at imperial level was put on the backburner until a major crisis happened, as it did in the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, the remaining vocabularies of reform continued in a similar pace as before, if not faster. In his first meeting at the Winter Palace with the zemstva representatives in 1894, the new Emperor Nicholas II made sure that they understood that the option of adopting ‘European institutions’ was out of the question but he promised to refocus the state’s attention on economic reform and development. Indeed, with the question of land reform seemingly resolved, the focus of the imperial state by the late nineteenth century was on commercial and industrial policy and the competition in the continent. Pursuing a Listian regulatory framework of moderate tariffs in this competition, Finance Minister (1892–1903) Sergei Witte (1849–1915) also encouraged Russian industrial and banking growth in the eastern Asian markets.12 In many respects, this double economic policy of protectionism and free trade was a reflection of Russia’s geopolitical standing; unable to compete economically against Western European economies, it sought to preserve its ‘great power’ status by championing the cause of international law, a rule-based European order under the standard of civilization.13 But it would be Witte who, following the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 that led to the Revolution of 1905 (he referred to it as ‘our damned revolution’ or smutna (the troubles)), would make the case to a suspicious Tsar that ‘the social and political unrest engulfing the Empire was fed by a single unifying cause: a broadly based public repudiation of unconstrained autocracy and bureaucratic rule’.14 What was needed was a compromise on fundamental political (constitutional) and social (civil rights) reforms that Nicholas II promised to grant in the October Manifesto of 1905. Witte drafted the constitution and in turn was appointed as the first Chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers.15 Yet six months into this post he could not manage to bring about public order and broker a constitutional order, resigning just before the First Duma would begin its sessions (April 1906). He imagined that the First Duma, as the constitutional pillar of monarchical Russia, was hence the ultimate political reform tool to bring about internal stability, but instead political radicalism and social disorder became more intensified after the new political parties (liberal, socialist and populist) in the Duma were unwilling to compromise with the imperial government.16 While formally, Nicholas II ‘domesticated’ the

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European civilization by granting the new Fundamental Laws (constitution) to this new order17 and despite the last imperial reformer, Prime Minister Stolypin’s, land reforms (privatization of obshchina) and electoral reform that pushed out radical parties from the Duma,18 these reforms proved inept to handle a fullblown European war. Meanwhile, Sultan Abdülhamid II , while suspending the constitutional order, taking political power away from the imperial bureaucrats who had dominated it since 183919 and pursuing a staunchly anti-Western and Pan-Islamic discourse, further liberalized the economy, which in fact experienced a period of intensive growth fuelled by the trade of raw materials with the Western economies and railway construction.20 By decreeing in 1881 the new Public Debt Administration (PDA ) (comprised of representatives from the Galata bankers and the Great Powers, including Russia) – even though the set-up of the PDA was part of the Berlin Congress stipulations, authorizing it to collect taxes on some monopolies and to manage internal debt,21 the sultan balanced the budget with the PDA being outside of the control of the Ministry of Finance and National Assembly. This raised Ottoman credit worthiness, repaying Ottoman bondholders while making vast amounts of money for himself.22 Being ‘an avid reformer and legislator’,23 he continued with the Tanzimat legal reform24 and through the Council of State laws were made to further streamline central bureaucracy. There was no controversy in this as long as there was ‘obedience to a sovereign will superior to the law’25 by the central bureaucracy and grand viziers.26 What the sultan would have during his thirty-years of authoritarianism (1878–1908) was what Tsar Nicholas II already enjoyed even after the establishment of Speranskyinspired, Witte-authored Russian Fundamental Laws.27 Even in terms of external relations his authoritarianism, combined with legal and economic reforms,28 did not isolate the empire. His empire could never claim the position that Nicholas II ’s Russia had at the turn of the twentieth century, which still sought to reform the European and international relations through international law by helping organize the Peace Congresses in the Hague in 1899 and 1907. But it was not ‘closed in on itself ’, rather as ‘the only world Muslim empire’, it remained part of ‘the modern community of nations, albeit as grudgingly accepted poor relations’.29 What made the discursive shift from the language of political reform to that of political revolution in both empires was the long continuation of political repression, the discarding of the consessionary approach to change that was manifested with the suppression of alternative views of emerging political groups on the future of the empires – coupled with a fear of financial as well as real imperial collapse (Ottomans) and defeat in war.

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By the turn of the twentieth century both empires entered a period of political instability and turmoil, marked by state financial crises and foreign threat, and pressure to continue with military and bureaucratic reforms.30 Asymmetric entanglement of the Ottoman economy in the Western economic space, and its intensive growth heightened the conflict between different groups and the ruling order, whose ideology of Pan-Islamism became dysfunctional.31 A revolutionary struggle had already begun, as Namik Kemal had predicted, when ‘the army of spies’ chased after ‘the army of exiles turned into revolutionaries’ in 1889, the latter coming to be known as the Young Turks. Midhat’s Constitution and Parliament served as an inspiration to Ottoman liberals who sought to get rid of the sultan’s despotism. ‘Their concrete, primary objective,’ wrote Berkes, ‘was not to institute, but to restore, constitutional government.’32 Their discourse was further entangled with that of nationalism thanks also to intellectuals who came from territories lost to Russia.33 When they met at the Paris Congress of 1902, the Young Turks debated whether a federalized (and backed by Western Powers) or a unitary, centralized and nationalized (Turkish) empire34 were the best alternatives to save the empire. Russian-born and Ottoman-educated Tatar intellectual Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), in his political pamphlet titled ‘Üç Tarz-i Siyaset’ (Three Policies) in 1904, thought that Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism had failed, while a third alternative, nationalism represented the sole path to pursue.35 Nationalist revolution, however, would not take place even when the Young Turks, having established the Ittihad ve Terakki (Union and Progress) through a network of political organizations abroad and a group of military officers from the region of Salonica-Monastir, achieved the Revolution of 1908, ‘the first of its kind in the empire’,36 by reinstating Midhat’s constitution.37 Rather it was a restoration of Midhat’s new politics. They added the multiple-party system (nationalist, liberal, socialist and Islamist parties entered the Assembly), while in economic terms they were forcefully against capitulations.38 The Young Turks did not even apply the term revolution to describe their historical event, referring to it instead as İkinci Meşrutiyet (Second Constitutional Government),39 but retrospectively theirs, and the 1905 Russian Revolution, together with the Iranian Revolution of 1906, Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Chinese Revolutions of 1911, came to be seen as part of a ‘global wave’ of political change40 sharing a constitutional revolutionary paradigm.41 By now the nineteenth-century strategy for political reform – top-down transformation of the imperial states and incorporating some elements and principles of change to buy time and avoid revolutions – bore fewer results. Meanwhile, Ottoman and Russian opposition forces – emboldened by the

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respective states’ weaknesses and aiming at capturing each other’s imperial state – justified their claim to power by advocating a constitutional system of rule.42 As it happened, in the Ottoman Empire they would be more successful in controlling the reinstated Parliament because the military supported the constitutional government, whereas in the Russian Empire opposition forces, legally restricted by the new constitution, did not as state power, the government and the military remained in the hands of Tsar Nicholas II .43 If, for the Ottomans, the revolutionary change that ‘accelerated catastrophically’ from the 1908 Revolution (with the consequences of the First World War) to the Turkish national struggle of 1919 to 192244 altered the content of revolution from being constitutional to national45 (such revolution was still legally recognized by the ‘old regime’), that was not the case for the Bolshevik Revolution.46 V. I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Communists, who took over from the Provisional Government of 1917, which finally derived legitimacy not from the monarchical but from the Constituent Assembly (i.e. people’s sovereignty) eight months later, had ‘scant regard for law or for representative institutions’.47 Speransky had been right to suggest that it was relatively easier to establish an ‘external constitution’ as opposed to an ‘internal constitution’ for when the Bolshevik Revolution/coup took place, public opinion did not raise a voice against the destruction of the Constituent Assembly in early 1918. And indeed, the ensuing civil war between 1918 and 1921 was more about getting rid of Bolsheviks than restoring the constitutional government.48 The aim of this book is to uncover these long-term tensions of the political reform and search for stability in these two powers, which spilled over as tensions between domestic and foreign politics. Political reform served as the most viable alternative as well as a device (tool) for long-term stability against revolutionary change and internal and external decline; religious and new legal, economic norms and orders were such instruments for connecting reform to stability. Thus, the language of political reform was the middle ground between no change (stagnation and repression) and radical change (revolution), and became the cyclical political choice in the minds and deeds of nineteenth-century Ottoman and Russian imperial politics, as well as the wider European one. It is also what makes them part of the European nineteenth-century legacy of the transformation of imperial states. Their contribution to this legacy did not completely run its course at the turn of the century. Rather, because of the successes as well as failures associated with it, this language was overtaken by the powerful ideologies of communism and nationalism, and further undermined by the outcome of the Great War. And while it was difficult to see how the Ottoman Empire could be

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reformed as a multi-ethnic state with a nationalist project at the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Empire could re-order and expand as a new multi-national, centralized state with a universal political project, as Communism was – a new political alternative that shunned the course of gradual, top-down, change from within, and instead offered a profoundly radical but also top-down and revolutionary one. But unlike in the Ottoman case, this Communist revolutionary change was to be carried out by complete political ‘outsiders’ to the existing political system.

Notes Introduction 1 Edmund Burke, Miscellaneous Writings, E. J. Payne, ed., 1990. Library of Economics and Liberty, [accessed 1 February 2017]. 2 Russian and Ottoman historical dates referred to in this book use the modern calendar (Gregorian). 3 Emma Rothschild, ‘Political Economy’, in G. S. Jones and G. Claeys (eds), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 756. 4 Charles Tilly, ‘How Empires End’, in K. Barkey and M. von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 1. 5 Ibid., p. 5. 6 Eric J. Hobsbaum, ‘The End of Empires’, in K. Barkey and M. von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 13. 7 Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 4–6; Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 13–14. 8 Reynolds, Shattering Empires, p. 1. 9 On the Russian Empire, Jelavich argued that from the height of 1815 to the catastrophe of 1914, the decline, the slackening of the power and prestige was relative. The task of the Russian diplomacy was to preserve the boundaries of 1815; see Barbara Jelavich, A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814–1914 (Philadelphia and New York: J. P Lippincott Company, 1964), p. vi; also see Hugh Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914 (NY: Frederick A. Prager, 1961); on the Ottoman Empire see Alan Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1994); John B. Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1977). 10 For the point made on constitution as a viable, future alternative to the Ottoman Empire, see Caglar Keyder, ‘The Ottoman Empire’, in K. Barkey and M. von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, CO:

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11 12 13

14

15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25

Notes to pp. 4–7

Westview Press, 1997), p. 30; on the Russian Empire, see Mark von Hagen, ‘The Russian Empire’, in Barkey and von Hagen (eds), After Empire, p. 68. Tilly, ‘How Empires End’, p. 5. Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 5, footnote 5. Maurus Reinkowski, ‘The State’s Security and the Subject’s Prosperity: Notions of Order in Ottoman Bureaucratic Correspondence’, in H. T. Karateke and M. Reinkowski (eds), Legitimising the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), p. 200. From a political-economic perspective of capital accumulation and distribution this point has been made by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the TwentyFirst Century, trans. by A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 16. Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: William Heinemann, 2012), p. 70. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964); Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire; Sherif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Syracuse, N.Y: University Press, 2000 [1962]); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). Edhem Eldem, ‘Constantinople: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital’, in E. Eldem Daniel Goffman, Bruce Masters (eds), The Ottoman City between East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 135–206, at 197–8. Carter V. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 1. Virginia H. Aksan, ‘Theoretical Ottomans’, History and Theory 47 (February 2008), p. 5. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, p. 132. Virginia H. Aksan, ‘Ottoman Political Writing, 1768–1808’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 25, 1 (February 1993), p. 54. Ibid., p. 6; see also, Juan Cole, ‘Review of Bernard Lewis. What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Responses’, Global Dialogue, 27 January 2003, [accessed 15 January 2012]. Alan Wood, The Romanov Empire 1613–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 244. M. Destrilhes, Confidences sur la Turquie (Paris: Dentu 1855, Second Edition), p. 69; Edouard P. Englelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat; ou: Histoire des Reformes das l’empire ottoman depuis 1826 jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols (Paris: Impremeur-éditeur F. Pichon, 1884). Christine M. Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), p. 108.

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26 Ibid. 27 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 9. 28 P. N. Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury (Moscow: Izadetl’stvo MGTU, 1992). 29 Nathan Eidel’man, ‘Revoliutsii s vherkhu’ v Russii (Moscow: Izadetl’stvo ‘Kniga, 1989), p. 26. 30 Marc Raeff, ‘Toward a New Paradigm?’ in T. Sanders (ed.), Historiography of Imperial Russia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 481–2. 31 Ibid. 32 Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Interest-Group Politics in the Era of the Great Reforms’, in B. Eklof, John Bushnell, Larissa. Zakharova (eds), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 63. 33 Eidel’man, ‘Revoliutsii s vherkhu’, p. 26. 34 Theodore Taranovski, ‘The Problem of Reform in Russian and Soviet History’, in T. Taranovski (ed.), Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–24. 35 Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Book Reviews: Reform in Russia and the U.S.S.R.: Past and Prospects. Robert O. Crummey’, The Journal of Modern History 6, 2 (1993), pp. 435–6. 36 Taranovski, ‘The Problem of Reform in Russian and Soviet History’, pp. 1–24. 37 Kemal H. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 (1972), p. 243. 38 See Henning Trüpper, ‘Teleology and History: Nineteenth-Century Fortunes of an Enlightenment Project’, in M. Koskenniemi and B. Stråth (eds), Europe 1815–1914: Creating Community and Ordering the World (Helsinki: Unigrafia Oy, 2014), pp. 147–62; Henning Trüpper, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 39 G. W. F Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: with Selections from Philosophy of Right, trans. by Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1988). 40 Here the literature is vast, see for instance, Desmond Dinnan, The Origins and Evolution of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jan Zielonka (ed.), Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (London: Routledge, 2002). 41 See Luisa Passerini (ed.), Images and Myths of Europe (Brussels: PIE -Peter Lang, 2003); Anthony Padgen (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mikael Al Malmbord and Bo Stråth (eds), The Meaning of Europe (New York: Berg, 2002); Lars-Erik Cederman (ed.), Construction of Europe’s Identity: The External Dimension (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2001).

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Notes to pp. 9–11

42 See for instance a critical perspective on political process of the European integration by Hagen Schultz-Forberg and Bo Stråth, The Political History of European Integration: The Hypocrisy of Democracy-through-market (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 43 Attila Melegh, ‘Provincial Europe’, International Sociology Review of Books (2011), p. 3. 44 Bo Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace, 1815, 1919, 1951 (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 1–2. 45 Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. xi. 46 Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History, p. 220. 47 Charles Recknagel, ‘Mirror Images: Are Putin and Erdogan too Much Alike to Compromise?’ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 25 November, [accessed 5 December 2015]; see also Mehul Srivastava, Alex Barker, Kathrin Hille, ‘Putin and Erdogan: So Alike They Can’t Stand It’, Financial Times, 26 November 2015, [accessed 28 November 2015]. 48 Julia Eoffe, ‘The Tsar vs. the Sultan’, Foreign Policy, 25 November 2015, [accessed 27 December 2015]. 49 Recknagel, ‘Mirror Images’; see also, Srivastava, Barker, Hille, ‘Putin and Erdogan: So Alike They Can’t Stand It’. 50 Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 51 Alexei Miller and Alfred J. Rieber (eds), Imperial Rule (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004). 52 Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschehause (eds), Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). 53 Peter Holquist, ‘The Russian Empire as a “Civilized State”: International Law as Principle and Practice in Imperial Russia in 1874–1878’, NCEER (July 2004), p. 1. 54 See George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711–1905 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973). 55 Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 163. 56 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 72. 57 Milen Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside: Midhat Pasa and the Vilayet of Danube, 1864–1868’, unpublished PhD Thesis Princeton University, Department of Near Eastern Studies (Princeton, September 2006), p. 1.

Notes to pp. 11–17

203

58 See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 5–23. 59 Raeff, ‘Toward a New Paradigm?’, p. 485. 60 Aksan, Theoretical Ottomans’, p. 2. 61 Rieber, ‘Interest-Group Politics in the Era of the Great Reforms’, p. 63. 62 Richard Whatmore, What Is Intellectual History (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), pp. 52–4. 63 See Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, ‘The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, 2 (1980), pp. 174–97. 64 Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 255–7.

Part 1 Preface 1 Tom Hopkins, ‘Ordering the World in the Nineteenth Century’, in M. Koskenniemi and B. Stråth (eds), Europe 1815–1914: Creating Community and Ordering the World (Helsinki: Unigrafia Oy, 2014), pp. 33–43. 2 Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2012), p. 205. 3 V. I. Semevskii, ‘Pervyi politicheskii traktat Speranskogo’, Russkoe Bogatstvo 1 (1907), p. 52. 4 Reshat Kasaba, ‘Treaties and Friendships. British Imperialism, the Ottoman Empire and China in the 19th Century’, Journal of World History 4 (1993), p. 220.

Chapter 1 1 The full text of the draft would stay hidden from the public eyes until 1847 when some parts of it were published by Nikolas Turgenev, La Russie et les Russes (Paris, 1847), appearing in full only in 1905 in the journal Russkaia Mysl’; see Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia 1772–1839 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), p. 159. 2 Valentina G. Chernukha and Boris V. Anan’ich, ‘Russia Falls Back, Russia Catches Up: Three Generations of Russian Reformers’, in T. Taranovski (ed.), Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 57. 3 Ibid. Victor Taki, ‘In Search of True Monarchy: Montesquieu, Speranskii, Karamzin and Politics of Reform in the Early Nineteenth Century Russia’, European Review of History – Revue européene d’histoire 16, 1 (2009), pp. 125–49.

204

Notes to pp. 17–18

4 Raeff, Michael Speransky; Andrezj Walicki, ‘Russian Political Thought of the Nineteenth-Century’, in G. S. Jones and G. Claeys (eds), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 812. 5 In his book, Nikolas Turgenev described Speransky as someone having worked on the constitutional form of government and representation; while his first biographer, Baron M. A. Korf, considered him as simply engaged with improving the imperial bureaucratic machine; see Baron M. A. Korf, Zhizn’ grafa Speranskogo (St Petersburg: [n.d.], 1861). 6 Following Turgenev, this label was strongly asserted by historian V. I. Semevskii; see V. I. Semevskii, ‘Liberal’nye plany v pravitel’stvennykh sferakh v pervoi polovine tsarstvovaniia imperatora Aleksandra I’, in Otechestvennaia voina I russkoe obshchestvo, Vol. 2 (Moscow: [n.d.], 1912), pp. 152–94; Semevskii, ‘Pervyi politicheskii traktat Speranskogo’. Some later works maintain this view, see Georg Sacke, ‘M. M. Speranskij. Politische Ideologie und reformatorische Tatigkeit’, Jahrbacher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 4 (Munich, 1939), pp. 331–50. 7 See M. N. Pokrovsky, ‘Russkaya istoriya s drevneyshikh vremyon’, in Izbrannyye proizvedenmya, Vol. 2 (Moscow: [n.d.], 1965); S. M. Seredonin, ‘Graf M. M. Speransky’, in Russkiyb iograficheskiy slovar’ (St Petersburg, Moscow: [n.d.], 1909); B. Syromyatnikov, ‘M. M. Speransky kak gosudarstvennyy deyatel’ i politicheskiy myslitel’, Sovetskoye gosudarstvo i pravo 3 (Moscow: [n.d.], 1940), pp. 92–113; Raeff, Michael Speransky. 8 ‘Now all these men [Emperor Alexander’s members of the Secret Committee, Prince Adam Czartoryski, Nicholas Novosiltsev, Victor Kochubei, and Paul Stroganov] were replaced by Speransky on the civil side and Arakcheev on the military. Soon after his arrival Prince Andrei, as a gentleman of the chamber, presented himself at court and at a levee. The Emperor, though he met him twice, did not favour him with a single word. It has always seemed to Prince Andrei before that he was antipathetic to the Emperor and that the latter disliked his face and personality generally, and in the cold, repellent glance the Emperor gave him, he found further confirmation of this surmise.’ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 454. 9 Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 27; David Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, The Slavonic and East European Review 54, 2 (April 1976), p. 203. 10 Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’; John Gooding, ‘The Liberalism of Michael Speransky’, The Slavonic and East European Review 64, 3 (July 1986), pp. 401–24; Chernukha and Anan’ich, ‘Russia Falls Back, Russia Catches Up’; Alla Sheptun, ‘Russian Monetary Reformers: Speransky, Mordvinov and Bunge’, in V. Barnett and J. Zweynert (eds), Economics in Russia: Studies in Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), pp. 41–56; Larissa G. Zakharova, ‘From Reform to Revolution’, in Theodore Taranovski (ed.), Reform in Modern

Notes to pp. 18–23

11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

205

Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 97–124. Walicki, ‘Russian Political Thought of the Nineteenth-Century’, p. 811. The outcome of these treaties was more French geopolitical domination in Central Europe, the emergence of the Duchy of Warsaw, and more importantly the Russian Empire joined the French in a coalition against Britain, leading to an Anglo-Russian war (1807–1812), which was low-scale compared to previous wars against France, and moreover made Russia part of the Continental Blockade against Britain. Gooding, ‘The Liberalism of Michael Speransky’, p. 410. Domenic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 (London: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 49. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 30. Cynthia H. Whittaker, ‘The Idea of Autocracy’, in T. Sanders (ed.), Historiography of Imperial Russia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 17–30. Leonid Shirokorad, ‘Russian Economic Thought in the Age of the Enlightenment’, in V. Barnett and J. Zweynert (eds), Economics in Russia: Studies in Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), p. 26. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 165. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 199. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 32, footnote 2; see also, N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Alexander I, ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie (St. Petersburg: A. S. Surovin, 1898), Vol. 2, p. 6. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 32–3. Elmo E. Roach, ‘The Origins of Alexander I’s Unofficial Committee’, Russian Review 28, 3 (July 1969), pp. 315–21. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 33; Charles de Mazade, Mémoires du Prince Adam Czartoryski et correspondance avec l’Empereur Alexandre Ier, 2 vols (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et cie, 1887), Vol. 1, p. 96. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 66; Shil’der, Imperator Alexander I, Vol. 2, p. 22. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 68; Taki, ‘In Search of True Monarchy’, p. 131. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 33–6. Ibid., pp. 12–28. Marc Raeff, ‘The Philosophical Views of Count M.M. Speransky’, The Slavonic and East European Review 31, 77 (June 1953), p. 446. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 23–4. Ibid., p. 120; see also, V. I. Semevskii, ‘Pervyi politicheskii traktat Speranskogo’, pp. 62–3. Taki, ‘In Search of True Monarchy’, p. 128. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 207. Quoted in Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 120. S. N. Valk (ed.), M. M. Speransky: Proyekty i zapiski (Leningrad: [n.d.], 1961), p. 28.

206 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Notes to pp. 24–28

Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 204. Ibid. Ibid., see also Valk, M. M. Speransky: Proyekty i zapiski, p. 31. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 204. There was a great reception of this work in the Russian intellectual circles of the time. See Stella Ghervas, ‘La Réception de L’Esprit des lois en Russie: histoire de quelques ambiguïtés’, in M. Porret and C. Volpilhac (eds), Le Temps de Montesquieu (Geneva: Droz, 2002), p. 398. Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. by T. Nugent (Digireads.com Publishing, 2010), p. 137. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1893 [1753]). Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 205. Ibid., p. 204; Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 120–1. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 120–1. Ibid. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 206. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 124. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 206. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 124; Semevskii, ‘Pervyi politicheskii traktat Speranskogo’, p. 74. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 125. Ibid., pp. 125–6. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 209; Valk, M. M. Speransky: Proyekty i zapiski, p. 75. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 204. Ibid., p. 207. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 131; Semeveskii, ‘Pervyi politicheskii traktat Speranskogo’, p. 127. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 215. Semevskii, ‘Pervyi politicheskii traktat Speranskogo’, pp. 53–4; Raeff, Michael Speransky, p, 216. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 224. Quoted in ibid., p. 225. Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, ‘History of the Senate’, [accessed 20 January 2015]. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 37. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., pp. 134–5. Semevskii, ‘Pervyi politicheskii traktat Speranskogo’, p. 52.

Notes to pp. 29–36 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87

88 89

207

Quoted in Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 55. Ibid., pp. 26–7. Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 212. Valk, M. M. Speransky: Proyekty i zapiski, p. 143. Ryan, On Politics, p. 499. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 224. Ibid., p. 141. Walter M. Pintner, ‘Reformability in Robert O. Crummey (ed.) (the Age of Reform and Counterreform, 1855–94)’, in R. O. Crummey (ed.), Reform in Russia and the U.S.S.R.: Past and Prospects (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 93. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 147–8. Ibid., pp. 145–6. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 152. Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825 (Stanford, CN: Stanford University Press, 1964 [1937]), p. 26. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 114–15. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 145–6. Ibid., pp. 85–6; see also, Adrian Brisku, ‘Empires without Cosmopolitanism? Locating Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman and Russian Empires’, in M. García-Salmones and P. Slotte (eds), Cosmopolitanisms in Enlightenment and Beyond (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2013), p. 137; Norman W. Taylor, ‘Adam Smith’s First Russian Disciple’, The Slavonic and East European Review 45 (1967), pp. 425–38. Quoted in Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 52–3. Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy: The Systems and Politics (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), Vol. 2. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 54. Russia had become party to this international system set up by Napoleon I in the Berlin Decree of 21 November 1806. This Decree, together with the subsequent Milan Decree of 1807 and Rambouillet Decree of 1810, setting up the Continental Blockade, were attempts by Napoleon I, during great commercial wars with Britain, to conquer it through the destruction of its commerce. See ‘Documents upon the Continental System’, The Napoleon Series [accessed 20 March 2010]. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 78. Ibid., pp. 77–8.

208

Notes to pp. 36–39

90 Being in a state of war with the Ottoman empire, the Emperor had reasoned that there was always the danger of Russian vessels being captured by the Ottomans. Yet, the Odessa grain producers and merchants petitioned the tsar to permit free grain trade because, while they were getting financially ruined, the Ottomans were not affected as they could get supplies from Britain. Ibid., p. 78. 91 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 92 Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, p. 126. 93 See Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2005). 94 Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825, pp. 13–17. 95 Sheptun, ‘Russian Monetary Reformers: Speransky, Mordvinov and Bunge’, p. 41. 96 Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 83–99; W. Stanley Jevons, Richard Cantillon and the Nationality of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1905 [1881]). 97 Ibid., p. 88. 98 Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 101. 99 Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, p. 106. 100 Christian, ‘The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky’, p. 201. 101 Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 160. 102 Ibid., p. 160. 103 Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 5. 104 Stella Ghervas, Réinventer la Tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et L’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance (Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 2008), p. 12. 105 Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp.161–2. 106 Taki, ‘In Search of True Monarchy’, p. 125. 107 Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 64–5. 108 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 109 Ibid., p. 166, see footnote 2. 110 Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 8; see also Valk (ed.), M. M. Speransky: Proyekty i zapiski, p. 24. 111 A. N. Fateev, ‘K istorii iuridicheskoi obrazovannosti v Rossii’, Uchenye Zapiski osnovanye russkoi uchebnoi kollegie v Prage (Prague: [n.d.], 1924), Vol. 3, p. 219; Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 40. 112 Field, The End of Serfdom, p. 9. 113 Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 171. 114 Ibid., pp. 172–3.

Notes to pp. 39–44

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115 Ibid., p. 174. 116 Ibid., p. 175. 117 Ibid.; Gooding, ‘The Liberalism of Michael Speransky’, p. 424; Korf, Zhizn’ grafa Speranskogo, p. 17. 118 Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, p. 106. 119 Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 187–93. 120 Ibid., p. 117. 121 Quoted in W. P. Cresson, The Holy Alliance: The European Background of the Monroe Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1922), p. 20. 122 Harold Nicholson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822 (New York: Grove Press, 1946), p. 250. 123 V. K. Nadler, Imperator Aleksander I i ideia sviashchennago soiuza, 5 vols (Riga: [n.d.], 1886–1892), Vol. 1, p. 3. 124 Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I (London and New York: Longman, 1994), p. 133. 125 Quoted in ibid. 126 Ghervas, Réinventer la Tradition, p. 183. 127 Hartley, Alexander I, p. 135; see Adam Müller, Die Elemente der Staatskunst (Berlin: Sander, 1809). 128 Hartley, Alexander I, p. 135. 129 Francis Ley, Alexandre 1er et sa sainte-alliance (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1975), p. 126. 130 The tsar authorized the establishment of the Russian Bible Society, modelled after the British and Foreign Bible Society. Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 165. 131 Henry Troyat, Alexandre 1er: Le sphinx du nord (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), pp. 311–12. 132 Ghervas, Réinventer la Tradition, p. 71. 133 Ibid., p. 12. 134 Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace, p. 65. 135 In the book titled Istoriya diplomatii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoj literarury, 1959), the Holy Alliance is seen as ‘an organization with a sharply delineated monarchical-clerical ideology, built on the ideas of revolution and repression of political and religious freedom of thought, wherever they may be manifested’. L. V. Mel’nikova, ‘Aleksandr I i sozdanie Svyashchennogo soyuza’, [accessed 27 March 2011]. 136 Ol’ga V. Orlik, Rossiya v Mezhdunarodnyh otnosheniyah, 1815–1829: Ot Venskogo kongressa do Adrianopol’skogo mira (Moscow: Nauka, 1998). 137 Maurice Bourquin, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance (Geneva: Georg, 1954); Cresson, The Holy Alliance; Ley, Alexandre 1er et sa sainte-alliance; John Hunter Sedgwick,

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138 139 140 141 142

143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

155 156 157

158 159 160 161

Notes to pp. 44–48 ‘The New Holy Alliance’, The North American Review 220, 825 (December, 1924), pp. 199–208; Jacques-Henry Pirenne, La Sainte-Alliance: Organisation européenne de la paix mondiale, Vol. 1 (Neuchatel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946); Ghervas, Réinventer la tradition. Hartley, Alexander I, p. 134. Prince Clemens von Metternich, Metternich: The Autobiography, 1773–1815 (Welwyn Garden City: Ravenhall Books, 2004), p. 262. Ibid. Ibid., p. 260. Adrian Brisku, ‘The Holy Alliance as “An Order of Things Conformable to the Interests of Europe and to the Laws of Religion and Humanity” ’, in T. Hippler and M. Vec (eds), Paradoxes of Peace in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 160. Metternich, Metternich: The Autobiography, 1773–1815, p. 261. Hartley, Alexander I, p. 134. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, p. 36. Troyat, Alexandre 1er: Le sphinx du nord, p. 313. Nadler, Imperator Aleksander I i ideia sviashchennago soiuza, Vol. 5, p. 637. Ghervas, Réinventer la Tradition, p. 186; see also A. M. Martin, ‘A. S. Sturdza I “Svjaščennyi sojuz” ’, Voprosy istorii 11 (1994), pp. 143–55. Mel’nikova, ‘Aleksandr I i sozdanie Svyashchennogo soyuza’, p. 6. Ley, Alexandre 1er et sa sainte-alliance, pp. 163–4. Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 211. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid. The decree elevated the diverse protestant churches in the empire to the same status as the Russian Orthodox Church – a move that still put them under the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church and allowing the latter to exercise certain controls over them. Ibid., pp. 167–76. Cresson, The Holy Alliance, p. 21. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Matthias Schulz, ‘Paradoxes of a Great Power Peace’, in T. Hippler and M. Vec (eds), Paradoxes of Peace in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 134. Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917, p. 175. O. J Frederiksen, ‘Alexander I and His League to End Wars’, Russian Review 3, 1 (Autumn 1943), pp. 14–15. Mel’nikova, ‘Aleksandr I i sozdanie Svyashchennogo soyuza’, p. 3. Ley, Alexandre 1er et sa sainte-alliance, p. 39.

Notes to pp. 48–51

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162 Alan Palmer, Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), p. 83. 163 Very likely they drew on the idea of early seventeenth-century French Minister, Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully’s Grand Dessin, an advice for the French king Henry IV to create peace among European monarchies on the principles that states had to have equal power and common faith. See Maximilien de Bethune, Baron de Rosny and Duc de Sully, ‘Mémoires des sages et royales œconomies d’estat, domestiques, politiques et militaires de Henry le Grand . . .’ in Nouvelle collection des mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe, Second Series, Books II and III (Paris: Edition Michaud et Poujoulat, 1837); see Brisku, ‘The Holy Alliance’, p. 160. 164 Anthony Padgen, The Enlightenment. And Why It Still Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 348. 165 Ley, Alexandre 1er et sa sainte-alliance, p. 40. 166 Quoted in Charles Morley, ‘Cartoryski’s Attempts at a New Foreign Policy under Alexander I’, American Slavic and East European Review 12, 4 (December 1953), p. 476. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid., p. 477. 169 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 170 Mazade, Mémoires du Prince Adam Czartoryski, Vol. 2, pp. 34–6. 171 N. Notovitch, La Russie et l’alliance anglaise (Paris: Plon, 1906), p. 202. 172 Hartley, Alexander I, p. 69. 173 Notovitch, La Russie et l’alliance anglaise, p. 202. 174 Palmer, Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace, p. 83. 175 This alliance, that was soon joined by Austria, set the basis for the Third Coalition, which like the ensuing Fourth Coalition would be crushed by Napoleon’s Grande Armée, in ibid., pp. 86–7. 176 Ibid., p. 87. 177 Pirenne, La Sainte-Alliance, p. 237. 178 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2010 [2005]), p. 119. 179 Pirenne, La Sainte-Alliance, p. 237. 180 Ibid. 181 Angela T. Pienkos, The Imperfect Autocrat Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich and the Polish Congress Kingdom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 29. 182 Palmer, Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace, p. 312. 183 The Charte Constitutionelle guaranteed equality before the law and religious toleration. The two constitutional achievements of Napoleon I were maintained, namely, the Civil Code and the Concordat with the Pope. Executive power was

212

184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192

193 194

195 196

197 198 199 200 201 202 203

Notes to pp. 51–55 given to the king and a bicameral assembly was set up that was to be chosen by a restricted voting population. The assembly had limited legislative power, with no right to initiate legislation but with the right to reject and not amend a bill proposed by the king, see Hartley, Alexander I, p. 129. Quoted in ibid. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 42–3. Georges Vernadsky, La Charte Constitutionelle de l’Empire russe de l’an 1820 (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1933). Ley, Alexandre 1er et sa sainte-alliance, pp. 209–28. Quoted in ibid. Ibid., pp. 219–20. Ibid., pp. 220–1. Mel’nikova, ‘Aleksandr I i sozdanie Svyashchennogo soyuza’, pp. 8–9. This represented a culminating point in sprouting liberal activities of German students and proclamations of liberal constitutions by some princes in some German states. See, Stråth, Europe’s Utopia’s of Peace, pp. 67–8. Bourquin, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance, p. 250. In Cadiz, Spain, the 1 January 1820 military revolt of the liberals against the re-established Bourbon Monarchy of Ferdinand VII managed to re-institute the liberal constitution of 1812 that had been abolished in 1814; followed by the insurrection of the secret society of Carbonari in Naples, in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, in July 1820 that was also able to force king Ferdinand I to grant a constitution modelled after the Spanish Constitution of 1812; and the military revolt of Oporto in Portugal in August of that year. Ibid., pp. 264–74. This came about following a stream of disquieting news within his realm, the disturbances in the Polish Diet (over time the tsar had granted almost dictatorial powers to his brother, viceroy to the Congress of Poland, Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich); by 1819 the tsar had abolished the freedom of the press and introduced preventive censorship (his government coming under constant pressures); and the revolt in the prestigious Semovnosky Guards (a peaceful protest against excessive military measures of a certain Colonel F. E Schwarc that was put down heavyhandedly by his government); see Hartley, Alexander I, p. 216. Mel’nikova, ‘Aleksandr I i sozdanie Svyashchennogo soyuza’, p. 9. Bourquin, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance, p. 254. Ghervas, Réinventer la Tradition, pp. 81–2. Quoted in Hartley, Alexander I, p. 152. Ibid. Bourquin, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance, p. 283. Ibid., p. 298.

Notes to pp. 55–60

213

204 Patricia K. Grimstead, ‘Capodistrias and a “New Order” for Restoration Europe: “The Liberal Ideas” of a Russian Foreign Minister, 1814–1822’, The Journal of Modern History 40, 2 (June 1968), pp. 175–6. 205 Bourquin, Histoire de la Sainte Alliance, pp. 299–314. 206 Ibid., p. 373. 207 Offering to send Russian troops there that would transit through French territory. Ibid., pp. 316–26. 208 France, keen to suppress the revolution in Madrid, was pivotal in dividing the two issues into a metropolitan and colonial one, and politely refusing the movement of a promised 150,000 Russian troops, leaving the tsar, together with the two other core countries of the Holy Alliance, Austria and Prussia, to back a protocol that gave France free hand to intervene in Spain. Ibid., pp. 341–8. 209 Hartley, Alexander I, p. 157. 210 Mel’nikova, ‘Aleksandr I i sozdanie Svyashchennogo soyuza’, p. 10. 211 The Tsar had put forward a plan for the establishment of three autonomous Greek principalities, similar to the status of the Danubian principalities of Moldova and Wallachia. The Greek side did not accept the proposal because it offered too little whereas the Turks rejected it because they saw in it too much to lose. 212 Hartley, Alexander I, pp. 159–60. 213 Ley, Alexandre 1er et sa sainte-alliance, p. 272. See Paul Bourychkine, Bibliographie sur la franc-maçonnerie en Russie (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1967). 214 Mel’nikova, ‘Aleksandr I i sozdanie Svyashchennogo soyuza’, p. 12. 215 Hartley, Alexander I, p. 160. 216 Quoted in Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, pp. 113–14. 217 Ibid., p. 180; Marc Raeff, The Decembrist Movement (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1966), pp. 3–5; N. M. Chentsov, Vosstanie Dekabristov – Bibliographia (Moscow and Leningrad: Tsentrarkhiv, 1929). 218 Raeff, Michael Speransky, p. 308. 219 Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, pp. 95–7. 220 Raeff, The Decembrist Movement, p. 12; S. S. Volk, Istoricheskie vzgliady Dekabristov (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR Publ., 1958). 221 Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, pp. 88–94. 222 Ibid., p. 100. 223 Ibid., pp. 100–13. 224 Raeff, The Decembrist Movement, p. 39. 225 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 226 Raeff, Mikhail Speransky, p. 316. 227 Mazour, The Decembrist Movement. pp. 267–8. 228 Ibid., p. 160. 229 Ibid., pp. 265–6.

214

Notes to pp. 61–63

Chapter 2 1 Appreciation of poetry among bureaucrats and statesmen went along with it serving as a venue for advancing political careers. Hippolyte Castille, Réchid-Pacha (Paris: Ferdinand Sartorius, 1857), p. 19. 2 Abdolonyme Ubicini, Lettres sur la Turquie, Partie 1 (Paris: Elibron Classics, 2007 [1853]), p. 31. 3 Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 103–6. 4 Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 72. 5 Karpat, ‘Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 258; Reshat Kaynar, Mustafa Reshid Pasha ve Tanzimat (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1954). 6 Quoted in Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 72. 7 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 105. 8 Harold Temperley, England and the Near East: The Crimea (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1936), p. 162. 9 Quoted in ibid. 10 Edouard P. Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat; ou: Histoire des Reformes das l’empire ottoman depuis 1826 jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Impremeur-éditeur F. Pichon, 1884), Vol. 1, p. 36. 11 Ubicini, Lettres sur la Turquie, p. 3. 12 See Linda T. Darling, ‘Circle of Justice’, in Kate Fleet, Gudrum Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson (eds), Encyclopedia of Islam, Three, [accessed 6 December 2016]. 13 Aksan, ‘Ottoman Political Writing, 1768–1808’, pp. 53–69. 14 Small corps of new troops trained by foreign instructors 15 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 113. 16 The highest ranking religious scholar in the empire with the authority to confirm the sultan, to issue decrees, to represent the law of Shariah; the link between religion and state. 17 Comprised of infantry units, the janissaries – (new soldiers) young Christian boys recruited through devshirme (a system of conscription for the Ottoman military and bureaucracy) – represented the first Ottoman standing army created in the second half of the fourteenth century, which lasted until 1826. Essential in any campaigns of war, they were fiercely loyal slaves to the sultan. They exerted enormous influence in Ottoman politics, at times deciding the fate of the empire. André Clot, Suleiman the Magnificent (London: Saqi, 2005), p. 15. 18 Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries, p. 437. 19 Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 103. 20 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 113.

Notes to pp. 63–66

215

21 The kanun was the code of law promulgated by Sultan Suleiman (r. 1520–1566) – the sultan was also known as the Lawgiver. It was composed of five sections: the first, called kanuni defter, dealt with laws of the finances; the second, kanuni djeraim, was the law of offences and penalties; the third, kanun sefer, regulated the military discipline; the fourth, kanuni timar, was concerned with military fiefs; and the last, kanuni techrifat, set the ceremonial rules of the Ottoman court. Meanwhile, the Shariah, the Muslim Holy Law, was comprised of four sources which are laid out in the Koran, aside from important gaps, as dispositions on the patriarchal power, the testaments, substitutions and contracts. 22 Quoted in Frank E. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement: A Study in Anglo-Turkish Relations, 1826–1853 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 277–8. 23 Ibid., p. 277. 24 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 39. 25 These terms sound more radical in the official French text than the Turkish one – ‘new institutions’, is ‘some new laws’ whereas ‘alternation and complete renovation’ is ‘complete alternation and delimitation’. Ibid. 26 Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 108. 27 Ottoman historiography considers him as the sole drafter of the Hatti, while some authors such as Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel K. Shaw suggest that the text was prepared at the Porte by its Consultative Council, however under his guidance. See Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel K. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Butrus Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century (1826–1876) (Constantinople: The Isis Press, 2001), pp. 73–5. 28 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 40. 29 Stefano Taglia, ‘Ottomanism Then and Now: Historical and Contemporary Meanings. An Introduction’, Die Welt Des Islams 56 (2016), p. 281. 30 See Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (London: Popular, 1890). 31 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 145. 32 Ibid., p. 146. 33 Ubicini, Lettres sur la Turquie, p. 144; Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2008 [1955]), p. 272. 34 Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p. 14. 35 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 194. 36 Nicholas Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, Zeitscrift fur Osteuropaische Geschichte 2 (1912), p. 384. 37 Halil Inalcik, ‘Decision Making in the Ottoman State’, in C. E. Farah (ed.), Decision Making and Change in the Ottoman Empire (Kirksville, MO: The Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1993), pp. 11–12.

216 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

Notes to pp. 66–70

Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 385. Quoted in Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 42. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 148. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 154. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 72. Quoted in Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 148–9. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 73; Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey; Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 2nd Edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), p. 62. Alexander Bitis, ‘The Russian Army and the Eastern Question’, PhD Thesis, The London School of Economics (2000), pp. 279–86. Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, p. 101. Aksan, ‘Ottoman Political Writing, 1768–1808’, p. 59. See M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923: A Study in International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1966). Aksan, ‘Ottoman Political Writing, 1768–1808’, p. 60. Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam, pp. 44–5. Viorel Panaite, The Ottoman Law of War and Peace: The Ottoman Empire and the Tribute Payers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 31. Virginia H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi 1700–1783 (Leiden, New York, Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1995), p. 200. Castille, Réchid-Pacha, p. 28. Reshad Kaynar, Mustafa Reshid Pasha ve Tanzimat (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1954), pp. 148–51. Castille, Réchid-Pacha, p. 77. Ibid., p. 78. This was in line with a series of events that had undermined and broken the longest standing non-ideological alliance of its kind, the Franco-Ottoman Alliance, between a Christian and a Muslim empire. This alliance was formalized in 1536 between Francis I of France and Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire, through the signing of the Capitulations. Agreeing on the pretext of defending the Christians in the Ottoman Lands, the Alliance was in fact aimed against the powerful house of the Habsburgs. The Capitulations, or Ahdname as they were called in the Ottoman Empire, meaning ‘official agreement’, had a strong commercial dimension as they conferred rights and privileges in favour of subject residing or trading in the Ottoman lands. See Maurits H. van den Boogert and Kate Fleet (eds), The Ottoman Capitulations: Text and Context (Rome: Instituto per l’Oriente C.A. Nallino, 2003). Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 129. K. E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 102.

Notes to pp. 70–77 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

217

See also Philliou, Biography of an Empire, p. 118. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 49. Quoted in ibid., p. 54. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Russian Identities: A Historical Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 135. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 54. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 134. Robin Okey, Habsburg Monarchy c. 1765–1918: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (New York: Macmillan, St Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 78. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 134. Ibid., pp. 160–1. Castille, Réchid-Pacha, p. 22. Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 98. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 161. Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 98. Ibid., pp. 98–9. Quoted in ibid., p. 99. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 170. The European powers were prepared to recognize Mehmet Ali as the ruler of the new Egyptian dynasty, but they had different interests in ensuring the internal political stability of the Ottoman Empire. See Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, p. 107. Ibid., pp. 107–8. Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 37. Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 108. Ibid., p. 100. Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century (1826–1876), p. 94. Ibid., p. 110. F. S. Rodkey, ‘Lord Palmerston’s Policy for the Rejuvenation of Turkey, 1839–1841’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12, Fourth Series (1929), p. 171. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 188. Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 387. Rodkey, ‘Lord Palmerston’s Policy for the Rejuvenation of Turkey, 1839–1841’, p. 172. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 273. Ibid., p. 274. Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 393. Ibid. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 275.

218 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Notes to pp. 77–82 Ibid., p. 274. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 163. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 69. Ibid., pp. 275–6; Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p. 158. Quoted in Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 276. This is generally the meaning used in the sources: a king who governs with violence, disregarding justice and the law. Although synonymous with despotic, there are slight differences in that the former implies the illegal usurpation of power to govern according to the law, whereas the latter implies exercising power outside of the law. For Rousseau, ‘the tyrant need not be a despot, but the despot is always a tyrant’. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 193–4. Castille, Réchid-Pacha, p. 18. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 23. The establishment of the Translation Office in 1821 was a direct outcome of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution. Until this time, the Ottoman diplomatic and consular services had been run by the Greek Phanariot elite, which came under attack following the revolution, and the Ottoman state intended to replace them with Muslim scribal officials. Indeed, the Translation Office combined a mixture of educational and bureaucratic roles. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 132–7. Castille, Réchid-Pacha, p. 25. Findley, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 163. Castille, Réchid-Pacha, p. 27. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 182. Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 383. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908’, p. 271. Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 387. Quoted in Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 271. Adolphus Slade, Turkey and the Crimean War (London: Smith and Elder, 1867), p. 32. Quoted in Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 391. Ibid. Ibid. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 272. Quoted in ibid., p. 172. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p. 175. Ibid., p. 174. Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century, p. 74.

Notes to pp. 82–86

219

122 Accordingly, these elites had been concerned about the long period of decline that the empire had befallen whereby the ability of the central state to collect its taxes and to protect the life, honour and property of the subjects – which was the task of the Ottoman state – was constantly undermined, while oppression and tyranny became omnipresent. They viewed the early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire as a decentralized system of government with local lords, throughout its territory, enjoying complete freedom whereas the authority of the sultan had become ineffective, a perception that was reverted under Sultan Mahmud II . Ibid., p. 78. 123 Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p. 175. 124 Ibid., pp. 209–10. 125 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 130; see also Mustafa Aksakal, ‘Europeanization, Islamization and the New Imperialism of the Ottoman State’, in T. Hippler and M. Vec (eds), Paradoxes of Peace in the Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 251. 126 Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, pp. 178–9. 127 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 131. 128 Cemil Aydin, ‘Globalizing the Intellectual History of the Idea of the “Muslim World” ’, in S. Moyen and A. Sartori (eds), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 164. 129 Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, pp. 179–80. 130 Ibid., pp. 177–8. 131 Quoted in Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 131. 132 Ibid., p. 180. 133 Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, pp. 180–1. 134 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 131–2. 135 Quoted in Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, pp. 182–3. 136 Ibid., p. 183. 137 Ibid., p. 184. 138 Quoted in ibid., pp. 186–7. 139 Quoted in Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 390. 140 Quoted in Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p. 186. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., p. 187. 143 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 157. 144 Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century, p. 86. 145 Ibid., p. 87. 146 Ibid., p. 88. 147 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 153. 148 Le Baron Antoine Juchereau de Saint Denys, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, 1792–1844, Vol. 4 (Paris: [n.d.], 1844), p. 239.

220

Notes to pp. 86–92

149 Castille, Réchid-Pacha, p. 31. 150 Ibid., p., 35. 151 Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History, p. 156; Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century, p. 94. 152 Metin Heper, ‘Centre and Periphery in the Ottoman Empire: With Special Reference to the Nineteenth Century’, International Political Science Review 1, 1 (1980), p. 92. 153 Ibid. 154 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, pp. 196–7. 155 Ibid., p. 198. 156 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 237. 157 Ibid., p. 198. 158 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 111. 159 Ibid., p. 199. 160 Quoted in Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 200. 161 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 231. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid., p. 238. 164 Quoted in ibid., p. 238. 165 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 84–5. 166 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 238. 167 Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 44. 168 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, pp. 200–1. 169 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 111. 170 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 170. 171 Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 389. 172 Ibid., p. 386. 173 For his part Reshid maintained that his downfall had nothing to do with whether the code was in accordance with the Holy Law. Rather, it had been a plot set by Rifat Pasha colluding with the British Ambassador Ponsonby, and another political foe, Riza Pasha, who convinced the sultan to dismiss him. Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 163. 174 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, pp. 200–4. 175 Quoted in Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 49; Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 394. 176 Quoted in Milev, ‘Rechid pacha a la reforme Ottomane’, p. 397. 177 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 164. 178 Ibid., p. 158. 179 Ibid., pp. 158–9. 180 Donald Quataert, ‘The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914’, in H. Inalcik and D. Quataert (eds), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 761–2.

Notes to pp. 93–96

221

181 Sevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1987]), pp. 9–10. 182 Brisku, ‘Empires without Cosmopolitanism’, p. 135; Halik Inalcik, ‘Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Economic History 29 (1969), pp. 135–6. 183 Quataert, ‘The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914’, p. 826. 184 Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 188–9. 185 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 150. 186 Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, pp. 69–70. 187 Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 188–9. 188 Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, p. 764. 189 Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, p. 57. 190 Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 70. 191 Brisku, ‘Empires without Cosmopolitanism’, p. 135. 192 Kasaba,‘Treaties and Friendships. British Imperialism, the Ottoman Empire and China in the 19th Century’, p. 220. 193 Yaşar Bülbül, ‘Transfer of Political Economy by A Traditional Society: Ilm-i Tedbir-i Menzil in the Ottoman Empire’, in A. G. Miroli and D. M. Weisman (eds), Actas de las XIII Jornadas de Epistemología de las Ciencias Económicas Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1st Edition, CIECE – Centro de Investigación en Epistemología de las Ciencias Económicas, Buenos Aires, 2007. 194 Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, p. 105; Brisku, ‘Empires without Cosmopolitanism’, p. 135. 195 Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p. 188. 196 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 72. 197 Quoted in Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 124. 198 Ibid., p. 122. 199 Ibid., pp. 122–5. 200 Quataert, ‘The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914’, pp. 825–6. 201 Necmettin Dogan, ‘The Origins of Liberalism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire’, Dissertation zur Erlagung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie am Institut für Soziologie, Fachbereich Politik – und Sozialwissenschaften der Freien Universität [Dissertation on the Doctoral Degree in Philosophy at the Institute of Sociology, Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität] (Berlin, 2006), p. 165. 202 Temperley, England and the Near East, pp. 167–8. 203 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 111. 204 Temperley, England and the Near East, pp. 167–8. 205 Ibid., p. 89. 206 Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 207–9. 207 Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, pp. 90–2.

222

Notes to pp. 96–99

208 Stanley Lane-Pool, The Life of Stratford de Redcliffe (London: Popular, 1890), pp. 12–18. 209 W. E. Mosse, ‘The Return of Reschid Pasha: An Incident in the Career of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe’, The English Historical Review 68, 269 (October 1953), p. 546. 210 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 228. 211 See Muriel. E. Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen: A Political Biography (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Education Publishers Inc., 1983), pp. 10–60. 212 Quoted in Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 209. 213 Ibid., p. 212. 214 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 226. 215 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 214. 216 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 230. 217 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 218. 218 Temperley, England and the Near East, p. 232 219 Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 215. 220 Except for the military schools set up in the eighteenth century with the help of French advisors – the Artillery School (1735), Royal School of Navel Engineering (1773) – and the training of state bureaucrats, in which the Translation Office had a prominent role, the Ottoman state did not have a formal system of education for its subjects. The Galata Palace Imperial School founded in 1481, transformed into a Medical School in 1839, was followed, after the Reform Edict of 1856, by schools that offered teaching on secular subjects. Such were the Galatasaray Lyceum in 1866 – set up following Sultan Abdülaziz’s 1867 Edict on Public Education – the School of Finance (1876), School of Law (1878), School of Commerce (1882) and the first Ottoman University which opened in 1919. See F. W. Frey, ‘Education in Turkey’, in R. E. Ward and D. A. Rustow (eds), Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 205–35; Gürsel Urtug, Ferruh F. Yücel, Hakan H. Ay, ‘The Role of Austrian Physicians and Prof Joseph Hyrtl (1804–1884) on Modernization of Ottoman Turkish Medicine’, Annals of Anatomy 185, 6 (2004), p. 494. 221 Peter the Great, after a close correspondence with his scientific academic advisor, German polymath Gottfried W. Leibniz (1711–1716), sought to establish a higher scientific and educational institution that would supply effective military and civil servants in line with his goal of creating a modern well-ordered state. This led to the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1725) and one of the first state-run universities in Europe, Moscow University (conceived in 1726 and established in 1755) in which secular subjects, law, medicine and philosophy were taught. Then, during Tsar Alexander I’s reign, between 1804 and 1819, new universities were set up: in Vilna, Dorpat (Tartu), Kazan, Kharkov and St Petersburg. See, Vera Kaplan, ‘The History of Reform in Russian Higher Education’, European Education 39, 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 38–43.

Notes to pp. 99–107

223

222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233

Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, p. 233. Ibid., pp. 218–20. Ibid., pp. 241–2. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 242. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 84. Ibid. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 82. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, p. 84. Philliou, Biography of an Empire, pp. 148–9. Slade, Turkey and the Crimean War, p. 32. Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854–1856 (New York: St Martin’s Press Griffin, 2000), pp. 15–34. 234 Alan J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 60–1. 235 Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 104.

Part 2 Preface 1 2 3 4 5

Hont, The Jealousy of Trade, p. 7. Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951, p. 5. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, pp. 13–17. Raeff, Michael Speransky, pp. 172–3. Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism, pp. 106–13.

Chapter 3 1

In contemporary accounts and works on what came to be known as the era of the Great Reforms, Nikolai Miliutin has been regarded as a great figure in the emancipation work. He has been accredited as being the most important person for pushing forward the cause of emancipation in the Editorial Commissions of 1859–1860. See G. Dzhanshiev, Epokha velikikh reform, 9th Edition (St. Petersburg: [n.d.], 1905); Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Un Homme d’état Russe (Nicolas Milutine) d’aprèd sa correspondance inedited. Étude sur la Russie et la Pologne pendant le règne d’Alexandre II (1855–1872) (Paris: [n.d.], 1884); W. Bruce Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin: An Enlightened Russian Bureaucrat of the 19th Century (Newtonville, MA : Oriental Research Partners, 1977).

224 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Notes to pp. 107–113

Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 7–9. Ibid., p. 9. E. M. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II (London: Bodley Head, Ltd, 1962), p. 69. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 14–18. Quoted in Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, p. 9. Marc Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Boulder, CO : Westview Press, 1994), p. 89. Ibid., p. 100. W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats 1825–1861 (DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 168. Tatiana Borisova, ‘Russian National Legal Tradition: Svod versus Ulozhenie in Nineteenth-century Russia’, Review of Central and East European Law 33 (2008), p. 314. Heide W. Whelan, Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and CounterReform in Late Imperial Russia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), pp. 47–8. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, pp. 3–16. S. Frederick Starr, Decentralisation and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870 (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 51–2. Borisova, ‘Russian National Legal Tradition’, p. 331. Quoted in Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander M. Martin, ‘The Rule of Law in Russia: Invitation to a Discussion in e-Kritika’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, 1 (Winter 2005), p. 2. Starr, Decentralisation and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870, pp. 52–3. Ibid., p. 53. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 66. It referred to the patronage of the tsar’ brother, Duke Konstantin (1827–1892), who transformed the imperial navy. This notion was understood as having a liberal connotation. Yuri. V. Zeldich, Pyotr Aleksandrovich Valuev i ego vremya (Moscow: Agraf, 2005), pp. 600–77. Quoted in Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 165. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 34. G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford, CN : Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 27–77. Quoted in Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 35. Quoted in Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 177. Ibid., p. 174. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 40.

Notes to pp. 113–117 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51

52

225

Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 150. Ibid., pp. 152–4. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 36–7. Kersti Lust, ‘Kiselev’s Reforms of State Peasants: The Baltic Perspective’, Journal of Baltic Studies 9, 1 (March 2008), p. 57. Quoted in Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 71. Boris Gorshkov, ‘Emancipation of Serfs’, in John Merriman and Jay Winter (eds), Europe 1789–1914: Encyclopaedia of Industry and Empire, Vol. 4 (Detroit, MI : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006), pp. 2150–2. Lust, ‘Kiselev’s Reforms of State Peasants’, p. 57. Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, Tricia Olsen, ‘Does Reform Prevent Rebellion? Evidence from Russia’s Emancipation of the Serfs’, Comparative Political Studies 48, 8 (2015), p. 990. This convened to review the law on ‘free agriculturalist’ of 1803 – which led to enactment of the law on ‘obligated peasants’ in 1842. It led to no breakthrough and it was even more impractical than the law it supposed to replace. Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861, pp. 40–2. Ibid., pp. 42–3. Quoted in ibid., p. 44. Quoted in ibid., p. 46. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 78. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 40–1. W. E. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia (New York: Collier Books, 1962 [1958]), p. 51. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 41–2. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 77. Ibid., pp. 70–1. Ben Eklof, ‘Introduction’, in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, Larissa Zakharova (eds), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 1994, p. vii. Larissa G. Zakharova, ‘Autocracy and the Reforms of 1861–1874 in Russia’, in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, Larissa Zakharova (eds), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, p. 20. Quoted in Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 66. Alfred J. Rieber (ed.), ‘The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii 1857–1864’, Études sur l’Histoire, l’Économie et la Sociologie des Payes Slaves 12 (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1966), p. 59. See also, John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 16. Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Alexander II : A Revisionist View’, The Journal of Modern History 43, 1 (March 1971), pp. 42–4.

226 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Notes to pp. 117–121

Eklof, ‘Introduction’, p. vii. Quoted in Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, pp. 92–3. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 170–1. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 103. Serge S. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II (St Petersburg: Izd. A.S. Suborina, 1911), p. 210. Ibid., p. 179. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 97. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 170–1. Zakharova, ‘From Reform to Revolution’, p. 98. Alan K. Wildman, The End of Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and Soldiers’ Revolt (March-April 1917) (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 3–40. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, pp. 128–9. B. Conacher, Britain and the Crimea, 1855–56: Problems of War and Peace (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1987), pp. 145–6; Krasnij Arkhiv, Istoricheskij zhurnal, Tom II (Moscow: Gosudarstvenoe sotsialno-ekonomicheskoe izdatelstvo, 1936), p. 28. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia, p. 49. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, pp. 128–9. Ibid., p. 131. Zakharova, ‘From Reform to Revolution’, pp. 98–9. Rieber, ‘The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii 1857–1864’, p. 59; Jelavich, A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814–1914, p. 126. Quoted in Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, p. 243. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 170–1. Zakharova, ‘From Reform to Revolution’, pp. 99–100; Zakharova, ‘Autocracy and the Reforms of 1861–1874 in Russia’, pp. 20–1. Zakharova, ‘Autocracy and the Reforms of 1861–1874 in Russia’, p. 22. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 170–1. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, pp. 114–16. Quoted in Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, p. 278. Ibid., p. 304. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 48–9. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia, p. 47. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 147. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 48–9. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 147. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 163–72. Jonathan Sperber, ‘State and Civil Society in Prussia: Thoughts on a New Edition of Reinhart Koselleck’s “Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution” ’, The Journal of Modern History 57, 2 (June 1985), p. 278.

Notes to pp. 122–129 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117

227

Starr, Decentralisation and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870, p. 60. Ibid., pp. 60–1. Ibid., pp. 64–5. Alexis de Toqcueville, L’ancien régime and la révolution (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères Libraires-Éditeurs, 1859). Starr, Decentralisation and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870, pp. 72–82. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 42. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of the Reform, pp. 165–85. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, pp. 148–9; Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia, p. 44. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 151. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 173. Larissa G. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostonova prava v Rossii, 1856–1861 (Moskva: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1986), pp. 124–30. John J. Powelson, The Story of Land: A World History of Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform (Cambridge, MA : Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1988), pp. 106–9. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia, p. 45. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 153. Ibid.; Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, p. 319. Quoted in Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 44. Quoted in ibid., p. 44. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 191. Quoted in Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 46. Ibid., pp. 48–9. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 196–7. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 49. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 196–7. Ibid., pp. 198–9. Zakharova, ‘Autocracy and the Reforms of 1861–1874 in Russia’, p. 29. Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (London: UCL Press, 1998), pp. 1–11. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 52–3. Joachim Zweynert, ‘Between Reason and Historicity: Russian Academic Economics, 1800–1861’, in V. Barnett and J. Zweynert (eds), Economics in Russia: Studies in Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), p. 63. Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 160. Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, pp. 52–3. Ibid., pp. 54–5. Ibid., pp. 56–7. Ibid., p. 62.

228

Notes to pp. 129–133

118 Quoted in Zakharova, ‘From Reform to Revolution’, p. 106. 119 On these two cases see J. H. Clapham, The Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815–1914, 4th Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 120 Zakharova, ‘From Reform to Revolution’, pp. 105–6. 121 Quoted in ibid. 122 Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 165. 123 Ibid., p. 166. 124 Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 202; Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 63. 125 Quoted in Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 62. 126 N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane ireforma P. D. Kiseleva, Vol. 2 (Moscow and Leningrad: [n.d.], 1958), pp. 100–57. 127 Quoted in Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II, p. 169. 128 Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, pp. 198–9. 129 Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, p. 241. 130 Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 164. 131 Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 69. 132 Gregory Freeze, ‘P. A. Valuev and the Politics of Church Reform (1861–1862)’, Slavonic and East European Review 1 (1978), p. 69. 133 Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 67. 134 N. P. Semenov, Osvobozhdenie krest’ian v tsarstvovanie Alexandra II (St. Petersburg: [n.d.], 1889–1893), Vol. 1, pp. 826–34. 135 Rieber, ‘Interest-Group Politics in the Era of the Great Reforms’, p. 62. 136 He remained an influential figure throughout the reign of Alexander II as Minister of State Domains (1872–1879) and then President of the Committee of Minsters (1879–1881). Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 164. 137 Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 66. 138 Starr, Decentralisation and Self-Government in Russia, pp. 178–9. 139 Quoted in Chernukha and Anan’ich, ‘Russia Falls Back, Russia Catches Up’, pp. 55–96. 140 Freeze, ‘P. A. Valuev and the Politics of Church Reform (1861–1862)’, p. 69. 141 Bascom B. Hayes, Bismarck and Mitteleuropa (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), pp. 92–4. 142 Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2003), pp. 117–26. 143 Chernukha and Anan’ich, ‘Russia Falls Back, Russia Catches Up’, p. 69. 144 Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, pp. 150–1. 145 P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik P. A. Valueva, ministra vnutrennik del, 2 vols (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR , 1961), Vol. 1, pp. 97–8; Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 395.

Notes to pp. 133–137

229

146 Valuev, Dnevnik P. A. Valueva, ministra vnutrennik del, vol. p. 104. 147 Quoted in Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, p. 396. 148 Valuev, Dnevnik P. A. Valueva, ministra vnutrennik del, Vol. 2, p. 219. 149 Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 163. 150 Quoted in Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, p. 65. 151 Ibid., pp. 65–6. 152 Ibid., p. 67. 153 Zakharova, ‘From Reform to Revolution’, p. 113. 154 Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, p. 369. 155 Ibid. 156 Quoted in ibid., p. 370 (italics in original). 157 Ibid., pp. 372–3. 158 James H. Billington, Fires in the Minds of Man: The Origins of Revolutionary Faith (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 1999), p. 322. 159 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 76. 160 Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 124. 161 See S. S. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II. Ego Zizn’ i Tarstvovanie, 2 Vols. (St.-Petersburg: Izd. A.S. Suborina, 1911); A. A. Golovachev, Desiat’ Let Reform 1861–1871, 5th Edition, (Moscow: [n.d.], 1894); Mosse, Alexander II and Modernisation of Russia; Alemdingen, The Emperor Alexander II; Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 124. 162 Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 125. 163 See for instance, V. A. Tvardovskaia, Ideologiia Poreformennogo samoderszhaviia (M. N. Katkov i Ego Izdaniia) (Moscow: [n.d.], 1978); M. N. Nechkina (ed.), Revoliutsionnaia Situatsiia v Rossii v Seredine XIX Veka: Kollektivnaia Monographiia (Moscow: [n.d.], 1978); M. Druzhinin, Russkaia Derevnia na Perelome 1861–1880 gg (Moscow: Nauka, 1978); John G. Gantvoort, ‘Relations between Government and Zemstvos under Valuev and Timashev, 1864–1876’, Doctoral Thesis, University of Illinois, 1971. 164 Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 125. 165 V. G. Chernukha, Vnutrenniaia politika tsarizma s serediny 50-kh do nachala 80-kh gg xix v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), pp. 180–200. 166 Chernukha, Vnutrenniaia politika tsarizma, p. 26; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, p. 77. 167 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, p. 77. 168 Quoted in ibid.; see also B. E. Nolde, Peterburgskaia misiia bismarka, 1858–1862 (Prague: [n.d.], 1925), p. 259. 169 Zakharova, ‘Alexander II’, pp. 190–1; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, p. 77. 170 In Wortman, Scenarios of Power, pp. 78–88. 171 Ibid., p. 90.

230 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188

189 190 191 192

Notes to pp. 138–146 Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry, pp. 408–9; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, p. 91. Quoted in Wortman, Scenarios of Power, p. 91. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 133. Ibid., pp. 136–7. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., pp. 166–7. Ibid., pp. 170–2. Walter G. Moss, A History of Russia, 2nd Volume: Since 1855 (London: Anthem Press, 2005), pp. 37–38. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, p. 172; S. Adrianov, Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del: Istoricheskii ocherk, 3 vols (St. Petersburg: [n.d.], 1901), Vol. 1, pp. 1–112. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform, pp. 171–2. Quoted in ibid., p. 173. Quoted in ibid., p. 177. Quoted in ibid., p. 180. Ibid. Holquist, ‘The Russian Empire as a “Civilized State” ’, p. 2. Martti Koskennimi, ‘Ruling the World by Law(s): The View from around 1850’, in M. Koskenniemi and B. Stråth (eds), Europe 1815–1914: Creating Community and Ordering the World (Helsinki: Unigrafia Oy, 2014), p. 16; Martti Koskennemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 20–37. Holquist, ‘The Russian Empire as a “Civilized State” ’, p. 8. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 8.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5

Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 127. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 152. Ibid., p. 169. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 66. Modern Turkish scholarship portrays him as the ‘heroic figure of Tanzimat’, ‘Hürriyet Şehidi’ (martyr of liberty), and on the other as a controversial figure for his role in the assassination of Sultan Abdulaziz; see Mehmet Çelik, ‘Tanzimat in The Balkans: Midhat Pasha’s Governorship in the Danube Province (Tuna Vilayeti),

Notes to pp. 146–150

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

231

1864–1868’, Master Thesis, Bilkent University, Department of History, June 2007, pp. 4–5. The line of his great achievements as a reformer is underscored in works such as: M. Hürdai Şentürk, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Bulgar Meselesi (1850–1875) (Ankara: TTK , 1992) and İsmail Selimoğlu, ‘Osmanlı Yönetiminde Tuna Vilayeti 1864–1878’, unpublished PhD Thesis, Ankara University, Institute of Social Sciences (Ankara, 1995): Western Ottoman scholarship also highlights his administrative skills, see: Hanioğlu, A Brief History, p. 76; Lewis, The Emergence, p. 163; Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 223; Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 267. For a nineteenth-century view on him see Engelhart, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 23, or Midhat’s close associate, Ottoman Albanian statesman Ismail bey Kemal in Sommerville Story (ed.), The Memoirs of Ismail Kemal bey (London: Constable, 1920), p. 28. Some other works have underscored his political character as a scheming politician, see Shimon Shamir, ‘Midhat Pasha and the Anti-Turkish Agitation in Syria’, Middle Eastern Studies 10, 2 (1974), p. 124. Meanwhile, other works from a Russian historiographical perspective portrayed him as a great enemy of Russian imperial projects, particularly in the Ottoman Bulgaria; see E.I. Fadeeva, Midhat Pasha: Jizn i Deyatel’nost (Moscow: [n.d.], 1977). A similar position was maintained in the communist Bulgarian historiography, only to be more balanced in post-communist accounts, see for instance: Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 117. Fruma Zachs, ‘ “Novice” or “Heaven-Born” Diplomat? Lord Dufferin’s Plan for a “Province of Syria”: Beirut, 1860–61’, Middle Eastern Studies 36, 3 (July 2000), p. 170. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 118. Story (ed.), The Memoirs of Ismail Kemal bey, p. 163. Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 33. Çelik, ‘Tanzimat in the Balkans’, p. 18. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 157. Lewis, The Emergence, pp. 115–17. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 78. Lewis, The Emergence, pp. 115–17. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 259. Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris & Co, 1998). Hanioğlu, A Brief History, p. 86. Çelik, ‘Tanzimat in the Balkans’, pp. 19–20. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 67. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 136. Ahmet Güner Sayar, Osmanlı İktisat, Düsüncesinin Çağlaşdaşmasi (İstanbul: Ötüken Yayıları, 2000), p. 61.

232

Notes to pp. 150–157

23 Mehmet Genç, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Devlet ve Ekonomi (İstanbul: Ötüken, 2005), p. 50. 24 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 88. 25 Ibid., pp. 88–9. 26 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856–1876, pp. 142–4. 27 Ali H. M. Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha: A Record of His Services, Political Reforms, Banishment and Judicial Murder (London: John Murray, 1903), p. 33. 28 Ivelina Malisheva, ‘Ottoman Commerical Regulations During the Tanzimat Period (1839–1877). Legislation Reforms and Their Application in the Town of Ruschuk’, Papers of the American Research Center in Sofia, Vol. 1 (Sofia, 2014), p. 123. 29 Davison, Reform, p. 145. 30 Ibid., p. 146. 31 Stefano Taglia, Intellectuals and Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Young Turks on the Challanges of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 100. 32 Hanioğlu, A Brief History, p. 76. 33 Davison, Reform, pp. 147–8. 34 Ibid., p. 148. 35 Ibid., pp. 150–1. 36 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 112. 37 Lewis, The Emergence, pp. 120–1. 38 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 14. 39 George W. Gawrych, ‘Tolerant Dimensions of Cultural Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire: The Albanian Community, 1800–1912’, IJMES 5, 4 (November 1983), p. 523. 40 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, pp. 1–2. 41 Maria Todorova, ‘Midhat Pasha’s Governorship of the Danube Province’, in C. E. Farah (ed.), Decision Making and Change in the Ottoman Empire (Kirksville, MO: The Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1993), p. 115. 42 Davison, Reform, p. 151. 43 Ibid., p. 157. 44 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 101. 45 Ibid., p. 1. 46 Todorova, ‘Midhat Pasha’s Governorship of the Danube Province’, p. 117. 47 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 69. 48 Todorova, ‘Midhat Pasha’s Governorship of the Danube Province’, p. 117. 49 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 69. 50 Davison, Reform, p. 152. 51 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 76. 52 Todorova, ‘Midhat Pasha’s Governorship of the Danube Province’, p. 119. 53 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 108. 54 Çelik, ‘Tanzimat in the Balkans’, pp. 35–40.

Notes to pp. 157–164

233

55 Aylin Koçunyan, ‘Long Live Sultan Abdülaziz, Long Live the Nation, Long Live the Constitution’, in K. L. Grotke and M. J. Prutsch (eds), Constitutionalism, Legitimacy and Power: Nineteenth Century Experiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 189. 56 Davison, Reform, p. 154. 57 Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 28. 58 Ibid., p. 30. 59 Ibid., p. 36. 60 Davison, Reform, p. 157. 61 Todorova, ‘Midhat Pasha’s Governorship of the Danube Province’, p. 113. 62 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside,’ p. 6. 63 Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 39. 64 Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, pp. 41–2. 65 Todorova, ‘Midhat Pasha’s Governorship of the Danube Province’, p. 116. 66 Davison, Reform, p. 149. 67 Todorova, ‘Midhat Pasha’s Governorship of the Danube Province’, p. 121. 68 Davison, Reform, pp. 154–7. 69 Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 39. 70 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 80–1. 71 Davison, Reform, p. 161; Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 52. 72 Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 50. 73 Ibid., p. 39. 74 Davison, Reform, p. 163. 75 Ibid., p. 161. 76 Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 57. 77 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 245. 78 In Engin D. Akarlı, Belgelerle Tanzimat-Osmanlı Sadrazamlarından Ali ve Fuad Paşaların Siyasi Vasiyetnameleri (İstanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1978), p. 2 (translation by Nurşen Demir). 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., p. 4. 83 Ibid., p. 5. 84 Roderic H. Davison, ‘The Question of Ali Pasha’s Political Testament’, IJMES 11, 2 (April 1980), p. 218. 85 Akarlı, Belgelerle Tanzimat-Osmanlı Sadrazamlarından Ali ve Fuad Paşaların Siyasi Vasiyetnameleri, p. 45. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., p. 46.

234 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123

Notes to pp. 164–171 Story (ed.), The Memoirs, pp. 52–5. Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 21. Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 32. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 122. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 175. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 80–1. Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 47. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 80–1. Ibid., p. 68. Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 33. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 123. Hanioğlu, A Brief History, p. 84. Butrus Abu-Manneh, ‘The Sultan and the Bureaucracy’, IJMES 22 (1990), pp. 257–61. Ibid., pp. 263–6. Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 77. Hanioğlu, A Brief History, pp. 109–10. Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 77. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 80–1. Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 62. Ibid., pp. 63–4. Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 95. Ibid., pp. 88–9. Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, pp. 64–6. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 69. Michelle Raccagni, ‘The French Economic Interests in the Ottoman Empire’, IJMES 11, 3 (1980), p. 368. Stanford J. Shaw, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Tax Reforms and Revenue System’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6, 4 (October 1975), pp. 421–5. Raccagni, ‘The French Economic Interests in the Ottoman Empire’, p. 368. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 119. Shaw, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Tax Reforms and Revenue System’, pp. 421–5. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 119. Ekaterina Pravilova, ‘The Property of Empire: Islamic Law and Russian Agrarian Policy in Transcaucasia and Turkestan’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 2 (Spring 2011), p. 356. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 65. Ibid., pp. 66–74. Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 100. Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism, p. 121.

Notes to pp. 171–177 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158

235

Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 100. Raccagni, ‘The French Economic Interests in the Ottoman Empire’, p. 348. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 119. Raccagni, ‘The French Economic Interests in the Ottoman Empire’, p. 348. Ibid., pp. 350–3; see also Hanioğlu, A Brief History, p. 91. Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, p. 46. Stefano Taglia, ‘The Feasibility of Ottomanism as a Nationalist Project: The View of the Albanian Yong Turk Ismail Kemal’, Die Welt Des Islams 56 (2016), p. 337. Raccagni, ‘The French Economic Interests in the Ottoman Empire’, p. 356. Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the SixteenthCentury Mediterranean World (Milton Keys: Penguin Books, 2016), p. 102. Raccagni, ‘The French Economic Interests in the Ottoman Empire’, p. 358. Murat Birdal, The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 1–10. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 205. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., pp. 201–2. Ibid., p. 202. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, pp. 267–8. Eric Zücher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 69. Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters (eds), Encyclopaedia of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), p. 417. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 217. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 206. Mardin, The Genesis, p. 358. Davison, Reforms, p. 145; Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 4. Mardin, The Genesis, p. 359. Lewis, The Emergence, p. 172; Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 263. Quoted in Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 264. Mardin, The Genesis, p. 359. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 208–10. Ibid., pp. 211–12. Ibid., p. 213. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 264. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 207. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 260. Mardin, The Genesis, p. 108. Hanioğlu, A Brief History, pp. 110–14. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 215.

236

Notes to pp. 177–184

159 Mardin, The Genesis, pp. 58–67. 160 B. H. Sumner, ‘Ignatyev at Constantinople: II ’, The Slavonic and East European Review 1, 13 (April 1933), p. 563. 161 Mardin, The Genesis, p. 66. 162 Sumner, ‘Ignatyev at Constantinople: II ’, p. 563. 163 Zücher, Turkey: A Modern History, p. 72. 164 Henry G. Elliot, Some Revolutions and the Other Diplomatic Experiences (London: John Murray, 1922), p. 228; see also, Lewis, The Emergence, p. 164; Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 80. 165 Zücher, Turkey: A Modern History, p. 72. 166 Elliot, Some Revolutions, p. 231; Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 82. 167 Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 83. 168 Robert Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 34–5. 169 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 226–7. 170 Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 87. 171 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 164. 172 Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period, p. 38. 173 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 164. 174 Mardin, The Genesis, p. 70. 175 Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 118. 176 Elliot, Some Revolutions, p. 249. 177 Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period, pp. 42–3; Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 117; Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 228. 178 Zücher, Turkey: A Modern History, p. 74. 179 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 228–9. 180 Mardin, The Genesis, p. 73. 181 Roderic, Reforms, p. 134; Vahan Kurkijan, A History of Armenia (Los Angeles: Indo-European Publishing, 2008), p. 338. 182 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 230–1. 183 Ibid., p. 241. 184 Ibid., pp. 237–9. 185 Ibid., pp. 240–6. 186 Hanioğlu, A Brief History, pp. 110–17; Shimon Shamir, ‘Midhat Pasha and the Anti-Turkish Agitation in Syria’, Middle Eastern Studies 10, 2 (1974), pp. 122–3. 187 Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period, p. 55. 188 Elliot, Some Revolutions, p. 251. 189 Hanioğlu, A Brief History, p. 118. 190 Thomas E. Holland, The European Concert in the Eastern Question (Darmstadt: Sciencia Verlag Aalen [Reprint of the Oxford Edition 1885], 1979), pp. 335–6. 191 Lewis, The Emergence, p. 167.

Notes to pp. 184–188

237

192 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 246–8. 193 Petrov, ‘Tanzimat for the Countryside’, p. 20. 194 M. T. Houtsma, T. W. Arnorld, R. Basset, R. Hartman (eds), First Encyclopaedia of Islam 1913–1936, Vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), p. 482. 195 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 164. 196 Lewis, The Emergence, p. 164. 197 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 225. There is a categorization of the rationales behind the use of the language of constitutionalism and the embrace of constitutions in the nineteenth century European history. See Kelly L. Grotke and Markus J. Prutsch (eds), Constitutionalism, Legitimacy and Power: Nineteenth Century Experiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 198 Volker Sellin, ‘Restorations and Constitutions’, in K. L. Grotke and M. J. Prutsch (eds), Constitutionalism, Legitimacy and Power: Nineteenth Century Experiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 84. 199 Devereux, The First Ottoman Constitutional Period, p. 172. 200 Bey, The Life of Midhat Pasha, p. 159. 201 Kemal H. Karpat, Studies on Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 78. 202 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 226. 203 Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 269. 204 Elliot, Some Revolutions, p. 253. 205 Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 255. 206 Davison, Reform, p. 165. 207 Ibid., p. 270. 208 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 221. 209 Midhat Pasha, ‘The Past, Present and Future of Turkey’, The Nineteenth Century 3, 16 (June 1878), p. 992. 210 Ibid., pp. 982–4. 211 Ibid., p. 985. 212 Ibid., p. 993. 213 Ibid., p. 992. 214 Houtsma, T. W. Arnorld, R. Basset, R. Hartman (eds), First Encyclopaedia of Islam 1913–1936, p. 482. 215 Shamir, ‘Midhat Pasha and the Anti-Turkish Agitation in Syria’, pp. 122–4. 216 Artan Puto, ‘The Idea of Nation During the Albanian National Movement, 1878–1912’, Doctoral Thesis, History and Civilisation Department, European University Institute, Florence, 2009, p. 200. 217 Ibid., p. 125. 218 Shamir, ‘Midhat Pasha and the Anti-Turkish Agitation in Syria’, p. 130. 219 Ibid., p. 136; Story (ed.), The Memoirs, p. 172; Houtsma et al. (eds), First Encyclopaedia of Islam 1913–1936, p. 482.

238

Notes to pp. 189–195

Epilogue 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime of the French Revolution, trans. by S. Gilbert, 2nd Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 1985), p. 177. 2 Ariel Salzmann, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), p. 1. 3 Ibid, p. 195; Alexis de Tocqueville, Ouvres complétes de Alexis de Tocqueville, 8 vols (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, Librares Editeurs, 1865), Vol. 3, p. 253. 4 Starr, Decentralisation and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870, pp. 72–82. 5 Salzmann, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 13–23. 6 Ibid., p. 195. 7 Salzmann, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire, p. 196. 8 Ibid., p. 197. 9 For a recent account on the problem of the democratization narrative and the interconnection between democracy and dictatorship since the late eighteenth century see first a summary of it by Markus Prutsch, ‘Crisis, Populace, and Leadership: Reflections on “Modern Caesarism”, in M. Koskenniemi and B. Stråth (eds), Europe 1815–1914: Creating Community and Ordering the World (Helsinki: Unigrafia Oy, 2014), p. 125; the full account is forthcoming as Markus Prutsch, Crisis, Populace, and Leadership: Reflections on the Discourse and Practice of ‘Modern Caesarism’ (London: Bloomsbury Academic). 10 Jürgen Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy, trans. by Ciarin Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace, p. 454. 11 Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, p. 193. 12 Boris Ananich, ‘Russian Economy and Banking System’, in D. Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 395–415. 13 Holquist, ‘The Russian Empire’, p. 1 14 Francis W. Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 190. 15 Modelled after Otto Bismarck’s chancellorship in Imperial Germany. 16 Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia, p. 191. 17 Peter Waldron, ‘Late Imperial Constitutionalism’, in I. D. Thatcher (ed.), Late Imperial Russia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 28–30. 18 Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, pp. 1–11. 19 Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, pp. 132–3. 20 Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 273. 21 Lewis, The Emergence, p. 135. 22 Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, pp. 135–51. 23 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 229.

Notes to pp. 195–197 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

239

Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 172 Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, p. 229. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, p. 271. V. S. Diakin, ‘Stolypin i Dvorianstvo (Proval Mestnoi Reformy)’ in Akademiia Nauk SSSR , Problemy Krest’iaskogo Zemlevladeniia i Vnutrenoi Politiki v Rossii, Dooktabr’skoi Period, (Leningrad: [n.d.], 1972), pp. 238–82; Gilbert S. Doctorow, ‘The Introduction of Parliamentary Institutions in Russia during the Revolution of 1905–1907’, Doctoral Thesis, Columbia University, 1975; David A. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia 1861–1906: The Prehistory of Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987). Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 250. Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, p. 3. S. Nader, ‘Historicising Revolutions: Constitutional Revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Russia, 1905–1908’, The American Journal of Sociology 100, 6 (1996), pp. 1391–2. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 273. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 250. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 274. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, pp. 161–3; Taglia, Intellectuals and Reform in the Ottoman Empire. Yusuf Akçura, ‘Üç Tarz-i Siyaset’ [Three Policies], trans by D. S. Thomas, [accessed 11 October 2015]. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 280. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. 252. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State’, p. 281. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, p. 194. Ibid., p. 192. Nader, ‘Historicising Revolutions’, p. 1383. Ibid., p. 1384. Ibid., pp. 1384–99. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, p. 192. Ibid., p. 194. Nader, ‘Historicising Revolutions’, p. 1399. Peter Waldron, ‘Late Imperial Constitutionalism’, in I. D. Thatcher, Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 28. Waldron, ‘Late Imperial Constitutionalism’, p. 28.

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256

Index Abdülaziz, Sultan coup to dethrone, 172 deposed (May 1876), 179 Imperial Ottoman Bank as limited joint stock company (1863), 171–2 suicide (1876), 180 Abdülhamid II , Sultan (r. 1876–1909), 146, 166, 193, 195 Public Debt Administration (PDA ), 172, 195 Abdülmecid I, Sultan (r. 1839–61), 85–6 France as protector of Ottoman Christians, 100 Aberdeen, Lord (British Foreign Secretary) (1784–1860), 97 abolition of serfdom, 120 by Emperor Alexander II , 120 and glasnost’, 120–1 and neglássny komitét, 120 absolutism: Chicherin’s, 112 governmental (Ottoman), 182 monarchical, 103 Ottoman local councils’, 159–60 Tsar Alexander I’s, 39 a-historicity, 9 Alexander, Grand Duke, serfdom views, 115–16 Alexander I, Tsar (r. 1801–25), 1, 19–21 and European order, 43–4 foreign policy, 50–1 intervention in Spain 55–6 negotiations with Britain, 56 and Speransky (1812), 40–1 Alexander II , Tsar (r. 1855–81), 1 abolition of serfdom, 120 and Crimean War, 117 and political representation, 137 and representative government, 137 Ali Pasha, 1, 146, 149 biographical details, 147 constitutional government ideas, 163–4

April 1809 Decree (state administration), 38 Arazi Kanunu (Land Law) (1858), 161 August 1809 Decree (state administration), 38 ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality’ (Russia), 110 autocracy (Russia), 19, 37, 105, 114, 119, 131, 133, 142, 194 Ayine-yi Delvet (Mirror of State) (1861), 166 Baader, Franz Xavier von (1765–1841) (theologian), 43 Bagdad, Midhat Pasha’s governorship, 160–1 Balta-Liman Treaty (1838), 93 barshchina (serf ’s obligation), 26 Britain: and Ottoman Empire, 68 and Ottoman independence, 99 Ottoman trade agreement, 94–5 Reshid Pasha’s alliance, 69–70 Tsar Alexander I’s negotiations, 56 British Government and Grand Design, 50 British-Russian discord, 72–3 Brussels Conference 1874, 142 Bulgarian Massacre (1876), significance, 178–9 bureaucracy: ‘European century’, 4–5 European influence, 132 ministerial, 136–7 and political reform, 4–5 reform and serfdom, 112–13 in Russia, 31 Valuev’s views, 131–2 bureaucratic reforms (Russia), 122 Canning, Stratford (1786–1880) (British Ambassador), 96–8 Carlsbad Conference (1819), 53

257

258 Castlereagh, Lord (1769–1822) (British Foreign Secretary), 44–5 Charte Constitutionelle (Russia, 1820), 52 Charter to the Russian People, 21–2 Charter of the Towns (1875), 19 Chicherin, Boris (1828–1904), 111–12 Christianity and politics, 42–3 Christians and Muslims, 77–8 civil and criminal codes revised, 88 civilization: principles of, 83 Rifat Pasha’s ideas, 83–5 codification, limiting monarch’s power, 21 codification of law, Speransky’s views, 59–60 commerce and war, 103–4 Commercial Code (1850), 90, 98 Commercial Treaty of the Empire (1838), 104 Commission on Laws (Russia), 20–1 Commission on Provisional and District Institutions (1859), 126 Congress of Aix-La-Chapelle (1818), 52–3 Congress of Berlin, Midhat Pasha’s views, 187 Congress of Verona (1822), 55–6 Congress of Vienna (1814–15), 47 Constantinople Conference (1876), 183, 186 constitution, concept of, 20 constitution for enthronement, 181 Constitutional Committee (Ottoman, 1876), 181–2 debates, 182 constitutional government concepts, 163–4 constitutionalism: and Hatti, 66–7 Speransky’s views, 27 Young Ottomans’ ideas, 173–4 constitutions, effectiveness, 54 Council of Ministers (Russia), 32–3 Council of State (Ottoman): composition of, 165, 176 Midhat Pasha heads, 164–5 parliamentary role, 162–8 Council of State (Russia), 33 court system (Russia), 13 Crimean War (1853–6), 100–1 Tsar Alexander II ’s views, 117 customary law (Russian), 109

Index daire-i adliye (Ottoman political theory), 62 Danube provincial reform criticised, 160 Decembrist Revolt (1825), 57, 109, 191 Decembrists, 59 decentralization (Russia), 121 decline, 6–7, 8 Decrees (state administration): April 1809, 38 August 1809, 38 detsentralizatsiia, 121, 125 diplomatic alliances (Russia), postCrimea, 118–19 disintegration, 9, 73, 138 division of powers: executive, 32–3 Ottoman, 182 Russian, 31–3 draft Ottoman Constitution (1876, Midhat Pasha), 179 first reading (July 1876), 180 opposition to, 180 preliminary conditions, 181 public opinion, 182 Russian demands, 182–3 Draft Statute (Russia, 1809), 18–19 generally, 29–30 principal issues, 30 ‘Eastern Question’, 7, 68–9 economic liberalism (Ottoman), 26 economic liberalization (Ottoman), 170 economic order (Russia), 127–8 economic policy (Ottoman), 168–9 foreign debt obligations, 169 economic protectionism (Ottoman), 170–2 overview, 170–1 economic reform (Russia), 34–6 and Adam Smith, 35 and Jean-Baptiste Say, 35 economic reforms (Ottoman, 1850), 169–70 economy and politics, 103–88 Editing Commissions (1859), 125–7 Egypt and Ottoman Empire, 67, 81 Elected Council (Mejliss), 88 emancipation, land see land emancipation

Index Emancipation Act 1861: consequences, 129 final stages, 129 preparation stages, 126 Emancipation Manifesto: proclamation, 130 reactions to (1861–2) emancipation of serfdom, 113–14 free-market alternative, 113 landless, 114–15 solidarity approach, 113–14 voluntary, 114 empire and progress (Russia), 107–43 Enlightenment in Russia (19th century), 18, 31 ‘Essay Concerning European Affairs’ (Rifat Pasha), 83–4 estates (Russia): hierarchy, 33–4 second, 34 third, 34 Europe and Russia, 141–3 ‘European Century’ (1815–1914), 1 and bureaucracy, 4–5 European intervention and Ottoman Empire, 67–8 European order and Tsar Alexander I, 43–4 executive division of power, 32–3 ‘Explanation of the Balance of Foreign Affairs Relating to Europe’ (1774), 68 feudalism: absolutist, 30 original, 30 and ‘republic’ principles, 30 and Russia, 30 Fezil, Prince Mustafa, open letter on constitution, 175–6 Financial Plan (Russia) (1810), 36–7 financial reform (Russia), 36–7 foreign debt obligations (Ottoman), 169 France: protection of Ottoman Christians, 100 reintegration into Quintuple Alliance, 53 war with Russia, 35–6 free trade: Ottoman Empire’s 92–3

259

and state protectionism, 35 Fuad Pasha, 1, 100, 146, 149 biographical details, 147 constitutional government ideas, 163 criticism of his Danube provincial reform, 160 provincial reform and, 151 fundamental laws of the state, 20, 23–4, 26 general statutes’ significance, 23–4 glasnost’, 120–1, 122–3 and abolition of serfdom, 120–1 government: concessions (Miliutin), 134 role of, 26 governors’ salaries (Ottoman), 87 governorship of Bagdad (Midhat Pasha’s), 160–1 achievements, 161 criticism of Midhat Pasha, 162 economic reform, 161 Grand Design (1804), 48–9 and British Government, 50 Grand Patriotic War (1812–14), 41 Greek insurgency in Ottoman State, 55 Hague Conventions 1899 and 1907, 142 Hatt-ı Hümâyun (imperial decree) (Hatti), 61, 84, 85, 148–9 and constitutionalism, 66–7 contents, 62 Lord Palmerston’s views, 66 Ottoman bureaucracy, 65–6 Ottoman interpretation, 64–5 and Ottoman legislation, 65 and Republic of Turkey, 67 High Council of Reform (Ottoman), 148 historical legal reasoning (Russian), 109–10 Holy Alliance (1815), 5, 42–3 achievements, 52 conservative and reactionary politics, 53 contents, 46 doubts over, 44–5 European acceptance, 45–6 failure of, 58–9 in literature, 44 Lord Castlereagh’s views, 44–5 Metternich’s views, 45

260 purpose of, 48 reforms, 45 Reshid Pasha’s views, 46 second congress (1820), 54–5 signatories, 45 and Sturdza, 45 support for, 42–3 third Congress (1821), 55 Hüsrev Pasha, 79, 86 bureaucratic reform, 86–7 ousted from power (1840), 89 on Second Constitutional Government (Ottoman), 74 Second Egyptian Crisis, 74 Ignatyev, General Nikolei, hostility to Midhat Pasha, 159–60 Imperial Manifesto, 119 Imperial Ottoman Bank as limited joint stock company (1863), 171–2 innovation: and Ottoman Empire, 64, 88, 139, 153, 162, 184 and Russian Empire, 80, 109 ‘internal constitution’ (Russian opposition), 134 international law: and inter-state order, 142–3 Russia’s, 141–2 international trade, 104–5 inter-state: arrangements (Russia), post-Crimea, 117–18 European inter-state politics, 50 ‘inter-state order’: European (Russian), 103 and international law, 142–3 Ittifak-i Hamyiet (Patriotic Alliance) (1865), 173 joint moral actions, 51–7 judicial reform (1861), implementation, 133–4 kanouni djeraim (penal code) (1840), 88 Kanun, 63 and Ottoman bureaucracy, 66 Karamzin and taxation reform, 37 Karlova project, 114–15 Kavelin, Konstantin D (1818–85), 111–12

Index Kikeli incident (1861), 173 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 54, 55 Konditsy (Conditions, 1730), 22 Konstantin, Grand Duke (1827–92), serfdom views, 116 Koran’s influence on Ottoman Empire, 64 land emancipation: complete or shared, 127 Nikolai Miliutin’s views, 124–5 opposition to, 125 state-led, 123–4 Land Law (Arazi Kanunu), 161 land, peasants’ right to rent, 126–7 law: purpose of laws, 20–1 and religion, 15–16 and social order (Russia), 34 theory, 15 Le Moniteur Ottoman (newspaper), 16, 94 legal codes, 21 Russian (1812), 21 legal equality (Russian), 110 legality: and rule of law (Russia), 110 in Russia, 110 legislation (Ottoman) and Hatti, 65 ‘Letters on Constitutional Regime’ (Namik Kemal), 176 liberal economic doctrines, concluding comments, 192 liberal reform (Russia), 111–12 ‘liberal tendencies’ (Russian opposition), 134 liberalism, cautious see Sage Libéralisme local government: Ottoman, strengthening, 158 and public involvement, 121 Russian reform, 121–2 local political reform (1861) implemented, 133–4 Loris-Melikov, Mikhail (1822–88), 139–41 career, 140 reform ideas and project, 140–1 Mahmud II , Sultan, 63, 79–80 British-Russian discord, 72–3 centralizing reforms and policy, 93–4 economic policy, 93, 94 Le Moniteur Ottoman, 16

Index and Mehmet Ali Pasha, 81 powers checked, 80 Main Committee on Peasant Affairs, 124 Mansure Army, 94 Martens, Feodor, and Russian international law, 142–3 Martinists, 18, 39 mazbatta (legal document), 88–9 meclis-i âyan see Senate Mehmet Ali Pasha: Peace Agreement of Kutahya (1833), 70–1 ruler of Egypt and Sudan, 90 and Sultan Mahmud II , 81 Syria military conflict, 73–4 Metternich: English and Russian action against, 53–4 Holy Alliance views, 45 intervention in Sicily, 54 Midhat Pasha, 1, 145–7 administrative changes in Ruse, 155–6 administrative skills appreciated, 158–9 arrest and death, 188 on Congress of Berlin, 187 criticism of his Danube provincial reform, 160 draft constitution (1876), 179 early career and childhood, 177 General Nikolei Ignatyev’s hostility, 159–60 governorship of Bagdad see governorship of Bagdad governorship of Nish (1861–3), 149, 151 governorship of Ruse, 155 governorship of Smyrna (1880), 188 governorship of Syria (1878), 157 as Grand Vizier (1873), 148, 167–8, 177 head of Council of State (1868), 164–5 military commander of the Sixth Battalion of the Ottoman army corps, 161–2 on Ottoman Constitution, 167, 178, 179–81 political change in Ruse, 156–7 political ideas reinstated, 196 and provincial reform, 151 recall to Constantinople, 160 and Young Ottomans, 177–8

261

military commander of the Sixth Battalion of the Ottoman army corps: Midhat Pasha’s appointment, 161–2 military confrontation, Russian and Ottoman Empire’s, 3–4 Miliutin, Nikolai (1818–72), 1, 107–11 construction of Moscow-St Petersburg railway, 108–9 dismissal from Commission on Provincial and District Institutions, 130 early bureaucratic career, 108–11 education and training, 107–8 head of Commission on Provincial and District Institutions (1859), 126 land emancipation views, 124–5 opposition to judicial reform, 134–5 opposition to local political reform, 134–5 views on zemstva, 139 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ottoman Empire), 105 Ministry of Internal Affairs (Russia, 1802), 28, 105, 139 and Russian reform, 28 Mirror of State (1861), 166 modernity, 103–4 modernization theory, 6 and Russian imperial history, 7 monarchical power limited, 25 monarchical support for Ottoman reform, 154–5 monarch’s power and codification limits, 21 monarchy: English, 24–5 political and social structure, 23 ‘unlimited’, 109 Moscow-St Petersburg railway construction, 108–9 Muraviev, Nikita (1796–1843), 57 views on political participation, 58 Muslims and Christians, 77–8 Namik Kemal, (1840–88), 173–9 career, 174 free-trade political economy, 175 ideas on ‘constitution’, 175–7 Letters on Constitutional Regime, 176

262 National Assembly (Ottoman), 176, 185–6 budget control, 185 independence of, 185 issues covered, 185 political power, 185–6 provincial reform, 185 National Assembly (Russia), 137–8 nationalism: Ottoman Empire, 3 Russian Empire, 3 Nazimov Rescript, 124 Nedim Pasha (1818–83), 166 as grand vizier (1871–2), 165–7, 168 opposition to Tanzimat reforms, 165–6 on Ottoman constitution, 167 neglássny komitét (1857), 120, 123 Nesselrode, Count von (1780–1862) (Russian Foreign Affairs Minister) 40, 43, 54, 71, 73, 117 Nicholas II (1868–1918), 194–5 New Order (Nizam-ı Cedid), 62 Nish, Midhat Pasha’s governorship (1861–3), 149, 151 Nizam-ı Cedid (New Order), 62 Northern Society, 57, 58 obshchina (communal settlement), 127, 129, 195 ‘On the Conditions of the Provincial Institutions’ (memorandum, 1868), 138 ‘On the Fundamental Laws of the State’ (Speransky, 1802), 23–4 ‘On the Gradualness of Social Improvement’ (Speransky, 1802), 26 ‘On the Reform Conditions in the Ottoman State’ (Rifat Pasha), 84–5 optimates, 25 ‘Ordered Soldiers of the Sultan’ (1841), 89 Osmanlilik (Ottomanism), 64, 110 Ottoman bankruptcy (1875), 172 Ottoman bureaucracy: and Hatti, 65–6 kanun, 66 post-Reshid Pasha bureaucratic reform, 90–1 reform, 86–7 Ottoman constitution: Midhat Pasha’s ideas and views, 167, 178, 179–81

Index Namik Kemal’s ideas, 175–7 Nedim Pasha’s views, 167 opposition to, 184 support for, 184–5 see also draft Ottoman constitution Ottoman constitutional government, military support, 197 Ottoman dynastic house and political and economic pressure (19th century), 1–2 Ottoman economy: liberalization, 95–6 Provincial Regulation, 150–1 Ottoman Empire: administration and finance system, 74–5 Alexis de Tocqueville’s influence, 191 and Britain, 68 decline of, 68–9 and Egypt, 67, 81 and European intervention, 67–8 free trade, 92–3 and innovation, 64, 88, 139, 153, 162, 184 instability, 63 Koran’s influence, 64 military confrontation with Russian Empire, 3–4 nationalism, 3 nineteenth century, interpretation of, 8 nineteenth-century political reform, 9–10 political instability, 196 relations with Russia, 3–4, 70–1 Ottoman Empire reform, 75–82 and religious fanaticism, 76–7 Reshid Pasha’s views, 75–6 Ottoman independence and Britain, 99 Ottoman ministers, tactics, 158 Ottoman nation, origins, 177 Ottoman political reform, 62 causes, 186–7 Ottoman political theory (daire-i adliye), 62 Ottoman Public Debt Administration, (1881), 172 Ottoman-Russian history parallels with twentieth century, 10–11 Ottoman state, Greek insurgency, 55 Ottomanism (Osmanlilik), 64, 110

Index Palmerston, Lord (British PM ) (1784–1865): and Hatti, 66 and Turkish independence (1833), 71–2 Panin, Count V N (1801–62), 128 Paris Congress 1902, 196 parliamentary division of power, 31–2 pashas, prosecution of, 87 ‘Past, Present and the Future of Turkey, The’ (Midhat Pasha), 186 Patriotic Alliance (Ittifak-i Hamyiet) (1865), 173 Patriotic War (1812), 36, 41, 43 Paul I, Emperor 1796–1801, 19, 21–2, 26, 70 Peace Agreement of Kutuhya (1833) and Mehmet Ali Pasha, 70–1 peasantry (Russian), liberation, 113 peasants, right to rent land, 126–7 penal code (kanouni djeraim) (1840), 88 people’s sovereignty (Russia), 197 ‘perpetual peace’, 49 Pertev Pasha (1800–58), 78–80, 82, 175 Pestel, Pavel (1793–1826), meeting with Alexander I, 57 Petersburg Convention (1868), 142 Pitt, William (British PM ) (1759–1806) and Third Coalition (1805), 49–50 political economy, 2 Ottoman Empire development, 145–9 political participation, Muraviev’s views, 58 political reform: concluding comments, 191–2, 193–4 projects, 5–6 political representation, 2 under Alexander II , 137 Vilayet Law, 152–3 political violence, (Miliutin), 134 politics: of change, 6 and Christianity, 42–3 and economy, 103–88 and property, 133–4 Porte (Ottoman government), 72–3, 153 liberal economic position, 156 Ottoman Empire reform, 75 and political factions, 68 Reshid Pasha represents, 78

263

positive-negative binary categorization, 4 ‘Preliminary Ideas on the Organisation of Relationships between the Gentry and their Peasants’ (Kavelin) (1856), 115 Preliminary Treaty of San Stefano (1878), 183–4 principia juris (Speransky), 20–1 private property rights (Russia) 127–8 proizvol, 122–3 property and politics, 133–41 provincial administration in Provincial Regulation, 150 provincial general assembly (Ottoman), 157 Provincial Government (1917), 139 provincial politics (Ottoman), representative element, 149 provincial reform (Ottoman): and Fuad Pasha, 151 and Midhat Pasha, 151 Provincial Regulation (Ottoman) (1858), 150 aim, 150 and Ottoman economy, 150–1 provincial administration aspects, 150 Public Debt Administration, (PDA ) (Ottoman, 1881), 172, 195 Quadruple Alliance, 41–2, 47–8, 72 Quintuple Alliance, France’s reintegration, 53 Raouf Pasha (1780–1859), 89 ‘rational legalism’, 10–11, 15 ‘rationalist police state’, 109 Rechtsstaat (rule of law), 22 reform: historical and political context, 11 monarchical support for, 154–5 Reform Rescript (Ottoman) (1856), 148–9 religion: and law, 15–16 theory, 15–16 religious fanaticism and Ottoman Empire reform, 76–7 representation, politics, 133–41 representative government: under Alexander II , 137 Ottoman, 88

264

Index

Republic of Turkey and Hatti, 67 ‘republic’ principles and feudalism, 30 Reshid Pasha (1800–58), 1, 61, 86 alliance with Britain, 69–70 British-Russian discord, 72–3 bureaucratic reform, 86–7 career assessment, 91–2 as grand vizier (1846), 98 on Holy Alliance, 46 liberalizing Ottoman economy, 95–6 Ottoman Empire reform, 75–6 political career, 78–9 political comeback (1841), 96–7 political thinking, 82–5 on religious fanaticism, 76–7 ‘Rose Chamber Edict’, 61–2 Second Egyptian Crisis, 74 Syria military conflict, 73 trade agreement with Britain, 94–5 revolution: revolutionary activity (1877–8), 139 and Russian polity, 109 and tyranny, 85 Rieber, Alfred, views on Russian reform, 116–17 Rifat Pasha (1807–56), 82–5 career, 82–3 ‘civilization’ considered, 83–5 Ottoman bureaucratic reform, 90–1 political writing, 83 Romanov dynastic house and political and economic pressure (19th century), 1–2 ‘Rose Chamber Edict’, 61–2 and Reshid Pasha, 61–2 Rostovtsev, Jakob (1804–60), 120, 124, 125–6, 128, 136 rule of law (Russia), 110 Ruse: administrative staff, 157–8 Midhat Pasha’s administration changes, 155–6 Midhat Pasha’s approach to governing, 155 Midhat Pasha’s political changes, 156–7 Russia: Alexis de Tocqueville’s influence, 190–1 British-Russian discord, 72–3 and bureaucracy, 31 Council of State, 33

customary law, 109 decentralization and self-government, 121 draft Ottoman constitution interests, 182–3 economic reform see economic reform (Russia) Enlightenment, nineteenth-century aspects, 18, 31 estates, 33–4 and Europe, 141–3 feudalism, 30 historical perspective, 30–1 international law, 141–2 legality, 110 nobility reforms, 38 people’s sovereignty, 197 relations with Ottoman Empire, 70–1 war with France, 35–6 see also specific entries Russian constitution (draft) (1899), 17 Russian Empire: and innovation, 80, 109 nationalism, 3 nineteenth-century interpretation of, 8 nineteenth-century political reform, 9–10 and Ottoman Empire, 3–4, 70–1 political instability, 196 Russian imperial history: modernization theory and, 7 overview (nineteenth century), 7 Russian industrial reform, 194 Russian Justice (treatise), 58 Russian political stability, 194–5 Russian reform and Ministry of Internal Affairs, 28 Russo-Turkish war (1877–8), 145, 172, 183 Sage Libéralisme, 51 abandonment, 54 Sankt Petersburgskii Zhurnal (Speransky), 16, 28 Say, Jean-Baptiste and Russian economic reform, 35 Second Constitutional Government (Ottoman), 196 Hüsrev Pasha’s views, 74

Index Second Egyptian Crisis: Hüsrev Pasha’s views, 74 Rashid Pasha’s views, 72, 74 secularization theory, 6 self-government (Russia), 121, 136 Selim III , Sultan (r. 1789–1807), 62–3 Senate (meclis-i âyan), 176 challenge to Tsars (1802), 27–8 power, 26 serfdom, 33–4 abolition see abolition of serfdom barshchina, 26 emancipation see emancipation of serfdom Grand Duke Alexander’s views, 115–16 Grand Duke Konstantin’s views, 116 liberty of peasantry, 113 and reform of bureaucracy, 112–13 Speransky’s ideas, 25–6 Shariah, 65, 76, 84 Sicily, intervention by Metternich, 54 Slavophiles, 110–11 and economic order, 127–8 Smith, Adam, and Russian economic reform, 35 Smyrna, Midhat Pasha’s governorship (1880), 188 sovereignty (Ottoman), 65, 182 Speransky’s views, 26–7 Tsar Alexander I’s intervention, 55–6 Speransky, Michael M. (1772–1839), 1 chief administrative secretary and assistant to Tsar, 29 codification of law, 59–60 on constitutionalism, 27 dismissal and exile of (1812), 39–40 draft Russian constitution (1809), 17 government career, 22–3 head of Second Department (1802–7), 28 ‘On the Fundamental Laws of the State’ (1802), 23–4 personal life, 29 political views of, 18 principia juris, 20–1 Russian legal code (1812), 21 Sankt Petersburgskii Zhurnal, 16, 28 and serfdom, 25–6 significance and role of, 17–18 on sovereignty, 26–7

265

True Monarchy, 5 and Tsar Alexander I (1812), 40–1 Spirit of Laws, The (Montesquieu), 24 state administration (Russia), 37–8 April 1809 Decree, 38 August 1809 Decree, 38 transfer to zemstva, 138–9 State Duma (Russia), 32 state-led regeneration and political change, 2–3 state power, concluding comments, 193 state protectionism and free trade, 35 Sturdza, Alexander (1791–1854), 37, 43 civil code preparation (1819–22), 54 on Holy Alliance, 45 Supreme Council of State and Justice (Medjliss Aali), 87 Supreme Executive Commission, 139 Syria, Midhat Pasha’s governorship (1878), 187 Syria military conflict, 73 and Reshid Pasha, 73 Tanzimat reforms, 67, 146, 162 alternatives to, 173 free-trade economy criticised, 175 launch, 98 legal reform, 195 Nedim Pasha opposes, 165–6 Reshid Pasha’s views, 98 Western political and economical influences, 177 tariff (Russia) (1810), 36, 39 tax collection (Ottoman), 157 taxation (Russia), 37 and Karamzin, 37 Third Coalition (1805) and William Pitt (British PM ), 49–50 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–59): complete works, 189–90 influence on Ottoman Empire, 191 influence on Russia, 190–1 reform ideas, 121–2 townships (Russia), 31 Treaty of Adrianople 1829, 63, 93 Treaty of Berlin 1878, 183–4 Treaty of Chaumont 1814, 41–2 Article V, 47 Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi 1833, 70, 72 Treaty of Küçük Kajnarca 1774, 93

266 Treaty of Tilsit 1807, 35 True Monarchy: definition, 26 focus of, 19 motivation and structure of, 30 philosophy, 23 True Monarchy (Speransky), 5 Turkey, constitutional regime, 187 Turkish independence, Lord Palmerston’s views (1833), 71–2 tyranny and revolution discussed, 85 ‘unanimity of intentions’, 52–3, 56 Valuev Circular (1863), 132 Valuev, Peter A. (1815–90), 130–2 administrative abilities, 132 local political and judicial reform (1861), 133–4 views on bureaucracy, 131–2 views on zemstva, 139 zemstvo proposal (1863), 133–4 Vergangene Zukunft (futures-past), 11 Vilayet Law (1864), 149–53 aim of, 149–50 drafting of, 151–2 political representation, 152–3 purpose, 152

Index Vorontsov, Count Simon (1744–1832), 21, 27 votchina notion of rule, 24 vyt, proposal (1864), 138–9 war and commerce, 103–4 Western Parliamentarism, Young Ottomans’ ideas, 173–4 Young Ottomans, 173–9 constitutionalism ideas, 173–4 and Midhat Pasha, 177–8 Western Parliamentarism ideas, 173–4 Young Russia (Zaichnevsky), 136 Zaichnevsky, Peter (1842–96), 136 zakonnost, 122–3, 125 Zapiska (1803 report), 28 zemsky sobor (land assemblies) 135–6 zemstva (local institutions), 133 Miliutin’s views, 139 national assembly elected by, 138 transfer of state administration to, 138–9 Valuev’s proposal (1863), 133–4 Valuev’s views, 139 Ziya Pasha on constitutional reform, 174–5