The Grand Strategy of the Ottoman Empire, 1826-1841

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Ottoman grand strategy during the turbulent years of war and reform between 1826 and 1841.The concept of grand strategy utilized in my thesis does hereby not refer to purely military matters. It is rather a notion that explains how a political authority strives to realize its long-term aims through mobilization of its available instruments and resources. During 1820s-1840s, facing grave internal and external threats, the Ottoman grand strategy was directed at defending its existing possessions and re-establishing the center’s authority throughout the empire. To ensure their aims, Ottoman decision-makers initiated a radical bureaucratic-military reform agenda and mobilized available fiscal, military and ideological resources at their disposal.

The majority of the existing scholarship tend to interpret the Ottoman reforms in an overly descriptive or superficial manner, therefore neglecting the Ottoman decision-makers’ perceptions, plans, and broader goals as well as the subsequent effects (and repercussions) of those policies within the empire. The “Eastern Question” literature, which is mainly based on European sources, often ignores the Ottoman agency and obscures the rather complex nature of Ottoman policy-making by assessing it within a facile “modernist-reactionary” bipolarity for the period in question. With my holistic approach and utilization of unused archival material, I will contribute to the existing knowledge about Ottoman policy-making and political-military transformation during the era in question.

I argue in my thesis that the imperial center consciously, if frantically, responded to the internal and external challenges by tightening its grip around its subjects and making far-reaching changes in its governmentality. Aided by an expanding and diversifying military-administrative bureaucracy, Ottoman rulers managed to collect more taxes, create and expand a disciplined army, limit the power of provincial notables, standardize governing practices and pragmatically used their newly established European embassies to achieve their foreign goals. The social and economic costs of these policies were also immense, as I clearly underline in my study. Many common subjects and members of the higher classes expressed neither optimism nor pleasure about the top-down reforms and state policies. They were heavily taxed, suffered from rampant inflation, while tens of thousands of men were pressed into the new military formations to serve until they became disabled, deserted or died.