The Sultan’s Advisers and the Integration of Arabs and Immigrants

Abstract

Abstract The war of 1877–78 and the Berlin Treaty of 1878 were instrumental in determining the fate of the Ottoman state and the policies and ideological views of Sultan Abdulhamid. The loss of the Balkan provinces deprived the country of over one-third of its population and of substantial revenues, reducing the once mighty Empire to a secondclass power, with its main strength now in Asia and in its Muslim population and its survival dependent upon England. Even worse, the Berlin Treaty introduced the concept of the nation-state as the new principle of political organization. As the Greeks had before them, the Serbians, Romanians, and Montenegrins declared independence and the Bulgarians autonomy and went on to form states based on a communal nationalism that blended ethnicity and religion and was bolstered by various myths of glorious historic pasts.