The Unionist presence in the Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1912

Abstract

This article investigates the way the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress, which was essentially an organisation with roots in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire and in the Western Anatolian province of Aydın, established itself in the provincial centres of Eastern Anatolia and the Arab provinces after the revolution of July 1908. It then seeks out the patterns that can be discerned in the composition of the local branches, and in the relationships of these branches with the committee’s centre (first in Salonica, then in Constantinople) on the one hand, and with the local Muslim elites and non-Muslim communities on the other.