“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate

Abstract

The Ottoman Empire was the last great Muslim world empire to survive into the age of modernity. The Ottoman state, together with its contemporaries, Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia, was engaged in a struggle for survival in a world where it no longer made the rules. As the nineteenth century approached its last quarter, these rules were increasingly determined by the successful and aggressive world powers, Britain, France, and after 1870, Germany. As external pressure on the ottoman Empire mounted from the second half of the century, the Ottoman center found itself obliged to squeeze manpower resources it had hitherto not tapped. Particularly nomadic populations, armed and already possessing the military skills required, now became a primary target for mobilization. This study is an attempt to come to grips with the “civilizing mission” mentality of the late Ottomans and their “project of modernity” as reflected in their provincial administration. It is the view of this writer that sometime in the nineteenth century the Ottoman elite adopted the mindset of their enemies, the arch-imperialists, and came to conceive of its periphery as a colonial setting.My definition of colonialism here closely follows the Leninist position as in “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In my view, this is still one of the best and most succinct definitions of imperialism. After showing how the partition of the word accelerated in the 1880s, Lenin concludes, “It is beyond doubt therefore, that capitalism's transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, isconnected with the intensification of the struggle for the partitioning of the world.” V. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977), 224.