The Ottoman Empire

The Kemalist case starts with a suitcase. In March nineteen twenty four, the last Ottoman caliph is handed one and put on a train to Switzerland.

Two years earlier, delegates in Ankara had hesitated over abolishing the sultanate at all, until Mustafa Kemal told them plainly what sovereignty was.

His case rests on the empire's own historians. Halil Inalcik documented its best years, from Mehmed the Second through Suleiman, as a functional meritocracy, where Christian boys were converted, promoted, and given power on ability, not birth. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was born an Orthodox Christian in Bosnia. Ibrahim Pasha was born Greek, in Parga. Koprulu Mehmed Pasha was born Albanian. All three ran the empire for sultans withdrawn behind the walls of Topkapi Palace.

The system worked, in this account, only while the sultan governed, and every later fix, the Tanzimat's constitution, the Young Turk revolution, arrived too late or too recklessly to save it.

The Arab Nationalist case starts with a single rifle shot, fired at the Ottoman barracks in Mecca on the fifth of June, nineteen sixteen, by Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the city's Hashemite guardian. The Arab Revolt begins.

This account calls the four centuries before that shot an occupation, not a partnership. From nineteen oh eight the Committee of Union and Progress makes Turkish the only language of government, courts, and schools, reversing centuries of administration in the empire's many tongues.

Its clearest proof is Cemal Pasha, the Committee's governor of Syria, hanging twenty two Arab nationalists in Beirut's main square in nineteen fifteen, and seven more in Damascus the next year. Beirut still calls that square the Martyrs' Square.

Historians paraphrase the case George Antonius built for it this way.

The Balkan Christian case starts with a battle both sides could claim to survive. At Kosovo Polje on the twenty eighth of June, thirteen eighty nine, both commanders die and Serbia survives another seventy years as a vassal state. None of that stopped the memory.

Serbian tradition turned that battle into the day a heavenly kingdom was chosen over an earthly one, the start of five centuries of servitude.

Its clearest evidence is the devshirme, the child levy. Every three to five years Ottoman officials entered Christian villages and took boys between eight and eighteen, converted them, and trained them as Janissaries or palace officials, for roughly three hundred years. Estimates of how many were taken run from five hundred thousand to one million. Mothers reportedly scarred their own sons to disqualify them.

In eighteen seventy six Ottoman irregulars killed an estimated twelve to thirty thousand Bulgarian civilians putting down an uprising. William Ewart Gladstone wrote a pamphlet about it that sold two hundred thousand copies in its first month.

The pluralist case takes Bayezid's ships and asks what held them up for four centuries after the refugees landed.

The historian Karen Barkey reframes it. The millet system was not built as tolerance, it was an administrative tool for governing difference, but the effect held for centuries. A Jewish merchant in Istanbul settled a contract dispute in a rabbinical court under his own law. His Muslim neighbor used a sharia court. His Greek Orthodox neighbor used the Patriarch's court. The sultan adjudicated between the communities. He did not impose one law on all of them.

In eighteen fifty six an imperial edict declared every Ottoman subject equal regardless of religion, and the reform commission that followed produced a code of one thousand eight hundred and fifty one articles, built on Islamic law in the structure of the Napoleonic Code. Parts of it were still in force in Jordan, Palestine, and Israel in the middle of the twentieth century.

Karen Barkey's own description of the system, paraphrased, was blunt.

The dissolution case starts with a line on a map that nobody living beside it was shown. In nineteen sixteen a British diplomat and a French one divided the Ottoman Arab provinces between their two countries in secret, and that is its own broadcast. What concerns this one is what was built on top of it.

Britain combined three separately governed Ottoman provinces, a Kurdish and Turkmen north, a Sunni Arab center, a Shia Arab south, into one new state called Iraq, and gave it a king who had never set foot in the country. France cut a Lebanon out of Ottoman Syria with borders drawn to guarantee a Christian majority. Lebanon's civil war, decades later, followed exactly those lines.

The Treaty of Lausanne in nineteen twenty three then unmakes what centuries of Ottoman rule had mixed together: one point two million Orthodox Greeks expelled from Turkey, four hundred thousand Muslims expelled from Greece, all of it compulsory. Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations official who ran the exchange, called his own project this.

The same dissolution left the Kurds, promised a state at Sevres in nineteen twenty and denied one at Lausanne three years later, spread across four countries whose borders were drawn on Ottoman maps.