2018/01/18 by Bruce Masters · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics
paper · doi:10.1093/jis/ety006
openalex publication_date 2018/01/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The Young Turk Revolution of July 24, 1908 was potentially a momentous event that might have saved the empire if it had delivered on its promises. Led by a group of middle level army officers, the coup’s objective was to restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876. The plotters did not see themselves as true revolutionaries but rather as protectors of the constitutional monarchy that the Tanzimat reformers of the mid-nineteenth century had envisioned. The sitting sultan, Abdülhamid II, was not overthrown and much of his governing council remained in place, at least initially. Nevertheless, many in the Ottoman Empire saw the event as opening a door to political liberty with the restoration of what was even by the standards of the early twentieth century a fairly illiberal constitution. Nevertheless, enthusiasm for the return of the constitution and the promise of elections for the parliament for which it provided was especially strong among the empire’s minorities, those whom Bedross Der Matossian calls the ‘nondominant groups’, meaning non-Turks. There were many such communities in the Ottoman Empire including predominantly Muslim non-Turkish linguistic communities: Arabs, Kurds, and Albanians. There were also, of course, the non-Muslim populations, most notably Greeks and Armenians. Der Matossian describes the reactions to the revolution and its aftermath of three of these ‘nondominant groups’: Armenians, Arabs, and Jews. These are interesting choices as each community provided a somewhat different set of responses to the various challenges facing an empire in the throes of a revolution, depending on their own aspirations and not necessarily those of the Ottoman body politic at large. In short, there were few dreams that were truly universally shared in the empire.