History questions not worth their own thread III

[J. pride]

The Ottoman Empire died because of the First World War, not because of the British and French saving it in the Crimean War. It's clear that plenty of people still cared about the idea of Ottomanism quite late in the game. After all, Enver's 1913 coup was designed to revitalize the empire, and although Enver himself was possessed of pretty wacky pan-Turanian ideas, the Committee of Union and Progress as a whole was still rooted in the very Muslim, Ottomanist foundations of state. Turkish nationalism as independent from Ottomanism did not come into play until 1918-9.

No, Im clear on that BUT were the Ottomans capable (likely) of surviving the Crimean War by themselves?

So the question is kind of a non sequitur: the Crimean War wasn't really a tipping point. While it was certainly not good for the Ottoman exchequer for various foreigners to get capitulations and whatnot, the loans provided by Western powers helped the country to industrialize and improve its military.

The loans were a big part of why Ottomans joined the Germans, werent they?

 

[Dachs]

No, Im clear on that BUT were the Ottomans capable (likely) of surviving the Crimean War by themselves?

Um, by themselves, they probably would've ended up yielding the Danubian Principalities without a war. But it never would have happened "by themselves", because the French started the crisis in the first place.

The loans were a big part of why Ottomans joined the Germans, werent they?

Yes. That's contingent, though. Regardless of the Ottomans' financial situation, almost the entire CUP leadership preferred an alliance with Russia (!) or France. Russia and France rejected alliance proposals in May-July 1914, so they signed a defensive alliance with Germany to provide security against a potential Anglo-Russian attempt to use the war to carve up the Ottoman Empire. When the British and Russians subsequently did use the excuse of the war to try to carve up the Ottoman Empire, the Turks felt backed into a corner, ended the concessions, and eventually secured a loan from Germany and declared war.

 

[LightSpectra]

Re-read the first amendment. It only says what Congress may do, and nothing about what states may or may not do. I noticed that the first time I read it, and I've always wondered whether it was specifically designed to avoid upsetting the applecart in states with established Christianity.

No, it's because the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government until the post-bellum amendments. The Founding Fathers were only concerned about centralized tyranny, not infractions of rights in individual states. They would've actually opposed the 14th amendment, on the grounds that it means the Supreme Court of the United States can dictate what are and are not rights to individual states, as opposed to regulating only (1) the federal government and (2) interstate law.

 

[J. pride]

When the British and Russians subsequently did use the excuse of the war to try to carve up the Ottoman Empire

Little skechy here; do explain? Im somewhat familiar with WWI but not to this extent?

 

[Dachs]

No, it's because the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government until the post-bellum amendments.

Well, it's more like they never explicitly applied to the states until after the ACW.

 

[Dachs]

Little skechy here; do explain? Im somewhat familiar with WWI but not to this extent?

The long and short of it is that the British and Russians were convinced that the Ottomans were a German puppet state by August 1914. They thought the same thing about Austria-Hungary, which is one of the reasons that the war started. Anyway, this was obviously false. Most of the CUP was aiming for neutrality, not war; even the pro-Entente factions that had been undercut by France's and Russia's rejection of the alliance proposals preferred to avoid fighting.

Yet the British established a blockade of the Ottoman coast in October 1914, while the Russians began supporting rebel groups in Iranian Azerbaijan and Armenia. British and Ottoman forces clashed on the Sinai frontier. Kitchener himself approved the dispatch of arms and cash to rebels in the Hijaz (why it took the British a full two years to follow up on that still confuses me). The British deployed an Indian Army division to Ahvaz in Iran - literally right on the Ottomans' doorstep - and then canceled that deployment to respect Ottoman sensibilities. So instead they moved it to Bahrain - hardly any less of a dagger pointed towards Iraq.

Why the British and Russians did these things is not clear - other than the supposition that the Ottomans were in the German camp, when they weren't. Some historians have explained it as a surreal coincidence of personalities. Churchill established the blockade because he was cheesed off about the Goeben and Breslau thing. Kitchener and the Indian government made their own maneuvers independent of each other. But from the inside, it sure looked like the British and Russians were getting ready to use the excuse of war to seize Ottoman territory. This gave a disproportionate amount of authority to Enver and swung many, including Talaat and Cemal, into his camp by late October. The financial situation contingent on mobilization - mobilization which had been done to safeguard Ottoman neutrality - helped do the rest.

 

[Lord Baal]

Kitchener himself approved the dispatch of arms and cash to rebels in the Hijaz (why it took the British a full two years to follow up on that still confuses me).

I can shed a little light on this. There were several reasons the British didn't follow up on the situation in the Hijaz for as long as they did, which included disunity among the Arabs, their lack of initial success against the Turks, and the belief that the British didn't need Arab assistance to take care of the Turks.

The initial revolt had two leaders, the Sharif of Mecca, Husein bin Ali (whose affairs were actually handled by his son, Prince Faisal, later King of both Syria and Iraq) and Ibn Saud (afterwards the founder of Saudi Arabia) who handled affairs in the two different regions the British had good diplomatic contacts with; the Hejaz and Najd. Ali was by far the more effective of the two at first, and as the Sharif of Mecca enjoyed great prestige in the Islamic world, but Saud already had vast experience in guerrilla warfare, having had to fight the rival Al Rashid family for control of the Najd for several decades before the outbreak of WWI.

The Sharifians and the Al Saud quickly became antagonistic towards one another, in large part due to their differing goals. The Sharifians desired unity among the Arabs (with a Hashemite in charge, of course), whereas the Al Sauds desired personal power for themselves, regardless of how much Arab land that actually constituted. Before long, the two groups were fighting each other using the arms the British had given them. This made them easy pickings for the Turks, who for the most part were content to just let them kill each other.

Eventually, the Sharifians elected to make peace with the Al Saud. The Al Saud agreed to restrict their operations to the Najd, whereas the Sharifians were free to go anywhere else. The Sharifians believed that they'd be able to unite the majority of the Arab world behind themselves against the Turks, then come back and deal with the Al Saud later. Ibn Saud thought that doing this would drain the Sharifians of manpower while he concentrated on subduing the Turkish vassals in the Najd, without having to bother actually fighting the Turks himself. In the end, Ibn Saud ended up being correct; after WWI he incorporated most of the Turks left in Arabia into his own army and convinced them to fight the British-sponsored Sharifians - this was during the period when the British were supporting the Greek invasion of Anatolia, so Kemal supported these actions and encouraged the Turks left in the Peninsula to distract and harass the British any way they could. This led to the Sharifians being forced completely out of the Arabian Peninsula and the unification of the Kingdoms of Hejaz and Najd into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

After peace between the Sharifians and the Al Saud was achieved in 1915, the Sharifians resumed their assaults on the Turks. But while the Sharifians had a great deal of experience in inter-tribal warfare with other Arabs, they were hopelessly out of their league against the Turkish Army. The Turkish garrison at Medina was completely unassailable, even to a British attack, and had the only functioning military airstrip in the area. The result was the complete rout of the Sharifians whenever they faced the Turks.

For their own part, the British saw this infighting and ineffectiveness in the early stages of the Arab Revolt and decided to concentrate on what they saw as better opportunities, such as the Gallipoli campaigns and repeated sorties against the Ottomans from Kuwait. Eventually, when the British ran out of other ideas - largely due to the fact that the Turks consistently handed their arses back to them whenever they faced each other - they sent heavy weaponry and military advisors - the most famous and able of which was T.E. Lawrence who assisted the Sharifians against the Turks; something which they probably should have done from the start.

But the Arab Revolt was never actually successful in forcing the Turks out of Arabia until the Turkish Army was finally beaten in the Sinai (in large part due to the efforts of Lawrence and the Sharifians in destroying trains, train-tracks and bridges, making re-supply of Medina cripplingly slow) forcing the Turks to positively hemmorhage troops and resources from Arabia-proper to deal with the more immediate threat of the British. This enabled the Sharifians to launch a daring raid on Aqaba, which was under-defended due to its garrison being called away to fight the British, which inspired much of the Arab world to unite behind the Hashemite family (as Faisal had always dreamt) and almost overnight transformed the situation for the Turks in the Middle East from one of 'how much of our Empire can we keep from the Allied Powers?' to 'what are our chances of even remaining an independent state when our entire Empire is in open revolt against us?'

 

[SeekTruthFromFacts]

What is meant by "Ottomanism" versus 'Turkish nationalism'? Was the former simply Turkish expansionist imperialism, or was there an element of uniting the umma (sp?) under the Caliphate?

largely due to the fact that the Turks consistently handed their arses back to them whenever they faced each other

I recently read a bit on Gallipoli and was impressed by the efficiency of the Ottomans. I hadn't appreciated that they had modernized their army like that. Yet they lost bits of the Balkans only shortly before....?

 

[Dachs]

What is meant by "Ottomanism" versus 'Turkish nationalism'? Was the former simply Turkish expansionist imperialism, or was there an element of uniting the umma (sp?) under the Caliphate?

Not expansionistic per se, but revivalistic. Yeah, Islam was pretty central to it, but in general Ottomanism was kind of just a unifying imperial ideology - rather like the attempts to foster "black-yellow" nationalism in the Habsburg Empire. In addition to the Turks and Kurds that Turkish nationalism focused on, Ottomanism tried to accommodate the various Arabs, Iraqis, and Syrians as well. Pan-Islam both worked for and against this.

I recently read a bit on Gallipoli and was impressed by the efficiency of the Ottomans. I hadn't appreciated that they had modernized their army like that. Yet they lost bits of the Balkans only shortly before....?

In 1914, the Ottoman army was, in the words of Strachan, "a bewildering blend of the new and the unreformed".

For instance, Abdulhamid II had tried to keep the army relatively weak, so it could not threaten his rule, but its inability even to fulfill the role of internal policing had led to the 1908 revolution, when the Third Army marched on the capital and deposed the sultan. By and large, the army subscribed to Ottomanism, in large part because a great deal of its officer corps came from Rumeli. When Sevket, one of the major figures in the revolution, tried to reform the army, it was therefore supposed to be on the lines of Ottomanization.

Ottomanization ran into some pretty serious problems, though. For instance, until 1914 (when the 1912 army law was finally passed), the army could not recruit from the inhabitants of Constantinople, from Arabs, from Kurds, or from nomads, and even after the army law was promulgated the lack of population registers made evasion of conscription a simple matter, and non-Muslims remained exempt. Regional corps were established under Sevket's administration to try to make mobilization easier, but the result was to prevent the assembly of the army into mixed groups - again weakening Ottomanization. But it's not clear that those mixed groups would have helped, because only 40% of the army spoke Turkish, and few of those could write it, while spelling remained unstandardized (one of Kemal's greatest achievements under the Republic). Enver tried to remedy the linguistic difficulties by introducing a common form of Arabic, similar to the Habsburg army's "army language", but by 1915 he had to give it up under the pressures of war. Furthermore, army equipment was poor.

It was not all doom and gloom, though. Enver, when he came to power in 1913-4, seized the war ministry as his personal fiefdom, and established a "Special Organization" (the Teskilat-i Mahsusa) to ensure personal loyalty. But at the same time, Enver avoided turning the army into a collection of yes-men, and kept many officers of proven ability. Enver was a brilliant organizer, if not a great campaigner; he did not live up to his reputation of "Napoleonlik", but he was far from a dilettante. Francis Cunliffe-Owen, the British attache, said in early 1914 that Enver's war ministry was "as up to date...as the Kriegsministerium [the German war ministry]".

Several observers have given the German mission of Liman von Sanders, the subject of a serious Russo-German diplomatic crisis in 1913, the role in modernizing the Ottoman army in the wake of the defeats in the Balkan Wars. But Liman's responsibilities were limited, and he clashed repeatedly with Enver. German officers before the war chafed at their lack of responsibilities, and they only gained a place in the war planning office during the spring and summer of 1914. Only with the outbreak of war did Liman, Kress von Kressenstein, Colmar von der Goltz, and others gain the kind of prominence for which they are best known, taking field commands, sometimes - see Goltz at Kut-al-Amara, for instance - to great effect.

Anyway. The Ottoman military's uneven performance is perhaps best put down to the incompleteness of the Sevket/Enver reforms. By 1912, they were barely implemented; by 1914, they were only half implemented. The result was an army that could generally perform very well defensively, but which was not suited to offensive operations.

 

[Tee Kay]

What is meant by "Ottomanism" versus 'Turkish nationalism'? Was the former simply Turkish expansionist imperialism, or was there an element of uniting the umma (sp?) under the Caliphate?

The official policy of the Late Ottoman Period was always a variant of "Ottomanism". Broadly speaking, Ottomanism was an ideology based on the belief that all subjects of the Ottoman sultan shared a common identity beyond nation, ethnicity or religion, and are all equal as Ottoman subjects. It was consciously constructed by Ottomans as a direct response to the rise in nationalism in the early 19th nationalist movements and the threat posed by the Great Powers who often exploit such nationalist movements for their own ends. The proponents of Ottomanism can very roughly be classified into two camps: the first group consists of genuine liberals who truly believed in liberty, equality, fraternity and the rule of law et cetera. The second group consists of conservatives of various stripes who wanted to preserve the empire, and saw Ottomanism as the best ideology which could potentially replace the traditional authority of the Sultan-Caliph as the foundation of the Empire.

Ottomanism was always a very vague idea and it was interpreted and implemented in different ways from its conception in the early 19th century. At certain times, it almost took the form of a genuine popular movement (eg during the early days of the Second Constitutional Period) though its main proponents were generally the Palace, the bureaucratic elite and certain groups who had an interest in the Empire staying together, such as certain Greek and Armenian notables - so it's not simply Turkish imperialism, but rather Ottoman imperialism, which not only Turks but elites of other nationalities participated in. Early on during the Tanzimat the bureaucratic institution of the Sublime Porte headed the reforms in a top-down manner that gradually modified the traditional structures of Ottoman society (eg the millet system). Later Ottomanism was expressed in the form of a movement for an Ottoman constitution. It was later still, under Abdulhamid II and later under the CUP, that the official "Ottomanist" ideology began to really take on an overt Islamic character in an effort to revive the institution of the Caliphate and preempt the rise of nationalism among the Arabs, Albanians and the Kurds (many of the Christian areas of the empire had by that point gained either autonomy, became independent, or was under foreign rule, with the exception Armenia).

As Dachs (I think) already said, "Turkish nationalism", by constrast, really only came to prominance in the last days of the First World War (though certain leaders of the CUP, like the notorious Enver Pasha, held strong Turkist/Turanist beliefs). It did kind of developed out of a variant of Ottomanism, but since it is quite explicit about basing identity on ethnicity it is quite distinct from early Ottomanism.

I recently read a bit on Gallipoli and was impressed by the efficiency of the Ottomans. I hadn't appreciated that they had modernized their army like that. Yet they lost bits of the Balkans only shortly before....?

Yeah, the Ottomans performed better during the First World War than commonly believed. With Galipoli, though, it was as much Allied blunder as Ottoman fighting abilitiy, if not more so, that contributed to the Allied defeat. It was a kind of pyrrhic victory for the Ottoman too; they lost more men than the Allies, while in the east they were beaten badly by the Russians.

Edit: didn't notice that Dachs already answered, and answered better.

 

[Tee Kay]

Where can I find a map (or something) showing the distribution of Daimyo domains in Feudal Japan between 1399 - 1836?

 

[aronnax]

Where can I find a map (or something) showing the distribution of Daimyo domains in Feudal Japan between 1399 - 1836?

Oh man I tried to find one once on Google. It was impossible except for this one small map whose source came from a cosplay forum. I suggest you hit the libraries and find a book on Japan with one.

 

[Tee Kay]

Given the popularity of everything Japanese in the West I'm surprised that it's easier to find information on the political/territorial evolution of Indonesia on the internet than that of Japan.

 

[SeekTruthFromFacts]

Try #31 and #32 on this page:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?389508-Sengoku-Total-War/page2

The key link is to a page at the Chinese Historical GIS, which is a reputable project I have heard of:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/japan/

Don't know how good they are at Japanese stuff though.

 

[SeekTruthFromFacts]

Thank you to Dachs and taillesskangeru for ideas on Ottomanism and the social factors. But what was the selling point? Let's imagine an Ottomanist met a Arab nationalist or a Zionist in the souk. How would he argue that they were better staying in the Ottoman Empire?

Was there any sense of an overarching ethnic identity, like Zhonghua minzu? So he argues "we're all really one family really, so we should stick together?"

Or is it "we have a great and glorious history, so we should stick together", even though all the great and good are Turks?

Or was it just après nous, le déluge?

 

[LamaGT]

Regarding USA federalism, i always asked why are the states so much independent(things like the execution allowed or not depending on the state is ridiculous imho).
Are there any social or cultural reasons?

 

[Leoreth]

Given their past experience with a strong centralized power, it makes sense, doesn't it?

 

[Yui108]

Regarding USA federalism, i always asked why are the states so much independent(things like the execution allowed or not depending on the state is ridiculous imho).
Are there any social or cultural reasons?

The Founding Fathers were horrified of strong central power, and states' rights are sacred. However, states autonomy has been declining now for over a hundred years, and the trend seems bound to continue.

 

[Ajidica]

Often forgot is that the states were already independant entities with their own administrative systems. At the time, it was best to keep the administration that worked because the distances and bad roads made having a strong central system unfeasible.

 

[Cutlass]

The Founding Fathers were horrified of strong central power, and states' rights are sacred. However, states autonomy has been declining now for over a hundred years, and the trend seems bound to continue.

That's not really true. Washington, Hamilton, and some others wanted a stronger federal government. Just not the equal to the strength and centralization of Britain. Jefferson and Madison were more horrified of any central power. Until, of course, it was their turns to be president.

The states already were separate entities for governance purposes before the nation was formed. Keeping that true was part of what was needed for an agreement to become a nation. States did not want to give up local rule. So the balance has been a compromise, and it's an ongoing compromise that is adjusted around the margins all the time.