Constantinople, April 24th 1909. In his palace, Sultan Abdul Hameed II can hear gunfire and artillery. Street fighting rages in the ancient city.
Monarchist forces are besieged in their barracks in the European quarter, surrounded by the Constitutionalist Army of Action. Last summer, he had bowed to the Constitutionalists, the so-called 'Young Turk' revolutionaries, and restored the 1876 constitution, and reconvened the Ottoman Senate for the first time in 30 years. But that only lasted 10 weeks before his supporters in the army smashed it in a counter-coup and restored absolute monarchy.
But that great gamble, he sees, has failed. In three days, the Young Turks and their Army of Action will enter the palace. They will convince religious authorities to issue a decree deposing Abdul Hameed and replace him with his brother.
Then, it will finally be the Young Turks' chance to stabilize the ailing Ottoman Empire. And at that task, they too will fail. Music: "Birth of the People" by Demetori Extra History is brought to you by our amazing patrons over on Patreon.
Thanks so much for your support! Way back in one of our first Extra History series, on the beginning of WWI, we talked about how at the end of the war, the victorious powers carved up the Middle East: men in drawing rooms deciding the fates of people They did not understand, and in some cases, lands they had never visited. This is the story of how that came to happen; A tale of revolts, secret treaties, betrayals, a struggle for homelands, and a British counterinsurgency operation in Iraq.
Now if that sounds familiar, it's because the consequences of these decisions are still playing out today. The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement in particular, a secret treaty dividing the Middle East between the British and French, is still actively discussed in the region. In fact, back in 2014, fighters from the self-styled Islamic state bulldozed barriers on the Iraqi-Syrian border, attempting to symbolically destroy the dividing lines on the Sykes-Picot map nearly a century before!
That's how alive this history still is! So, given the size of this topic and how controversial some of the material can be, we want to lay out our objective right at the beginning. In short, while we can't tell you everything about this topic, We want to explain at a basic level how a regional map that looked like this in 1914 changed within a single decade to look like the region we know today, a place that the Great Powers considered a backwater frontier zone in 1914, But would increasingly come to dominate political thought in the 20th century.
And all of this starts with the Ottoman Empire. Though many have described the late Ottoman Empire as 'The Sick Man of Europe', Historians now consider this view outdated. While it is true that the Empire declined in the late 19th and early 20th century, its fall was not as inevitable as many European politicians believed.
Founded in the 13th century, by 1900, the empire was over 700 years old, and had met and bested through policies of reform, more crises than many younger nations had ever encountered. Despite suffering a string of military defeats in the 18th century, losing its territory in the Balkans, the empire's economy remained stable for the first half of the 19th century. This was due to a series of political, legal, and social reforms, including modernizing their economy and instituting a codified system of secular law, and as an aside, they also decriminalized homosexuality in 1858.
But during the mid 19th century, the empire also came under enormous outside pressure, largely from the emergent threat of Russia, which gobbled up Ottoman territory in Eastern Europe, precipitating a refugee crisis, as Muslims fled from the periphery to the empire center. And in its first attempt to fight European powers and hold on to its territory, The Ottomans increasingly needed to rely on foreign alliances and foreign loans. In return, they had to agree to extreme conditions, for instance, that foreigners were not subject to Ottoman law.
In Constantinople, locals were even expected to stand aside and let a foreigner pass if they ever encountered one on the street, and European consulates also extended their protections to local Christians by granting them citizenship, fueling resentment, and it gets worse. Hard hit by the global economic crisis of 1873, the Ottoman Empire went bankrupt two years later and ended up entering a program where France and Britain controlled its debt and controlled part of its economy. So, humbled economically, defeated militarily, and with its European possessions shrinking, in the 1890s, Sultan Abdul Hameed II turned his frustration with the Christian governments of Europe into domestic persecution campaigns, including outright massacres against its Christian Armenian minority.
Witnessed by foreign journalists, this increasingly isolated the Ottomans on the world stage. The Young Turk revolution then, and the abdication of Abdul Hameed after the counter-coup, offered a ray of hope: a new beginning, with the empire adopting a more representative, liberal, and pluralistic model along the lines of European democracies. But then the Young Turks ran into the trap of all successful revolutionaries, mainly that once they took the reins of power, all of the problems of the previous government were now their problems, and they had inherited a divided society.
When they played to the 70% of Ottomans who were Muslim, they upset the minority Christians and Jews, Liberal reforms on women's rights angered the Conservatives, and the Young Turks increasing reliance on Turkish nationalism outright alienated the non-Turks in the province, such as the Arab population. This state was an economic crisis, its population splintered, and with the government so obviously weak, both rivals and revolutionaries saw their chance. Italy took Libya, independence movements rocked the Balkans and Albania, and internal uprisings sent the army everywhere.
And the British, the Ottoman's closest partner, turned on them. In 1882, they used a pretext to invade and occupy the Ottoman possession of Egypt, taking control of a buffer zone on the west bank of the Suez Canal, thus securing their vital sea route to India. In 1906, they exploited a minor incident between British officers and locals to seize the east bank as well.
Increasingly, European powers saw the Ottomans remaining Imperial possessions in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia as the next frontier in their own Imperial schemes, not only to grab religious sites in the Holy Land, but to secure Christian minorities and seize new ports in the Mediterranean. Russia, in particular, wanted Constantinople and Anatolia, while Britain saw the Middle East as a crucial buffer to guard India from its rivals. And of course, the big, dark, slick elephant in the room was the discovery of large exploitable oil fields.
That meant with the British Royal Navy switching from coal to oil, and other nations following suit, securing a source of crude suddenly became a vital national security interest. on the eve of the 1st World War, Ottoman territory in the Middle East was crawling with spies and intelligence officers trying to set up their nations to grab territory and land armies once the guns started firing. A group of British agents mapped crucial areas under the cover of an archaeological expedition.
(Actually by chance, one of those 'archaeologists', a teenager named T. E. Lawrence, would end up as a major player in subsequent events.
) German operatives, using the same cover, attempted to stoke up an insurgency against British rule in Egypt, and American agents of the Standard Oil Company toured the country in disguise as religious tourists, scouting possible sites for drilling. This expectation of gorging themselves on Ottoman territory increasingly gained a name, the Great Loot, and it would begin as soon as the Great Powers finally broke into war. Meanwhile, internal unrest was growing as well in the Ottoman Middle East.
For centuries, one of the better aspects of Ottoman administration was its light rule. As long as a province paid its taxes, acknowledged the supremacy of Constantinople, and showed up if there was a war, they could essentially do as they pleased. This semi-autonomy was a pragmatic, even enlightened way of operating an empire that contains so many different religious and ethnic groups.
But as emergency after emergency consumed the Ottoman Corps, that autonomy turned into open neglect, and then when Constantinople did put its foot down, it was not welcome The Young Turk government increasingly came into conflict with the powerful Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and a conservative traditionalist who'd been appointed by the deposed Sultan, Hussein disliked the Young Turks Liberizing social reforms. In addition, he distrusted the government's insistence on building a railway line linking Damascus to Mecca. While this was supposedly to assist the yearly pilgrimage, Hussein and his sons increasingly suspected that the real purpose was to be able to move troops internally should the Arabs ever rebel, and for Hussein and his sons, rebellion would be very much in the cards, for in 1913, the Young Turk party took direct control in a coup, the following year, the railway reached a neighboring Medina, an Archduke died in Sarajevo, and the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers.
Hussein, however, did not. Instead, he made the British an offer: Recognize an independent Arab state, and he would lead an Arab revolt. The war and the Great Loot had begun.
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