The University of Chicago No Empire for Old Men: The
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO NO EMPIRE FOR OLD MEN: THE YOUNG OTTOMANS AND THE WORLD, 1856-1878 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND CIVILIZATIONS BY MADELEINE ELFENBEIN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2017 Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... v Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 A Popular Response to the Crisis of Sovereignty .................................................................... 2 Saving the State from Itself ....................................................................................................... 5 Ottomanism and the International Turn ............................................................................... 16 Who Were The Young Ottomans? .......................................................................................... 19 Young Ottoman Legacies ........................................................................................................ 22 Outline of Chapters .................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 1: A Nation in Search of Sovereignty ...................................................................... 29 States in Formation ................................................................................................................. 31 From a Global Power to a “Phantom State”? ......................................................................... 39 The Tanzimat as a Response to the Crisis of Sovereignty .................................................... 55 A Nation Against Its State ....................................................................................................... 58 The Young Ottomans and the Liberal International ............................................................. 70 Raising “the Banner of the Peoples” in Istanbul ................................................................... 76 Chapter 2: Namik Kemal and the Dream of a Liberal Ottoman Imperium .................... 80 Hamiyet .................................................................................................................................... 85 Hürriyet .................................................................................................................................... 94 Hakimiyet ............................................................................................................................... 101 Chapter 3: Teodor Kasap and the Making of an Ottomanist Public .............................. 113 The Melting Pot of the Mediterranean: Kasap’s Cappadocian Origins ............................. 125 On the Battlefield of Humanity: Kasap in Europe with Dumas ......................................... 129 An Ottoman by Choice ........................................................................................................... 136 From Ottoman-ness to Ottomanism .................................................................................... 150 Kasap and the “Honorable Cosmopolitans” ........................................................................ 153 Kasap in Exile ......................................................................................................................... 169 Chapter 4: Ali Suavi and the Ottomanist Critique of Liberalism ................................... 176 A Pious Cosmopolitan in Training ....................................................................................... 183 A Strategic Alliance with Liberalism .................................................................................... 188 Suavi’s European interlocutors ............................................................................................ 203 From Anti-Liberalism to Islamism ....................................................................................... 218 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 224 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 227 ii Acknowledgements This project got its unlikely start in a course on Montesquieu co-taught by Paul Cheney and Robert Morrissey, who gave me the green light to look for points where French and Ottoman political thought might intersect, and to whom I am indebted for their early encouragement. It developed through the cheerful provocations of my advisor, Holly Shissler, and it has benefited tremendously from her guidance and encouragement. I am grateful to my committee members, Orit Bashkin, Hakan Karateke, and Jennifer Pitts, for their insights and patient support for a project that occasionally threatened to wander off course. I'm especially grateful to Jennifer Pitts for crossing departmental lines to serve on my committee, and for providing a rich source of methodological inspiration. I owe a great deal to my language teachers: Helga Anetshofer in Turkish, Saeed Ghahremani in Persian, and Kay Heikkinen in Arabic. I’m also grateful to Selim Kuru for his early enthusiasm, and to Ahmed El Shamsy for helping me to prepare an exam field in Islamic political thought. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Department of Education, which supported my coursework with FLAS fellowships for Turkish and Persian study; the Social Sciences Research Council, for an International Dissertation Research Fellowship that financed a year of research in Istanbul and Paris; the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago, which provided funding for an archival trip to London; and the University of Chicago Center in Paris, for a summer residency there. I am also grateful for feedback received from audiences at the Middle Eastern History and Theory Workshop, the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France, the Intellectual History Workshop, and the NELC Colloquium at the University of Chicago, as well as my fellows at iii the 2015 IDRF fellows’ workshop in Berkeley, California (especially Mou Bannerjee, to whom this dissertation owes its title). I am happy to bear an incalculable debt of gratitude to friends whose comradeship has sustained me throughout eight years of graduate school, especially Nicole Nitsche, Emily Blumberg, Lydia Kiesling, Fatih Kurşun, Carlos Grenier, Toygun Altıntaş, Tolga Cora, IJpek Cora, Annie Greene, Basil Salem, Chris Markiewicz, Andrea Brown, Nicole Beckmann Tessel, Emma Stone Mackinnon, Ashleigh Campi, Elizabeth Gichana, Hannah Mosher, Anna Weichselbraun, Hannah Chazin, Molly Cunningham, Kaya Williams, Jay Sosa, Eli Thorkelson, and Talia Weiner in Chicago; Dan Liu, Laura Alex Frye-Levine, Alison Wendlandt, Clare Moran, and John Vining in Madison; and the brave band of itinerant knowledge workers who have been my companions in Istanbul, London, Paris, and cyberspace, especially Elçin Arabacı, Michael Polczynski, Ella Fratantuono, Emily Neumeier, Sotirios Dimitriadis, Alex Schweig, Nir Shafir, Sam Dolbee, Chris Gratien, Oscar Aguirre-Mandejano, Sanja Kadrić, Isacar Bolaños, Zoe Griffith, Lale Can, Dzovinar Derderian, Ercüment Asıl, and Alp Eren Topal. My gratitude extends to the members of the Any Good Thing Writing Group, led by Rebecca Barrett-Fox, for steady encouragement through the final stretch. My most generous and patient mentors have been my parents, Andrée Pagès and Jay Elfenbein. I am indebted to them for the suspension of disbelief that makes dissertations possible. For the constancy of their love, friendship, and willingness to watch the baby, I thank Gus Pagès, Nina Marrero, Debi Elfenbein, Mike Laas, Pat Laas, Kelly Laas, and Scott Dick. For gentle kicks toward the finish line, I thank Simone Elfenbein-Laas. And for all this and more, I thank Molly Laas. iv Abstract This dissertation explores the rise of the Young Ottoman movement in the 1860s as a product of the new geopolitical order that emerged in the wake of the Crimean War (1853–1856). It combines a close study of the writings of three major Young Ottoman thinkers with archival research documenting the transnational sources of their ideas, and situates the emergence of these ideas within the histories of both European liberalism and modern Islamic political thought. Chapter 1 (“A Nation in Search of Sovereignty”) charts the profound shift undergone by Ottoman sovereignty over the course of the nineteenth century. It describes the model of sovereignty developed by Tanzimat-era statesmen in conjunction with their European collaborators as porous, a structure reflective of the increasingly internationalized distribution of power over the lives of Ottoman subjects. The Young Ottoman movement, I argue, was an organized response to this newly porous model of sovereignty that resisted both the loss of international prestige and the reduced political efficacy of Ottoman subjects it created; yet the movement itself arose through transnational networks that paralleled the web of formal institutions it sought to challenge, marking a newly internationalized phase of Ottoman dissident