Dissolution of the empire

Abdülhamid was deposed and replaced by Sultan Mehmed V (ruled

1909–18), son of Abdülmecid. The constitution was amended to
transfer real power to the Parliament. The army, and
particularly Mahmud Şevket Paşa, became the real arbiters of
Ottoman politics.

Rise of the CUP

Although the removal of many of its political opponents had allowed
the CUP to move into a more prominent position in government, it
was still weak. It had a core of able, determined men but a much
larger collection of individuals and factions whose Unionist
affiliation was so weak that they easily merged into other parties.
Although the CUP won an overwhelming majority in the election of
April 1912, its support rapidly melted away following military losses
to Italy. Evidence of army hostility finally forced the CUP out of
office in July 1912, to be succeeded by a political coalition called
the Liberal Union.
The Liberal Union, too, lost support following defeats in the
Balkans. That provided the opportunity for a small group of CUP
officers and soldiers to stage a coup (January 23, 1913), known as
the Sublime Porte Incident, to force the resignation of the
grand vizier Mehmed Kâmil Paşa and establish a new cabinet under
Şevket Paşa. Şevket Paşa, however, was not a Unionist, and it was
only after his assassination (June 11, 1913) that the CUP at last
succeeded in establishing a Unionist-dominated government
under Said Halim Paşa.

Internal developments
The disastrous results of the Young Turks’ external policies
overshadowed the important internal developments of the years
1908–18. Further administrative reforms, particularly of provincial
administration in 1913, led to more centralization, although by
European standards the central Ottoman government remained
relatively weak, particularly in the more distant provinces. The
burden of taxation was well below that of European powers.
The Young Turks were the first Ottoman reformers to promote
industrialization, with a Law for the Encouragement of Industry
(1909, revised 1915). Although they had little success, they did build
a framework for later state-directed economic planning.
Considerable attention was given to education, especially to the
neglected area of the primary level. The process of secularization of
the law was carried much further. A major development in national
journalism took place, and the status of women improved. The
whole period was one of intense social and political discussion and
change.

Turkish nationalism
The basic ideologies of the state remained Ottomanism and Islam,
but a new sense of Turkish identity began to develop. That new
concept was fostered by educational work of the Turkish Society
(formed 1908) and the Turkish Hearth (formed 1912). A political
twist was given by the adherents of Pan-Turkism and Pan-
Turanianism. Pan-Turkism, which aimed at the political union of all
Turkish-speaking peoples, began among Turks in Crimea and along
the Volga River. Its leading exponent was Ismail Gasprinski
(Gaspirali), who attempted to create a common Turkish language.
Many Pan-Turkists migrated to Ottoman lands, especially after
1905. One of them, Yusuf Akçuraoğlu, argued in Üç tarz-ı
siyaset (1903; “Three Kinds of Policy”) that Turkism provided a
better basis for the Ottoman Empire than either Islam or
Ottomanism. Pan-Turanianism developed from a much-disputed
19th-century theory of the common origin of Turkish, Mongol,
Tungus, Finnish, Hungarian, and other languages; some of its
advocates envisioned a great political federation of speakers of those
languages, extending from Hungary eastward to the Pacific Ocean.
Those ideas, however, found little support within the Ottoman
government. The accusation that the Young Turks pursued a
deliberate policy of Turkification within the empire in order to
alienate non-Turks and promote the rise of Arab and
Albanian nationalism is an oversimplification. The extension of
government activity inevitably brought with it the Turkish language,
as it was the language of government. That produced some reaction
from speakers of other languages, but the evidence suggests that it
did not override basic feelings of Muslim solidarity, except among
some small minorities. It was among the Christian groups that
distinct separatist ideas were developed.

Foreign relations
The foreign relations of the Ottoman Empire under the Young Turks
led to disaster. The 1908 revolution provided an opportunity for
several powers to press their designs upon the empire. In October
1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and Bulgaria proclaimed its
independence. Italy seized Tripoli (Libya) and occupied
the Dodecanese, a group of islands in the Aegean Sea; by the Treaty
of Lausanne (October 18, 1912) Italy retained the former but agreed
to evacuate the Dodecanese. In fact, however, it continued to occupy
them.
The two Balkan Wars (1912–13) almost completed the destruction of
the Ottoman Empire in Europe. In the first (October 1912–May
1913) the Ottomans lost almost all their European possessions,
including Crete, to Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and the
newly created state of Albania (Treaty of London, May 30, 1913). In
the second (June–July 1913), fought between Bulgaria and the
remaining Balkan states (including Romania) over the division
of Macedonia, the Ottomans intervened against Bulgaria and
recovered part of eastern Thrace, including Edirne. The Ottomans
had lost more than four-fifths of the territory and more than two-
thirds of the population of their European provinces.

The people
In 1914 the total population of the Ottoman Empire was
approximately 25 million, of which about 10 million were Turks, 6
million Arabs, 1.5 million Kurds, 1.5 million Greeks, and 2.5
million Armenians. The population of the empire (excluding such
virtually independent areas as Egypt, Romania, and Serbia) in the
period immediately prior to the losses of 1878 is estimated to have
been about 26 million. Natural increases and Muslim immigration
from Russia and the Balkans virtually made up the losses, and in
1914 the population was increasingly homogeneous in religion and
language, though a variety of languages continued to be spoken.

World War I, 1914–18

The Ottoman entry into World War I resulted from an overly hasty
calculation of likely advantage. German influence was strong but not
decisive; Germany’s trade with the Ottomans still lagged behind that
of Britain, France, and Austria, and its investments—which included
the Baghdad Railway between Istanbul and the Persian Gulf—were
smaller than those of France. A mission to Turkey led by the
German military officer Otto Liman von Sanders in 1913 was only
one of a series of German military missions, and Liman’s authority
to control the Ottoman army was much more limited than
contemporaries supposed. Except for the interest of Russia in
Istanbul and the straits between the Black and Mediterranean seas,
no European power had genuinely vital interests in the Ottoman
Empire. The Ottomans might have remained neutral, as a majority
of the cabinet wished, at least until the situation became clearer. But
the opportunism of the minister of war Enver Paşa, early German
victories, friction with the Triple Entente (France, Russia, and Great
Britain) arising out of the shelter given by the Ottomans to German
warships, and long-standing hostility to Russia combined to
produce an Ottoman bombardment of the Russian Black Sea ports
(October 29, 1914) and a declaration of war by the Entente against
the Ottoman Empire.
Enver PaşaEnver Paşa.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
World War I: Gallipoli CampaignA Turkish perspective on the
Gallipoli Campaign (1915–16), widely known among Turks as the
Battle of Çanakkale.© Behind the News (A Britannica Publishing
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The Ottomans made a substantial contribution to the Central

Powers’ war effort. Their forces fought in eastern Asia Minor
(Anatolia), Azerbaijan, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, and the
Dardanelles, as well as on European fronts, and they held down
large numbers of Entente troops. In September 1918 they
dominated Transcaucasia. During the war the Young Turks also took
the opportunity to attack certain internal problems—the
Capitulations were abolished unilaterally (September 1914),
the autonomous status of Lebanon was ended, a number of Arab
nationalists were executed in Damascus (August 1915 and May
1916), and the Armenian community in eastern Asia Minor and
Cilicia was massacred or deported to eliminate any domestic
support for the pro-Christian tsarist enemy on the Eastern Front.
Between 600,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians were killed. These
events are now widely described as a genocide of the Armenian
people.
After 1916, army desertions took place on a massive scale, and
economic pressures became acute. The surrender of Bulgaria
(September 28, 1918), which severed direct links with Germany, was
the final blow. The CUP cabinet resigned on October 7, and a new
government was formed under Ahmed Izzet Paşa on October 9. On
October 30 the Ottomans signed the Armistice of Mudros.

Allied war aims and the proposed peace settlement

Entente proposals for the partition of Ottoman territories were
formulated in a number of wartime agreements. By the Istanbul
Agreements (March–April 1915), Russia was promised Istanbul and
the straits; France was to receive a sphere of influence
in Syria and Cilicia. Britain had already annexed Cyprus and
declared a protectorate over Egypt. By the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot
Agreement (January 3, 1916), the French sphere was confirmed and
extended eastward to Mosul in Iraq. A British sphere of influence
in Mesopotamia extended as far north as Baghdad, and Britain was
given control of Haifa and Acre and of territory linking the
Mesopotamian and Haifa-Acre spheres. Palestine was to be placed
under an international regime. In compensation, the Russian gains
were extended (April–May 1916) to include the Ottoman provinces
of Trabzon, Erzurum, Van, and Bitlis in eastern Asia Minor. By
the London Agreement (April 26, 1915), Italy was promised the
Dodecanese and a possible share of Asia Minor. By the Agreement of
Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne (April 1917), Italy was promised a large
area of southwestern Anatolia, including İzmir and an additional
sphere to the north. Britain made various promises of independence
to Arab leaders, notably in the Ḥusayn-MacMahon correspondence
(1915–16), and in the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917)
promised to support the establishment of a national home for the
Jewish people in Palestine.
The Russian withdrawal in 1917 and postwar bargaining led to some
modifications of those agreements, and the Allied terms were not
finally presented until 1920. By the Treaty of Sèvres (August 10,
1920), the Ottomans retained Istanbul and part of Thrace but lost
the Arab provinces, ceded a large area of Asia Minor to a newly
created Armenian state with access to the sea,
surrendered Gökçeada and Bozcaada to Greece, and accepted
arrangements that implied the eventual loss of İzmir to Greece. The
straits were internationalized, and strict European control of
Ottoman finances was established. An accompanying tripartite
agreement between Britain, France, and Italy defined extensive
spheres of influence for the latter two powers. The treaty was
ratified only by Greece and was abrogated by the Treaty of
Lausanne (July 24, 1923) as the result of a determined struggle for
independence waged under the leadership of the outstanding
Ottoman wartime general Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk.
Malcolm Edward YappThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Sultans Of The Ottoman Empire

The table provides a chronological list of the sultans of the Ottoman
Empire.