Negotiating the Ottoman Constitution : 1856-1876

Abstract

The dissertation is about the genesis of the Ottoman Constitution, which was promulgated on December 23, 1876. The main objective is to reconstruct the nineteenth-century Ottoman constitutional movement in relation to Europe and international politics without neglecting the internal administrative developments that affected the process. The dissertation traces the transcultural and transnational dimension of the internal process of the genesis of the Ottoman Constitution and shows that the Ottoman constitutional movement developed beyond the control of Ottoman bureaucracy and state apparatus, through a web of relations that exceeded the boundaries of the Ottoman territory. The movement incorporated, from domestic authorities to foreign powers, a plurality of formal and informal agents of different ethno-religious, cultural and ideological backgrounds and of different legal norms. The dissertation investigates how Ottoman reformers synthesised different legal traditions, imported from the West to the Ottoman context through various human channels, and how the Ottomans' constitutional thought was shaped and negotiated by the encounter of European models with the imperial political culture as well as by the encounter of foreign actors with domestic draftsmen.