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Abstract
With few exceptions, scholarship on the history of the Young Turk revolution has been Turkocentric, addressing the history of the revolution from the perspective of the Young Turks as the dominant group in the Ottoman Empire.
The following dissertation deals with the impact of the Young Turk revolution on the Armenians, Arabs, and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. It examines how ethnic politics was manifested during the first year of the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918) which led to a dramatic escalation of ethnic tension culminating in the counter-revolution and the Adana Massacres of 1909. The revolution became a milestone in defining intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic politics. Unlike existing historiographies on the subject, which have dealt with an individual ethnic group's relationship with the ruling elite, this dissertation discusses the history of the period from the perspective of multiple ethnic groups living in the Empire. The dissertation, which is based on Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Ladino, and French primary sources, covers a variety of geographic areas (Istanbul, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Anatolia). It examines the impact of the revolution on the socio-political structure of the ethnic groups and the way it defined the political attitude of both the government and the ethnic groups towards each other. In doing so it provides us with a unique perspective for understanding ethnic politics in an Imperial framework.
Despite the fact that the revolution opened new horizons and new opportunities for the ethnic groups, it also created serious challenges both for the authors of the revolution and the ethnic groups. The post-revolutionary period became the litmus test for the endurance/sustainability of the main principle of the revolution: the creation of an Ottoman citizen based on equality, fraternity, and liberty, whose allegiance would be to the Empire. The realization of this goal was extremely difficult in a period when all ethnic groups in the Empire began projecting their own perception of what it meant to be an Ottoman citizen. While CUP's version of Ottomanism entailed that Turkish would be the main language of the Empire, the administrative system of the Empire would be centralized, and all ethnic groups would abandon their ethno-religious privileges, the ethnic groups perceived Ottomanism as a framework in which they would be allowed to preserve their languages, identities, and ethno-religious privileges, and envisioned an Empire based on administrative decentralization. What followed was a tense battle between the CUP and the ethnic groups over the future of the Empire and the position of the ethnicities in it. Through this battle of ideas, the ethnic groups negotiated their place in the Empire. This was done through ethnic politics, something which totally contradicted the political system that the revolution strove to achieve. In other words, while the supreme ideal of the revolution was the creation of a political system in which members of ethnicities would not participate in the political process as ethnic blocs, in reality they continued to do so.
