Civilizations+in+Crisis

Civilizations in Crisis: Ottomas, Egypt, and China

Ottoman Empire and Egypt
As industrialzed European nations were expanding their imperial possessions the Ottoman Empire and Egypt were in decline.

As you read pages 593-604 take notes in the chart below. Be sure to focus on causes of decline, European inervention and reform programs


 * Ottoman Retreat and the Birth of Turkey || Western Intrusions and Crisis: Egypt ||
 * * Brought on by a succestion of weak rulers withina political and social order that was centered on a sultan at the top. Inactive or incept sultans opened the ways for power struggles between rival ministers, religious experts, and the commanders of the Janissary corps.
 * Competition between the elite factions further eroded effective leadership within the empire, weaking its control over the nation.
 * Provincial officials conlluded with the local landowning classes, the ayan, to cheat the sultan of a good portion of the taxes that were owed to him and they skimmed all the revenue they could from the already impoverished peasantry in the countryside.
 * The position of the artisan workers in the towns deteriorated because of competition from imported manufacturers from across Europe. By the 18th to 19th centuries this led to urban riots in which members of the artisan guilds and young men's associations tended to take control. Merchants especially those who belonged to the menority religious communities such as the Jews and Christians grew more and more dependent on commercial dealings with their European counterparts. This accelerated the influx of Western manufacturered goods that was steadily undermining handicraft industries within the industry. Ottoman economic dependence on some of its most threatening European political rivals increased alarmingly.
 * Ottoman leaders embroiled in internal squabbles and their armies were deprived of resources needed to match the great advances in weaponry and training made by the European rivals.
 * The long standing threat to Vienna was forever vanquished, and the Ottomans were pushed out of Hungary and the northern Balkans.
 * During the late 1700's the Russian Empire, strengthened by Peter the Great's forced Westernization became the main threat to the Ottoman empires survival. Military setbacks increased while the Russians advanced across the steppes toward warm-water ports on the Black Sea nd the Ottomans' weakness was underscored when thei attempts to form alliances with other Christian powers failed.
 * By the late 1870's the Ottomans had been driven out of nearly all of the Balkan territory and also most of the European provinces in the area.
 * Despite the setbacks from Russian and European forces, the Ottoman empire was able to survive until the 20th century even though its had been severly weakened. Its survival resulted from a division in European powers wach of which were featured would gain more from the total dismemberment of the empire.
 * However the largest impact in the Ottomans survival was from reforms from within, initiated by the sultans and their advisors at the top of the imperial system and carried out in stages over most of the 19th century. At each stage reform initiatives increased tensions within the ruling elite. Some advocated far-reaching change along European lines, others argued for reforms based on preceding events from the early Ottoman period while others had vested interest of blocking any changes.
 * Deep divisions between the Ottoman elite made the reform a dangerous spot which contradicted the main reason for the wants to reform. Modest innovations, including the introduction of the first printing press in 1727 helped the empire but only for s short lived period.
 * Sultan Selim III (r. 1789-1807) believed that bolder initiatives were needed if the dynasty hoped to survive. His reform efforts were aimed at improving administrative efficiency and building a new army and navy which angered powerful factions within the bureaucracy. They were also seen by the Janissary as a dangerous threat. Two decades later a more skillful Sultan Mahmud II succeeded where Selim III had failed. He sercretly built a strong army with the help of his European advisors in 1826 when he also ordered his agents to incite a mutiny agains the Janessaries. After cowing the ayan (provincial nobles) into at least some formal submission to the throne he launced a program of more far-reaching reforms than Selim III had attempted and failed. Mahmuds advisors argued for self strengtheing through a return to the Ottoman and Islamic past which led to them patterned out to the West. He began to establish a diplomatic corps on the Western lines and exchanges ambassadors with the European powers. Westernization of the army was expanded from Mahmuds secret force to a whole military establishment with European military advisors. Both army and navy were imported to to supervise the overhall of training armamenty and officers education.
 * In decades to follow Western influences were pervasive at upper levels of Ottoman society. Tanziment reforms between 1839 and 1876. University education was reorganized on Western lines and training in European sciences and mathematics were introduced.
 * State run postal and telegraphs were established in the 1830's.
 * Extensive legal reforms were enacted and in 1876 a constitution based heavily on European prototypes was created. Legal reforms greatly improved the position of minority religious groups whose role in the Ottoman economy increased at a steady rate. Artisans role in societies were genreally weakende after an 1838 treaty with the British.
 * Reforms from the Sultans eventually led to improve the Ottomans ability to fend off the assaults led by foreign aggressors. The Ottoamn sultan Abdul Hamid responded to the growing threat from westernized officers and civilians by attempting to return a despotic absolutism during his long reign from 1878-1908. He nullified the constitiution and restricted civil liberties, particularly the freedom of the press.
 * Dissidents or even suspected troublemakers were imprisoned and sometimes tortured and killed. The deep impact of decades of the reform were demonstrated to push for further westernization in certain areas.
 * The military continued to afopt European arms and techiniques which increasingly were affected under the instruction of the German advisors.
 * The depotism of Abdul Hamid came to an abrupt end in the nearly bloodless coup of 1908. Resistence to his authoritarian rule had led exiled Turkish intellectuals and political agitators to form the Ottoman society for Union and Progress in Paris in 1889.
 * Clandestine printing presses operated by Young Turks (members of a newly founded society) turned out tracts denouncing the regime and outlining further steps to modernize and save the empire.
 * Assasinations were attomepted and the coups plotted but until 1908 all were undone by a combination of divisions within the ranks of the the westernized dissideents and their police counterparts.
 * Sympathy in 1908 had a great deal to do with the coups success. An even more important event was the fact that only a handful of the Sultan's supporters were willing to die defending the regime. Due to these events a group of officials had come into power where they restored the constitution and some of the freedom of the press. They also promised reforms in education and even the status of women within the empire.
 * Just as the sultans before them, the Young Turk officers managed to stave off the collapse of the empire by achieving last-gasp military victories and by playing the hostile European powers against each other.
 * The Young Turk's eventually overthrew the sultan but they could not let themselves to give up the empire ruled by the Turks for over 600 years. They began to try and salvage their empire. || * By the early 1800's the Arab peoples of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, Coastal Arabia, and north Africa many of these civilizations who had been once under the rule of the Ottoman-Turkish Empire. Most Arabs resented Turkish domination.
 * Egypt did not establish a permanent European establishment in the homeland. Napolean's invasion of Egypt in 1798 sent shock to the rest of the world. Napoleans motives for launching the expedition, had little to do with designs for the empire in the middle east. He saw the European campaign as the prelude to destryoung British power in India.
 * Napolean was able to slip his fleet past the British blockade in the Mediterranean Sea and put his armies ashore in 1798. Following was one of the most lopsided military clashes in modern history. As his army marched inland Napoleans forces were met by tens of thousands of calvary bent on defending the Manluk regime that then ruled Egypt as a vassal of the Ottoman sultans. The term Mamluk literally meant slave and it suggested that Turkish origins of the regime and Egypt were made up of many slaves.
 * Muhrad- head of the coalation of Mamluk households that shared power in Egypt at the time of Napoleon's appearance. His contempt for the talented young French commander was a symptomatic importance of the ignorance of occuring of events in Europe. This ignorance led to a series of crushing defeats, the most famous which came in a battle fought beneath the pyramids pf the ancient Egyptian pharohs. This was a brief but bloody battle. However, the disciplined Firepower of the French legion devastated the ranks of the Mamluk calvary who were clad in medievil armor and wielded spears against the artillery.
 * In the choas that followed the French invasion and eventual withdrawel in 1801 a young officer Muhammad Ali emerged as the effective ruler of Egypt. He was greatly impressed by the weapons and discipline of the French. He then continued to bring the standards up to French standards. He introduced Western-style conscription military among the Egyptian peasantry, hired French officers to train his troops and imported Western arms and finally adopted Western tactics and modes of organization and supply.
 * Muhammad Ali's efforts to introduce reforms patterned after Western precedents were not confined to the military, but they fell short of fundamental values and the transformation into the Egyptian society.
 * To help his economic base, he ordered the Egyptian peasantry to increase their production of cotton, hemp, indigo, and other crops that were a demand for Western Europe. Efforts to improve Egyptian harbors and extend irrigation works met with some success and led to modest increases in the revenues that could be devoted to the military.
 * Attempts to reform education were also ambitious. Numerous schemes were built to creat and industrail sector which were frustrated by the opposition of European powers and intense competition from the Western-manufactured goods.
 * Muhammad Ali died in 1848. His descendents provided a successtion of rulers who were known as khedives after 1867. They were formal rulers of Europe until they were overthrown by the military coup that brought Gamel Abdul Nasser to power in 1952.
 * His successorrs were not as successful as he was towards the beginning. While cotton production was being increased and the landlord class grew fat, the great majority of the peasant population went hungry. The long-term consequences of these actions were equally troubling. The great expansion of cotton prodcution at the expense of food grains and other crops rendered Egypt dependent on a single export. That meant it was vulnerable to sharp fluctuations in demand and price on the European markets which much of their exports were sent to.
 * Much of the revenue the khedives were able to collect, despite the resistence of the ayan, was wasted on the extravagent pastimes of the mostly idle elite connected to the palace. Most of what was left was squandered to military campaigns to assert Egyptian authority over the Sudanic peoples of the Upper Nile.
 * The completeion of the Suex canal in 1869 transformed Egypt into one of the most strategic places on earth. The canal soon became a vital commercial and military link between European powers and their colonial empires in Asia and East Africa.
 * Thinkers such as al-Afghani (1839-1897) and his disciple Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) stressed the need for Muslims to borrow scientific learning and technology from the west and to revive their earlier capacity to innovate.
 * Mounting debts of the khedival regime and the strategic importance of the canal gave the European powers, particularly France and Britain a growing stake in the stability and accessibility to Egypt.
 * French and British bankers, who had brought up a far share in the canal urged their governments to intervene militarily when the khedives proved unable to make their loan payments.
 * Ahmad Orabi- Son of a small farmer in lower Egypt. He had attended Qur'anic school and studied under Muhammad Abduh at al-Azar. He was a native Egyptian, however he had risen in the ranks of the kedevial army and had increasingly critical of the fact that the officer coups were dominated by Turks with strong ties to the khedival regime.
 * The khedive attempted to save money by disbanding Egyptian regiments and dismissing Egyptian officers which sparked a revolt led by Orabi in the summer of 1882. Riots in the city of Alexandria became to be a daily occurence. After bombarding the coastal batteries set up by Orabi's troops, the British sent ashore an expeditionary force that crushed Orabi's rebellion and secured the position for the khedive.
 * As Egypt fell under British control, the invaders were drawn to turmoil and conflict that gripped the south. The sedentary peoples who worked the narrow slip of land were easily dominated.
 * Egyptian authority as it existed was concentrated in areas and towns such as Khartoum which was the center of Egyptian administration in Sudan. ||

Read Western Dominance and the Decline of Civilations(IN DEPTH P.596-597) MI:

The Qing Empire
As you read 604 to 611 take outline notes on the Rise and Fall of the Qing Empire. Be sure to include Main Ideas for each subtopic and to highlight key terms.

The Last Dynasty: The Rise and Fall od the Qing Empire in China:

MI: A nomadic group north of the Great Wall, the Manchus, begant to shift and expand to control what later became known as the Qing dynasty of China in the late 17th century. The main reason for this sudden seizure of a once great empire was the fact that in 1644 an official had let the Manchus into their borders without even a slight notice that his plan might backfire on his country. However by the early 18th century only 2% of the people of the Qing dynasty were actually Manchu, the majority of the population was the Chinese peope.