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The Tanzimat Reforms

The Tanzimat era of 1839-1876: the Gülhane Decree, the Islahat Edict, the 1858 land code, the 1864 Vilayet Law, and the first Ottoman constitution of 1876.

The Tanzimat — literally “reorganizations” — is the conventional name for the centralizing, Europeanizing reforms of the Ottoman Empire that began with the Gülhane Decree of 3 November 1839 and ended with the promulgation of the first Ottoman constitution on 23 December 1876. The Tanzimat era transformed the institutional framework of the Ottoman government, the relationship between the state and its non-Muslim communities (the millet system), the legal system, the educational system, the fiscal system, and the provincial administration. The reforms were inspired by European models and supported, with varying degrees of consistency, by Britain, France, and (later) the German Empire; they were opposed, with varying degrees of success, by conservative elements within the Ottoman ruling class.

The Gülhane Decree, 3 November 1839

The Tanzimat was inaugurated by the Gülhane Decree (Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane), read aloud in the rose garden of the Topkapı Palace on 3 November 1839, in the presence of Sultan Abdulmecid I, the members of the Divan-ı Hümayun (the imperial council described in the article on the Grand Vizier and the Divan), the senior officials of the empire, and a delegation of foreign ambassadors. The decree, drafted principally by Mustafa Reşid Pasha and his associates, promised security of life, honour, and property for all Ottoman subjects, regardless of religion; a regular and transparent system of taxation; a fair and public system of justice; the abolition of tax farming (iltizam); and the equal applicability of the new laws to all subjects. The decree was followed by a series of codes — the 1840 Penal Code, the 1850 Commercial Code, the 1858 Land Code, the 1864 Vilayet Law, and the 1870 General Schools Regulation — that together constituted the Tanzimat legal framework.

The Islahat Edict, 18 February 1856

The Islahat Edict (Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856) was issued on 18 February 1856, in the midst of the Crimean War, under the pressure of the British and French allies of the Ottoman state. The edict extended the guarantees of the Gülhane Decree to the non-Muslim communities in explicit terms: equality of all subjects before the law, eligibility of non-Muslims for military service, eligibility of non-Muslims for state office, abolition of the haraç (poll tax on non-Muslims), abolition of the discriminatory provisions of the kanun, and reorganization of the non-Muslim millets. The edict was the first of a series of measures that the European powers used to intervene in Ottoman affairs on behalf of the empire’s Christian subjects. The 1863 Armenian National Constitution, the 1869 Rum Millet Regulation, and the 1865 Jewish Millet Regulation all attempted to implement its provisions.

The 1858 Land Code

The 1858 Land Code, drafted principally by Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, was the most ambitious single legal reform of the Tanzimat era. The code replaced the classical kanun on land tenure with a new framework that recognized several categories of land (mülk, miri, vakıf, metruk, mevad) and regulated the rights of ownership, transfer, and inheritance. The code aimed to encourage agricultural productivity, to clarify the legal status of land, and to provide a basis for the orderly assessment and collection of the land tax. The code had an unintended consequence: by clarifying the legal status of land and establishing procedures for registration, it opened the door to large-scale alienation of land to non-Muslim merchants, European speculators, and (later) commercial agriculture.

The 1864 Vilayet Law

The 1864 Vilayet Law reorganized the provincial administration on a uniform pattern modelled on the French departments. The empire was divided into vilayets (provinces), each governed by a vali (governor) appointed by the Ministry of the Interior. Each vilayet was divided into sanjaks, each sanjak into kazas, and each kaza into nahiyes. The vali was assisted by an Idare Meclisi (Administrative Council) and a judiciary drawn from the reformed secular courts. The 1871 General Administration of the Provinces Law supplemented the 1864 law, and the two together constituted the basic framework of Ottoman provincial administration until the abolition of the empire — and, indeed, the basis of the provincial system of the Turkish Republic until the early twenty-first century.

The 1876 Constitution

The most ambitious product of the Tanzimat era was the first Ottoman constitution, the Kanun-ı Esasi (Fundamental Law), promulgated on 23 December 1876 by Sultan Abdulhamid II. The constitution was drafted by a commission of senior officials led by Midhat Pasha, under the pressure of the European powers and the threat of European intervention. It established a bicameral parliament — a senate (Meclis-i Ayan) appointed by the sultan and an elected chamber of deputies (Meclis-i Mebusan) — and a system of ministerial responsibility, building on the model of the Grand Vizier and the Divan inherited from the classical period. The first Ottoman parliament met on 19 March 1877. It lasted only two years: in February 1878, using the pretext of the Russian advance on Istanbul in the war of 1877–1878, Abdulhamid II prorogued the parliament and ruled as an autocrat for the next thirty years. The constitutional experiment, however, established the principle of constitutional government in Ottoman practice and was the model on which the Young Turk constitution of 1908 was based.

The Limits of the Reforms

The Tanzimat reforms were not, in the event, able to preserve the empire. The reforms failed for several reasons: the resistance of conservative elements within the ruling class, the limited administrative capacity of the state, the opposition of the European powers, the rise of nationalism, and the long-term economic decline of the empire. Despite these limitations, the Tanzimat reforms were one of the most ambitious programs of state-directed modernization in the nineteenth-century world, and the constitutional monarchy, the secular school system, the reformed civil service, and the codified laws of the Tanzimat were the foundation on which the modern Turkish Republic was built in 1923.