Young Turk Revolution

In July 1908 a revolt by army officers in the Ottoman Balkans compelled Sultan Abdul Hamid II to bring back the constitution he had suspended thirty years earlier and to summon a new parliament. The rising was organised by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the leading group within the Young Turk movement. It opened the Second Constitutional Era in the Ottoman Empire and began a long period of upheaval in which power shifted from the palace to the CUP.

Abdul Hamid came to the throne in 1876 amid palace coups led by constitutionalist ministers, and he duly granted a constitution and an elected parliament. After the unsuccessful war with Russia that ended in 1878, he suspended the constitution, sent parliament home and ruled as an autocrat for the next thirty years. His reign nonetheless expanded modern schools, and their graduates formed a new class of officers and officials who resented his rule.

The Young Turks wanted to dismantle the sultan's absolutism. Many were imperial patriots who blamed him for the territorial losses agreed at the Congress of Berlin and believed that a constitution would reconcile non-Muslim subjects, removing the excuse for foreign intervention. For years they were mostly exiles, but by 1906–1908 many officers and officials in the Balkans had joined the CUP. A secret society founded in Salonica in 1907, whose members included Mehmed Talat, merged with the CUP and became its internal headquarters.

Grievances were sharpest in Ottoman Macedonia, torn since the 1890s by fighting between rival Bulgarian, Greek and other militias. Reform schemes imposed under Great Power supervision after 1903 offended Muslims and army officers, who feared the province would be partitioned. Troops were chronically unpaid, and promotions were blocked by older officers distrustful of the new military-school graduates.

The spark was a meeting between Edward VII of Britain and Nicholas II of Russia at Reval in June 1908, rumoured to herald a new reform package that would partition Macedonia. On 3 July Major Ahmed Niyazi seized money and weapons from the garrison at Resne and took to the mountains with some 160 volunteers, recruiting among Albanian villagers and even some Christian Bulgarians by promising equality under a constitution. Other officers, including Ismail Enver, followed his example. On 7 July the commander sent to crush the revolt, Shemsi Pasha, was shot dead by a CUP gunman in Monastir.

The mutiny spread through the Third Army in Salonica and reached the Second Army at Adrianople, while Albanians gathered at Ferizaj declared support for the constitution. On 22 July Monastir fell to the rebels. Facing the threat of a march on the capital, and possibly deposition, the sultan restored the constitution on the night of 23–24 July and called elections. Celebrations followed across the empire, with Muslims and Christians often celebrating together.

Within weeks the empire lost ground abroad. Bulgaria declared full independence on 5 October 1908, and the next day Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it already occupied. The CUP won almost all seats in the elections of late 1908. In April 1909 a counter-revolution backed by soldiers and religious students demanding Sharia law broke out in Istanbul, but CUP-led forces from Macedonia crushed it on 24 April. Abdul Hamid was deposed in favour of his half-brother Mehmed V, and from then on the throne counted for little in Ottoman politics.

The promise of equal citizenship soon gave way to disillusion among many non-Muslim communities as the CUP centralised power and favoured Turkish nationalism, and by 1913 the constitutional regime had given way to Unionist dictatorship. Historians differ on its character: Şükrü Hanioğlu calls it a watershed but not a popular constitutional movement, while Ronald Grigor Suny describes it as a coup by a small group of officers and activists. The revolution also inspired reformers elsewhere, from Iran to Central Asia.

Our 1900 map shows the empire's European provinces before the revolution, and the 1914 map shows the much smaller European foothold left after the Balkan Wars, along with Bulgaria as an independent state and the lands of Austria-Hungary.