The Turkish Nationalist Remaking of Ottoman Society

In December 1912, an armistice was signed to end the Balkan Wars, a humiliating defeat for the Ottoman Empire. The next month, in January 1913, an extreme Turkish nationalist faction of the Young Turks—the Committee for Union and Progress—seized control of the Ottoman government in a coup. The new government would be run by Minister of War Ismail Enver, Minister of the Interior Mehmed Talaat, and Minister of the Navy Ahmed Djemal. The three were referred to as “the triumvirate,” and they immediately implemented Turkist policies intended to increase the dominance of Turks and Turkish culture in the empire.

Even before the coup, Turkish nationalists were gaining power. During the war nationalists organized a boycott of Greek Ottoman shops. Before long targets of the boycott included Armenians and other non-Muslim businesses. Tekinalp, an architect of Turkish nationalist ideology, boasted that the boycotts "caused the ruin of hundreds of small Greek and Armenian tradesmen." Furthermore, he argued:

The systematic and rigorous boycott is now at an end, but the spirit it created in the people still persists. There are Turks who will not set foot in foreign shops unless they are certain that the same articles cannot be purchased under the same conditions in the shops of men of their own race, or at least of their own religion. The feeling of brotherhood has taken firm root in the hearts of the people all over the empire. ¹

Following the coup, the U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye, Henry Morgenthau, chronicled Talaat, Enver, and Djemal’s implementation of Turkist policy in the remaining territories of the empire:

In place of a democratic constitutional state they resurrected the idea of Pan-Turkism ² ; in place of equal treatment of all Ottomans, they decided to establish a country exclusively for Turks.... Their determination to uproot [Christian schools], or at least to transform them into Turkish institutions, was merely another detail in the same racial progress. Similarly they attempted to make all foreign business houses employ only Turkish labor, insisting that they should discharge their Greek, Armenian, and Jewish clerks, stenographers, workmen, and other employees. They ordered all foreign houses to keep their books in Turkish; they wanted to furnish employment for Turks, and enable them to acquire modern business methods. The Ottoman government even refused to have dealings with the representative of the largest Austrian munition [weapons] maker unless he admitted a Turk as a partner. 

They developed a mania for suppressing all languages except Turkish. For decades French had been the accepted language of foreigners in Constantinople; most street signs were printed in both French and Turkish. One morning the astonished foreign residents discovered that all the French signs had been removed and that the names of streets, the directions on street cars, and other public notices, appeared only in ... Turkish characters, which very few of them understood. Great confusion resulted from this change, but the ruling powers refused to restore the detested foreign language. ³

• 1Stephan H. Astourian, “Modern Turkish Identity and the Armenian Genocide,” in Richard Hovannisisan ed. Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 37.
• 2A form of Turkism that advocates not only in ensuring the domination of Turks and subordination of non-Turks within the Ottoman Empire, but also expanding the empire eastward to integrate Turkish people outside of Ottoman territory into a larger Turkish empire.
• 3Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Plandome, NY: New Age Publishers, 1975), 293-285.