Abdulhamid II

Abdülhamid II ruled the Ottoman Empire for thirty-three years and suspended its constitution for thirty-two of them. He came to the throne in 1876 after two sultans had been deposed in three months, at a moment when the empire was bankrupt, in revolt in the Balkans, and under Russian threat. He accepted the first Ottoman constitution and an elected parliament as the price of his accession. He prorogued the parliament in February 1878, during the disastrous war with Russia, and did not recall it for three decades. The Treaty of Berlin cost him most of the European provinces. Britain took Cyprus and later Egypt, France took Tunisia, and the empire's finances passed to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, a body of foreign bondholders' representatives collecting a share of state revenue directly. His response was centralisation and surveillance. He governed from Yıldız Palace through a personal secretariat, built an extensive network of informers, and censored the press severely. He also modernised heavily: railways including the Hejaz line, telegraphs, law and military schools, the expansion of primary education, and a professional bureaucracy — much of which produced the officers who overthrew him. He promoted pan-Islamism and his claim to the caliphate as a source of legitimacy at home and leverage abroad. The Hamidian massacres of Armenians between 1894 and 1896 killed somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people. The Young Turk revolution forced him to restore the constitution in 1908, and a counter-coup the following year saw him deposed. He died under house arrest in 1918.

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