Middle East - Anthony Ham [30]
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Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, by Jason Goodwin, is anecdotal and picaresque but still manages to illuminate the grand themes of Ottoman history.
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The British, of course, had other ideas. Under the cover of protecting their own Indian interests, they forced the French out of Egypt in 1801. Four years later, Mohammed Ali, an Albanian soldier in the Ottoman army, emerged as the country’s strongman and he set about modernising the country. As time passed, it became increasingly obvious that Constantinople was becoming ever more dependent on Egypt for military backing rather than the reverse. Mohammed Ali’s ambitions grew. In the 1830s, he invaded and conquered Syria, and by 1839 he had effective control of most of the Ottoman Empire.
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At the Battle of the Pyramids, Napoleon’s forces took just 45 minutes to rout the Mamluk army, killing 1000 for the loss of just 29 of their own men.
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While it might have appeared to have been in Europe’s interests to consign the Ottoman Empire to history, they were already stretched by their other colonial conquests and holdings (the British in India, the French in Africa) and had no interest, at least not yet, in administering the entire region. As a consequence, the Europeans prevailed upon Mohammed Ali to withdraw to Egypt. In return, the Ottoman sultan gave long-overdue acknowledgment of Mohammed Ali’s status as ruler of a virtually independent Egypt, and bestowed the right of heredity rule on his heirs (who continued to rule Egypt until 1952). In some quarters, the Ottoman move was viewed as a wise strategy in keeping with their loose administration of their empire. In truth, they had little choice.
That the weakened Ottomans were struggling to hold their empire together and had become rulers in name only in many parts of the Middle East was not confined to their reliance upon the Europeans in dealing with Egypt. Not surprisingly, the Europeans were always at the ready to expand their influence in the region. In 1860, the French sent troops to Lebanon after a massacre of Christians by the local Druze. Before withdrawing, the French forced the Ottomans to set up a new administrative system for the area guaranteeing the appointment of Christian governors, over whom the French came to have great influence.
While all of this was happening, another import from the West – nationalism – was making its presence felt. For centuries, a multiplicity of ethnic groups had coexisted harmoniously in the Ottoman Empire, but the creation of nation states in Western Europe sparked a desire in the empire’s subject peoples to throw off the Ottoman ‘yoke’ and determine their own destinies. The people of the Middle East watched with growing optimism as Greece and the Ottomans’ Balkan possessions wriggled free, marking the final death knell of Ottoman omniscience and prompting Middle Easterners to dream of their own independence. In this, they were encouraged by the European powers, who may have paid lip service to the goals of independence, but were actually laying detailed plans for occupation. Mistaking (or, more likely, deliberately misinterpreting or ignoring) the nationalist movement as a cry for help, the European powers quickly set about filling the vacuum of power left by the Ottomans.
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The Druze, by Robert Betts, only covers up to 1990, but this is otherwise the most comprehensive work on the Druze, a little-known people, and essential to understanding their reputation for fierce independence.
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The Ottoman regime, once feared and respected,