***Ottoman Empire: External Pressures from Europe or Internal Ignorance*** A. Trade Routes The wealth of the Ottomans was largely due to their presence on trade routes. The Empire stood at the crossroads of all the continents and sub-continents: Africa, Asia, India, and Europe. However, European expansion created new trade routes that bypassed Ottoman territories. Vast amounts of revenue began to disappear from the economy since the state collected tariffs on all good passing through the Empire. B. Ottoman Empire and Industry The Ottomans kept their old labor practices, in which production was concentrated among craft guilds and made by hand. Therefore Europeans produced products with new, industrial methods; hence, they were far cheaper than similar products produced in Ottoman territories. Many Ottoman began to buy British and French goods. C. Greek Independence of 1821 The revolution that broke out in Greece in 1821 was primarily a nationalist uprising rather than liberal revolution. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, whose vast territories were gradually being recessed throughout the 18th century and early 19th centuries. The Ottoman Empire’s military was unable to defeat this nationalistic movement and Greece gained its independence.

In 1875, the Slavic peoples living in the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina led an uprising against the Ottomans in order to gain their freedom. The general weakness of the Ottomans led the two independent, neighboring Slavic states, Montenegro and Serbia, to aid the rebellion. Within a year, the rebellion spread to the Ottoman province of Bulgaria. The rebellion was part of a larger political movement called the Pan-Slavic movement, which desired to unify all Slavic people. The war went very badly for the Ottomans because of the decline of janissaries and inability to modernize like Europe. By 1878 they had to sue for peace. Under the peace treaty, the Ottomans had to free all the Balkan provinces, including Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. E. The Balkan Rebellion of 1876 The Ottoman Empire had a dual economy in the nineteenth century consisting of a large subsistence sector and a small colonial-style commercial sector linked to European markets and controlled by foreign interests. The empire's first railroads, for example, were built by foreign investors to bring the cash crops of Anatolia's coastal valleys--tobacco, grapes, and other fruit--to Smyrna (Izmir) for processing and export. The cost of maintaining a modern army without a thorough reform of economic institutions caused expenditures to be made in excess of tax revenues. Heavy borrowing from foreign banks in the 1870s to reinforce the treasury and the undertaking of new loans to pay the interest on older ones created a financial crisis that in 1881 obliged the Porte to surrender administration of the Ottoman debt to a commission representing foreign investors. The debt commission collected public revenues and transferred the receipts directly to creditors in Europe. F. Heavy Loans The first major Ottoman war was the Crimean War ( ). Like so many of the later conflicts with Europe, this one was initiated not by the Ottomans, but by the Europeans. Russia was primarily interested in territory. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Russia had slowly been annexing Muslim states in Central Asia. By 1854, Russia found itself near the banks of the Black Sea. Anxious to annex territories in Eastern Europe, particularly the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia (now in modern day Czechoslovakia), the Russians went to war with the Ottomans on the flimsiest of pretexts: the Ottomans had granted Catholic France the right to protect Christian sites in the Holy Land (which the Ottomans controlled) rather than Orthodox Russia. That, according to the Russians, justified going to war with the Ottomans. The war soon became a European war when Britain and France allied with the Ottomans in order to protect their lucrative trade interests in the region. The war ended badly for the Russians, and the Paris peace of 1856 was unfavorable to them. D. The Crimean War