Abstract
This book offers a historical comparison and contrast of the concepts of reform that developed in the Ottoman and Russian Empires during the nineteenth century. It comprehensively focuses on individual, yet interconnected, accounts of the efforts of key reform figures in both empires during that period and efforts made by the two imperial states to renew themselves.
Employing a combined methodology that takes into account insights from the 'Cambridge School' Speech-Act Theory and Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgechischte, this book builds upon existing historical literature, on imperial Russian and Ottoman historiographical texts on reform, and on the biographies of key reformists in both countries, including Tsars Alexander I and Alexander II, and on Russian and Turkish statesmen like Mikhail Speransky, Reshid Pasha and Midhad Pasha. It relies, crucially, on con(textual) readings of the thoughts and deeds of those figures.
The historical concepts of reform served as key links between the Russian and Ottoman polities in the wider context of geopolitical, economic and cultural/intellectual developments and the changes on the European continent during the nineteenth century. The book argues that unlike in the previous centuries, reform manifested itself in both empires in the forging of new, permanent laws and institutions, in the opening up of their economies to the outside world and in joining and remaining in the European political community of imperial states.
The book offers insightful historical examples of the fate of multi-national and supranational polities that sought to reform themselves constitutionally, politically and economically under internal and external pressures.