“Decline of the Ottoman Empire” Video Response

This video by CaspianReport discusses the decline of the Ottoman Empire during the late 19th and early 20th Century. The Ottoman Empire was an empire founded in 1299 AD in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) by Osman I, a Turkish tribal leader. By 1354, the Ottoman Empire reached into Southeastern Europe and eventually ended the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople. During its height of power in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empire was a multinational and multicultural empire controlling a majority of the Middle East and Southern Europe (including countries such as Greece and parts of present-day Italy), the Caucuses, and Northern Africa. With Constantinople as its capital and control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the center of interactions between the Middle East and Western worlds for half a millennium.

Despite its long track record of success, the Ottoman Empire began to fall behind European rivals such as Great Britain, France, and Russia during the mid-18th century. Additionally, the Ottoman army consequently suffered severe military defeats in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which prompted them to initiate a process of reform in the late 1830s known as the Tanzimat. As such, over the course of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state became more powerful and organized, despite suffering territorial losses, especially in the Balkans, where many new states such as Greece and Albania emerged by the 1860s. The Ottoman Empire allied with Germany in the early 20th century, hoping to escape from the isolation which had contributed to its recent territorial losses, and thus joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. While the Empire was able to hold its own during the conflict, it began to deal with internal dissent, in particular with the Arab Revolt in its Arabian holdings and the rise of Jewish immigration into the region of Palestine starting in the late 19th century. During this time, atrocities were committed by the Ottoman government against the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. The Ottoman Empire ultimately collapsed by the end of World War I and was replaced by the Republic Turkey in 1923. The former Ottoman territories were also divided up into new nations by Great Britain and France after World War 1 and continue to serve as the basis for the modern Middle East.