The state of Ottoman administration in the Balkans continued to deteriorate throughout the 19th century, with the Sublime Porte occasionally losing control over whole provinces.

[7] Austria consolidated after the turmoil of the first half of the century and sought to reinvigorate its longstanding policy of expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.

Meanwhile, the nominally autonomous, de facto independent principalities of Serbia and Montenegro also sought to expand into regions inhabited by their compatriots.

[13][14] The decision to increase taxes for paying the Ottoman Empire's debts to foreign creditors resulted in outrage in the Balkan provinces, which culminated in the Great Eastern Crisis and ultimately the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) that provided independence or autonomy for the Christian nations in the empire's Balkan territories, with the subsequent Treaty of Berlin in 1878.

[14][16] This made the European creditors bondholders, and assigned special rights to the OPDA for collecting various types of tax and customs revenues.

[17]) It is worth noting that the Ottoman government had frequently declared the tax revenues from Egypt as a surety for borrowing loans from British and French banks.