Second Constitutional Era
Italy invaded Ottoman Tripolitania in 1911 and the empire lost the vast majority of its remaining European territory when the Balkan League overran Rumelia in 1912.
The Ottoman Parliament angered the Allies by signing the Amasya Protocol with Turkish revolutionaries in Ankara and agreeing to a Misak-ı Millî (National Pact).
As plans for the partition of the Ottoman Empire advanced following the Conference of London, the Allies forced the dissolution of the assembly, thus bringing the Second Constitutional Era to an end.
These demands for independence by Christians who did not identify with Ottoman rule would therefore turn the Empire's previously multicultural society upside down, creating cycles of violence and suspicion between neighbors.
Therefore, centralization and economic nationalism were also key goals of Ottomanism and Tanzimat, not only in create equality for all under the law by consolidating previously autonomous sections of society such as abolishing the outdated Millet system, but also to empower the government to redistribute wealth and opportunity to its Muslim subjects.
He instead went on to rule as an autocrat (istibdâd as marked by contemporaries, although many expressed longings for his old-fashioned despotism a few years into the new regime), emphasizing the empire's Islamic character and his position as Caliph.
Though the justification of the Hamidian autocracy was so that the empire won't collapse, many found it hypocritical of Abdulhamid to be content with foreign pressure by conceding sovereignty, land, and the economy to western powers.
It was in this context the Young Turks movement formed as a loose coalition of elements in the empire opposed to Sultan Abdulhamid II's absolutism.
[1] The Young Turk Revolution began with a small insurrection of Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) supporters in Macedonia and spread quickly throughout the empire.
Ahmet Rıza who returned to the capital from his exile in Paris became president of the Chamber of Deputies, the parliament's lower house, and gradually distanced himself from the CUP as it became more radical.
On 30 January 1909, the minister of the interior, Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha, took the podium to answer an inquiry sponsored by both Muslims and non-Muslims, all but one of whom were from cities in the Balkans.
The interchanges were performed along the nationalism lines among the non-Muslim deputies, according to their ethnic and religious origins, and of Ottomanism as a response to these competing ideologies.
The constitutionalists were able to wrestle back control of the Ottoman government from the reactionaries with Mahmud Şevket Pasha's Action Army (Turkish: Hareket Ordusu).
In addition, the CUP implemented the secularization of the legal system and provided subsidies for the education of women, and altered the administrative structure of the state-operated primary schools.
The Christian communities largely ceased their rebellious activities while the Albanians, who were 70% Muslim and until that time had been the most loyal group in Macedonia, now started to rebel against the Ottoman state.
In the middle of the war against Italy and in the midst of yet another Albanian revolt,[11] the CUP called for early national elections in order to thwart Freedom and Accord Party's ability to better organize and grow.
Angered at their loss in the election, the leadership of Freedom and Accord sought extra-legal methods to regain power over the CUP, complaining vocally about electoral fraud.
The eruption of the Balkan War in October derailed plans for the elections, which were canceled, and Ahmed Muhtar Pasha resigned as Grand Vizier.
The new Grand Vizier, Kâmil Pasha, formed a Freedom and Accord cabinet and began an effort to destroy the vestiges of the CUP remaining after the Savior Officers' revolt.
However, the heavy Ottoman military upsets during the war continued to sap morale, as rumors that the capital would have to be moved from Istanbul to inland Anatolia spread.
At this point, Kâmil Pasha's government signed an armistice with Bulgaria in December 1912 and sat down to draw up a treaty for the end of the war at the London Peace Conference.
Because of the losses experienced by the army so far in the war, the Kâmil Pasha government was inclined to accept the "Midye-Enez Line" as a border to the west and, while not outright giving Edirne to Bulgaria, favored transferring control of it to an international commission.
On 23 January 1913, Enver Bey burst with some of his associates into the Sublime Porte while the cabinet was in session, a raid in which the Minister of War Nazım Pasha was killed.
After his death, he was succeeded by Said Halim Pasha, and CUP began to repress Freedom and Accord and other opposition parties, forcing many of their leaders (such as Prince Sabahaddin) to flee to Europe.
With most of the Christian population having already left the Empire after the Balkan Wars, a redefinition of Ottoman politics was in place with a greater emphasis on Islam as a binding force.
[12]On 13 October 1918, Talat Pasha and the rest of the CUP ministry resigned, and the Armistice of Mudros was signed aboard a British battleship in the Aegean Sea at the end of the month.
The Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919–20 took place where the leadership of the CUP and selected former officials were court-martialled under charges of subversion of the constitution, wartime profiteering, and the massacres of both Armenians and Greeks.
It had signed the Amasya Protocol with the Turkish National Movement in Ankara on 22 October 1919, in which the two groups of agreed to unite against the Allies occupying the country and call for these elections.
[12] On the morning of 16 March, British forces, including the Indian Army, began to occupy government buildings and arrested five parliament members.
[23] In practical terms, the meeting of 18 March, was the end of the Ottoman parliamentarary system and of the Parliament itself, which had previously served as symbol of a generation's quest for "eternal freedom" (hürriyet-i ebediye) for which men had sacrificed themselves.
