The role and impact of the 1908 Revolution in the socio-political transformation of the Ottoman Empire

By drawing upon the bourgeois revolution theoretical framework, this thesis reveals three crucial aspects of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. First, it identifies the bourgeois actors, comprising both Muslim and non-Muslim capitalists, behind the revolution. Socio-economic changes in the late Ottoman and early Republican eras are often understood as "bureaucracy creating a native bourgeoisie" rather than as a mutual interaction and symbiosis between the Muslim-Turkish bourgeoisie and the state bureaucracy. This thesis challenges this dominant paradigm, showing that, like their non-Muslim counterparts, the Muslim-Turkish bourgeoisie had significant agency and profoundly influenced the political process and policymaking during and after the 1908 Revolution. Second, the thesis identifies the significant contradictions between long-term capital accumulation in the Ottoman Empire and the structures of the regime of Abdulhamid II, explaining how the revolution helped remove obstacles to bourgeois power and capitalist development. Finally, by focusing on the place of the Ottoman Empire in the world economy and geopolitics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the thesis explains the interplay between global and local actors and factors that shaped the processes and outcomes of the Young Turk Revolution.