The Eighteenth Century: the Westernizers 431
to describe his reform program in strictly non-Westernizing terms, leaving the
fully-fledged introduction of European institutions and measures to the next
generation, prepared through his educational and centralizing reforms; on this
point, Mahmud differed from Peter the Great of Russia, whose reform is often
paralleled to the Ottoman “autocratic modernization” of the 1820s and 1830s.110
Moreover, the initial motives of the nineteenth-century reforms were of a
more pragmatic nature than simple admiration for revolutionary and modern-
ist ideas. Donald Quataert has emphasized that the imitation of France was
based on its image as “the most powerful nation in continental Europe”, with
the implication that universal conscription (which presupposed the granting
of universal rights) was the basis of that strength.111 This argument draws a
direct line between Mahmud and his successors’ reforms on the one hand, and
the ideas of eighteenth-century Ottoman authors, both “traditionalist” and
“Westernizing”, based on the axiom of “reciprocity”, on the other.
110 See, for example, Ortaylı 1995, 32–35.
111 Quataert 2000, 67. Cf. İlber Ortaylı’s remark that “the Ottomans chose Westernization out
of necessity, rather than out of admiration for the West” (Ortaylı 1995, 19; see also ibid.,
124).