180 • 11 WESTERNIZING REFORM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURYThe Tanzimat was not a total success. Some Ottoman leaders lost the
power and prestige they had customarily enjoyed. The subject nationalities
expected more from the 1839 rescript than the actual reforms could deliver.
Balkan Christians did not want centralization of power; they demanded au¬
tonomy. Some now sought independence. The Romanians were among the
many European peoples who rebelled in 1848; it took a Russian invasion to
quell their revolt. Without firm British backing, the Ottoman reform move¬
ment would have collapsed. Unfortunately, Britain's support of Ottoman
territorial integrity was on a collision course with Russia's attempt to spread
its influence in the Balkans. The crash was the Crimean War of 1853-1856.
The Ottoman Empire, aided by British and French troops, defeated Russia
and regained some lands in the Balkans and the Caucasus. But the price for
Western support was a second official proclamation, Abdulmejid's 1856
Imperial Rescript (Hatt-i-Humayun). Its gist was that all Ottoman subjects,
whether Muslim or not, would now enjoy equal rights under the law. This
was a revolutionary statement. Most Ottoman Muslims opposed giving
Christians and Jews the same rights and status as themselves, defying the
basic principles of the Shari'a. Some of the millet leaders feared losing their
religious autonomy. Discontented Christian subjects still rebelled, but now
there were also uprisings by Muslims who opposed the new Ottoman pol¬
icy. The Tanzimat reforms continued, though, in such areas as landowner-
ship, codification of the laws, and reorganization of the millets (those of
the Armenians and the Jews, who did not yet seek separate states). After the
Crimean War, the Ottoman Empire was admitted to full membership in
the European Concert of Powers, and no one dared—until later—to speak
of its imminent collapse or partition.
PERSIA UNDER THE QAJARSPersia was the only Middle Eastern country outside the Arabian Peninsula
that was never fully absorbed by the Ottoman Empire. Even if the Safavid
shahs had often fallen back before the might of the janissaries in the six¬
teenth and seventeenth centuries, they had always retained control at home.
After the Safavids' fall in the early eighteenth century, a succession of dynas¬
ties (most of them Turkic in origin but Persian in culture) ruled over that
sprawling and heterogeneous country, in either uneasy alliance or open con¬
tention with the nomadic tribes, rural landlords, urban merchants, and Shi'i
ulama. Following the meteoric career of Nader Shah (d. 1747), the country
went into a long decline. The Qajar dynasty (1794-1925) ineffectually resis¬
ted dissolution from within and encroachments from without. Russia was