ABSTRACT
TO THE EXTENT that it failed in its economic Westernization, the Tanzimat regime showed to the Turkish people its lack of a genuine social substratum. Even its successes had increasingly deprived the Tanzimat of any of its possible supports. Ottoman sovereignty was no longer based upon Islam. It no longer meant rule over a number of subordinate theocracies called millets. It was not even a sovereignty sustained by a Turkish “nation,” as that did not exist either in the modern sense of nationality, or in the sense of religious community. And it was not based upon the interests of an economic class, because its usurer-capitalists and adventurous speculators did not constitute a rising class capable of creating a modern nation.
