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Politics24 July 1908 (constitution restored)

Young Turk Revolution

Also called: Second Constitutional Era, Committee of Union and Progress

Young officers and intellectuals of the Committee of Union and Progress rose and forced Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the Midhat constitution. The next year they deposed him.

Ottoman Greek lithograph celebrating the restored constitution, 1908, showing Midhat Pasha, Enver and others
Ottoman Greek lithograph celebrating the restored constitution, 1908, showing Midhat Pasha, Enver and others

Sotiris Christidis · Public domain · Source

Under Abdulhamid II’s autocracy, Western-educated young officers and intellectuals formed the secret Committee of Union and Progress (the Young Turks). In July 1908 officers of the army in Macedonia rebelled, and on 24 July the sultan restored the constitution suspended for thirty years and reopened parliament. When a counter-revolution broke out in April 1909, the Young Turks crushed it and deposed the sultan.

Yet amid the turmoil Bulgaria declared independence and Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, and further territory was lost in the Italo-Turkish War (1911) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). Once in power the Young Turks stressed Turkish nationalism, provoking an Arab nationalist reaction, and took the empire into the First World War on Germany’s side.

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States at the time
Ottoman Empire
Bulgaria · independence
Austria-Hungary

People

  • Abdulhamid II1842 – 1918

    monarch · Ottoman sultan (1876–1909) who granted a constitution, soon suspended it and ruled as an autocrat for thirty years

Before and after

Earlier
1877 Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlin
Later
1912 Balkan Wars

Themes that include this event

  • Imperialism and the Partition of the World1839 – 1914

    From the Tanzimat to Sarajevo — seventy-five years in which the powers carved up West Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and the peoples there answered with reform and resistance