Military Revolution and Its Effect on Turkish Modernization

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Some researchers tried to explain the changes that occur in military developments approximately from the 15th century to the 18th century with Military Revolution thesis. They linked some of the developments in technology, administration, science and economy to the military developments. Michael Roberts described a number of changes in the European military affairs between 1560 and 1660 as the Military Revolution. After his research, many historians began to do extensive research on this subject. As a result of the increasing interest in Ottoman military history in recent years, the effect of the Military Revolution on the Ottomans and the contributions of the Ottomans to this revolution were tried to be put forward.

Ottomans were affected by these military developments because they had both geographical connection and mutual interest relationships with its European and Russian rivals. If a military revolution took place in Europe, the Ottomans tracked it down in some ways. The Otto- mans started to lose wars and territories in the last quarter of the 17th century. As a result of these developments, Ottomans had to transfer the military technologies and tactics along with scientific, administrative, economic and institutional structures from Europeans. These de- velopments caused the Ottoman cultural life to have a dual structure in the middle of the 18th century. The ulema class, which continues to produce knowledge in the madrasas, traditional educational institutions, has started to lose its previous power. On the other hand the new scientist group called mütefennin started to gain strenght. They were mostly military and civilian bureaucrats. In the last quarter of the 18th century, members of this new group began to establish European-style military schools. Then they were followed by civilian schools. New sciences and arts developing in Europe have started to be used here. Disciplines such as ballistics, economics, management, civil engineering, ship building and mathematics have been the main subjects taught in these schools to come. This led to the construction of the foundations of Ottoman-Turkish modernization. As a natural consequence of the Military Revolution, Ottoman epistemic group named "mütefennin" introduced the new sciences and the technologies to Ottomans and they founded the new military and civil institutions. The Ottoman "mütefennins"started to get the privileged position over other scholars like ulema in the late 18th century and pushed other epistemic communities out of the stage of history in the 20th century.