This article has been written for Easy History by Deniz Gun Erazlan.
Introduction:
The Ottoman Empire governed the Middle East for more than four centuries – from the Hejaz and Baghdad to Damascus and Jerusalem. But today, the Ottomans’ role in shaping the region is often reduced to a footnote. In popular Western histories, they are portrayed as stagnant and declining, overtaken by the arrival of European colonial powers. In Arab nationalist narratives, they are remembered less as a shared imperial past and more as foreign occupiers. While not entirely unfounded, these portrayals miss something critical: the Ottoman state was not simply a fading empire – it was the framework through which the modern Middle East took shape.
As Eugene Rogan notes in The Arabs: A History, the Ottomans provided a form of regional governance that, while far from democratic, was often more stable and less disruptive than what came after them. They ruled not only through military force but also through law, local intermediaries, and negotiated authority. Karen Barkey’s work on Ottoman pluralism emphasises that the empire succeeded for so long not by forcing uniformity, but by allowing diversity to function within a broader political structure. Rather than suppressing difference, the Ottomans organised it through the millet system, for example, offering communities a degree of autonomy while still maintaining imperial cohesion.
Şükrü Hanioğlu, writing on the late Ottoman period, adds that the empire’s final century saw serious efforts to modernise and centralise. These reforms, especially during the Tanzimat era, reshaped provincial administration and redefined the empire’s relationship with its Arab territories, not always successfully, but with lasting institutional impact.
This article asks a straightforward but often overlooked question: What did the Ottomans actually leave behind? The answer is more complicated than either nostalgia or rejection allows. Through systems like the vilayets and millets, the Ottomans laid down the architecture of governance, identity, and coexistence – structures that, in many cases, were dismantled or distorted in the post-Ottoman period. What follows is not a defence of empire, but an attempt to reconsider its long-term imprint: on borders, bureaucracy, diversity, and memory.
From Vilayets to Nation-States:
When the Ottoman Empire expanded into the Arab provinces in the 16th century, it inherited a region defined more by fluid loyalties and overlapping identities than rigid national borders. To govern such diversity, the empire implemented a flexible provincial system structured around vilayets (provinces) and sanjaks (districts). These units were headed by governors appointed by the central authority, but often staffed by local elites, allowing the Ottomans to extend imperial control without direct domination. As Hanioğlu highlights, this system was not static; by the 19th century, it had evolved significantly through a series of reforms aimed at centralisation and administrative modernisation, especially during the Tanzimat era.
The importance of the vilayet system becomes clear when examining how modern Middle Eastern states were drawn. Iraq, for instance, emerged from the unification of three former Ottoman provinces – Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra – each with distinct ethnic, sectarian, and tribal compositions. According to Rogan, the Ottoman administration, while imperfect, provided a functional if uneven balance of power among these groups. The abrupt reorganisation of these territories under British mandate rule after the First World War disrupted this balance, contributing to the deep fragmentation and instability that followed.
A similar pattern occurred in Syria and Lebanon. Under the Ottomans, these territories were governed as large units – notably the Vilayet of Syria and the autonomous Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate – with an eye toward managing diverse religious communities within shared regional frameworks. The imposition of new borders by the French Mandate, in line with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, carved the region into separate states with artificial identities. The creation of Greater Lebanon, in particular, ignored the historical administrative unity of the region and privileged certain sectarian groups over others, seeding conflicts that persist to this day.
It is important to note, however, that the Ottoman system was far from ideal. Hanioğlu describes how, despite reformist intent, provincial governance often remained inefficient, corrupt, or fragile, particularly in peripheral regions. Still, what the Ottomans offered was a form of statehood that acknowledged local diversity and allowed for degrees of regional autonomy under an overarching imperial framework. The later collapse of this system – and its replacement by European mandates and nationalist regimes – led to a much more rigid vision of sovereignty, one that struggled to manage the same diversity the Ottomans had once contained.
As Rogan puts it, the collapse of the Ottoman state created a political vacuum that was quickly filled by outside powers and new ruling elites, but without the same administrative cohesion. In many cases, modern Arab states inherited borders without inheriting the governing institutions or flexibility that had once sustained those regions. In this way, the vilayet system was not simply a relic of empire, but a lost model of governance – one that was flawed, but far more regionally rooted than what came after.
Millets and Minorities – Governing Diversity Before the Nation-State:
One of the most distinctive features of the Ottoman Empire was its approach to managing religious diversity – a strategy best captured in the millet system. Far from seeking to homogenise its population, the empire embraced a model of governance in which religious communities were granted autonomy over their internal affairs. Under this system, Christians, Jews, and later various Muslim sects operated their own courts, schools, and communal leadership structures. These groups were not equal in status to Muslims under Islamic law, but they were recognised as legitimate parts of the imperial fabric – allowed to live “according to their own laws,” as long as they paid taxes and acknowledged Ottoman sovereignty.
As Karen Barkey argues in Empire of Difference, this form of imperial pluralism was not merely a pragmatic compromise – it was a deliberate and durable strategy of governance. Rather than ruling by imposing cultural uniformity, the Ottomans institutionalised difference, managing a wide array of identities within a single imperial system. This helped reduce internal rebellion, allowed for long-term coexistence among rival religious groups, and helped bind disparate communities to the empire.
The system’s logic was non-territorial. As Barkey and Gavrilis emphasise, a millet was not defined by geography but by religious identity. Armenians in Aleppo and in Istanbul, for example, belonged to the same millet, even if they lived hundreds of kilometres apart. This meant that Ottoman subjects often carried multiple identities at once – as members of a millet, as residents of a city, and as subjects of the sultan. Loyalty was layered, not singular.
However, the system had its limits – and its consequences. While it created space for religious minorities, it also reinforced communal divisions. In the 19th century, as European powers began to intervene on behalf of Christian populations in the empire, the millet structure hardened. What was once a fluid and functional arrangement increasingly became a tool for foreign influence and sectarian entrenchment. Communities began to define themselves in narrower, more politicised terms. When the empire collapsed, this legacy did not disappear – it evolved.
In places like Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, post-Ottoman states inherited not just the communities, but the categories. French and British administrators mapped Ottoman millets onto new national structures, institutionalising sectarian identity in everything from electoral systems to public service appointments. What had once been a way of managing difference under the empire became the foundation for systems of sectarian politics, often exploited by post-colonial elites and foreign powers alike.
None of this is to say the millet system was ideal. It was hierarchical, gendered, and exclusionary by modern standards. But it was, as Barkey notes, an early model of governance that recognised complexity rather than flattening it. In an age when many Middle Eastern states still struggle to balance diversity with unity, the Ottoman experience offers a reminder – not of a golden age, but of a different way of organising pluralism.
Memory and Myth – The Arab Break-Up with the Ottomans:
While the Ottoman Empire left behind visible administrative and social structures, one of its most enduring – and contested – legacies is the way it is remembered. For many Arab nationalist thinkers in the 20th century, Ottoman rule came to symbolise foreign domination. Movements like the Arab Revolt during the First World War, and the wave of nationalism that followed, reframed the Ottomans not as fellow Muslims or regional rulers, but as Turkic imperialists who held back Arab progress. In schoolbooks and political rhetoric, the empire was cast as backward, oppressive, and disconnected from local aspirations.
This rejection of the Ottoman past was not merely academic. As Madawi Al-Rasheed argues, the post-Ottoman Arab world consciously distanced itself from imperial memory as it sought to build national identities from the ruins of the empire. In her analysis of Saudi religious reformers and intellectuals, Al-Rasheed shows how references to the Ottoman period were either muted or reframed to fit the needs of new state narratives. The empire’s multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian framework no longer suited the exclusive logic of Arab nationhood or the centralising impulses of postcolonial regimes.
Yet, even as Arab states pushed away from the Ottoman past, a different kind of revival was unfolding in Turkey. Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the last two decades have seen a marked return of Ottoman symbolism in domestic and foreign policy – from neo-classical architecture and television dramas to regional diplomacy invoking “shared history.” Critics in the West and in the Middle East have often labelled this trend “Neo-Ottomanism”, suggesting an ideological return to imperial ambitions.
But, as Soner Çağaptay argues in The Misnomer of Neo-Ottomanism, this term is often overused or misunderstood. Erdoğan’s foreign policy, he notes, is more nationalist than imperial – based less on reviving Ottoman governance structures and more on projecting Turkish power. The nostalgia is real, but it’s also selective. The Ottomans are invoked when convenient, particularly to signal regional leadership to Arab and Muslim audiences, but without reviving the inclusive administrative models that once defined the empire.
This has led to a curious tension in the region: while many Arab states remain ambivalent or hostile to their Ottoman heritage, Turkish politics has leaned into it – not to recreate it, but to repurpose it. In countries like Lebanon, Iraq, or Egypt, where Ottoman influence once shaped law, education, and commerce, there is little public memory of shared governance. Instead, the Ottoman legacy appears only in architectural remnants, in contested historical debates, or in imported soap operas broadcast in prime time.
As Al-Rasheed notes, “Ottoman memory has become both a tool and a battleground” – claimed by some, erased by others, and reshaped by those seeking to write new national stories. In the modern Middle East, the Ottomans may be long gone, but the struggle over what they meant – and what they still mean – continues.
Conclusion:
The Ottoman Empire governed the Middle East for centuries, not simply as a distant imperial force but as a complex and layered political system. Through administrative structures like the vilayet system and socio-political frameworks like the millet model, the Ottomans shaped the contours of governance, diversity, and identity in ways that still echo today. Their empire was far from flawless – it was hierarchical, often inefficient, and resistant to many forms of modern reform. But it also offered forms of accommodation, pluralism, and continuity that were lost in the violent transitions to colonial rule and post-colonial state-building.
The legacy of the Ottomans is neither a golden age to be romanticised nor a dark chapter to be dismissed. As we’ve seen, it was both enabling and limiting, inclusive and exclusive, and its memory continues to be politically charged. In an era of renewed instability, contested borders, and rising authoritarianism, re-examining the Ottoman past is not about resurrecting the empire, but about understanding the foundations upon which the modern Middle East was built and, in many ways, continues to stand.
References:
- Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (New York University Press: 2008)
- Karen Barkey & George Gavrilis, “The Ottoman Millet System: Non-Territorial Autonomy and its Contemporary Legacy”, in Ethnopolitics, Vol. 15 (2016), pp. 24-42
- M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press: 2008)
- Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (Basic Books: 2009)
- Soner Çağaptay, “The AKP’s Foreign Policy: The Misnomer of ‘Neo-Ottomanism’”, in Turkey Analyst, Vol. 4 (2011)
- Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (Oxford University Press: 2015)
- Madawi Al-Rasheed, “A Historian’s Take on Ottoman Memory and Arab Identity”, in Jadaliyya (2016)
About the Author:
Deniz Gün Eraslan is an undergraduate student of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. His academic interests focus on the history of the Ottoman Empire, Middle Eastern politics, and the study of political memory. He is committed to presenting complex historical subjects in an accessible and thoughtful manner for a broader audience.
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