Inevitable Choice for Survival: The Last Ottoman Grand Strategy

Abstract

Today most scholar in the field, defines the concept of grand strategy as the allocation of a state’s resources to meet its main objectives. In history no exceptions all states had guiding strategy to grow, exist or survive within the international environment. Even though Ottoman Empire like all other ones in history, had never used the grand strategy term to define their overall purpose, most empire’s rulers set main objectives, established priorities, allocate resources and followed long term systemic plans in order to establish regional/global supremacy from fourteenth and eighteenth century successfully. However, their political/military/financial supremacy faded away when they were not able to renew the existing grand strategy according to the shifting international environment during the eighteenth century. This study examines the Ottoman’s new revised grand strategy had emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century in order to secure the survival of empire. Within historical context, this paper designed to discuss Mahmud II’s innovative and visionary grand strategic approach in detail. While doing it this study overall linked the centralization, westernization, Ottomanization and the balance of power policy in foreign affairs as the main component of renewed grand strategy. Last but not least this study presents an analysis of the attempt to reshape the empire’s late period grand strategy aim to outmanoeuvre stronger rivals in an anarchic international order shaped by European great powers.