This book traces the transcultural and transnational dimension of the

internal genesis of the Ottoman Constitution, which was promulgated on

December 23, 1876. It shows that the constitutional process

incorporated, from domestic authorities to foreign Powers, a plurality

of formal and informal agents of different ethno-religious, cultural,

and ideological backgrounds and that its investigation goes beyond the

study of a national narrative.

Considering the issue of constitutional reforms from different angles

(foreign influence and pressure, the agency of domestic actors and

through discourse analysis of reform decrees), the book brings a

critical approach to the existing historiographical narratives, which

reduce Ottoman constitutional history to a simplistic process of

transplanting western legal artefacts and regimes without measuring the

selective control of dominant domestic groups over the process. Instead,

the book shows the evolution of a continuous set of negotiations of

various actors on the idea of constitution in the Ottoman Empire and

thus sheds light on the social construction of the idea of justice and

constitutional law. The draft constitutions studied throughout the book

are the textual embodiment of these negotiations and unveil the ways in

which concepts and issues such as legitimacy, the restriction of

political power, lawful government, liberty, equality, the rule of

people and the treatment of minorities reached the Ottoman context and

the ways in which they acquired new meanings or equivalents during their

adaptation to the imperial political culture.