Anxiety of backwardness: Civilizational crisis and discourse of underdevelopment in the late Ottoman period

Date

2026-7-27

Author

Şebin, Yunus Emre

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This thesis examines the political and intellectual responses that took shape in the late Ottoman period around a condition termed the anxiety of backwardness. The term denotes the conviction that the empire had been displaced to the periphery of a civilizational hierarchy established by European modernity, and that its survival depended on demonstrating its belonging within that hierarchy. Three currents that opposed one another in almost every respect, the Hamidian regime, the Young Turk opposition, and the Islamist intellectuals, each produced a distinct diagnosis of this perceived backwardness and a distinct prescription for its cure. The regime staged a meticulous performance of modernity before European audiences. The Young Turks defined the empire as a diseased organism and appointed themselves its physicians. For the Islamists, the cause of perceived backwardness lay in a departure from the true essence of Islam. Through an analysis of their periodicals, treatises, poetry, and archival correspondence, this thesis argues that beneath these conflicts the three currents shared a common epistemic ground. Each had accepted, often without noticing the acceptance, the categories through which European modernity classified their own civilization from outside. Also, each current held an elitist conception of salvation that reduced the population to an object to be administered, treated, or guided. These two features, Eurocentrism and elitism, constitute one of the most consequential intellectual legacies of the late Ottoman period.

Subject Keywords

Underdevelopment, Ottoman intellectual history, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Elitism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119988

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis