The Two Wars

The first inter-imperial war amongst the Great Powers since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Crimean War (1853–1856) shook the world and devastated peoples, economies, and finances. Some historians argue that it symbolized the destruction of the Concert of Europe. This chapter offers an alternative assessment. It shows that the Concert continued to exist after 1856 even though the peace established on the heels of the Crimean War was delicate and repeatedly tested peace in Europe and the Levant. Like the aftershocks of a disastrous earthquake, its aftermath witnessed further Great Power wars, civil strifes, and rebellions. The precarious climate that emerged at the time dovetailed with the existing and newly emerging tensions in Mount Lebanon. These snowballed into further fighting in the mountain during the summer of 1860—a much more devastating conflict, with a death toll around three to five times greater than the civil wars of 1841 and 1845 combined.

The Russian Peace in the Levant

In 1833, the civil war between Istanbul and Cairo was brought to an end with an unexpected intervention. The Ottomans’ age-old enemies, the Romanovs, were involved in the war on the side of Sultan Mahmud II and Hüsrev Pașa. In the summer of 1833, Russia and the Ottoman Empire even signed a defensive alliance treaty, which transimperialized the civil war in the Ottoman world, as Britain and France strongly protested this treaty and strove to prevent its ratification. This chapter discusses how the civil war in the Levant came to an end with the Russian intervention, focusing on the previously unmentioned pull-factors that allowed for this intervention. It also shows how the Concert of Europe found itself in disconcert after the 1833 intervention as war preparations began in St Petersburg against a potential Anglo-French attack.

An Unusual Quest for Revenge

The literature on the latter phase of the Eastern Crisis in the 1830s usually concentrates on the policy of European ‘great men’, how they piloted bureaucratic and military reforms in Istanbul and then brought an end to the crisis by means of their shrewd diplomacy, commitment, or opposition to the Concert of Europe. This chapter places the emphasis elsewhere. With a prosopographical approach to the experience of the Ottoman statesman and diplomat Mustafa Reșid (1800–1858), it documents the decisive role the Ottoman agency played in ending the disconcert among the Powers in the 1830s and enabling the intervention of the Quadruple Alliance in the 1840s. The chapter discloses the unique roles played by the idea of civilization and the quest for security in the Ottoman decision to sign free trade agreements with the European Powers as of 1838, and the declaration of the Gülhane Edict of 1839, which allegedly inaugurated the Tanzimat era.

Order in the European Concert Era

Chapter 5 (“Order in the European Concert Era”) examines three moments of order change opportunity in the nineteenth century centered around the Concert of Europe. The first section assesses the scholarly debate over what the Concert actually was, making the case that it constituted a decisive departure from the brand of balance-of-power politics that had previously dominated Europe. And yet accepting what the Concert was says nothing about how it came to be, an argument developed in the second section that examines the strategic and exclusionary impulses behind its origins after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The third section assesses two more cases of opportunity where the dominant actors elected not to seek major changes to the Concert order: the aftermath of the liberal revolutionary wave of 1848 and the negotiations that ended the Crimean War in 1856.