Research: The Ottoman Empire and the European balance of power revolution: 1856-1871
Research project: "The Ottoman Empire and the European balance of power revolution: 1856-1871" Key words: Ottoman Empire; diplomatic history, European balance of power Tutor: prof. Massimo Bucarelli, prof. Luca Micheletta The purpose of my project is to analyze the Ottoman diplomatic perspective towards the European balance of power in the second half of the 19th century. The research will focus on the most important events that altered the power relations in the old continent after the 1815 Treaty of Wien: the Italian and the German Unification. These two major events have been vastly debated by the academic literature from different points of view; however, after a preliminary analysis, there seems to be a lack of studies from an Ottoman perspective. The Ottoman Empire was both directly and indirectly influenced by the Italian and German Unification: the 1861 events represented both an internal and an external threat to the stability of its borders. From an external point of view, the Italian unification represented the birth of a new major player in the Mediterranean basin, which soon after its birth began to develop territorial claims towards the Sublime Porte; the German Unification, on the other hand, caused arguably the most relevant shift in the European balance of power after 1815, thus triggering a series of events that ultimately affected both the internal stability of the Ottoman Empire and its survival. The present project aims at analyzing which policies the Ottoman decision makers tried to implement vis-à-vis these historical and geopolitical changes and how the Sublime Porte attempted to avoid direct consequences to the territorial integrity of its Empire. The research will primarily take into account the Ottoman diplomatic documents from 1856 to 1871, which are currently held in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Ottoman Archive of the Prime Minister) in Istanbul. Along with these documents, the project will also analyse the Italian, Prussian, French and British diplomatic documents, in order to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of events.