The Ottoman Empire and the emergence of its ‘Irish Question’

Abstract

Ireland had a strangely prominent position in the early revolutionary formulations. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels placed the country at the centre of their political blueprint. 1 There was an overall positivity about it. The Irish peasantry had proletariat-like qualities; an honour bestowed upon no other rural community. 2 Even the nationalism in Ireland was a progressive force. 3 They argued that the power of the British aristocracy stemmed from their possessions in Ireland. Therefore, a united Irish and English proletarian movement could end the authority of the landed nobility and this would, in return, trigger a European uprising. 'The lever' , which was going to unhinge a global revolution, 'must be applied in Ireland' , Marx wrote to Engels in a letter dated December 1869. 4 It has been suggested that this disproportionate interest, disproportionate at any rate given the size of the country, was a result of the individual connections of the two men. John Rodden stated that Marx and Engels in fact 'struggled' to incorporate Ireland into their political framework because of their intimate bonds. According to him, it was the 'compelling and lifelong personal and cultural tie [that] wielded unacknowledged and possibly decisive force on their theoretical program and helped make Ireland the historical exception that it became in their work' . 5 As an Ottoman historian living in Dublin, I can sympathize with the famous duo. Ireland is a fascinating country with an equally fascinating history, and one would ideally like to include it into one's scholarly writing. But does it fit in?Hitherto the history of the Ottoman Empire and Ireland has been subject to popular accounts focusing solely on the Sultan Abdülmecid's celebrated aid to Ireland during the Great Hunger in 1847. 6 Two countries have been considered to 'lie a continent apart' and without any connection save a chance happening. Was it really the case? Were the Ottomans not aware of the happenings in Ireland? In other words, was the Ottoman help to Ireland really by chance or rather a result of deliberate and watchful policies developed over the years? This article analyses the Ottoman Empire's perception of Ireland and how it evolved through different stages in connection with the Empire's own political trajectory. Here, in a nutshell, it is proposed that another history of Ireland and the Ottoman Empire is possible.The Ottoman diplomatic history is one of the least studied aspects of the Empire. When historians talk about its foreign relations at its last phase, they tend to depict the Sublime Porte as a pawn of European power games without any agency of its own. 7 We often forget that non-Western regions had their international relations strategies, political agendas, and foreign policy priorities even in the nineteenth century. As Selçuk Esenbel has shown, there were 'alternative pattern[s] of international relations [which were not] registered in treaties' . 8 Even though a new generation of scholars are looking at various aspects of the Empire's soci...