Tanzimat the Balkans : Midhat Pasha's governorship in the Danube Province (Tuna Vilayeti), 1864-1868

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing Midhat Pasha’s governorship in the Danube province between 1864 and 1868 within two dimensions: Midhat Pasha as an Ottoman governor symbolizing the Tanzimat ideology and modernization in the countryside; and the rise of the Bulgarian revolutionary movements supported by the Russian Pan-Slavist policies. For this purpose, focus is placed on Midhat Pasha’s reforms in this pilot region, which would be carried out as examples for the other provinces within the empire, and also his struggle against the national uprisings. The huge amount of relevant single documents in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives in Istanbul and the Ottoman archives in Sofia along with the provincial newspaper, (Tuna), the yearbooks of the province, and the memoirs of Pasha himself constitute the main source and bases of this thesis.