The Making of Ottoman Legalism: International Law and the Standard of Civilization

This paper examines how the Ottoman Empire, from the mid-19th century onwards, utilized international law through what I term Ottoman legalism, a distinctive form of legal argumentation. Rather than treating international law as a European system imposed on a passive non-European world, this paper's approach demonstrates how Ottoman statesmen actively used legal reasoning to defend imperial sovereignty and challenge the hierarchical assumptions embedded in the contemporary “standard of civilization.”

Focusing on the Lebanon-Syria (1860-61) and Crete (1866-69) crises, this paper analyzes how Ottoman officials used concepts of treaty law, sovereignty, state responsibility, and non-intervention in response to Europe's humanitarian and civilization claims. Figures such as Fuad Pasha, Ali Pasha, Musurus Pasha, and Safvet Pasha reframed sovereignty not as a cultural trait but as a legal performance and practice demonstrated through dialogue, accountability, and reciprocity. In doing so, they exposed the tension between international law's claims to universality and its unequal application to European and non-European states.

By rearticulating Ottoman diplomatic and legal arguments, the paper situates the empire within a broader global historical context of non-European engagement with international law. It presents Ottoman jurisprudence not as a consistent European export of international law, but as a contested field shaped by interaction, negotiation, and resistance. The paper argues that Ottoman legal thought anticipated later critiques of the international legal hierarchy (e.g., postcolonial and TWAIL) and offered an alternative genealogy of sovereign equality in the modern international order.