Can There Be a “Civilized Turk”? Encountering Ottoman Modernity in post -1878 Niš

Abstract

Serbian historiography has usually assessed the period of Ottoman modernizing reforms known as the Tanzimat (1839–1876) negatively, if at all. Since the Tanzimat reforms were never introduced in central Serbia, which by the 1830s had gained its autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, many historians of nineteenth-century Serbia ignored the Ottoman reforms altogether. Scholars working on regions, like Niš, that were subject to the Tanzimat reforms and later annexed to Serbia, have viewed these reforms in terms of their usefulness to the Christian population, finding them insufficient at best, dishonest and financially detrimental at worst.2