This book has analysed the complex interconnected transformations of ruler visibility and popular belonging over the course of a century – from the accession of Sultan Mahmud II in 1808 to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908.

In the aftermath of the Greek Revolution of 1821–9 and the abolition of the Janissary corps in its midst (1826), Mahmud II was able to press on with some of his most sweeping military, bureaucratic-administrative, socioeconomic, legal and, as this book has focused on above all, sociocultural reforms. The sultan thus engineered the first shift in modern ruler visibility, with a view to (1) establishing a plane of diplomatic reciprocity with and acceptance by the increasingly powerful West and (2) cultivating and cementing the loyalty of his Ottoman (especially non-Muslim) subjects. Breaking away from century-long Ottoman thinking and protocol, Mahmud II began dressing and carrying himself as a Western ruler before revolutionising public dress codes accordingly. The sultan made himself available to the public gaze (and vice versa) by going on ever longer and more extensive tours of the Ottoman countryside. He even ordered the unprecedented production, dissemination and embedding of his own portraits into innovative public rituals of popular allegiance. While Mahmud II would not live long enough to reap the fruit of his labours, by initiating the annual royal (birthday and accession day) celebrations in the Ottoman capital, the provinces and the newly opened permanent embassies abroad, in 1836, he did indeed set in motion powerful and long-lived processes of internal social reconfiguration and greater cultural homogenisation.

Until recently, the overall Ottoman reform process of the mid-nineteenth century, collectively known as the Tanzimat, was uniformly and rather indiscriminately referred to as ‘Westernisation’, with its inevitable corollary of ‘secularisation’ in most standard narratives of the period. Moreover, its start was fixed to the date of the Gülhane Rescript (3 November 1839), that is, the beginning of Sultan Abdülmecid's reign.

This book instead has added further weight to the growing scholarly opinion that the Tanzimat had been effectively under way well before 1839. Moreover, its central engine was not a Western (especially British) agent, but the sultan himself, who, with the help of his advisers, designed new annual pan-imperial public ruler celebrations with a view, yet again, of centralisation, in line with his other reforms, only this time of subject loyalties.