What did the Ottoman Empire do to modernize itself in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and how successful were the reforms?

I'm actually going to disagree with /u/Phychic_Killer in large part.

The original impetus for the 19th century reforms was Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Syria, which ended in 1801. His campaign proved decisively (as it did for so many European powers) that the old forms of war were hopelessly outdated, and the French system combining levee en masse with modern weaponry and drill was the only way forward.

Here I'm going to break the story into two contrasts, one successful one not. When Napoleon left Egypt the Ottoman Sultan sent an enterprising, and truly gifted young ethnic Albanian named Muhammad Ali to re-establish control of that country. He did so brilliantly, defeating the squabbling factions that had filled the power vacuum and consolidating all local power around himself as no other Pasha of Egypt had done before him. He then set about a crash course of modernization along European lines.

Muhammad Ali destroyed the entrenched military mameluke class, which had held onto real power despite their official subjugation to the Ottomans 300 years earlier. His genius was to realize that to reform the military he had to have the money to pay for it, to have the money he had to reform the administration, to reform the administration he would have to fundamentally alter society, and for that he would need a military. In other words the program had to be comprehensive and done all it once, so that's exactly what he did. He changed the tax system, confiscated lands, centralized administrative control, introduced government printing presses for issuing laws, controlled population movements, established a military draft, a corvee, added industry to the nation's agriculture (and shifting to an export economy based around cotton), he brought European drill instructors and technical advisers, bought European guns, instituted education reforms, and, crucially, did so without putting Egypt into foreign debt (unlike his grandchildren, but that's another story.)

This is in contrast to the Ottoman's whose only real initial response was along a military line, where the formed the Nizam e-Cedid corps, the "new order" military corps." Contra /u/Phychic_Killer the problem wasn't that the Ottoman's relied on a draft-- a draft was exactly what they needed to match European armies doing the same thing! Rather it was they couldn't break the stranglehold that the Jannisaries held, as a martial class, on the Ottoman administration and military. Nor did they realize, until much later, how reform of the military would require reform of the state. The Ottoman empire remained hopelessly decentralized right up until the very end of the 19th century.

If proof is needed that one succeeded where the other failed, Muhammad Ali, though nominally in the Sultans service, fought a war against the empire from 1831-33 and absolutely wiped the floor. He could quite easily have marched on Constantinople itself (they made it quite far into the Anatolian interior) except that Britain and France combined threatened military action if he didn't stop.

In the case of the Egyptians, the modernization program continued, but their downfall was foreign debt, brought on in part by the collapse in cotton prices after American production reached pre-civil war levels within a decade of slavery's abolition. This would eventually lead to the occupation of Egypt by Britain in 1882, and as a result Egypt suffered as so many colonial subjects did in the age of European imperialism.

The Ottoman story is a bit different. They kept trying reforms, including the Tanzimat reforms and the attempt at a constitution, but nothing ever quite worked. Here /u/Phychic_Killer is quite right that they simply suffered defeat after defeat, such that by the early 20th century they had virtually no European possessions remaining.

Where I would break with him again is over the post-1908 reforms (and particularly after the 1913 coup.) Although they were extremely short lived (as he notes, the empire dissolved in 1920) they seem to have actually been incredibly effective. The European powers were absolutely shocked in World War I at the Ottoman military capabilities. The British found themselves facing an enemy that was able to put up incredibly stiff resistance at Gallipoli, Gaza, and in Iraq, and the Germans were pleasantly surprised to find that they actually had an effective ally.

For all the talk of the Ottoman empire as the sick man of Europe, in the war the Ottomans never suffered a revolution like the ones that tore apart Russia and Austria-Hungary, or a revolt like the one that forced the final armistice. They continued fighting in places like Medina until even 1919. And then after the War, the rump Turkish army under the command of Ataturk succeeded in establishing Turkey as an independent state.

Nor were the reforms strictly military as they had been in the past. Ottomanization and Turkification efforts seemed to be making both cultural and administrative efforts towards reform in the outlying provinces for the first time.

It's of course counter-factual but it's fascinating to me what might have happened to the Ottoman empire if they had remained neutral or joined the entente in the First World War, given the flash of brilliance in those final years.

edit: source wise, I recommend Malcolm Yapp's The Making of the Modern Near East, 1792-1923, Eugene Rogan's The Arabs, a History, and P.J. Vatikiotis's The History of Modern Egypt, From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak.