During the nineteenth century, partly under the influence of the spontaneous spread of ideas through personal contact and study, partly under direct political pressure from the Western powers, the central government made periodic attempts to introduce Western political and social institutions by promulgating decrees which there was little or no machinery for implementing. The model, Western Europe, was itself in a state of violent and accelerating change. Concepts such as universal suffrage, education for all and equal rights for minorities, were developing in Europe spontaneously and indigenously, in a close relationship to the new technology, and to the new forms of society it rendered possible. These ideas, wrapped up with, and based on other older Western notions, such as secular legislation and secular justice, were to be applied from the top downwards, by order of a centralised authority, to a society whose social structure and morality were fundamentally different from those of Western Europe.
The central government, in the name of enlightenment, justice, liberty and efficiency, was forced into an unprecedented absolutism. Yet the imposed changes either caused unanticipated and complicated results far from the legislator's intentions, like the 1856 Land Registration Act, or else had little or no effect, like the 1878 Constitution. But it is pointless to discuss these attempts at reform in terms of rationality and success. They were the reactions of the ruling class to new social situations, and symptoms of profound social changes, the course of which they did no more than influence. The reactionary regime of Abdul Hamid from 1878 to 1908 did little to slow down these