The study of the Tanzimat period-that crucial time of attempted _reform and westernization in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire \-is still in its infancy. We are many years and scores of monographs away from a definitive history, which will be possible only after full exploitation of the Turkish archives and of other widely scattered materials in over a dozen languages. Much still remains to be known s.iniply of what happened and how and .when, not to speak of why. \This, therefore, is a preliminary- attempt to recount and assess the majpr.refofm developments and to put them in 'their historical context. The focal period is the climactic two decades of the Tanzimat which led up to the promulgation of the first Ottoman constitution in 1876.