Officers of the Committee of Union and Progress, based in Salonika and Manastir, threatened to march on Constantinople unless the Sultan reinstated the 1876 constitution and parliament. Facing the threat of civil war, Abdul Hamid II capitulated on July 23, 1908, restoring constitutional government and beginning the Second Constitutional Era. The revolution accelerated the empire's slide toward nationalism and, ultimately, its dissolution after World War I.
For thirty years Abdul Hamid II had ruled the Ottoman Empire as an absolute monarch, suspending the constitution he himself had grudgingly signed in 1876 and running an extensive network of spies to crush dissent. But a secret society of army officers, bureaucrats, and exiles known as the Committee of Union and Progress, or Young Turks, had been organizing for years in the empire's European provinces, frustrated by military weakness, foreign encroachment, and the Sultan's paranoid despotism.
In July 1908, officers in Macedonia mutinied, and the movement spread with startling speed. Telegrams poured into the palace threatening a march on the capital. Isolated and unable to rely on the loyalty of his own army, Abdul Hamid announced on July 23 that the constitution was restored. Crowds in Constantinople and across the provinces celebrated with an intoxicating, short-lived sense of unity among Turks, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews alike.
The euphoria did not last. Within a year the Sultan was deposed after a countercoup, and the CUP tightened its grip on power, eventually steering the empire into World War I on the side of Germany. The 1908 revolution is remembered as a hinge moment: it promised liberal reform but instead opened the path to the nationalist, authoritarian politics that would dominate the empire's final years.