| Muhammad Ali | Leader of Egyptian modernization in the early nineteenth century. He ruled Egypt as an Ottoman governor, but had imperial ambitions. His descendants ruled Egypt until overthrown in 1952. |
| Janissaries | Infantry, originally of slave origin, armed with firearms and constituting the elite of the Ottoman army from the fifteenth century until the corps was abolished in 1826. See also devshirme. |
| Serbia | The extreme northeastern sector of Asia, including the Kamchatka Peninsula and the present Russian coast of the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Strait, and the Sea of Okhotsk. |
| Tanzimat | 'Restructuring' reforms by the nineteenth-century Ottoman rulers, intended to move civil law away from the control of religious elites and make the military and the bureacracy more efficient. |
| Crimean War | A war fought in the middle of the nineteenth century between Russia on one side and Turkey, Britain, and France on the other. Russia was defeated and the independence of Turkey was guaranteed |
| extraterritoriality | Foreign residents in a country living under the laws of their native country, disregarding the laws of the host country. 19th/Early 20th Centuries: European and US nationals in certain areas of Chinese and Ottoman cities were granted this right. |
| Young Ottomans | Movement of young intellectuals to institute liberal reforms and build a feeling of national identity in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. |
| Slavophile | Russian intellectuals in the early nineteenth century who favored resisting western European influences and taking pride in the traditional peasant values and institutions of the Slavic People. |
| Pan-Slavism | A movement to promote the independence of Slav people. Roughly started with the Congress in Prague; supported by Russia. Led to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. |
| Decembrist revolt | place in Russia on December 14 1825, Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against Nicholas I's assumption of the throne after his elder brother Constantine removed himself from the line of succession. |
| Opium War | War between Britain and the Qing Empire that was, in the British view, occasioned by the Qing government's refusal to permit the importation of opium into its territories. The victorious British imposed the one-sided Treaty of Nanking on China. |
| Bannermen | Hereditary military servants of the Qing Empire, in large part descendants of peoples of various origins who had fought for the founders of the empire. |
| Treaty of Nanking | Treaty that concluded the Opium War. It awarded Britain a large indemnity from the Qing Empire, denied the Qing government tariff control over some of its own borders, opened additional ports of residence to Britons, and ceded Hong Kong to Britain. |
| treaty ports | Cities opened to foreign residents as a result of the forced treaties between the Qing Empire and foreign signatories. In these places, foreigners enjoyed extraterritoriality. |
| most-favored-nation status | A clause in a commercial treaty that awards to any later signatories all the privileges previously granted to the original signatories. |
