The Young Turks were a broad opposition movement in the late Ottoman Empire to the absolutist régime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The most powerful organisation within the movement, and the most conflated, was the Committee of Union and Progress, though its ideology, strategies, and membership continuously changed. By the 1890s, the Young Turks were mainly a loose and contentious network of exiled intelligentsia who made a living by selling their newspapers to secret subscribers. Beyond opposition, exiled writers and sociologists debated Turkey's place in the East–West dichotomy.