"Mercantilism Stronger than Patriotism": Ottoman Émigrés in Latin America and the Limits of Ottomanism

Studies of the final decades of the Ottoman Empire have emphasized that the state sought to propagate the shared secular ideology of Ottomanism that highlighted the primacy of Ottoman identity among its subjects, regardless of their distinct religious and ethnic affiliations. The failure of Ottomanism to gain traction has been attributed to the growth of separatist nationalist movements among Ottoman religious and ethnic minorities, and has been cited as catalyzing the rise of Turkish nationalism during the final years of the empire, setting the precedent for the political ideology and Turkification programs of the Turkish Republic. These studies, focusing on state efforts to promote Ottomanism from within the empire itself or examining non-Muslim intellectuals in France and the United States fomenting nationalism, have failed to consider the extent to which the actions of non-elite Ottoman émigrés undermined the project of Ottomanism, but often motivated by economic expediency rather than ideology.

This paper locates contention over Ottomanism and loyalty to the empire in the discourses and practices of non-Muslim Ottoman emigrants in Latin America and Ottoman authorities’ responses to them. It argues that Sephardic Jewish and Arab Christian émigrés resisted Ottoman attempts to dictate exclusive loyalty and promulgate a shared Ottoman identity, whether by fracturing along religious and linguistic lines, or by adopting or performing non-Ottoman nationalities in order to facilitate the continued geographic mobility that undergirded their commercial and social success. In response, the Ottoman government sought diplomatic relations with Latin American states in an attempt to protect, monitor, and regulate these individuals. The actions of these individuals and the Ottoman government’s failure to control them reveal the extent to which emigrants exposed the limits of Ottomanism and the reach of the state.