Session Abstract

The notion of imperial citizenship has provided a new lens for understanding the transition from subjecthood to citizenship in modernizing, centralizing states that sought to increase control over their subject populations and to curb the burgeoning appeal of ethnic nationalisms in the long nineteenth century. In multi-confessional, multi-ethnic, and colonial states, the emergence of new citizenship regimes often coincided, however, with broader religious and supranational currents that complicated, and sometimes undermined, the emergence of civic or national forms of citizenship. State attempts to clearly demarcate a citizenship boundary were also frustrated by large-scale mobility, migration, common markets, overlapping spheres of sovereignty, and forms of religio-political authority that transcended national, colonial, and imperial borders. In periods of tumult, newly minted citizens often hedged their bets, maintained old allegiances, and sought to preserve de facto forms of dual or even multiple citizenships. The point of departure for this panel is that the aforementioned hybridity and boundary-crossings were not exceptions to a pre-supposed, standard or one-dimensional citizenship project or regime; rather, they formed an intrinsic part of transitions from subjectood to citizenship, and from empire to nation-state.

Bringing together a geographically diverse range of case studies, this panel explores how overlapping forms of sovereignty (political, juridical, religious) as well as multilayered imperial and colonial loyalties shaped the formation of citizenship regimes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Middle East, Eastern Europe/Balkans, Central Asia, and South Asia. Faiz Ahmed’s paper examines Ottoman and British contestations over Afghans and Indian Muslims from the aftermath of the 1877-1878 Russo-Ottoman war to the eve of the first world war, with the goal of highlighting the jurisdictional contours of a new and intensifying geopolitical rivalry between the Porte and the British Raj in particular. Lale Can examines how Central Asian Muslims in Ottoman lands continued to enjoy citizenship-like rights – even after being designated in an 1869 law as “foreigners” – due to the reinvigoration of the Ottoman caliphate and the sultan’s claims of authority over the worldwide Muslim community, the umma. In her work on Muslims in Habsburg-occupied Bosnia, Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular analyzes the ways in which allegiance and contestations over sovereignty informed individual notions of subjecthood and citizenship, and how loyalty to the caliph was a lasting legacy of Ottoman rule. In another contested borderland of the (post)-Habsburg world – the Adriatic city of Fiume – Dominique Reill explores how the provisional government of this semi-autonomous polity drew on notions of latent Habsburg imperial sovereignty as it sought to include and exclude populations from a nascent citizenry that could be later incorporated in the nation-state of Italy. In this way, each of the papers explore the realms of possibility and contingency –for state elites and ordinary citizens – during this transformative juncture for the late Ottoman, British, and Habsburg empires.  Diverse in geographic scope and socio-political context, the papers share a common thread of highlighting how multilayered forms of imperial sovereignty and loyalty shaped the terms of membership in the new states which succeeded them.