From an Empire of Subjects to an Empire of Citizens: The Paradigm of Ottoman Secularization

I will examine the Ottoman transition from an empire of unequal subjects to an empire of nominally equal citizens in the mid to late nineteenth century as part of a global problem of moving from systems of overt discrimination to those of constitutional equality. This transition is typically interpreted as a failure given both the relentless nature of Western imperialism that undermined the territorial integrity of the Ottoman empire and the ultimate collapse of the Ottoman empire itself following the First World War. Rather than understanding the Ottoman case as peculiar, however, this talk examines how the bifurcation of Ottoman sovereignty led in one part of the empire to unprecedented cases of ethnic cleansing and nationalist violence and in another part of the empire toward an unprecedented culture of coexistence across religious lines.