Sammendrag
The chapter proposes a substantial revision to the literature on state-society relations in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire by challenging the widely held notion that Ottoman state had officially embraced Ottomanism, the project of creating an Ottoman nation out of the religious and ethnic diversity of the Empire’s subjects. It demonstrates through a comprehensive analysis of nineteenth-century texts that, contrary to the prevalent assumption in historiography, the Ottoman state did not have a clearly defined project for citizenship during the Tanzimat. Rather, it was acting in response to domestic and international pressure in implementing ad hoc reform policies, which historians have interpreted in hindsight as governed by Ottomanism. After providing a genealogy of the concept of Ottomanism, the chapter traces the earliest identifiable Ottomanist project to the Young Ottoman opposition in 1860s and 1870s in reaction to what they perceived as a “problematic” application of the principle of equality by the Ottoman government.
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