The Governance of Inequality: The Making of the Armenian Question in the Late Ottoman Empire
This work examines the evolution of the Ottoman regime of ethnicity in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period in which the state expanded its authority to frontier zones. It focuses on the changing set of relationships between Ottoman institutions and Armenian communities. It adopts a microhistorical approach to identify the sites of contention where the discrepancy between official proclamations of imperial beneficence, and the lived realities of seigneurial domination and discriminatory rule were most felt. It traces how rural Armenians attempted to utilize the empire’s promise of legal equality and imperial citizenship in their push for major social and political transformations. It pays particular attention to the ebb and flow of imperial reform, international intervention, and communal mobilization in the making of the so-called Armenian Question in the second half of the nineteenth century. The study aims to contribute to our understanding of the rise of supremacist and discriminatory politics around the globe in the fin-de-siecle by situating the Ottoman regime of ethnicity in a global context.
Integration and Minoritization: Governing Hierarchies in the Late Ottoman Empire
The project examines the making of ethno-confessional hierarchies in late Ottoman state and society with a particular focus on Armenians in the empire. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire extended equality before the law to its non-Muslim subjects under a new imperial and international regime. The last quarter of the nineteenth century marked important changes in Ottoman policymaking. Sultan Abdülhamid introduced a set of new policies in order to assert the primacy of his Sunni Muslim subjects and to curb Armenian efforts towards self-governance and administrative integration. The project focuses on this period (1856-1908) in order to trace the shifts and contradictions in the Ottoman regime of ethnicity. The reformation and abolition of ethnic, confessional and racial hierarchies were at the center of imperial and international politics during this period. The global connections in the Ottoman case are doubly important, because Ottoman modernization was intrinsically tied with international diplomacy from the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore, it also seeks to situate the Ottoman example within a global context with attention to the contemporaneous expansions and contractions of citizenship and subjecthood in the Russian Empire and the United States.