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2 - Nations and Nationalisms in the Late Ottoman Empire

from Part I - Imperial and Postcolonial Settings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

By
Ebru Boyar
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

In his popular novel, Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), which was first published in Istanbul in 1943, Sabahattin Ali wrote that “for some reason or other people prefer to investigate what they feel sure they will find. It is without doubt easier to find a brave man to descend to the bottom of a well where it is known that a dragon lives than to find a man who will show the courage to descend into a well about the bottom of which nothing is known.”1 This view applies nicely to research into nations and nationalisms, for the bottom of the well is already known: the Ottoman Empire collapsed and was replaced by new nation-states. This collapse has often been taken as the “inevitable” triumph of nation-state over empire, the victory of national identities over other identity constructions.

Keywords

Arabismthe Balkan Warscivilizationdecentralization
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 24 - 42
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Aymes, Marc, A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Adrian Morfee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).Google Scholar
Boyar, Ebru, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kayalı, Hasan, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khalidi, Rashid, Anderson, Lisa, Muslih, Muhammad, and Simon, Reeva S. (eds.), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Methodieva, Milena B., Between Empire and Nation: Muslim Reform in the Balkans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021).Google Scholar
Provence, Michael, The Last Ottomans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).Google Scholar

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