As part of their nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms, the Ottomans declared that no class of people could be held inferior to another on the basis of language, race, or religion. The Suryani Christians were then faced with a problem: did they constitute a “class of people” of their own? Until this point, they had been represented to Istanbul through the Armenian patriarch as effectively an extension of the Armenian community. By the late nineteenth century, however, the Suryani were no longer satisfied with this hierarchical arrangement known as yamakl?k. In order to end it, they had to demonstrate their complete independence of and distinctiveness from the Armenian church and community. This paper examines how the Suryani effected such a separation by considering two aspects of this project: the efforts by the church to reconnect with distant Suryani across the eastern provinces of the empire, and the church’s attempt to extend its authority over the Syriac Christians of southern India. By thus exhibiting the coherence and extent of the community—reaching as far as Sri Lanka and the Malabar coast of India—the Suryani church and patriarch sought to make the claim that the community’s subordination to the Armenians was obviously unnatural and patently absurd. In order to subvert one form of hierarchy, however, the church had to institute others internal to the category “Suryani” itself, evidenced by the solidification of ecclesiastical authority over the community. By examining this Suryani experience of the late Ottoman project of “equality,” this paper seeks to move beyond, first, teleological accounts of Ottoman history that assume that the empire was (or at least ought to have been) moving steadily toward equality, and second, a tendency to render the divergence of Ottoman reform from European lines of secular development as a “failure.” Instead, the paper asks a question more appropriate to the historical record: how did the Ottoman project of equality transform those entities that it sought to equalize? Extrapolating from the Suryani experience, it argues that equality did not replace hierarchy but rather relocated hierarchy within, rather than across, identitarian categories.

A recent crop of “revisionist Tanzimat” scholarship in the last decade and a half shows that constitutionalism and political reform mattered throughout the Ottoman Empire far more than previously understood. Ottomans in the provinces, non-Muslims, and the non-elite are now understood to have engaged with, embraced, altered, and challenged central concepts and tools in the transformation of imperial political life. One of the central questions that begs further study surrounds “representation” – who merited selection or later election to the two Ottoman parliaments and local councils, who they represented, and on what basis this representative bargain was founded. This paper examines these questions in the two key moments of the establishment of the first and second parliaments (1876 and 1908), and across imperial space. By examining the Arabic-language Christian and Muslim press (in Beirut and Cairo) as well as the multi-lingual Jewish press in various locales (Istanbul, Salonica, Jerusalem), and drawing on secondary scholarship on other religious and linguistic communities, this paper teases out how different communities and regions envisioned their role/s –and their voice/s— in the parliament and by extension, in Ottoman political life. Although there was some trans-confessional consensus on the desired and necessary qualities of an imperial representative, there also emerged several tensions surrounding his role representing the ethno-religious community, the province, and the empire as a whole.

This paper examines the promulgation of constitutions by non-Muslim communities in the late Ottoman Empire, focusing on the case of the Orthodox Christian (Rum) community and the “General Regulations” which they issued in 1862. The examination aims for an assessment of the issues of representation and citizenship in a modernizing multi-national empire. Exploring the changes in the legal/administrative basis of the Rum community, the paper seeks to understand the evolution in the internal dynamics of the community and its relationship with the Ottoman state in the mid 19th century. The General Regulations were both the result of the Tanzimat project of the Ottoman state setting forth a reorganization of imperial administration and the culmination of power struggles among communal leaders, both lay and ecclesiastical. The Regulations set forth new forms of communal administrative institutions and new ways of representation in and of the community. More specifically, this paper dwells on the characteristics and components of this constitutive text and combines an examination of its guiding elements with what was happening on the ground in terms of the local organization of communal authority and the development of internal communal dynamics. Concentrating on cases from various towns of Anatolia, the presentation juxtaposes administrative developments with practical realities such as the strengthening of the new middle classes and the consolidation of the koinotita as a local administrative institution.

In the 19th century, blossoming constitutional movements in the Middle East drew participants from different ethno-religious (Tunisia and Mount Lebanon, Jews and Greeks), cultural, and ideological backgrounds. These individuals relied on debate and interaction with one another to form coherence out of movements from a range of disparate views. For this reason, a full understanding of these constitutional processes must consider the discourse in the empire in order to discover how and to what extent domestic actors perceived Ottoman reforms as a synthesis of local traditions and western examples. This paper explores these two concepts: constitutional reform and the discourse generated around its applicability in the Ottoman-Armenian community. Contextualizing the Armenian National Constitution as an element within the wider framework of Ottoman social, religious and educational reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries, would not only weave together Armenian and Ottoman histories, but would also pave the way for a better understanding of communal behavior towards constitutional practices on the micro and macro levels. Tracing the development and the ways in which communal institutions functioned in the center as well as in the provinces, I explore processes of solidification of communal boundaries and the rigidification of religious identities during a period of major communal reorganization. By focusing on a few examples from the capital and beyond, I examine how constitutionalism was practiced on the micro-community level, and what were the debates and struggles around its application. While the inclusion of laymen into the ecclesiastical apparatus of the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul was a change that 19th century brought about, a history of the Armenian National Constitution contributes to the growing literature on secularism in the Middle East. In other words, addressing the issue of the Patriarchate’s changing role in the administration of the community leads to questions about the transformation of identities (religious or otherwise) in relation to the shifting nature of millets in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the 19th century, blossoming constitutional movements in the Middle East drew participants from different ethno-religious (Tunisia and Mount Lebanon, Jews and Greeks), cultural, and ideological backgrounds. These individuals relied on debate and interaction with one another to form coherence out of movements from a range of disparate views. For this reason, a full understanding of these constitutional processes must consider the discourse in the empire in order to discover how and to what extent domestic actors perceived Ottoman reforms as a synthesis of local traditions and western examples. This paper explores these two concepts: constitutional reform and the discourse generated around its applicability in the Ottoman-Armenian community. Contextualizing the Armenian National Constitution as an element within the wider framework of Ottoman social, religious and educational reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries, would not only weave together Armenian and Ottoman histories, but would also pave the way for a better understanding of communal behavior towards constitutional practices on the micro and macro levels. Tracing the development and the ways in which communal institutions functioned in the center as well as in the provinces, I explore processes of solidification of communal boundaries and the rigidification of religious identities during a period of major communal reorganization. By focusing on a few examples from the capital and beyond, I examine how constitutionalism was practiced on the micro-community level, and what were the debates and struggles around its application. While the inclusion of laymen into the ecclesiastical apparatus of the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul was a change that 19th century brought about, a history of the Armenian National Constitution contributes to the growing literature on secularism in the Middle East. In other words, addressing the issue of the Patriarchate’s changing role in the administration of the community leads to questions about the transformation of identities (religious or otherwise) in relation to the shifting nature of millets in the 19th and early 20th centuries.