This study will analyze how Armenian “nationalism” came to develop within the Ottoman milieu and question whether it was a full-fledged ideology or a patriotic construct adopted by Armenian political/revolutionary elites who hailed from different imperial entities (Ottoman/Western and Russian and Persian/Eastern Armenian). Western Armenian “nationalism” in this sense was a product of the internal developments of the Armenian Millet in the Ottoman Empire. Even in its earliest manifestations in 1850s, the experience was catechized through a project of Educational Reawakening—introduced by the Western Armenian elite in Constantinople—which was geared toward self recognition and equality before law and guaranteeing the security of Armenian communities in the eastern provinces vis-à-vis the Kurdish land grabs. This political outlook was not nationalistic per se but rather it advocated some sort of self rule (Adam-i Merkeziyyet) within the political confines of the Ottoman State. This was in itself commensurate to the overall Tanzimat project that successive Ottoman governments tried to implement since the 1860s. It is from this perspective that this study attempts to reconstruct the Armenian “nationalist” paradigm within the confines of a patriotic project that would ultimately lead to an ideology of Ottomanism that, in the minds of many Armenian intellectuals, was best suited for a multi-ethnic state such as the Ottoman Empire. Eastern Armenian “nationalism,” on the other hand, was developed by an elite educated in the Russian/revolutionary atmosphere from the 1860s onwards, and came to advocate a much more aggressive ideology akin to those found among the Ottoman Christian populations in the Balkans. It was through the filtration of this eastern Armenian ideological construct into Western Armenia that the proverbial Millet-i Sadika was to be transformed into a Millet-i Asiya between 1890 and 1908. Yet the 1908 Second Ottoman Constitutional Revolution brought with it what seemed to be a new breath for the development and success of Ottomanism. This was to be the ideal culmination of what Armenians in the empire had hoped for. However, international power politics and successive wars (1911, 1912-1913) would lead to the demise of this fledgling Ottomanism and all hopes attached to it. By tracing these complex local, regional, and international contexts, this study highlights how and when the Western and Eastern Armenian milieus overlapped and diverged in the development of Armenian “nationalism.” And it does so by utilizing sources from the ARF, Hnchag, Ottoman (BOA), and British Archives (FO).

During the Nineteenth century, Ottoman Christian subjects began to build new elementary schools taught in the vernacular languages. Those schools are often considered as the cradles of nationalism, and even claimed to be the forerunners of political independence. It is true that the vernacular schools prepared the future cadre of nationalist leadership, but not all the graduates became political activists. The principle of education, needless to say, was to provide children with better knowledge for their future career, and not to train nationalist fighters. We should not, therefore, oversimplify the meaning of vernacular schooling. The teaching in vernacular started as a tool to facilitate the effective education that had been taught in Greek. The quest of efficiency continued even after the fall of Greek preponderance over the Christian education. The vernacular schools remained as auxiliary to the higher institutions that instructed children in French, Greek, Turkish, etc. The vernacular learning had another vulnerability. As vernacular schools were usually founded and conducted by small parish communities, many of them could not provide constant and enough qualified lectures. In order to overcome the weakness, some managers requested state protection, creating the room where the Ottoman policy of public education could infiltrate among the Christian subjects. In his discussion, the author will examine the several aspects of junction between the Ottoman integrationist policies with the Christian aspiration for better education, by picking up the Danube Province in the 1870s.

The role of state celebrations in propagating the nation and its achievements became one of the major tools of empires and nation-states in the nineteenth century in their attempt to shape a common identity and memory. For the Ottoman state, popular celebrations had been used to boast the sultans' legitimacy well before the nineteenth century. Religious festivals and elebrations related to the sultan's family were all perceived as suitable opportunities to herald the dynasty's grandeur and ability. During Abdülhamid II's rule, this old tradition was developed further thanks to new modes of communication, technology and entertainment that were all used to promote the sultan's public image and legitimacy. However, the Young Turk revolution of 1908 brought the Ottoman Empire an "explosion" of public ritual and celebration. This tendency was intensified especially following the military defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912-13) after which the regime adopted a new calendar of state celebrations, rituals and symbols in which the nation and its proclaimed achievements came to the forth. Notwithstanding the military defeat, the introduction of several new national holidays (îd-i millî) served the Young Turks to advance their discourse regarding the rejuvenation of the Ottoman nation in a new spirit that could combine Islam and modernity. Turkish nationalism was absent from these celebrations. One example of these holidays was the commemoration of the "Restitution of Edirne", celebrated on the 10th July (23 July according to the Georgian calendar) that was designated to memorialize the return of this imperial city to Ottoman control following the Second Balkan War. Liberated Edirne turned into a unified symbol for a society that endured unprecedented defeat. By using Ottoman archival sources and contemporary press, I explore the shaping of this new holiday and the public ceremonies that accompanied it. Subsequently, I discuss the significance of this national commemorative day in promoting the new discourse of Ottomanism as presented by the regime following the Balkan Wars and its attempt to build a shared national calendar and narrative. These celebrations, I will argue, did not only mark a turning point in the late Ottoman calendar of festivals and reflected the new identity of the Ottoman state; it also paved the way for national celebrations in the Turkish Republic and in the different Middle Eastern states that inherited the Ottoman Empire following its demise at the end of WWI.

Nationalism as a category of analysis in imperial frameworks is essentially a necessity to establish a coherent teleological narrative that conditions historical analysis to the end of the empire and birth of nation-states. Nationalism in the end suggests a rupture in political ideology that does not belong to imperial settings. In a bid to avoid teleology, available scholarship has thus far highlighted the fluidities of ethnic identities and loyalties in the provinces as well as the attachment of the late Ottoman statesmen to the Ottomanist ideals in the final years of the empire. Taking into account this body of recent scholarship, how can one rearticulate the political ideology of the Ottoman state and its elites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the absence of a teleological reading? This paper argues that empires in Europe and elsewhere that ruled over multi-ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities responded to the rise of linguistic and religious nationalisms since the 1820s through a similar, albeit not uniform, formulation of an official nationalism that would function as a supranational identity and accordingly co-opt nationalist currents. The Ottoman response, formulated by its own intelligentsia, was no different. By utilizing Ottoman newspapers, memoirs, and archival material, I accordingly suggest reading the late Ottoman history through the prism of an Ottoman official nationalism which was essentially an ideology of conservation characterized by its emphasis on bureaucratic perfection, cultural assimilation into the imperial polity, and interventionist measures of modernization that were to inculcate loyalty on the ground. Yet, various communities that were at the end of the assimilationist Ottoman measures had protection and backing abroad, minimizing the Ottoman state’s capacity of coercion (and thus success of integration/assimilation) and accordingly forcing its ruling elite to bargain and negotiate with diverse political factions, whether revolutionary or those of the ancien régime. While Ottoman official nationalism proved a futile attempt of saving the state, the legacy of the late Ottoman political experience continued to be as pronounced in the articulation of subsequent nationalist arrangements, whether Turkish or Arab, in the post-WWI period, just as other continuities in architecture, cuisine, administration, law, language, and culture came to mark the transition from empire to republic.