The Greek anti-Ottoman revolt in the 1820s brought increased suspicion among the empire’s ruling circles toward not only Greeks but non-Muslim subjects in general. This sparked government security measures in Istanbul, home to substantial Christian and Jewish populations. This article examines such measures intended to bring non-Muslim subjects under control, and the overall impact the Greek revolt had on the Ottoman approach to its subjects. It argues that the revolt catalyzed changes in the state’s attitude toward population surveillance and its treatment of non-Muslims. When the empire felt the need to bring non-Muslims under control, a major challenge was how to verify and vouch for the latter’s identity, since they deemed Muslim officials incapable of doing so. Thus, though they were suspicious of non-Muslims, they actively used the religious authorities of their communities to implement various security measures, including the creation of a population record and the introduction of internal passports. At the same time, religious authorities found it essential to demonstrate their and their community’s pro-Ottoman position by cooperating with the state in its efforts to find enemies within. Incorporation of non-Muslim religious authorities into imperial governance led to official recognition of the representatives of smaller non-Muslim groups, including Latin subjects, Armenian Catholics, and Jews. The result was a standardization of non-Muslim communities with officially recognized representatives before the government.

This article asks how, in early post-World War II Canada, Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese communities claimed whiteness in the context of Canada’s racially restrictive immigration regulations that defined them as “Asiatics,” and hence inadmissible. But, it also examines how Canadian politicians and immigration bureaucrats responded to those claims. Using so-far untapped archival records, this article shows that immigration authorities were unwilling to redefine the racial status of these groups out of fear that doing so would provide a wedge for other groups of “Asiatics” to press for the ability to migrate to Canada. In this case, Syrians, Armenians, and Lebanese could be regarded as experiencing collateral damage in the politics of whiteness. While Canadian immigration authorities seemed to privately accept the white/European identity claims of these groups, they were nonetheless unwilling to publicly grant them one of the privileges of whiteness – namely the ability to migrate to Canada on a basis equal to that of other white immigrants. Instead, the government used “merit-based” orders-in-council as an under the radar administrative mechanism to admit members of these groups. This allowed the government and the immigration department to avoid a larger public debate about racial discrimination against “Asiatic” immigrants.

After the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War, the Ottoman Empire saw the rise of ethnic and sectarian clashes in Anatolia, the Balkans, and elsewhere, and the task of explaining that rise remains unfinished. Many have examined the intellectual formations of ethnic and sectarian solidarities after 1878, but the availability of new ideas cannot alone account for their widespread uptake. Why after 1878 did ordinary people respond more to calls upon ethnic and sectarian solidarity? Drawing on sources surrounding the 1879 famine in the Ottoman East, this article steps away from imperial metropoles to examine overlapping environmental, financial, and technological disjunctures. Adopting the methods of political ecology, the article underscores the simultaneous effects of drought, sovereign default, and an influx of modern weapons, each of which imposed uneven hardships along ethno-religious lines. Together, they created a climate of lived confessionalization that highlighted the communal categories upon which emergent movements called.

This article argues that non-Muslim engagement with 19th-century Ottoman reform should be understood in the context of a confessionalized politics that originally fostered partnerships of governance in the 18th century. The confessionalization of non-Muslim communities in the 18th century, which resulted in the political empowerment of Istanbul-based ethnarchs, promoted the establishment of robust communal boundaries that were more legible to the central state. These arrangements also made non-Muslim communities such as the Armenians partners in governance, responsible for supporting the state's effort to maintain its place atop a contentious imperial politics. The Tanzimat reforms, which reorganized non-Muslim communities and devolved some power from the clergy to the laity, were not a novelty, but instead a renegotiation of non-Muslims’ roles in the centralization of state. Rather than embrace secularized identities, non-Muslims enthusiastically used their own religious institutions to promote state centralization. In the process, they reconfigured relations of power in the region that left non-Muslims structurally marginalized.

A significant body of literature argues that American evangelical missionaries working in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century directly contributed to the rise of Armenian nationalism. While acknowledging that missionaries had an effect on Armenian nationalism, this article finds that the impact of missionaries was much more unintended than is commonly assumed and resulted primarily from Armenian reactions to growing missionary influence. Employing new data on the biographies of Armenian nationalist leaders as well as comparative-historical methods, the article offers evidence that missionary influence spurred a backlash among the Armenian community that intensified preexisting local initiatives, increased investment in mass education in the provinces, and modernized its schooling system, all of which popularized and strengthened Armenian nationalism.

The collapse of socialist regimes resulted in tremendous regional realignments in the regions surrounding the heartland of Eurasia. Remarkably, not only states, but also transnational actors have played significant roles in this process. This study highlights transnational ethnicities (Mingrelians, Armenians, and Muslims) in Abkhazia, and tries to describe how the involvement of transnational religious organizations (such as the Armenian Apostolic Church and Turkey's Diyanet) affected the politics around these minorities. In the Black Sea rim, interstate and transnational politics are rather autonomous from each other. For example, when scores of powerful countries, such as the United States and European Union member states, desperately tried to ignore Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regarding it as a lawless act, Turkey's Diyanet admitted that Russia's recognition of Abkhazia created a new legal situation and began to fulfill its long-dreamed-of desire to help the Abkhazian Muslims. According to political conjuncture in Abkhazia, the same Gali population changes from Georgians to Mingrelians and back. This demonstrates how ethnic categories are used in a constructivist way in the Black Sea rim.

The spring of 1894 was an important period for Constantinople's Armenian community. Two assassination attempts targeted the Armenian patriarch Khoren Ashekian, and the chairperson of the Armenian Political Assembly Maksudzade Simon Bey, respectively. In both cases, the assailants were partisans of the Hunchakian Party, an Armenian revolutionary organization established in 1887. Analyzing the reasons behind these two attacks, and the imperial context in which they took place, this article challenges aspects of mainstream Armenian and Turkish historiography on the Hamidian period. It argues that a critical look at these two attacks through a socio-economic paradigm rather than an ethno-political one provides a viable analytical framework for deconstructing the notion of the “Armenian millet” as an undifferentiated community. More generally, the article explores the role of violence in shaping intracommunal relationships in the early 1890s.