19th through 20th Centuries | 257population transfers, and multiple genocides. The events of the final years of the
empire had an enormous impact on creating and shaping the modern Middle
East, North Africa, Caucasus, and southeastern Europe as inheritors of an Otto-
man legacy for good and ill.
Part IV investigates the continuing transformation and evolution of Otto-
man identity that took place with the onset of modernity in the Ottoman Empire,
including the concepts of nationalism, modern science, mass politics, modern
state practices, nationalist secessionist movements, and European imperialism.
As Ottoman identity expanded to include all the empire’s subjects and shifted
from dynastic to state loyalty, many Ottoman subjects attempted to negotiate
new identities within the era of nationalism and national self-determination.
These centripetal and centrifugal forces are on clear display in the chapters of
this final section. Chapter 18 investigates the changing nature of the Ottoman
monarchy in relation to its subjects, particularly non-Muslim, during the early
nineteenth century and how the institutionalization of monarchic celebrations
helped foster group and state consciousness among the empire’s non-Muslim
communities. Chapter 19 looks at the construction of Ottoman identity in rela-
tion to the importation of European scientific practices and notions of progress
and civilization among the empire’s educated elite as they attempted to fit the
Ottoman-Turkish world into this conceptualization of scientific progress. Chap-
ter 20 deals with the interactions between the Ottoman state and its Armenian
populations in terms of mass migration to the United States and return migration
to eastern Anatolia and how this affected relations between the state and Otto-
man Armenian and other Christian populations during this era of mass politics
and emerging ethnonationalist identities within the empire. Chapter 21 uses the
biography of a prominent Greek Orthodox Ottoman politician and statesmen,
Pavlos Carolidis, to reconstruct the differing understandings of Ottomanism
during the Second Constitutional Period as opportunities for greater political
participation emerged and as crisis enveloped the empire. Finally, chapter 22
looks at the lives and work of two prominent Ottoman Jewish brothers during
the empire’s final years and dissolution. Most intriguing about these brothers is
their negotiated identities, which straddled a conceptualization of Ottoman civic
nationalism, their own Jewishness, and the solidification of Zionism in Ottoman
Palestine.