 Ruler Visibility, Modernity,

and Ethnonationalism

in the Late Ottoman Empire

Darin N. Stephanov

World War I ended the Ottoman Empire with much bloodshed and de-

struction. From its ruins emerged many successor states organizing themselves
around the ethnonational principle. Their leaders and intellectuals engaged in
massive projects of nation making that included the creation and purification
of national languages, formation of national literary canons, and writing of na-
tional histories. These parallel processes shared an extremely negative attitude
toward the imperial past and represented an attempt to break free from it. The
new national elites treated the last Ottoman sultans in a particularly harsh and
openly hostile manner—as ineffectual, despotic, or both. Consequently, the no-
tion that their imperial administrations had been neither willing nor capable of
reform, progress, and modernization permeated both popular and academic lit-
erature, fixing the discourse of empire for the next century.
This chapter is an attempt to do justice to the last Ottoman rulers and reveal
how their legacy lives on to this day. In the process, it demonstrates the follow-
ing: First, these monarchs did reach out to their subjects in multiple novel ways,
forging unprecedented direct ties of loyalty to the ruler. This process, which took
place against the background of age-old regional forms of belonging, connected a
subject’s lived and well-known micro world to a newly imagined, abstract macro
world of the imperial center and the empire at large. Second, over time, the sul-
tans became victims of their own success, since specific imperial communities
used this template to direct their members’ attention toward newly imagined na-
tions of their own. Third, these new demands on one’s imagination and the re-
sultant macro bonds forged are key elements of modernity and the ethnonational
mind-set still shaping the world today. Finally and sadly, this chapter makes clear
that the traits of this worldview did carry then as they do now the seeds of vio-
lence and destruction.