The Syriac Christians of the Late Ottoman Empire: Secularism, History, and the Struggle for Millet Recognition
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Mikhail, Alan
Abstract
This dissertation offers a history of the Syriac Orthodox Christians in the late Ottoman Empire that focuses in particular on their struggle for Ottoman state recognition as a “millet,” a term that I argue has been fundamentally misunderstood in Ottoman historiography. Drawing on a unique set of Syriac communal sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Syriac, and Garshuni (Arabic/Turkish in the Syriac script), the dissertation contends that the Syriac Christians’ struggle for millet recognition represented an attempt to render themselves legible by the terms of a nineteenth-century Ottoman imperial system that was undergoing a radical transformation. This transformation, I suggest, is best understood as the rise of a radically new way of conceptualizing social difference across late-Ottoman society, one rooted in the presuppositions of secular history. The emergence of the millet concept attested to this secular historical consciousness. Asserting to the Ottoman state, to their neighbors, as well as indeed to themselves that they deserved recognition as a millet—as a distinctive historical collectivity that required forms of political representation and communal autonomy—the Syriac Christians fashioned themselves as a secular historical subject. This self-fashioning brought with it myriad consequences—some promising, others perilous, but all emanating from what I argue was the Syriac Christians’ dramatic entrance into historicity itself. This story’s principal site is the Ottoman Empire in the period of modernizing reform but it travels to other historical venues as well—Victorian-era London, colonial India, and the Christian ecumenical dialogues of twentieth-century Europe—where the project for Syriac recognition transpired. In doing so, it offers not simply a new framework for understanding the secularizing transformations of the late Ottoman Empire but also a transnational account of the problem of “history” in the organization of social difference in secular modernity more broadly.
Recommended Citation
Clements, Henry Atticus, "The Syriac Christians of the Late Ottoman Empire: Secularism, History, and the Struggle for Millet Recognition" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 949.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/949
