A Late/Post-Imperial Region of Difference: The Ottoman Empire and its Successor Polities in Southeastern Europe, Turkey, and the Arab East, c. 1850s–1940s

Abstract: This text links the literatures on late/post-Ottoman history and on supranational regions. It argues that the area corresponding to the Ottoman Eurasian provinces before the empire’s step-by-step modern-time contraction became a region in the 1850s–1940s. Two processes pulled this region together: sovereignty contests and state-building impacts between the shrinking empire, nascent post-Ottoman nation-states, and interventionist European empires. While shifting around 1920, the region persisted until these two processes waned in the 1940s. The two processes were entwined. They shared a bedrock: the fact that the empire’s premodern religio-ethnic heterogeneity became an issue in modern times, encouraging homogenization. A centrifugal process—the disintegration of the Ottoman “Empire of Difference”—had a centripetal effect: a late/post-imperial region of difference united by the ricocheting impacts of homogenization, persisting “minority” populations, and meddling states, including European empires. Our case helps revisit supranational regions. Compared, for example, to world or global regions, external actors played a more direct part in “our” region; it was short and had a transformative rhythm; and it was characterized not by relatively ordered commonality but by joint volatile differences. Hence, this case forms part of, and illustrates, a broader pattern of modern Eurasian and European empires’ disintegration, which did not just usher in neatly separate nation-states.