Dual Despotisms: Young Ottoman Anticolonial Thinkers and Projects of Global Integration (1889-1908)

Through the work of Ahmed Rıza and Prens Sabahaddin, this dissertation re-evaluates the term despotism, and the relationship between the domestic and international. I propose reading the term ‘despotism’ critically, and complicating it by thinking of it as layered: the domestic despotisms of certain countries are not simply endemic to their internal dynamics. Rather, these states exist within a despotic world order, one that can sometimes aid and abet their despotism and at other times coerce them. While there are societies that are despotic towards their own citizens, this cannot be separated from their own position within the world, and their limitations in the international realm, especially if they are in a disadvantaged position in global affairs. This dissertation examines the relationship between domestic and international despotisms in order to pose questions about freedom and unfreedom from the viewpoints of oppressed citizens. I reframe this relationship by reflecting on the politics of inclusion: the countries of the Global South are not fully included in the world system as equal members, and in many cases, they fail to create the types of inclusive citizenship that many countries in the Global North (correctly or incorrectly) boast of having and sustaining. As with despotism, the problem of inclusion occurs at dual scales: neither simply as the inclusion of all states in the international hierarchy nor as the domestic inclusion of all persons in a polity, but as the intersection and inextricability of the two. Inclusion refers both to the inclusion of all states, from the most to the least powerful, in the world system equally, and to the inclusion of the many peoples in each of these states as equal citizens in the polity itself. These inclusions can overlap, and at times they can clash. Fighting for both requires resisting dual despotisms.