| Project Detail |
European citizenship in the pre-19th century Ottoman Empire
In the 17th and 18th centuries, European mercantile communities began to establish themselves in economically vital cities of the Ottoman Empire. However, before the 19th century, the concepts of citizenship and universal identification systems were not yet developed in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The MSCA-funded MAKEFRA project investigates the evolution of citizenship and naturalisation norms in the pre-19th-century Ottoman Empire. Specifically, it examines European mercantile communities in Istanbul, Aleppo, and Izmir, and the legal disputes that arose between Ottoman and European authorities regarding the status of European immigrants. The project assumes these conflicts played a pivotal role in establishing internationally recognised rules, and that this laid the groundwork for the modern citizenship and naturalisation systems.
This project explores the creation of norms on citizenship and naturalization in the pre-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It focuses on European mercantile communities in three cities-Istanbul, Aleppo, and Izmir in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on jurisdictional disputes between Ottoman and European officials over the legal belonging of European immigrants. Since that, before the nineteenth-century, a territorial-based notion of citizenship and universal identification systems did not exist in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the political affiliation of European merchants and other immigration was often a matter of local controversy and diplomatic negotiations. These episodes of crisis, MAKEFRA argues, lead to the elaboration of internationally-recognized rules and practices over legal belonging, a “proto-citizenship” for European and Ottoman subjects. These rules, jointly elaborated by European and non-European actors, constituted the basis for modern-day systems of citizenship and naturalization in Europe and the Middle East. |
