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Imperial Citizenship and the Rule of Difference: Historical Institutionalism and the Case of Ottoman Empire
- Authors: Fadeyev I.A.1
-
Affiliations:
- Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences
- Issue: No 6 (2025)
- Pages: 72-90
- Section: Modern history
- URL: https://medbiosci.ru/0130-3864/article/view/360459
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.7868/S0130386425060058
- ID: 360459
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Abstract
This study interrogates the institution of imperial citizenship as a historically sedimented and juridically ambivalent construct, situated at the intersection of law, identity, and imperial governance. Employing the analytical lens of historical institutionalism, it examines the Ottoman Empire, tracing how path-dependent trajectories, critical junctures, and feedback mechanisms gave rise to a dual logic of imperial rule: the codification of differentiated citizenship and the preservation of communal autonomy through legal pluralism. The Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869 serves as a focal point, representing an attempt to redefine subjecthood from confessional allegiance to secular legal membership. Citizenship thus functioned not merely as a legal status but as a colonial apparatus for segmenting populations, regulating allegiance, and constraining political agency. The analysis contends that imperial citizenship in its Ottoman incarnation cannot be understood through the liberal idiom of universal rights, but rather as a mode of governance structured through asymmetry, legal ambiguity, and communal stratification. The institutional legacies of these arrangements – marked by legal pluralism, differential inclusion, and identity-based governance – continue to reverberate within post-imperial polities. Ultimately, imperial citizenship reveals itself less as a neutral legal category than as a historically contingent artifice of rule: simultaneously integrative and exclusionary; universalist in rhetoric, yet particularist in practice.
About the authors
I. A. Fadeyev
Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences
Author for correspondence.
Email: fadeyev.ivan@yahoo.co.uk
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2202-2246
Scopus Author ID: 57195421011
ResearcherId: AAO-9571-2020
кандидат исторических наук, старший научный сотрудник
Moscow, RussiaReferences
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