Introduction: minority forms of resilience in the Post-Ottoman World

Abstract

In this introduction, we propose a genealogy of “minority,” both as a concept and legal category, and of its uses and applications, in the post-Ottoman Mediterranean. Acknowledging its legal incipience in the post-Great War treaties imposed on newly independent Central and Eastern European states, we claim that, in the Eastern Mediterranean, that category grafted itself on the preexisting regimes of capitulations and protection. But while the latter were regimes of privileges, guaranteed by Western powers, and accorded to European citizens and some Ottoman subjects, that of minority was one of an unwelcome exception, feebly defended by the League of Nations, within the constraining environment of the newly formed nation-states. The literature has extensively studied the human cost of that transition from capitulations/protection to minorities in the post-Ottoman world. Instead, our collective effort intends to highlight the strategies of resilience developed by minorities in the Eastern Mediterranean following the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. The central argument running through the entire book is that the resilience of pockets of religious and ethnolinguistic diversity around the Mediterranean became essential to the constant reassertion of sovereign claims on the part of post-Ottoman nation-states.