Property and national and imperial sovereignties in the interwar Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

A vast literature has documented the key role of inter-communal violence, population transfers and the reallocation of confiscated property in the consolidation of mutually exclusive national identities in the interwar successor states of the Ottoman Empire. Despite their analytical sophistication, these studies adopt for the most part a statocentric perspective on the nationalization of identities in the Eastern Mediterranean. This article revisits this narrative by highlighting the initiatives of Christians and Muslims defying the political identities assigned to them by the Greek-Turkish 1923 Treaty of Lausanne with a view to preserve their properties. Settled in the Italian-controlled Dodecanese, these historical actors leverage on the fascist authorities' colonial anxieties regarding their contested sovereignty in the recently (1912) occupied Dodecanese and on the Mussolinian government's objective to bolster its political prestige in the broader region. By so doing this article argues that these Christians and Muslims become co-creators of a new "Aegean" or "minor Italian" citizenship positioning them at the apex of the Italian colonial hierarchy. Challenging the axiomatic correspondence between political identity and territory in the historiography on the nationalization of senses of belonging in the interwar Eastern Mediterranean, this article thus highlights processes of "translocality." To the extent in which the Italian government borrows more from an "national" rather than "imperial" repertoire to defend internationally the interests of their subjects, this paper further questions the normative opposition between "colonial empire" and "nation" as two mutually incommensurable political formations.