Barry’s excellent series on Ottomanism, nationalism, and republicanism has been so good it might be hard to keep up with the dialogues it’s sparked. Here’s something from Barry in regards to a question about the Ottoman Empire’s millet system (I’ve edited it slightly, breaking up the response into more easily-digestible paragraphs):

I think I’ve tried to address this in the post. I do say that the idea of a ‘milltet system’ is a retrospective idealisation of Ottoman version of classical Muslim concept of protected minorities. In a slightly less direct way I’ve cast doubt on the idea of a pluralist Ottomanism developing on a federal basis as you mention or on a less territorial cultural pluralist basis.

As I argue in the post, Ottoman accommodation of minorities was in collapse from the early 20th century, Serbian uprisings leading to Serbian autonomy and then a war leading to Greek Independence. I presume that Ottoman modernist pluralism/federalism was simply unobtainable by then, it was just far too late for the Ottoman state to become a kind of Switzerland or even a liberalised highly pluralised unitary state.

The movement towards a national republic for the core Ottoman lands, i.e. what is now Turkey, can be traced back at least to the destruction of the Janissary order and the Serb/Greek break aways. Part of what I am arguing overall, as I hope will be clear as proceed, is that it is very very difficult for a traditional state based on a traditional hierarchy of traditional communities/estates/corporations existing over a large varied territory can exist in the modern world without some kind of top down homogenisation (think of the way China expanded over the centuries assimilating conquered peoples into Han culture) or a Russian style solution of constant political autocracy in different forms in which Slavic Orthodox Russian identity is at the centre even where Orthodox Christianity is apparently replaced by Bolshevism/Marxism-Leninism.

In short what I’m assuming and arguing is Ottoman pluralism/cosmopolitanism is an illusion, that there was never anything more than a temporary balance between components, fragmentation and separatism kept growing and separation between ‘nation states’ was inevitable. If we look at the world now, we might take India as the closest thing to a federalised liberalised Ottomanism, but India still rests on a massive predominance of Hinduism, a de facto hierarchy in which Hinduism is above other religions, regional and caste based violence, and a persistent element of Hindu chauvinism which is now explicitly in power and has never really been out of power even when the governmental ideology was apparently something else.

I’m not suggesting there is some alternative conception of what could have happened in the sub-continent which would work better than what there is now, but I can’t see that Indian neo-imperial (because based on the work of imperial regimes over the centuries) federalism works better than Turkish national-republicanism.

There is more on the millet system at NOL here, here, and here. And here is an excellent Barry essay on imperial nostalgia that’s on topic and worth reading (or re-reading).