The latter decades of the Ottoman empire are occasionally held up as a golden age of pluralism and tolerance; in some respects, they were, particularly after the British put the kibosh on the lion’s share of the Arab slave trade. The empire’s non-Turkish, non-Muslim populations were organized into millets, or “nations,” governed by the laws particular to their religious and national groups. Armenians, Syrian Christians, Greek Orthodox, a variety of Jews, Arab Catholics—all were able to practice their religions and participate in public life with relative impunity under their own leaders, who answered to the sovereign of the sublime House of Osman, sultan of sultans, khan of khans, kalif, padishah, etc., who generally had more pressing concerns than micromanaging the affairs of the millets.
The problem was that the Ottoman state didn’t end up doing the things we expect states to do very well at all. Inefficient revenue-collection techniques and the marginalization of the Silk Road as a central trade route sent the fisc into a long period of decline. The farther-flung polities notionally under the suzerainty of the Sublime Porte did more or less whatever they wanted, including committing various violations of the rights of the millets. (The Iraqi Jewish Sassoons, the great trading dynasty of the 19th century, fled Baghdad for British India because of the depredations of the Mamluks, who were so independent as to wage occasional wars on the central government in Istanbul.) Various Western powers exploited the independence of the millets to meddle in Ottoman internal affairs under the guise of “protection.” This administrative and fiscal chaos meant that the sultan had difficulty doing things like fielding a modern army, which became a serious, even thematic weakness in the First World War.
The aftermath is well known: the last-ditch Ottoman efforts to modernize and homogenize, which featured what are characterized as the first modern genocides; and the failure of those efforts, which led to the collapse of the empire. The secularism, nationalism, and official monoculturalism of the modern Republic of Turkey, particularly the enforcement of Turkish language use irrespective of ethnic background, were ultimately a reaction to the failure of the millet system. The unified nation-state is the way we moderns have balanced the particular and the universal in human society. It hasn’t been perfect, but it has worked.
In one of the characteristic backwards steps from more sophisticated to less sophisticated political systems in the past 60 years, the Western world has moved away from nationalism and embraced milletization, particularly in the face of mass immigration. Western milletization has some peculiar twists, though. First, it is everywhere inflected through the peculiarities of American racial dynamics, even in places where those dynamics are almost unintelligible. (Why were there Black Lives Matter marches in Sweden, where there is no history of African slavery and blacks make up less than 1 percent of the population?) Second, the institutions of the nation are themselves identified with “whiteness,” which is denigrated, but those institutions are then expected to be used to dole out compensatory privileges to historically disfavored millets.
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