The “Millet” Paradigm: On Difference in the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

This article argues that the late Ottoman Empire saw the rise of a novel concept of difference, the “millet,” that fundamentally reordered the lives of the empire’s many subjects. Rather than a term with clearly identifiable content—“religion,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” or otherwise —millet should be understood instead as auguring the emergence of history as the organizing principle of the late Ottoman politics of difference. Unlike the Islamic distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim that had previously structured Ottoman rule, the millet paradigm did not stipulate any predetermined set of terms through which difference had to be articulated. Instead, it issued an injunction to Ottoman subjects to merely say who they were, to declare the name they went by—to confess. This simple injunction, however, which appeared to require nothing other than assent to the reality of history itself, tended to misfire. When it did, Ottoman subjects confronted the anxious truth that history—the purported ground of the millet paradigm of difference—was no ground at all.