Integration, conflict, and autonomy among religious minorities in the late Ottoman Empire: The Greek-Catholic (Melkite) Church and sectarian turmoil in Mount Lebanon and Damascus

Abstract

The 19th century was a time of social and political upheaval for the Ottoman Empire. To contend with dwindling territories, uprisings, unrest, and international military, political, and economic pressure, it had to overcome structural deficiencies in the armed forces, economy, and State bureaucracy that kept it lagging behind its European counterparts. The modernizing impetus ultimately took the form of full-fledged legal and institutional reform by mid-century, transforming but also unsettling the Ottoman State and society. In this article we discuss a central component of those reforms and of the international relations of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century: the legal status of non-Moslem minorities. We frame our discussion in the analysis of two moments: the official recognition of the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) religious community in 1848 and the sectarian civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. The intersecting vectors of economic religious and political interests in their local, regional and international dimensions will be fleshed out, evincing a more nuanced and multilayered, and less monolithic and state-centered, approach toward the international relations of the late Ottoman Empire and the working of its institutions.