Loyalty and citizenship : Ottoman perspectives on its Russian border region (1878-1914) / Gözde Yazıcı Cörüt

At last my long-standing interest in the Russo-Ottoman border encounter has born its first fruit!T he origins of my interest in this topic date back to the reopening of the Turkish-Georgianborder in Sarp in 1988, when Iwas alittle girl in Trabzon. Iwas fascinated by the sudden appearanceand flourishing of 'Eurasian' (colloquially 'Russian')bazaars, and enthralled by the luggage-trade activities in this Eastern BlackSea area. Iwas particularlyintrigued by how local people saw these newly arriving, ex-Soviet citizens. Then, over time, Ifound myself mulling the roots of the movements and meetings of cultures in the borderland region, until Ifinally came to formallystudy the subject. Ihaveexperienced wanderings of my own during the course of my academic studies, but am very happyn ow to find myself stationed in Leipzig as ap ostdoctoral researcher with the Transottomanica research project. It is aprivilege and honourt os ee my monograph published as part of the Transottomanica series. In this respect, Iw ould like to thank Stefan Troebst, who acquainted me with the project, along with Stefan Rohdewald, Stephan Conermann and Albrecht Fuess, who supported the publication academically and financially. Ia ma lso grateful to Frank Hadler, head of the Verflechtung und Globalisierung Department at the GWZO (the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe), with which Iamaffiliated in Leipzig. This book is based on the dissertation Is ubmitted to the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Manchester. Iwould like to express my deepest gratitude to friends and colleagues at the Russian Studies department.F irst and foremost, theseg ot om ys upervisor, Vera Tolz, for her invaluable guidance, timely warnings, scholarlyi nputs and consistent encouragement. Ia mh appyt ob ek indly assured by her academic support for my current project. It is also agreat pleasure to thank my internal examiner, Ronald Buckley, and external examiner, To uraj Atabaki, for offering their expertise and for their insightful comments, constructivecriticismsand suggestions for future research. "Gözde Yazıcı Cörüt unfolds the details of everyday life and represents the local people as active agents - active, moreover, in relation both to the changing nature and effectiveness of the Ottoman state's assertion of territorial authority and also to the differences between policies and practices of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Overall, she focuses on the end-of-empire border politics and the issue of Ottoman citizenship not only from the perspective of macro-level political developments and central state power but also in terms of the peripheral specificities of administration and the movements and subjecthood choices of people inhabiting the Russo-Ottoman borderland. The author presents a new type of multi-faceted account of borderland development in which ethnoreligious considerations came to inform a somewhat messy production of sovereignty in the context of the modernizing transition between empire and nation-state." -- Page 4 of cover