Lessons in Empire: Ottoman Educational Policies and the Politics of Ethno-Religious Pluralism, 1850-1918

Emine Evered

This project examines questions of diversity and pluralism in late Ottoman educational politics. Though ethno-nationalist ideologies and foreign rivalries are cited often for causing imperial collapse, such claims fail to recognize roles played by the state itself in promoting – albeit unwittingly – the politicization of such identity constructs. Through an analysis of late-Ottoman educational records, it is evident that educational policies intended to contain, manipulate, or otherwise affect the conduct of ethno-religious minorities’ identities actually promoted their particularization. This individualization of ethno-religious identities in a pluralistic society like the Ottoman Empire thus exacerbated problems of resistance, fragmentation, and secession. Based upon extensive archival research and previously untapped historical documents, this study includes previously unheard voices and considers how educational policies in those societies that did not maintain the nation-state as the ultimate ideal – and the nation as the ultimate sovereign, eventually failed. Also employing GIS to research and present historical data, this study creates a year-to-year mapping of late-Ottoman schooling in order to spatially analyze distributions of expenditures and schools, school types, the numbers and identities of students and teachers, relevant socio-economic patterns and processes, and the many geopolitical and territorial changes of the late-Ottoman era. In sum, this project is the first ever attempt to move beyond just the voice of the imperial state in order to understand the center-periphery dynamics involving Ottoman education policies as they were applied and reacted to in the empire’s many ethno-religious minority communities.

About Emine Evered

Born in Kars, Turkey, Emine Evered earned an MA in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in History with a minor in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. With interests in ethno-national and religious identities in late-Ottoman and early republican Turkey, her PhD dissertation focused on the politics of schools and schooling in the late-Ottoman era. In particular, she analyzed how education was used by the state as a mechanism for enhancing control while, simultaneously, it was also used by competing empires and local ethno-nationalism and religious groups to contest Ottoman authority. Her present research is furthering her examination of this doctoral project and is also being extended to studies of education for girls and women in Islamic societies.