“The Ottoman Empire so wasn’t Europe”: Rethinking the Nation State and Why I’m in London

Some of you may say, “Cassandra, you’ve gone to graduate school to delay the inevitable process of finding a real job.” While there is certainly some truth in this statement, several experiences as of late have reinforced why I’m in a master’s program, and more specifically, in London, at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

It began on Monday, in my End of Empire: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire class. Although we are only in week four we’ve already gotten to the “decline” of the empire. [This is something of a joke between my best friend and I…Whenever she is impatiently waiting for something she exclaims, “What is this, the fall of the Ottoman Empire?!”]

When speaking about the decline of the Ottoman Empire we’re talking about anywhere from 400 to 100 years before the actual collapse.  In class, the fourteen of us and Professor Fortna, are, like all good historians, trying to “problematize” this. How can we talk about decline at the height of an empire?  What does decline mean? Is it comparative? [– At one point, Professor Fortna, in a jokingly exasperated voice says, “the Ottoman Empire so wasn’t Europe!”]

Through this process of discussion, it comes out of our collective comments that to view either progress or decline as linear is to streamline, or discard major aspects of the empire. From here my mind was racing— Why do we think about things as linear? Is it simply because we like timelines? Why does knowledge have to be so neat? In this particular case we are talking about an empire that lasted over 600 years. Throughout that time notions of government changed drastically, including the  development of the modern nation state as it is known today. It was at this point that I was left reeling.

The nation state. It all gets back to that. One reason we read Ottoman history the way we do is a projection of what we know happened. But when we’re talking about the height of the empire in the 16^th century the notion of the modern nation state simply didn’t exist. I could keep going on and on about how this affects the historiography but for fear that I may have lost you already, I’ll shift gears.

Monday night that was all I could think about—the nation state. So you can imagine how pleased I was on Tuesday during my “Gendering Migrations and Diaspora” tutorial when “the nation-state issue” surfaced again. We were discussing refugees and exile as categorical terms. One of the commonalities between these terms, and the people categorized within them (from Haitian refugees to the prolific James Joyce), is that society can’t “handle” their movement. It is a “problem” that needs to be addressed—granted exile implies one has the means to move on one’s own. But both refugees and exiles are understood as problematic because of our normative view of the nation state as being the ideal. To belong to one place, have one language, to be settled. It is difficult to retrace the somewhat convoluted road travelled to arrive at this conclusion, and yet in that moment, sitting in class, I was somewhat awestruck.

Two unrelated classes converging on the point of the nation state. It’s one of those moments I cherish, when knowledge transgressesdisciplinary lines, and spans time frames. How beautiful is that? The nation state seemed to govern these larger frameworks through which we read back into history as well as how we understand movements among people.

I’ll admit it—I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. It changes almost daily. And yet I found this experience deeply poignant because I realize this is what I want to do forever. Not be a student necessarily (No more student loan debt, please. Thanks.) But to be in an environment where knowledge is both collective and individual, discussed and contested, that’s where I want to be. I don’t know where this place exists but I have to believe it’s out there somewhere.