Will Hanley’s analysis of the 1909 revision of the 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law takes up one of the central themes that occupied the Office of Legal Counsel: the slippery relationship between the legal definitions of nationality, subjecthood, and citizenship. As Hanley argues, recent scholarship on the 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law has c…[Read more]

This essay is part of a pioneering special issue on Ottoman international law, and analyses the work of several Egyptian and Ottoman lawyers focused on the understudied field of private international law. It argues for greater attention to the history of private international law by examining lawyers and functionaries in Ottoman and post-Ottoman…[Read more]

This article argues that during World War I, the Syrian and Lebanese periodical press in the American mahjar created new space for transnational political activism. In São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York City, diasporic journalists and political activists nurtured a new nationalist narrative and political culture in the press. In a public…[Read more]

Established in 1920, al-Nadi al-Homsi in Sao Paulo, Brazil was a young men’s club devoted to ˜Syrian patriotic activism and culture in the American mahjar (diaspora). Founded by a transnational network of intellectuals from Homs, the fraternity committed itself to what it saw as a crucial aspect of Syrian national independence under Amir Fa…[Read more]

For half a million ‘Syrian’ Ottoman subjects living outside the empire, the First World War initiated a massive political rift with Istanbul. Beginning in 1916, Syrian and Lebanese emigrants from both North and South America sought to enlist, recruit, and conscript immigrant men into the militaries of the Entente. Employing press items, cor…[Read more]