This book examines the position of Greek Orthodox Christians within the administrative, social and economic structures of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The author engages in a rarely undertaken comparative analysis of Ottoman, Greek and European archival sources to understand the ties among Christians within the administrative, social and economic structures of the imperial and Orthodox Christian worlds. As a local study based on the hitherto under-explored provincial region of H davendigar in the heartlands of the empire, it questions the commonplace assumptions about the meaning of ethno-religious community in a Middle Eastern imperial framework.
Offering a deeper and more nuanced investigation of Ottoman Christians by connecting Ottoman and Greek history, which are often treated in isolation from one another in a way that downplays their mutual influence, this work sheds new light on communal existence.
