Abstract

Abstract:

This article contributes to the growing body of literature on extraterritoriality and citizenship in the age of empire by focusing on a series of consular and jurisdictional conflicts between the Ottoman and British Empires. It argues that from the late 1870s to the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman government forcefully campaigned for its own extraterritorial privileges—not by overpowering military or economic might, but through a series of legal and diplomatic rows with the British Crown concerning Afghans and Indian Muslims. The fırst part examines disputes between the Sublime Porte and the British Raj over diplomatic privileges in India, especially the sensitive issue of expanding Ottoman consulates from coastal cities to the subcontinent’s interior and frontier with Afghanistan. The second part examines Anglo-Ottoman contestations over itinerant Muslims falling in the nebulous and overlapping categories of Afghans, Pashtuns, and “Pathans,” as well as other Indian Muslim émigrés seeking Ottoman nationality. At the heart of these cases was not simply imperial competition over property and prestige, but a more elusive contest over the loyalties and bodies of human beings who did not easily fall into either Ottoman or British imperial frameworks of subjecthood.

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