I began my studies of nation-related phenomena in 1999 at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and quickly developed two profound dissatisfactions. The first had to do with the lack of clear definitions of basic terms and strict adherence to them, even in seminal works in the field, which I thought was a fundamental impediment to the scientific method. The second concerned the persistent overemphasis on elite strands of thought and narratives at the expense of studying the unfolding of the modern worldview as a mass mentality early on, starting from a simple question: ‘Where did the average person first get what eventually became ethnonationalism from?’, to which one might add ‘and when and how?’. In short, I could pose the following key question, which still remains largely unanswered: ‘What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethnonational mindset and where shall we search for its roots?’. Unfortunately, both of these systemic problems persist to this day despite occasional (individual) attempts at (partial or situational) amelioration.

In truth, the past two decades have witnessed a veritable explosion of studies employing a profusion of secondary qualifiers – hybrid, nested, compartmentalised, fragmented, fractured, bounded (identities); porous, permeable (communal boundaries), and so on. Undoubtedly, these have helped push the field much further. Yet, for all the rising complexity and subtlety of more recent scholarship on missing or misrepresented aspects of belonging, basic terms such as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ (with the added twist of ‘millet’ and an alleged ‘millet system’ in the Ottoman context), ‘patriotism’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘identity’, more broadly, are still predominantly employed in a static, unqualified (aggregating), interchangeable and largely anachronistic manner. In other words, they are deployed in past settings as all too convenient shortcuts or umbrella terms lumping together and labelling people on the ground who most likely saw themselves and the world around them in alternative, much more complex ways.

This book proposes a more systematic and comprehensive approach to these challenges in the context of the late Ottoman Empire. It proceeds from a firm conviction that the present terminological apparatus is inadequate and counter-productive when it comes to the study of a fitful, meandering, yet compellingly real process of becoming modern and ethnonational in outlook at the popular level.