Muslim Land, Christian Labor Transforming Ottoman Imperial Subjects Into Bulgarian National Citizens, C 18781939

This book tells the history of how Ottoman Muslim subjects became citizens of Balkan Christian nation-states. The analysis concentrates on southern Bulgaria, a region marked by shifting borders, competing Turkish and Bulgarian sovereignties, rival nationalisms, and migration. These kinds of problems accompanied to the disintegration of the dynastic empires into nation-states. The monograph demonstrates how local post-Ottoman constructions of capitalism engendered nation and citizenship. The analysis shows how land that belonged to Muslims―individually or communally―became symbolic and material resource for Bulgarian state building and capitalism. Muslim land was also the terrain upon which rival Bulgarian and Turkish nationalisms developed. Both also evolved in relation to the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Bulgarian statesmen expected of Bulgarian Christian farmers to grow into modern citizens by mechanizing their labor so as to increase revenue for industrialization. By the outbreak of World War II Turkish Muslims had turned into polarized national minority; their conflicting efforts to adapt to post-Ottoman Bulgaria disclosed the increasingly limited citizenship rights available not only to Turkish Muslims but to Bulgarian Christians as well.