In its last decade, the Ottoman Empire underwent a period of dynamic reform, and the 1908 revolution transformed the empire's 20 million subjects into citizens overnight. Questions quickly emerged about what it meant to be Ottoman, what bound the empire together, what role religion and ethnicity would play in politics, and what liberty, reform, and enfranchisement would look like. Ottoman Brothers explores the development of Ottoman collective identity, tracing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews became imperial citizens together. In Palestine, even against the backdrop of the emergence of the Zionist movement and Arab nationalism, Jews and Arabs cooperated in local development and local institutions as they embraced imperial citizenship. As Michelle Campos reveals, the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was not immanent, but rather it erupted in tension with the promises and shortcomings of "civic Ottomanism."
"As Western observers currently rush to describe the Arab Spring as an unprecedented experiment in popular participatory politics, Michelle Campos has provided a timely reminder that Middle Easterners are no strangers to the concepts of civic engagement and representative democracy . . . [Ottoman Brothers] should be applauded as a bold attempt to revive an overlooked period of Palestine's history.
Historical Journal
"This book is a great accomplishment and sheds light on numerous important aspects of Palestine in this last decade of the empire's existence."
Digest of Middle East Studies
"Furthermore, reconsidering the inter-communal relations in the context of Palestine, Campos challenges the presumption about the existence of Arab-Jewish conflict in the early twentieth century . . . Campos has a positive view of the process in the immediate aftermath of the 1908 Revolution as a relatively successful civic experiment based on the notions of Ottomanism and shared homeland . . . [O
