Making the Franks: European Immigration and Citizenship in the Pre-Modern Ottoman Empire.

This project explores the creation of norms on citizenship and naturalization in the pre-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire.

It focuses on European mercantile communities in three cities-Istanbul, Aleppo, and Izmir in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on jurisdictional disputes between Ottoman and European officials over the legal belonging of European immigrants.

Since that, before the nineteenth-century, a territorial-based notion of citizenship and universal identification systems did not exist in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the political affiliation of European merchants and other immigration was often a matter of local controversy and diplomatic negotiations.

These episodes of crisis, MAKEFRA argues, lead to the elaboration of internationally-recognized rules and practices over legal belonging, a proto-citizenship for European and Ottoman subjects.

These rules, jointly elaborated by European and non-European actors, constituted the basis for modern-day systems of citizenship and naturalization in Europe and the Middle East.