Settling Aftermath Regimes: Itinerate Cham Albanians in the post-Ottoman World, 1822–1932

Abstract

During the “Age of Revolution,” disruptions that initiated transitional processes in many European states had their origins in peripheral zones, often themselves in a perpetual state of destabilization due to colonial administrative policies. From the Haitian Revolution to the destabilization caused by the American revolutions, European states collapsed and reconfigured to become the modern states associated with the era. This symbiotic relationship between the historical center and the periphery increasingly acknowledged, needs its equivlent. The same dynamics are at play in the following article, one that monitors the collective action of a particular group of Albanian Orthodox Christians who establish themselves in diasporas in Egypt and North America. Their ultimate contribution to the transformations impacting the larger Ottoman Empire and its Balkan/Eastern Mediterranean territories, recorded as the era of ethno-nationalism and liberation proves to invite a set of collective state building enterprises and Great Power adjustments witnessed elsewhere in Europe. And as events in Haiti and the larger Americas induced significant change in the empire’s metropole, so too did the charted actions of heretofore ignored Albanian Ottomans inform the evolution of diplomacy and international law as applied in Post-Ottoman contexts after the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913.