Masayuki Ueno’s Managing Religious Diversity offers a meticulous examination of Ottoman–Armenian relations through the lens of “religious privileges” (6–8). Ueno makes a compelling case for rethinking the commonly held assumptions about the so-called millet system. He argues that the nineteenth-century Ottoman state, far from maintaining the autonomy of religious communities, sought to constrain and discipline non-Muslim clerical institutions through the controlled deployment of religious privileges (imtiyazat). These privileges were selectively granted and regulated by the Ottoman state, which used them to assert control over non-Muslim communities, particularly the Apostolic Armenian Church, while shaping communal governance to suit imperial priorities. Ueno’s central thesis contends that these privileges were not remnants of Ottoman tolerance but active mechanisms of modern statecraft, adapted to manage the political risks and potential of multiconfessional urban populations during a century of reform, foreign intervention, and internal change. Ueno adopts a legal-institutional approach grounded in Ottoman archival sources and focused on the structural negotiations between the state and non-Muslim clerical institutions. His core analytic category, religious privileges, is an important and underexplored concept that allows him to move beyond the rigid boundaries of the millet system. This represents an important contribution to the ongoing historiographical debates about the millet system, imperial governance, and religious diversity.
The book is divided into six chapters which have a chronological and thematic progression. It begins with early nineteenth-century interconfessional dynamics and ends with post-Tanzimat administrative and legal transformations. The introduction sets the historiographical and theoretical stage by criticizing the long-standing notion of the millet system as a stable, premodern institution. Instead, Ueno proposes analyzing the management of religious diversity through the evolving concept of religious privileges as active components of imperial rule. Ueno situates his study within recent revisions of Ottoman historiography that emphasize state centralization and social transformation. He proposes a new lens for understanding state–community relations in the Ottoman Empire by showing how religion was politicized, through both internal dynamics and external pressures, in the nineteenth century.
The first chapter, entitled “Cooperation against the Religion of the Pope,” examines how the Ottoman state and the Apostolic Armenian leadership cooperated to prevent the spread of Catholicism among Armenians, viewing it as a destabilizing force aided by European powers. Ueno examines how Catholic missionary activity and the emergence of Catholic Armenians as a distinct group posed a political threat to the Ottoman state and the Apostolic Armenian Church.
Chapter 2, “Participation of Lay Elites in Community Administration,” shifts the focus to Armenian merchants and sarrafs (moneylenders) who increasingly took part in communal governance, often negotiating power with the clergy and the state. This chapter traces how nonclerical Armenian elites gained influence in the administration of community affairs, particularly within the Apostolic Patriarchate of Istanbul. Ueno shows that communal leadership was often contested, and that lay elites were important actors in shaping the internal dynamics of the Armenian millet, although always with Ottoman oversight.
The next chapter, “The Promises of the Tanzimat Reforms,” argues that the Tanzimat reforms redefined state–community relations by promising legal equality while also intensifying state regulation of religious institutions. In this chapter Ueno critiques the myth of equal citizenship as simplistic and incomplete. He analyzes the 1839 and 1856 imperial edicts, which transformed the Ottoman state’s relationship with its non-Muslim subjects. These reforms simultaneously opened new legal horizons for Armenians and imposed new controls over their communal structures, especially by redefining the legal parameters of religious privilege.
Expanding the lens, the fourth chapter, “The Armenian Church and Transimperial Politics,” describes the Armenian Apostolic Church deeply embedded in transimperial politics, particularly through its entanglements with Russia, Britain, and France. The author documents the increasing role of foreign protectionism in shaping Armenian communal life. Patriarchs, clergy, and lay leaders often appealed to European powers in pursuit of protection, leverage, or legitimacy. Ueno traces these entanglements to show that religious identity became a site of geopolitical contestation.
“Negotiating the Scope of Communal Affairs,” chapter 5, focuses on legal cases and state interventions in disputes over schools, appointments, and community funds. These illustrate that religious privileges were fluid and contingent. They were interpreted differently by the state, the patriarchate, and ordinary Armenians. In this chapter Ueno describes how the Ottoman authorities gradually defined and limited the scope of what counted as a communal affair, how the Armenian leadership continuously contested the boundaries of communal authority, and how religious privileges became sites of negotiation, not fixed grants.
In the last chapter, entitled “The Legacy of the Tanzimat Reforms,” the author argues that by the late nineteenth century the millet system had been fundamentally reshaped. The state’s grip over religious institutions had tightened, even as new ideas of nationalism and citizenship emerged. Ueno concludes that the Ottoman state’s religious policy transitioned from decentralized tolerance to centralized management of diversity, with long-term effects on Armenian political identity. This transformation set the stage for the emergence of nationalist movements, but also redefined the meaning of religious leadership, communal boundaries, and minority status in late imperial Istanbul.
Although Ueno’s legal-administrative perspective is invaluable, his study also presents several limitations that become particularly visible when viewed in the context of recent historiography on the Ottoman non–Apostolic Armenian communities. The recent scholarship offers an alternative lens through which the Armenian experience in the Ottoman Empire can be understood, one that emphasizes confessional pluralism, intracommunal sectarianism, and the informal political agency of non–Apostolic Armenian elites.Footnote 1
To begin with, Ueno’s study is confined almost entirely to the experience of Apostolic Armenians under the formal authority of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul. Although this allows for a deep and focused institutional analysis, it also occludes the experiences of other Armenian confessional groups, such as Catholic and Protestant Armenians, who played a major role in Ottoman politics, diplomacy, and intercommunal life. For example, the Catholic Armenian households of the early nineteenth century operated both within and beyond the formal bounds of millet politics, engaging in high-level financial mediation, diplomatic correspondence, and transimperial networking. This recent scholarship challenges the dominant assumption that religious authority within the Armenian community was concentrated in the Apostolic patriarchal institution.Footnote 2 By excluding Catholic and Protestant Armenians and focusing only on Catholic missionaries as active agents, Ueno presents a somewhat homogenized image of Armenian communal politics, which inadvertently replicates the limitations of the very millet framework he seeks to critique. However, these Catholic elites were neither passive recipients of Ottoman policy nor merely religious dissenters; they were architects of alternative communal frameworks long before and during the Tanzimat.
Moreover, Ueno’s narrative is heavily weighted toward the post-1839 Tanzimat period, beginning with the 1856 Ottoman Reform Edict and continuing through the constitutional era. Although he acknowledges earlier developments, particularly in the context of the Crimean War, his analysis treats the pre-Tanzimat era primarily as a backdrop for later reforms. However, the early nineteenth century, especially the period between 1808 and 1830, was a formative moment in the transformation of communal boundaries and sectarian identities.Footnote 3 Particularly, the execution of the Catholic Armenian Düzoğlu brothers in 1819, situated against the backdrop of Mahmud II’s early reforms, reveals that sectarian tensions and questions of political loyalty were already erupting within the Armenian community well before the Tanzimat.Footnote 4 By bracketing off this earlier period, Ueno misses a crucial phase in the evolution of communal politics, following the framework popularized by scholars like Ussama Makdisi, that sectarianism and sectarian politics only emerged in the post-reform era.
As stated, one of the most valuable aspects of Ueno’s book is his critique of the historiographical model of the millet system as static and oversimplified. He rightly argues that what later scholars identified as “the millet system” was in fact a product of ongoing negotiation, redefinition, and state intervention, particularly during the Tanzimat period. His reconstruction of the evolving role of the Armenian Patriarchate and its incorporation into Ottoman administrative structures is supported by careful archival work and offers important insights into the dynamics of Ottoman modernity.
However, his analysis remains confined to formal structures and rarely engages with informal political practices, everyday sectarian frictions, or the competing internal discourses within the Armenian community itself. The importance of intermediary elites, who wielded power not through official religious office but through financial leverage, transimperial capital, and sectarian patronage, should not be overlooked in any future study of Ottoman religious diversity. Such studies must account for the informal architectures of power that shaped communal life.
In conclusion, Ueno’s Managing Religious Diversity is an important contribution to both Ottoman and Armenian studies, offering a much-needed revision of the millet paradigm and a nuanced account of state–community negotiations in the nineteenth century. Despite its limitations, particularly in scope and confessional inclusivity, the book sets a high standard for future scholarship on the complex interplay between religion, empire, and modernity.
