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As cousins, we discovered a treasure trove of family papers, revealing the intricate relationship between precarity and privilege of our family from Salonica navigating the post-Ottoman transition. Recognising the potential of family history to provide a more intimate and complex historiography, this article offers our initial study of these family papers. By highlighting the challenges posed by the scarcity of such documents in Middle Eastern studies, emphasising women's roles in preserving family memory and focussing on the interplay between personal and political domains, we identify the preparation of a family tree as a gendered and socioeconomic project of preserving the past and shaping the present. By tracing our family's origins, including unsettling discoveries, we address matters of identity and memory before embarking on our analysis. By reconstructing the biographies of two generations, we characterise the family's socioeconomic struggle to sustain their precarious privilege amid shifting frontiers and along their journey from Ottoman Salonica to Kemalist Turkey. Ultimately, this article underscores the significance of family history as a transnational, intergenerational, intersectional and social history that enriches our understanding of the post-Ottoman transition through the lives of ordinary (and some extraordinary) Ottomans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the reevaluation of the modern state-system's emergence in the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, challenging conventional narratives and focusing on topics like the transformation of state sovereignty, defining post-Ottoman territoriality, and the role of identity politics in nation-state formation. It emphasizes the need to overcome methodological nationalism, rethink the relationship between imperialism and nationalism.

The international recognition of Turkey through the Treaty of Lausanne is often seen as the foundational moment of Turkey in international diplomacy. This article approaches diplomatic history from a decentred perspective. It highlights the activities of various non-state actors and semi-official figures who became engaged in international politics during the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923). They used citizen diplomacy, public propaganda, as well as other clandestine and public channels of transnational diplomacy to strive against the Allied peace terms. Notwithstanding their divergent political visions and agendas, these unofficial diplomats strengthened—though not always intentionally—the international recognition of the Turkish nation-state formation, only to be absorbed by the Ankara government's growing monopoly on foreign policy. Informed by the New Diplomatic History approach, this article illustrates the important role of unofficial, transnational dynamics that escapes state-centred accounts of Ottoman-Turkish diplomacy during the aftermath of the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]