Stakes of origins: how interactions with states (un)made a family in the interwar eastern Mediterranean

Spanning the 1880s to the 1930s, this article examines the experiences of a family in the eastern Mediterranean whose ‘origins’ acquired new legal significance amid state efforts to categorise and homogenise former Ottoman populations after World War I. In the 1920s and 30s, disputes emerged over whether this Orthodox Christian, immigrant merchant family of late Ottoman Mersin – a port city in southern Turkey – was Greek natives of Turkey or Arabs of Syrian origin, as they claimed. These disputes unfolded in postwar contexts shaped by the Population Exchange and option of nationality as stipulated in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, through interactions involving Turkey, Greece, and France as the League of Nations’ mandatory power in Syria and Lebanon. By foregrounding the petitions family members submitted to states, this article illuminates how they navigated evolving political and legal circumstances under successive regimes. The family’s encounters reveal the evolving socio-legal grounds of interaction with states as new regimes were constructed in former Ottoman domains. Rather than treating the family as a social unit universally defined by intimacy, the article highlights the role of power asymmetries and prolonged struggles with state institutions in the making and unmaking of families under historically specific circumstances.