Ottoman diplomacy in Greece: the case of Syros, 1830–1900

The island of Syros in the Cyclades almost spontaneously emerged in 1830 as a prominent transit and trade hub for Greece and the Ottoman Empire. The present work is an attempt to conduct a deductive reading on the impressive number of documents produced by the Ottoman Consulate General of Syros (şehbenderlik) records to answer two interrelated questions: (I) how the Ottoman Empire engaged with its former territory and (II) what kind of diplomatic tools the Sublime Porte used to deal with the security challenges it perceived emerging in the Eastern Mediterranean after the establishment of the Hellenic Kingdom in 1830. Delimiting a definition of illegality during the Age of Mobility in the Middle East, the states depended on one another to control and define the movements of illegality but paradoxically refused to cooperate. Frustrated, the Ottoman Empire, appropriated from European international legal thought, acted in typical nineteenth-century imperial coerciveness and considered using force to occupy Syros to compel the Greek state. The current article asserts that the Ottomans not only appropriated the French model of diplomacy but also European justifications of imperialism as it pertained to diplomatic coercion.