Needs That Bind Materializing Nationality in Post-Ottoman Regimes

"Needs that Bind gently but firmly displaces our understanding of post-Ottoman state succession as mostly a project of military conquest, diplomatic fixing, and political culture. We learn how, distant from land frontiers, thousands of middling state servants reidentified themselves amidst terrible battles to create new majorities-battles that remain at the heart of political struggle a century later." -Will Hanley, Florida State University

"Orçun Can Okan has written a new and wonderfully original history chronicling the human consequences of imperial collapse. What happens to pensioners, war widows, license holders, passport bearers, and nationality as a legal category, when a state disappears, borders change, and people remain? Needs that Bind shows the upheaval and human costs in poignant and thorough detail." -Michael Provence, University of California, San Diego