Non-Turkish Ottoman subjects served as carriers of Western-derived national ideas

Evidence

Suleyman Pasha (d. 1892) was the author of a universal history, published in 1876, which includes a section on the pre-Islamic Turks— the first in modern Turkish historiography—based chiefly on Davids and other European writers. Shemseddin Sami Frasheri (1850–1904) was an Albanian whose career illustrates the way in which the Balkan peoples, more accessible to Western influences, served as carriers for new ideas. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 2014

Categorization

• XREF: The pattern of ethnic minorities as transmission vectors for nationalism resonates with general knowledge about nationalism emerging through ‘carrier’ intellectuals (à la Miroslav Hroch on nationalist intelligentsia).