Southeastern European nation-state formation caused mass death and expulsion of Muslims

Evidence

The Bulgarians achieved autonomous statehood in the Balkan conflict of the 1870s, when Russia waged war against the Ottoman empire to enable it to carve out a state of its own. In this conflict, according to one calculation, about 260,000 Bulgarian Muslims were killed or died of disease, starvation and cold; by 1879, 17% of the Muslims of Bulgaria had perished. As many as half a million may have been permanently expelled from the country. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1040

Categorization

• SHARE: For a friend interested in the Muslim population collapses of the post-Ottoman Balkans — 260,000 killed, 17% mortality, 500,000 expelled is the kind of number that anchors the whole story.
• SEED: The settler-colony frame on ‘Christian nation-states carved from Ottoman lands’ — who did the ethnic cleansing and why Europe never called it that — is a strong essay angle.