To curb the influence of minority populations and "outside enemies," the Ottoman government implemented new and experimental Tanzimat reforms within the empire's center and provincial regions. By the 1860s, the city of Rusçuk in present-day Bulgaria and capital of the Ottoman Danube province became a test case for this expansive reform movement within an urbanizing and contested peripheral landscape. In Empire and Nation in the City, Mehmet Çelik traces how the Danube province and Rusçuk, in particular, experienced a series of swift political transitions from a "modernized" Ottoman administration, to a Russian provisional government, and finally to a Bulgarian nation-state.
Çelik examines the transformative effects of each political system, arguing that Bulgarian nationalism was not a uniform ideology, but a flexible and mutable one that engaged multiple loyalties—Bulgarian and Ottoman among them. To understand these competing loyalties, he explores the diverse religious and multiethnic makeup of Rusçuk and the multifaceted responses to imperial control, nationalist sympathies, and political movements. Rather than assess Ottoman rule and Bulgarian nationhood as separate periods, Çelik bridges these moments to understand the continuity of Ottoman reforms within a burgeoning Bulgarian nation.