New ideas about how people should relate to power played out in relations between as well as within states. The French revolution promoted rights of self-determination, and devices (later termed plebiscites) for legitimating both new regimes and transfers of territories. Napoleon further instrumentalized, then abandoned, such practices. His enemies criticized his pursuit of ‘conquest’-but thereby raised questions about their own habits. After the wars, fuzzier notions of consent featured in discourses around ‘legitimacy’. Revolutions, which continued to be employed to constitute would-be-lawful regimes, tested prevailing ideas. In the Ottoman world, instruments that could be conceptualized as constitutions played a part in negotiations around overlordship. From the 1850s, plebiscites came back into use, alongside other means of registering consent to boundary change. Increasing involvement of European powers in attempts to resolve conflicts within Ottoman domains (thus Mount Lebanon, Crete) encouraged cross-fertilization between what were in some ways already convergent practices.
