Ottoman History Podcast - Breadwinner Soldiers in the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

with Kate Dannies hosted by Sam Dolbee and Can Gümüş | For the last century of its history, the Ottoman army fought war after war for the survival of the empire. In this episode, Kate Dannies explores another fight for survival: that of millions of Ottoman families, as sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers were drafted into the new imperial army. As Prof. Dannies argues in her new book, the transition to a modern army staffed by conscripts created a new social contract between state and society with the "breadwinner soldier" at the center. As the Ottoman Empire made growing demands on its citizens, they made growing demands on the government to exempt or pay soldiers with dependents. When the mobilization of the Balkan Wars and the First World War prompted the Ottoman government to conscript breadwinner soldiers at unprecedented levels, many rebelled against the terms of military service. In this conversation, we explore the social history of the Ottoman Empire's last wars through the lens of family life, charting a new history of what war meant for ordinary Ottoman citizens.          « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman history podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. In a previous episode, we featured an interview with Mustafa Oksicall about his new book, The War That Made the Middle East, recorded before a live audience at a symposium about Ottoman society at the end of empire hosted by University of Virginia. In that conversation, we discussed the history of the First World War on an imperial scale, focusing on the many stories yet to be told over a century after the empire's collapse. In this episode, we delve deeper into the social experience of war in the Ottoman Empire, with Kate Dhanies, author of Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire,

Family, Law, and War, out from Edinburgh University Press. In her conversation with Sam Dolby, John Gumush, and the UVA audience, Professor Dhanes explained how family life, labor, and the struggle for survival were at the center of a new social contract forged between the Ottoman state and its subjects over a century of military modernization and how during the First World War that contract fell apart. Enjoy. Kate, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you so much for having me today. So to start things off, we wanted to talk about this category that we see very eminently just in the title of the book, The Breadwinner Soldier. And we'll have time to talk about the history of that, how it came about,

how it changed. But maybe to start us off, can you talk about that term, where it comes from, and how we can think about that as a way to connect the front of war with the home front? The way that this research actually started was when I found a table. I was reading the 1914 Ottoman military law. And I came across a section called the Mwinses-Ile-Masha, which we could translate as the allowance for families of breadwinners, right? That's one possible translation. Within that section of the law, there were different articles explaining, you know, what to do when a man who had a family was conscripted. And most importantly, what struck me the most was there was a table in this section of the law that actually laid out in great detail, you know, the possible dependent, quote unquote, relatives of the soldier and alternative men who could provide for them when the man was conscripted.

And so from that table, just trying to understand why that was in the military law kind of kicked off this entire research. And the reason why I kind of latched onto this and kept going with it is because the law really reflected the fact that this idea of breadwinning dependency, family relationships was extremely central from the very beginning to Ottoman military law. And the more I did the research, and particularly for the book, I went back in time to 18. 26, kind of expanding out from World War I. From the very inception of the modern Ottoman army, this idea of, you know, how do we balance family conscription and agricultural labor was very, very central to the way that the army was structured, the way it operated, and actually material to its performance in battle. So another term you use is extraction. So what does it mean for us to think of the citate as an extractive entity in terms of different kinds of labor. Extraction was something I discussed a lot with different colleagues and whether or not this was the right term. But I just couldn't get past this idea that the military institution,

more and more over the decades, starting with 1826 up through the war, was geared toward, you know, trying to take more resources, more labor, more, you know, just the lifeblood of the population to fuel this enterprise, right? And particularly after the Crimean War with the Ottoman debt crisis, thinking about how those financial circumstances impacted the Ottoman budget and the spending priorities and the impact that that had on what they could spend on the military, what they could spend on social projects. I found in the book that extraction of household resources was absolutely essential to the ability of the Ottoman state to conduct war, particularly after Crimean War and particularly during the First World War, as they were pressed in

on all sides from geopolitical issues, from debt crisis, and from, you know, just the ongoing process of trying to fight in this conflict. And so I landed on extraction as, you know, trying to understand the value of this unpaid labor and resources. And so I'll just give some examples from the book. One thing I focused on a lot was, you know, how did troops feed themselves? How do they clothe themselves, where do they sleep when they're passing through these different territories? And you come across, I came across a lot of, you know, just anecdotal, but kind of systematic evidence of, you know, the diets of soldiers were different in different parts of the country, depending on what they could find in the local area.

And so there was kind of this assumption that, okay, we're going to give the army these rations, but they're going to scavenge additional, you know, sources of food in the local area. And what does that mean? That means, like, people that actually live there don't necessarily have things to eat, right? people are living in other people's houses as billets, taking water resources, taking clothing, et cetera. So thinking about just like drawing attention to how material those types of extractive actions were to the ability of the army to fight was my goal. Yeah, I mean, while reading, it felt to me like in some ways a labor history of unwaged work of the family and then also the military. the military. And I think that's just such a powerful nexus that you're located at. So maybe to give us a

sense of how the breadwinner soldier as category emerged and then also these points you just made about the power of extraction as a way to think it through, maybe we could start in the early 19th century. You mentioned 1826. So the end of the Janissaries, how does military reform and legal reform form lead to the dilemma of the breadwinner soldier. And how is the Ottoman state handling that dilemma? Great. My favorite story to tell. So when the Janissaries were violently disbanded and a quote-unquote modern European-style army

was implemented in their place, this was originally a recruitment-based army in theory. but in practice it was forced recruitment and the recruitment was taking place largely in specific areas of central Anatolia among the peasant men and the state's ideal soldier was a quote young bachelor of peasant stock this was Sultan Mahmoud II who said that

and he was trying to create this army of men who were without family ties or at least with wives and children, who had not been exposed to city life, and who could kind of comprise this body of a new type of Ottoman army. And so what happens immediately, almost immediately, when they try to recruit people, there's this sense of, you know, we could offer this opportunity, you could make more money for your family, but these people are working in, you know, household-based agricultural economies

for the most part. And so the interdependence of household labor in agriculture is something that really caught my attention. And I felt it was really important to this story because in a lot of the regulations that came later, it was like, oh, if a man goes to the army while his neighbor or his family can plow his fields, right? But that's not really how this labor works. You need every available body and everybody has their assigned tasks to produce subsistence. And so almost immediately they run into this issue of, okay, we cannot conscript or recruit all of these people while still having, you know, people

get married and have children, reproducing the population was an issue at that time, and also, you know, feeding the empire was a huge issue at that time. So we need people in the fields, we need them at home, and we need them in the Army. So what do we do? And so the first solution to that dilemma was to create the Redif Force in 1834. And so the idea behind the Redif was, okay, we can recruit people into the army, but they'll stay by their, you know, at home, essentially, and be able to still farm and be with their families, but we'll also have this fighting force as needed. Well, that didn't work. And there's a lot of interesting documents that I used in the book about people, basically people debating, like, how do we get them to train? Do we bring them every month? Do we bring them

every week? Do we bring them quarterly? And nobody could come up with a solution that, again, balanced these different needs. And the situation became so dire. that it's actually discussed in the Gulhane rescript. And a promise is made, you know, we're going to try to spread out the burden of militarized labor across the empire more equally. And so they do that first by trying to expand recruitment into different parts of the empire. So they go into Kurdistan, the Arab lands across different parts of Anatolia and to the Balkans to try to, you know, take this burden of conscription off of central Anatolia and spread it out more. so that helps to a certain degree.

And then they introduced in 1843 and formalized a little bit later in the 1846 military law, this idea of conscription by lottery. So everybody is now liable for the lottery, and people will be have their lots drawn and go to the army instead of the recruitment-based method from before. But this brings up the problem of the breadwinner, right? That's where it's a problem before because of this. this, you know, what I call in the book, the delicate balance of agriculture, family,

and conscription. With the conscription being implemented, the state has to deal with, you know, how do we exempt certain people who are sole breadwinners, right? Who is eligible for this? And beginning with the 1846 law, they start to codify this. And at first, it's very ad hoc. It's like very kind of hypothetical situation. So reading the law is really interesting because it's like, suppose you have, you know, this young man. And he has a mother who is, is a widow and like it's like all sorts of very specific family situations. And they say, you know, what you should do with those kind of men. And so we see in 1846 the beginning of this idea of the breadwinner as necessarily exempt from military service. So that creates this

precedent wherein if you are a breadwinner, you do not have to serve in the military, or at least do not have to serve in the active duty military. You might be in the, um, the redefe force, but you're allowed to stay close to home. That precedent becomes a bigger and bigger problem for the state because, you know, most people are breadwinners. A lot of people get married, you know, at a young age, have children, have dependent parents. And so the problem then becomes who do we recruit and how. And as you can imagine, all the different family situations, contingencies are just exponentially problematic for the state in terms of how do we deal with all these different situations. So what I trace in the book and what we see over the course of time is the state trying to

elaborate and systematize this. And the end result of that is a table I spoke about at the beginning, which is still imperfect. There's another part to this story. So at a certain point, particularly in the Crimean War, the state realizes that when they need to mobilize breadwinners, right, if there's a conflict, they have to pay their families some sort of allowance. Okay. And at first, this is framed as imperial beneficence, Sadaka I Shahane, in the Crimean War. And then later on, it becomes, it comes to be seen as a right of the breadwinner soldier, right? So you cannot ask breadwinners to come out of the reserves and go into active duty service

in a war without paying them compensation. So we have this overlapping ideas of breadwinners are exempt, their first place is the home, the fields, but if they do need to be called up, there's a financial component to that, right? And so it becomes this situation where not only can the military not recruit enough men to power the army, but the financial burden of that becomes very, very intense over time. You have already given us a detailed overview of how the Ottoman Empire attempt to create a delicate balance in your own terms. between household labor, agricultural labor, and military conscription. So was the Ottoman case unique, or were there similar challenges in the other empires as well,

especially maybe the agrarian ones? Yes, I love this question. I thought about this a lot. So a lot of, obviously, the combatant nations in World War I had separation allowance policies. But to my knowledge, the Ottoman empires, like this concept of paying people, for military service if they're a breadwinner. The Ottoman system is one of the oldest, if not the oldest. And I think the most analogous case would be in the Russian Empire where they had a similarly agrarian setting and they needed to, you know, compensate for that labor with some sort of payment.

In different parts of Europe, they have different systems. So in Britain, they had like a means-tested system where you were eligible for some sort of benefits if you qualified. In Germany, I believe everybody just got an allowance regardless. So different states had different approaches to this, you know, what were people entitled to for their service? What kind of role did the family play in that? But in the Ottoman case, what was interesting as well is that a lot of the logic of this seems to have been more about the existence of a system rather than a functioning system itself. So there's very much this dynamic where, you know, just the idea that you are entitled to this or that it could happen seems to have played a major role in continuing the conflict

and continuing to mobilize people to war, even if, you know, people were going for months or even longer without receiving these benefits, just the idea, okay, oh, the state will follow through on this later. seems to have been important to a lot of people. And people seemed to, even in very remote rural areas, people were aware of these policies. And people talked about these policies and knew what they were entitled to. And so the Ottoman people played a huge role

in kind of demanding their right to these policies and shaping how they played out and making sure that they stayed in place over time. Yeah, I think we get a really clear sense of this legacy of protest. and this discourse of rights, as you mentioned. And we want to talk a little bit more about the ways that people resisted it in a minute,

but you have so many just vivid depictions of people in really difficult circumstances, whether family circumstances or war. And I wondered if there are examples that really stuck in your mind of those difficult circumstances and how people manage to survive. One that really comes to mind was, There was a report about, this is about from the Balkan War period.

This journalist goes to different parts of the empire and he's kind of assessing the agricultural production in different areas and this is in the midst of the Balkan wars. And he basically says somehow in these areas, the agricultural production has increased during this wartime period when the men have been mobilized. And he's like, somehow it happened, right? And, you know, Of course, the women were the ones doing the labor at that time period. And just trying to imagine, we don't have details about it, of course, but just trying to imagine the backbreaking work that these people were doing to survive. And if you read kind of more contemporary anthropological studies of agricultural labor, you see that, you know, during harvest time, during planting time, women in particular work like 24 hours a day, right? intensively, not only doing the agricultural labor, but the social reproductive labor and care

work in the household. And so that just, you know, juxtaposing those two things just made me realize, you know, they were continuing to do this even without the men. And they were like kind of putting their entire body and willpower into survival. This theme of survival and, you know, people literally sacrificing their flesh and blood and time and energy to survive and help their families survive, I think was something that just really came through to me in this research and especially thinking about women and the kinds of things they did. Another example would be one kind of inspiration to me for the, I don't talk about it that much in the book, but Erfon Orga's memoir of World War I. So he was a child.

child during World War I in Istanbul. He's from kind of an elite family and their house burns down. His father dies or he gets killed in the war. And the whole book is about how his mom and grandmother survived, like what they did. And one thing that sticks out about that one a lot to me is just time, right? People would go for hours, hours and hours every day just looking for like a little bit of bread. So spending your, like in an urban context, just like search, using your physical, you know, energy to just find that one piece of bread to reproduce yourself for another day is just like a very kind of moving and I think important aspect of this to me. So going back to the Balkan wars, during the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman Empire attempt to eliminate the Muynse's exemption, which provoked

popular resistance that you term great Muyns' revolt. So how does this moment help us rethink the relationship between crisis, popular resistance, and law? And also, what does it tell about how the war transformed the family from a protected social unit into a site of extraction? And we should say here to Muinces, you've translated as breadwinner. Yes. And we can discuss the terminology if people are interested.

So I had done research at the Turkish military archives during graduate school. But at that time, you could really only go in and tell them what your topic was. And then they would interpret your topic for you and give you the documents they thought you would want. So I ended up with a lot of stuff about like women's labor battalions. And he was like, oh, gender, women. Okay. So I didn't get a lot of useful things when I went the first time. But now these files are available at the Ottoman archives.

And so I had the good fortune of being able to do additional research. And it was great because I knew that the origins of this kind of allowance for families of breadwinners policy that we see in the 1914 military law was in the Balkan Wars. But seeing those documents really helped to uncover what happened in the Balkan Wars and how important that episode was. to what came later in World War I. These discoveries helped me realize that the way we talk about the Balkan wars in Ottoman historiography, we tend to lump them together and it's like this precursor to World War I. But when you look at it from this angle, it's really clear the differences between the first and second Balkan Wars and how instrumental these policies around breadwinners were to,

you know, shifting things into a better situation after the defeat in the first Balkan Wars. as I found in the first Balkan War, there's basically an outright revolt of Mwinses recruits because not only do they mobilize an unprecedented number of Bradwinner soldiers for the Balkan wars, but they also try to cancel the allowance payment because they don't have money to pay it, right? And so they call these people up, they're trying to get them to fight, they're not paying the families, and people are saying, you know, we either have the right to money or we have the right to not be doing this. And kind of there's a really interesting dynamic where certain groups of Wynce's men are sent home and then other Wynce's men get word of that and they start leaving.

And it's basically like a very big problem for the Ottoman military to the point where they retroactively pass a law saying, okay, we're going to give the allowance, right? Like starting from the beginning of the first Balkan War, everybody's going to get the allowance. Wynces people have to stay. You know, we're not letting them go home. They have to be recruited, but we'll pay. we'll pay the allowance, as we have done in the past. That happens, but they, at the same time, eliminate the actual idea of Mwinces from the military law. So they're like, anybody who has dependents can be called up, but Mwinces is no longer a basis for automatic exemption.

And what's interesting about that is that even though they passed that law during the Balkan wars, later when World War I breaks out and quote unquote, Mwinces are mobilized, that's still a shock to the system. People are still like Mwinces and Muenli were called together. And so there's still this like collective memory that Mwinses like shouldn't be called to war. And they are. The other thing that they do is eliminate the redefe force. So there's no longer this kind of reserve force in that time period. And this then lays the foundation for the 1914 military law, which does away with the Mwinses exemption, but, you know, prescribes this allowance for service. To me, this process is very extractive, and that's how I view it and how I analyze it

in the text, because what we see over the course of time, and particularly in these moments of crisis, crisis of war, financial crisis, is the state saying, okay, we can squeeze the population more and more. We're in a time of crisis. We're in the midst of the war. We can mobilize people and, you know, make these different laws that we might not have been able to do in the past. And so it's only through that kind of nexus of the Balkan wars and financial crisis that they're able to finally do away with this Mwins's exemption, which, by the way, they had been trying to get rid of for decades. So when we're talking about the expansion of the size of the Ottoman army, the Mwinse's exemption

had always been kind of the bane of the existence of Ottoman generals, that they're like, how do we get rid of this? And they knew they couldn't. They try it in the first Balkan War. It doesn't work. Even more important than do we conscript non-Muslims. this discussion about, you know, what do we do about this muncie exemption was a constant source of discussion amongst the military leadership throughout this time period.

So you've mentioned a few times this table that it seems like was kind of the germ of this project in some ways. So it's a table from the 1914 military law. And I wonder if you might just describe a part of it or a part of what seems so fascinating because I would agree. In the text, you describe it as a remarkable table, and it is. Should I read it? Yeah, just read some questions. So there's one side, and it says the conscripts, relatives who may be in need of assistance. So it's all, you know, from the perspective of the male soldier recruit.

So we have his invalid or physically unfit father and or widowed mother, his current wife or divorced wife in her waiting period, physically unfit grandfather or widowed grandmother, sisters. brothers, nieces and nephews, and then children are the potential dependents. And on the other side of the table, most of these categories have at least seven or eight potential alternative breadwinners. So just to give one example for the wife, it would be her son, her father, her son's son or her grandfather, her daughter's son, her brother, her brother's son or her paternal uncle. So for each and every one of these types of relatives, there's plenty of different options of relatives that could take their place as the

breadwinner. And as the war goes on in 1916, they pass a law that further expands that. So that's an extractive aspect of this as well. And it really relates to discussions about like contemporary welfare states and this like family relationship for family responsibility versus state responsibility for subsistence. And I think the take. really shows that. But I interrupted you when you were talking about the hubris of it. The hubris of it, right? Like this idea that they start off in 1846, as I mentioned, with, you know, all these scenarios, like endless scenarios of what could happen. And you see in the sources, there's constant discussion between military officials, state officials, and religious officials about what to do

in various types of situations. So this table is very much based on, uh, Nuffika law in Islamic law, right? So this idea of who is responsible for who in these relationships. And one interesting thing that I found is that over time in a process of extractivism and militarization, the military priorities overtake the actual legal precepts of Sharia in the Nuffika realm. So one example of that is that initially, you know, a father's responsibility for his wife and children is kind of like immutable in Islamic law. So even if he, you know, abandons them, disappears, the best they can do is take out loans in his name, for example. Like, his responsibility for them unless he's dead is immutable. He cannot pass that to anyone else in

Nuffaca law. But the military is like, well, what if we make him legally dead and then, you know, we can pass responsibility over? And so over time, you know, a man being conscripted comes to be equivalent to his legal death in Islamic law, allowing them to then, right, assign responsibility for these family members to others. So I think what we see, I call it the bureaucratization of kinship in the book. So this idea that you can like rationalize and create a table that explains everything, when in reality it's like thousands of pages of documents. documents. What do we do if the person's a half-brother? What do we do if the person got married in this time

period or this time period, right? You cannot bureaucratize this, and it becomes this bureaucratic nightmare for the Ottoman state, and it also provides a lot of avenues of resistance and agency by people, and they use these family relationships and statuses to navigate military service and conscription. Do you also call it militarization of Islamic law, right? Yes, yes, exactly. And you see that. It's like, it's very striking because the table, clearly you can tell it kind of maps onto those categories. But in the documents, the military officials ask the meshayat all the time, you know, what do we do here? What is your legal ruling on this? You started to talk about this a little bit, but how does World War I change this situation?

I mean, we've talked today. We have many people in this room who have done incredible research on just the devastation involved in World War I on so many levels. how does this shape this practice? How does this shape how people are trying to resist it? You know, going back in time helped me to understand more about the suffering that people endured during World War I. These laws themselves and how people navigated them set the stage for the biggest human catastrophe

that the empire had seen. Up until that point, up until May 1914, team when they passed this law, there had been some semblance of an idea of, you know, we need to prioritize the family. We need to prioritize subsistence economies together with, you know, the military and the survival of the state and its protection. With, you know, the dismantling of that idea, militarization has overtaken all other priorities. And we know that it's a, you know, fight for the empire's existence, all of that kind of stuff. But how that affected people is that they went into this war having suffered the devastation of the Balkan wars. You know, some of these men had

been serving in the military for decades. And when World War I begins, the society is already depleted. And the law does not provide for any of this kind of social safety net where some people are left at home to help protect, provide, support their families. And so I think that structural aspect of the arrangement of military and civilian life, you know, prefigures the kind of social suffering that we see during that time period in ways that explain a lot about how much people suffered, but also why the empire was able to keep fighting. Because there's, there was always that question in Ottoman historiography of World War I, how did the empire, or in all the, you know, all the historiographies of the different combat nations, how do they keep?

keep going, right? When resources run out, how they keep going is this extraction from the population, in my view, one of the ways they keep going. And we can only understand that when we understand how central family was to the military and to, you know, their ability to wage war in a material sense. On family again. So in your book, you also show that, like, how the Ottoman Empire turn to family and marriage as a way to stabilize society during the World War I. How do you read 1917 family law, the Hukuky Aila Karanamese.

From the perspective of the law, I'm also curious how you think this law was related to the Ottoman state's previous effort to establish a patriarchy without men in your terms. I was always curious, like, why, you know, it's the middle of the war,

right, like, why are they passing a family law now? And of course, there's very good reasons why they're doing so. So I think the first thing I will say about this is, is they had been trying to do this for a long time. And this relates to the question I asked Professor OxyCol earlier today about, you know, how does war create this space for radical change that might not be possible in other time periods?

For many decades with the Magelli project, the, you know, state officials have been trying to wrench this power over law away from religious officials. And with family law, this was not something they were, had been able to do previously. So I think we should understand the passage of the family law during World War I as something that could only happen with the militarization of Islamic law and kind of this crisis moment when the civil state has the power to kind of say, okay, we're taking this over.

So that's one portion of it. In terms of the content of the law, some have analyzed it as kind of like a positive step for women's rights. And we can debate about that. I think that's less interesting than how it tries to set the stage for the reconstitution of the breadwinner led family. Right. And so one thing it does is extend the time period that you are eligible for an annulment

if your husband disappears. And I read that as trying to preserve this structure of the breadwinner family in the absence of men. So it moves from this emphasis on like remarriage, divorce, and kind of reconstitution of living families to how do we create the structure of the family, this idea of responsibility that we can then pass off to others. So that's one thing the family law does. It makes it harder in some ways for women to divorce. And it puts some different limits on annulment over kind of like physical illnesses and disabilities. So within the context of the war, what we see is this greater emphasis on a return to stability

and normality, quote unquote, through the reconstitution of the family. Because part of the social upheaval, of course, of the war is loss of family, you know, a lot of stories in the archives of women, like leaving their husbands while they're away at war, making new families, all sorts of kind of social disorder, if we want to call it that, taking place. And from the perspective of government officials, this is not something that is conducive to reproducing and reconstituting a society at that time period. And so marriage and family particularly becomes really essential to this to the point where they engage in a state-sponsored marriage campaign, where they try to force people to get married in very amusing but also not amusing ways. So I have support questions about marriage, but I also want to remind everyone that we'll be opening it up soon.

So think of questions that you might ask. You'll have a chance to take the mic. So on marriage, Kate, one of the really vivid sources that you found are a number of marriage ads, people seeking partners. And so I wondered if you might read a few of these, because it really, I mean, there are a number of different ones, but there are some that show, you know, the effect of devastation

and the way that patriarchy is shaking in some ways. Okay, so this is one of them. I'm 52 years old with a salary of 5,000. I am alone in Istanbul. I have two children from my previous wife, one 14 and 116 years old. I'm looking for marriage to an honorable woman of a suitable age who can clean house and who is very organized.

another one says I'm 34 years old I'm a clerk in Istanbul with a salary of 1,000 kourush I would like to marry a girl in possession of good judgment the girl who will share my life should be no more than 25 and she must read and write due to the current circumstances

it is not possible to live on a salary of 1,000 kourush so the woman who will be my wife must have a fortune on the condition that a harem is maintained, I can live as a son-in-law, it's scuvesi. Yes, one more. Okay. All right, one more. So this is from a woman.

My husband died, and apart from one son, I have no one. We have a small four-room house. I can make a happy family with an honorable man. I do not have a problem moving to the provinces. It's like a dating gap. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, maybe say more about how you read these sources alongside the legal changes.

Yes. So I got the idea or like learned about these sources from the late Yavu Salim Karakashla's work, where he talks about the society for Ottoman Muslim women, I think it's called, which is created in Istanbul in World War I to provide work opportunities for women who are widowed. So he has a lot of sources about that. I then found a lot of other ones. Some of these are from Vakit.

Those were a more official program. And then different magazines and newspapers across the empire started copying this idea and it became kind of a trend. So there was a lot of them during that time period. So the way I analyze these sources, it was like just really interesting to read them to me because the first thing that I noticed off the bat was that man had a lot more demands, right, than women. They could be a lot pickier about what they wanted and some of them go into even greater detail than the ones we just read. So it speaks to something about the shifting balance of what women can expect in marriage and the kind of shift of the patriarchal bargain that we see. in wartime.

And we often read about this or discuss this in like Western European narratives of the war where it's like, okay, you know, in wartime women went out to work. All this stuff happened. But then, you know, they had to go back into the household. And it's obviously a very different dynamic in the Ottoman context. But I think one of the things that we do see is the undermining of this traditional breadwinner dependent marriage, if that, you know, and especially in urban context. text. So this idea that, you know, a woman should work should contribute something financially

becomes more like socially acceptable during this time period. And that comes out very clearly here. Another thing, and I talk about this in my article, which is about this, these sources. But the argument I make in that is about the idea of a pensioned breadwinner. So a lot of women don't ask for anything specific, except they want somebody who has a pension. Okay. And so what I found really interesting about this was what I spoke about a little bit earlier, which is that people have this idea, even this is 1918, right, that the state pension system is solvent and like a thing that will provide security, even at that late stage. And so I think this really kind of reinforces this argument that Professor OxyCol and others have made

that this collapse of the empire is by no means a foregone conclusion or something that people are even necessarily thinking about even in 1918. So I think those sources really underlined. That and it also, another thing I'll say, is that it points back to this question of survival and the way that marriage and marriage to somebody from a woman's perspective who would have a pension

or provide not drink, not abuse, you allow you to stay home as a housewife was an important survival strategy for many women, right? Women were not necessarily trying to go work in a factory or work in an office to be quote unquote liberated during this time period. They just wanted, you know, to have less work to do and to be able to be in a situation where they and their children could survive the war. So we see marriage to strategic marriage emerge as a very important survival strategy, especially at this least. stage of the war and throughout the war. So even in Irfan Orga, the memoir I mentioned before, his grandmother actually strategically gets remarried to a wealthy man and that helps the entire

family survive at a certain point in their story. And there's, you know, of course, many, many examples of that. But in the case of the Women's Chalmersion of Human, get married, right? Yes. So at a certain point, so they started in 1916 and it's more, you know, providing work. In 1918, they're like, okay, you know, the writing's on the wall. Now workers need to get married, both men and women. And that's when they launched this campaign to try to get people married. And people would either would get more benefits, more pay, et cetera, once they got married. All right.

It's time to open it up. Questions, comments? Chris will come over with the microphone. My name is Eugall Yannukdag, Dag, from University of Richmond. I want to ask you about the public morality aspect of, this whole thing, whether that was an important factor or not, especially in terms of passing these laws. Yes. Thank you for that question. That allows me to talk about one of my favorite documents from this research, which was basically a situation where lots of men were filing for

divorce from a specific town. And their military commander was very upset about this because it was impeding their military duties and the men were upset. And it turned out that a lot of the women had been accused of illicit sexual relations in the town. And so this relationship between women's morality at home and men's ability to focus on their military duties was something very much at the forefront of people's minds. Just as a little aside, what ended up happening in that case

was that the Ministry of War was trying to take the right to file suit against such women from the husband. So in Islamic law, it's the purview of the husband to launch Zena accusation against his wife. Nobody else can do that. The Ministry of War is like, let us take that right. And then we can just prosecute all these women for Zina. And then the military will be in great shape. They don't end up being able to do that. But what this episode reveals is that public morality was a discourse that was very important.

It was also materially very important to people to the extent that they knew what was going on. In the book, I definitely focus less on what people are saying about this because there's a lot of narratives about like women going hungry, for example. So when we talk about the allowance, there's a lot of examples that I give in the book where people are trying to get the same. state to raise the amount of the allowance. And they're framing that request in terms of Namus, honor, you know, women are going to lose their honor if we don't give them this, you know, money and wheat or whatever. So that kind of language is very powerful in terms of making these persuasive arguments. And we also see it play out on the ground with people's decision making. I really like that part of the book that you use, you show how Namus was instrumentalized by

the soldiers themselves to get rid of their military duties, actually. One of the arguments I try to make is to push back against some of the ideas about, you know, like patriotism, loyalty, you know, broader ideas about national, you know, morality or, you know, these kinds of topics. And to think about how a lot of men, if not most of them, saw, their honor as like protecting their family. And Professor Yanukda has this great quote in his paper, which is like where I think it was an Ottoman military official saying,

you know, they see their namus as their field and their family. Was that what it was? Yeah. So and I really like that really resonates with what I found in this research is that people weren't necessarily thinking about, you know, should I be a good Ottoman patriot and serve in the army? it was like, how do I protect my family?

How do I make sure that they're safe? And one fascinating thing about this was the communication. Like people had ways of knowing what was going on. Like this word of mouth, people passing information about what was going on, was a huge concern among men. And that was one of the major things that prompted and forced the Ottoman military and civil officials to make sure that they were paying attention to these policies. Even if they couldn't fully fund them, they knew they had to,

you know, convince these men that their families were safe if they wanted them to keep fighting. And so that like men insisting on that and, you know, having that as the center of their personal identity and priorities really had a huge impact on how these policies played out. And I believe the family law you talked about in 1917 is precisely around the time when desertion starts to become a real issue in the Army. Isn't that correct? Yes. So desertions are a huge. issue throughout the war, right? But it peaks. 1917 has the highest rates of the First World War period. And one of the arguments I make in the book, and this is something Ahmed Amin Yalman also

observed in his kind of contemporary history, was that family ties had a huge impact on people's decisions to desert because there seemed to have been this shift where the state was kind of taking care of families, subsistence was sort of going, okay, not really, but like manageable. And then it reaches a certain point where, you know, there's really not a lot of food. There's not a lot of, you know, security. People get more and more worried. And that kind of calculus of do I stay in the army or do I go really, really shifts during that time period. So I, again, And like I said, with the Balkan wars, kind of breaking down the periodization, I think about this idea of kind of a 1916, 1917 shift in how the Ottoman state is using family-based policies,

first as like a punitive deterrent desertion, right? There's things like collective punishment, execution, basically saying, like, don't desert or we're going to do bad things to your family. And it shifts to, okay, you know, stay in the army or come back to the army and we'll make sure your family's taken care of at that time period. I'm Graham Pitts from the University of Mississippi. Thank you for this very convincing portrait of the home front during the First World War. I'm curious about how even a process you're describing this is, which is to say,

there's many men in the Ottoman Empire who can pay an exemption fee don't have to go serve. Is there variation across space according to sect as well, is my question? Because sometimes I feel like this is the experience of, of a Turkish-speaking Muslim, urban and rural working class? Or am I wrong about that? And does this actually apply much more broadly? Thank you. That's a great question.

I do think it applies a lot more broadly. And so one of the things I was actually surprised to find in the research is that there's a lot of cases from, you know, non-Muslim soldiers. There's a lot of cases from the Arab lands, different parts of the empire where the same kinds of discussions and issues are arising. Just one example about the exemption fee is that a lot of men, I have one case from Syria where a bunch of men pay the exemption fee, but then they're going to be called up again. So the exemption fee didn't exempt you permanently, and you could still be called up as a reservist. And so some men in Syria asked the government, and they were like, can we pay another exemption fee?

and like you never call us to the war again. And the government's like, yeah, like, that's not really a thing. That's illegal. But because of like their social class and their location, they gave a one-time exemption to that group of men. So they grant their request. And they're like, we're not going to really mess with this. We're going to let these people be completely exempted.

So they use the policy strategically, depending on what's going on. So for example, there was one case from Bosnia where there was like some political upheaval going on and they're like, we're not going to call the moincers from Bosnia right now, because that's just going to add fuel to the fire. And so it applies to everybody at a certain point, but they kind of navigate it strategically depending on what's going on to make sure that they don't cause issues. And another kind of flip side of that is when people start protesting because they're not being paid the allowance, the place where protests happen is where they send the money. Right. So they're just kind of like putting out fires, trying to manage a situation

in any way they can. And how people are treated depends a lot on, you know, their background and their location, but everybody's involved, I would say. Yituckin, Ohio State University. Kate, these policies that you describe in verbal one context ended up in failure, right? By the end of the war, there are hundreds of thousands of families or the munis' relatives who are not paid at all or very inadequately paid, you know, the munis is much, Turkey-Kourush which remains ridiculously low in the face of huge inflation. So I believe

the failure of these policies along with other like profiteering, like hunger and feminine and population movements etc. contributed a huge or created a very deep decline of legitimacy and imperial legitimacy. So I would even go ahead and say speculatively after the war, after the empire, there is no popular nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, for example, compared with Austria-Hungary, for example. Do you think, do you think that it contributed to the lack of the collapse of legitimacy, imperil legitimacy? Do you, or do I overreed that? What I would say is that up until the point where I kind of stop this research, I do not see that at all. And I even see people continuing to have recourse to this notion of pensions or allowances

even after the war. But that doesn't tell the whole story necessarily. So I think there's a way in which people can be upset at the empire for abandoning them, but also not be able to imagine another government, right? Like if we even think about ourselves, like right now, right? Like, we can be angry, but can we conceptualize that that's going to lead to like a total change of our situation? And so I think the question of legitimacy and popular feelings about legitimacy versus

the enduring nature of institutions are different but intertwined. My name is Ella Fred Entwano and I'm just so taken with this framing of the bureaucratization of kinship and your framing of it as an act of hubris, but one is that is very, very embedded in bureaucracy itself. And I guess I'm just curious. So I think after we did the table read, I understand what the table looks like. I still am not sure, like, how did they actualize something from that? So can you, did you, did you, did you,

Did you find that they did actualize something from it or is just a table that exists? Thank you for asking that question. So yes, they do actualize this. And even before the table, right, in earlier iterations, there's a lengthy investigation process, right? To become eligible to receive this allowance or the exemption, you have to be processed through the table, essentially. So bureaucrats were actually investigating each and every soldier going, checking their residents, checking who lived in the house, and really going through all of those details to determine whether or not somebody was allowed to be exempted or to have the allowance as a conscript. And so, as you can imagine, this created a situation that was rife with corruption, with, you know, misinformation and was heavily reliant on the types of kind of bureaucratic registration systems that are still difficult today and were not

fully developed at that point in time. And so there was a lot of ways that people used this investigation process to try to gain exemption, right? Some people would, you know, buy another house and register themselves separately, even though they actually lived with, you know, a bunch of male family members. People would marry like an older widow or a young girl just to say they were married. Like there were all sorts of ways you could try to navigate this system. But the bureaucrats were interestingly and aggressively interested in like, right, rooting out people who were trying to cheat the system because the system depended so heavily on being able to get every single eligible man, right? Especially before they do away with some of these leniency. It's like this

drive that you see in the documents to get every single person you could possibly get and conscript them is really, really striking to me. And in my dissertation, I interpreted this as like, wow, look at this great Ottoman bureaucracy. And then later, I was like, you know, was this the good use of resources? But like, you do see a lot of resources being put into this because, and I think that's why one of the main contributions of this book is like this whole system, this idea of Muen Cislich was a huge issue in the military that's like not discussed at all in the historiography and had a huge impact on the institution, the performance, the bureaucratic arrangement of resources, all sorts of different things that played into these, you know, bigger questions. Thank you everyone so much for

your questions. Thank you, Kate, for speaking with us. Thank you, everyone.