Ottoman History Podcast - Captivity and Ransom in Ottoman Law

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

Episode 420 with Will Smiley hosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud How did an Irish-born Russian nobleman serving in the Russian army end up an Ottoman slave and valet to an Ottoman-Albanian officer? And what possibilities existed for his eventual release? In this episode, Will Smiley traces the history of Ottoman laws of captivity and ransom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how older practices of enslavement and ransom transformed into a new legal category of "prisoner of war" and shedding light on a path to modern international law that lies outside of Europe. « Click for More »

It's when someone is in state custody and you're imprisoning them or deporting them that the state has to decide how its intellectual commitments in theory map onto someone's very legal body. And when people then have every incentive in the world to make their own legal claims. And really, theoretical constructs become really real. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Zoe Griffith. We're recording today in New York City with Dr. Will Smiley, an assistant professor of humanities at the University of New Hampshire and the author of the just-released book entitled From Slaves to Prisoners of War, The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law. So congratulations, Will, on the book, and thank you for coming on the

podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Great. Me too. So Will is actually a pretty rare commodity in Ottoman history because after he did his PhD, he went and did a JD at Yale Law School. And so I think as a field, we're lucky to have you, and there's no one better to have written this book on the evolution of Ottoman law of warfare and captivity, sort of within the context of modern international law as it evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries. So again, the title of the book, From Slaves to Prisoners of War, I think is a really valuable addition to the field. It places the Ottomans in maybe an alternative comparative perspective than we're used to within a Black Sea geography as opposed to a sort of Western European geography. And I

think that the timeline sort of spanning the 18th into well into the 19th century is a fraught endeavor and very, very well managed in the book. So should be of great interest to many of our listeners. Maybe the best place to start in talking about the book is actually the geography, because I think a lot of Ottoman historians, when we think about comparative histories, the comparison is never to the east, it's always to the west, and sort of judging the Ottomans on a scale of modernity against Western Europe. And you've chosen to place the Ottomans in conversation with Iran and with the Russian Empire in the Black Sea. So maybe you could talk a little bit about why that was a fruitful comparison in thinking about the history of captivity and laws of war.

I came to this project because I was reading an 18th century Ottoman chronicle by Talay Sanizade Hafez Abdullah Effendi, written about the 1787 to 1792 Russo-Ottoman War. And I came across the story of an Ottoman merchant named Mehmet, who was on his ship out of Trabzon in 1787 when war broke out. And his ship had the misfortune to stumble across a Russian naval squadron. He was taken on board. They sank the ship. And then a storm came up and damaged the ship, took the mast off, and it was set adrift.

They could barely steer. And at this point, according to Talia Sanizade, the chronicler, the sailor spoke up and said, if you just let the ship drift, we're going to hit the shore, it'll be destroyed, and the soldiers there will kill all of you, the provincial troops. What you should do is let me steer us for Istanbul. And there you'll surrender and you'll become captives. And when peace is made, you will again be free. And this got me thinking it's the kind of thing that in other contexts you would take for granted. That, of course, yes, surrender in war is an option.

And yet it's the kind of thing that from an Ottoman perspective looks a little bit weird, especially in the context of Ottoman-Russian relations because they're so well known for centuries of conflict and especially enslavement, Tatar slave raids into Russia. And that's what makes this, I think, especially odd. Ottoman-Russian conflict has often been kind of at the edges of Ottoman studies, although scholars like Virginia Aksan have brought that in, emphasizing the importance of those conflicts to Ottoman political and military evolution. But I think others as other I'm kind of following other scholars who suggested that there's actually more to that relationship than just conflict. So in a book published just a couple years ago, Andrew Robarts talks about cooperation to control disease and migration. Jim Meyer in a later period has written about migration. And so I think I'm trying to add to this by showing that there are legal relations as well. And what intrigued me about this story

of Talay Sanizadeh and the sailor is that, I mean, did the story happen this way? Unclear. There are Russian sources that talk about this sailor, talk about him being captured on the ship. The exact speech that he allegedly gives in Talay Sanizadeh is not recorded in Russian sources, but for a variety of reasons, it's not clear they would have recorded it. But either way, Tal Asanizadeh must have thought his audience would find the story plausible. So what that got me wondering about is kind of the shared understanding of rules that made Mehmed able to make this argument, that made him able to say, when peace is made, you'll again be free, and that made the Russians willing to believe it. Likewise, according to Russian sources,

when the admiral commanding the squadron got word that his ship wasn't sunk but had been captured, he actually gave thanks to God that it would one day come back to them. He said, it'll be ours hereafter again. So almost the same sentiment on the flip side, that captivity is kind of a temporary state leading you back to where you started. Coupled with that, at the same sentiment on the flip side, that captivity is kind of a temporary state leading you back to where you started. Coupled with that, at the same time, I was finding this in Tal Es Sanezade, early in my PhD. I also noticed that in Stanford Shaw's History of Selim III's reign, he talks about how the new Nizami Jadid army, kind of the ancestor really of the modern Turkish army indirectly, had it as its earliest trainers and members, Russian prisoners and deserters. So from two different sides, I felt like something was happening with

captivity here, that on the one hand, there are some rules, some legal understandings that connect these empires we see as rivals. But at the same time, there's a story of individuals and kind of people moving back and forth. So it's not just an intellectual history of law, and it's also not just a social history of people moving. It connects both. And this is what I would put in a plug for legal history more generally. I think that's the promise of it, that you can connect ideas to actions, ideas to experiences. And captivity is really fruitful for that, because as I argue in the book, captivity is kind of where law becomes real. As we see even today with Guantanamo Bay, for example, or International Criminal Tribunals at The Hague, it's when someone is in custody.

Deportation centers, I imagine, perhaps not quite the same. It's when someone is in state custody and you're imprisoning them or deporting them, that the state has to decide how its intellectual commitments in theory map onto someone's very legal body. And when people then have every incentive in the world to make their own legal claims and really theoretical constructs become really real. Yeah, no, that's incredibly interesting to think about it that way. I mean, there are a lot of interesting characters in the book, and I really did like the human vignettes that you were able to pull out the one who initially stood out to me was um an irishman who wound up as an officer in the russian army who was captured and forced to like you please

tell the story better than i do but but the question i'm trying to get at is um you know from this this guy's history who are these captives like what are the different I don't know if we can say categories but you know you have to disentangle a lot of different kinds of captivity laws evolve differently for each kind so can you tell us the story of Brown which is very interesting and then maybe just talk a little bit about you know what is the nature of this captivity as it was as we think about it in the 18th century when you know before we get into an era of modern international law yes brown is a fun it's a fun one so i try to start each of my chapters with a vignette of someone whose experiences illustrate uh the particular rules that i'm talking about in

that chapter brown is george von brown who's like a lot of these noble officers who circulated between empires in the 18th century. He's an Irishman by birth, a count in the Holy Roman Empire by nobility. And in service, he was working for the Russian army, the Imperial Russian army, during the 1735 to 1739 war between the Ottomans, Russians, and Austrians. And he found himself wounded and captured at the Battle of Graka, which was an Ottoman defeat of the Austrians in 1739. So he was captured and enslaved, taken to Edirne, and then he ended up serving as a valet to an Albanian officer. And according to his memoir, to Brown's memoirs, his job was to haul the Albanian officer around on kind of a cart while the Albanian officer who was recovering from his own wounds ate raisins. One of these weird quirky stories.

And so to me, what von Braun's story illustrates is the way that slavery was the fate of Ottoman captives in the early 18th century. Right. Even if they were extremely highly ranked nobles, even if they were military officers of enemy armies. And perhaps one day ransom could be a way out for captives. But slavery was kind of the default situation. I should say Bron Brown is not representative in that he is an elite cosmopolitan officer, of which there are many. And they are overrepresented in my sources because these are the kind of people who wrote memoirs. So they illustrate some of the rules and experiences, but at the same time, their own particular experiences aren't necessarily generalizable,

as I try to keep in mind throughout the book. And so, you know, would the duties or experience of captivity have been extremely different for people of a lower rank? I mean, was he sort of given the position of valet because he was such a high-ranking nobleman? Or, you know, what happened to ordinary soldiers who were captured? So Brown was able to get out of captivity because he was ransomed with the help of the French ambassador to Istanbul. That was certainly not something that most captives could expect. But more generally, his value and his experiences were determined by his value to his captor in terms of slave labor until the value of a ransom surpassed that. And that general dynamic, I think, is very typical of Ottoman captivity up until the mid-18th century, that really what matters is a captive's economic value through labor or ransom more than, for example, their political identity. The fact that he was a nobleman in itself or that he was a Holy Roman imperial

subject, those things weren't in themselves important, but they were important in that being a nobleman gave him access to kind of a network that could raise ransom funds. But it was the ransom funds that his Ottoman captor cared about, not his nobility. So can you just tell us a little bit about what we know about this law of ransom system, how it worked? Yeah. So in the book, I talk about ransom as something that I don't really look at the starting point of it, since that's beyond the scope of my own research. But Yuval Rotman, for example, writing about medieval and late antique captivity, talks about how with the rise of Islam, all three Middle Eastern monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, all perceive what he calls a religious obligation to ransom co-religionists.

And that certainly is something that a thousand years later still seems to be an ethical ideal, at least, in multiple empires around the Black Sea. Other scholars have shown us, and I try to bring this together in the first chapter of the book, that there are thriving systems of kind of frontier customary law, what Gizal Palfi calls the customary law of the border zone, that these are thriving all along the Ottoman frontiers, whether in the Mediterranean or in the Hungarian frontiers or in the Black Sea steppes or in the Caucasus.

And these are mostly worked out kind of locally, but they are legal systems with mutually shared understandings of what is allowed and what's not allowed, with punishment for violations, often through reprisals. There's a great incident that Mark Stein talks about in his work from Paul Rico that a grand vizier brings an army to Hungary in the 17th century. And when he orders some captives to be executed, local militia leaders object saying, if you kill these captives, you'll go home to Istanbul, but we'll still be here to bear the brunt of reprisals.

So it's really the law is at the borderlands, not at the center. I use the term law of ransom in the book in a more particular sense for what happens around 1700, which is that ransom provisions get incorporated into international agreements between the Ottoman state and its rivals. between the Ottoman state and its rivals, so that ransom is no longer as much a customary borderland thing as it is something that is codified and how it will work, and it goes to the heart of the empire, that you get ransoming orders of Catholic monks who travel up and down the Ottoman corridors of Ottoman power, ransoming people. Russian state agents begin taking ransom responsibilities in Istanbul, so ransom really comes to the center. The next change that I see, which is even more significant, is that in the mid-18th century, you get treaty provisions that start to prescribe release without ransom when wars end, which is really a critical break because it takes

the release from captivity out of the economic realm into the political. That elite Ottoman slave owners, for example, their incentive to release their captives will, from 1739 onwards, no longer be that they receive money which compensates them for the labor they believe they've lost. But instead, if they don't release captives, the Ottoman state will punish them. Ottoman state coercion as the Ottomans try to fulfill their international obligations. And the same thing, in theory, is true on the flip side. From the Russian side, specifically. Exactly. That the Russians are supposed to release Ottoman captives as well.

Right. Yeah. And they call that the law of release. Right. In 1739, the Russians had kind of just gotten the upper hand militarily. They made peace not in reasonably even terms, in large part because the Austrians had floundered. They lost the Battle of Graka, which is the battle at which von Braun, whom we just discussed, was captured. And the result is that they had, I think, enough power to press for their interests and try to get a ransom-free release, but not so much power that they could simply impose it unilaterally. So for example,

in 1711, the Ottomans defeated Peter the Great at the Battle of the River, In 1711, the Ottomans defeated Peter the Great at the Battle of the River. And they obtained the release of all Russian captives with no apparent ransom. But it was a unilateral demand made one time in the field with no reciprocity. The key conditions of 1739 are the Russians have an upper hand so they can get what they want, but not so much they can get everything. And as a result, they kind of make this a reciprocal legal obligation, which makes it kind of, I think, acceptable enough that it gets continued in every subsequent treaty. And even as Russian military power over the Ottomans grows, I mean, 1739, they kind of barely get the upper hand.

1774, the next peace treaty is Kuchik-Karnarja, which is infamous for the fact the Russians had essentially mopped the floor with the Ottoman army and navy as well. And they could have perhaps demanded more. And we can talk later. They did demand a little more, but then soon backed down from it. And then as they continue to win subsequent wars by incredible margins, they keep the same treaty in terms of captivity, I think in large part because they're reciprocal and they come to be understood as kind of a customary legal way of ending wars rather than kind of to the victor go the spoils, but instead sort of like the ordinary architecture of what peace looks like.

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CJ Micah, Will Hanley, James Baldwin, and Margaret Ferguson. Thanks for supporting our program and thanks for tuning in. Now back to Zoe Griffith's interview with Will Smiley, talking about his book, From Slaves to Prisoners of War, The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law. So we are here with Will Sm smiley talking about his uh very recently published book from slaves to prisoners of war um and i guess now we'll come to the prisoners of war so uh slaves or captives are now um released under treaty law between the ottomans and the russians but uh by the late 18th century, you know, the evolution of

this process takes another important step in terms of redefining the nature of captivity or redefining the status of captives as prisoners of war. And so again, if you could talk about maybe the motives behind that switch, how it maps on to the evolution of modern international law, things are not running sort of unilaterally from west to east. There's a lot of crossover here. So maybe you could map out this transition for us. So by the 1770s, when the Ottomans and Russians go back to war, this is the 1768 war, which was famously a total catastrophe for the Ottoman Empire. By this point, it's established in one treaty, and everyone seems to understand it will be the case in the next treaty, that when wars end, captives will be released, that Russian subjects who have not converted to Islam will be freed

without ransom, which will require the Ottoman state to coerce slave owners to go literally knock on doors, to pull people out of households, to take on essentially a lot of political costs in coercing powerful slave owners around the empire, some of whom are very well connected or actually are part of the Ottoman state. And so midway through the war, there's an armistice. And at the same time, Musinzade Mehmed, kind of known generally as a more capable grand vizier, takes over. And there are a couple other things happening at the same moment. For one thing, the Ottoman fleet at its sea has long been dependent on ore-powered galleys, for whom the Ottoman state needed large numbers of essentially unskilled young men as rowers.

Captured enemy soldiers were a great source of these rowers. So for a long time, you saw earlier in the 18th century, back into the 17th century, that when enemy soldiers were captured, the Ottoman state would seize or buy many of them and put them on the galleys with no real expectation of ever releasing them. And the galleys were not a healthy or long-lived place for people to end up largely. Do we have any idea how long people lasted on the galleys? I don't know. That's a good question. Everything seems to indicate that it was not a long time, but I don't have any good sense of how long it really was.

Probably the shorter the better. Possibly, yes. There were also, I mean, there were free Ottoman rowers as well who probably had better conditions, but large numbers of them were slaves. So by the middle of the 1768 war, there are a couple things converging. One is that the Ottoman fleet is destroyed at the Battle of Cheshme in 1770 by Ghazi Hassan Pasha being the main survivor, and I know you've dealt with him in your work as well. And so when it's rebuilt, it seems the Ottomans are largely relying on sail-powered vessels rather than oar-powered vessels. So at this moment, they have much less need for unskilled young men as slaves. What they need to run these ships are skilled sailors.

At the same time, they expect that when this war ends, they will have to return captured Russians. And based on their experience in the 1740s and also on their experiences during an armistice in the middle of the war, it seems clear the Russian state is most interested in obtaining the release of captured soldiers. They're a valuable commodity. out of the estates on which they were serfs, taught them military skills, they don't have an economic incentive to put them on galleys. And the compromise they seem to adopt is if you look at Ottoman archival documents, you see that in larger and larger numbers, there are captured Russian soldiers simply arriving in Istanbul and being put off to the side, put in the arsenal, but not apparently set out in galleys in large numbers.

They're simply sitting there. And what I see happening is these are essentially prisoners of war. Now, this is a category we would take for granted, that a prisoner of war is something we know what it is. But what I try to do in the book is suggest that it's actually kind of, we need to problematize this category to think about it as something we need to think about the history of, that the concept of an enemy combatant being treated differently than non-combatants and held temporarily with the certainty of release when a war is over is something that

had not really existed as a category before in Ottoman practice, and now it does. So do the Ottomans have a term for it? The category predates the term, but you do see creeping into Ottoman documents in the late 18th century the idea of usura-yuharb, or literally captives of war. But they're also still simply called usura, or captives, or miri-esirleri, or state captives, which is the same term that 100 years earlier would have meant slaves who row in galleys. I think in Ottoman official minds, there's definitely a different category, even if the term hasn't changed. You really see this in the 1780s when they start to capture large numbers of people in that war, and they refer to the prisoner trouble and how they can't wait for it to be out of the way when they send these prisoners home. Clearly, these are not people for labor. So even if the legal term, in purely

Islamic legal terms, these are still technically slaves of the sultan. But my argument is that Ottoman officials don't at all think of them this way anymore. They are there for a limited time and everyone understands that in some sense they are still basically the property of the Russian state, not of the Ottoman sultan. They're kind of held for safekeeping. And so how would you say that this either overlaps with or runs parallel to like developments that are going on in Western European international law where it seems like there is developing? Do they have a firm conception of prisoners of war? How are these issues being dealt with? And at what point do they intersect with the Ottoman experience of captive taking? Among Western Europeans, there's a category of prisoners of war, that captives taken in war are not slaves, when Europeans are fighting each other. In the colonies, you know, in imperial wars, as a number of scholars have shown, many of these rules go out the window, and the Europeans have different legal understandings that often heavily draw on slavery. I mean, Europeans are happy to invoke religious concepts of that legal enslavement of non-Christians justify the African slave trade or against indigenous peoples. Likewise, there are

instances of people being sold into indentured servitude through captivity. So it's not quite as clean cut as saying that there are prisoners of war, but it's definitely a category that exists by the late 18th century for sure. European traditions of ransom have largely died out by that point, so really prisoners of war kind of put off to the side. The Ottomans don't come to their practices by looking at what Western Europe is doing, really, at all, as far as I can tell. But once they start keeping these people off to the side,

European diplomats and travelers in the Ottoman Empire start recognizing that these people are what they would call prisoners of war. And I think that's really critical because only once that recognition occurs can you get discourses about whether the Ottomans treat their prisoners well. You know, when the fate of those captured in war in the Ottoman Empire is to be sold onto the galleys, few Europeans talk in terms of the Ottomans don't treat POWs well, because that's simply not what's happening. These are slaves. Once you have POWs, then you can talk about POWs, and then you can get critiques and arguments as you do get over the acceptability of prisoner treatment. Kahraman Shakul has a great article about French engagement in this

discussion during the war against Napoleon. So that's where the Europeans are. I want to be clear that the Europeans in the 18th century have very few rules about, very few legally binding rules about how well captives can be treated. Death rates for prisoners of war in European wars in the 18th century, even against other Europeans, can be quite high or they can be lower. I mean, the emergence of permanent camps doesn't come until the late 19th century, I'm sorry, late 18th, really during the Napoleonic Wars. The British are renowned for putting American prisoners during the War of Independence on kind of moored ships in harbor, which became death traps. Disease rates were high as they were for Ottoman prisoners. So in no sense, it's important to say when I talk about prisoners

of war, the existence of the category doesn't mean they're treated well. It can be a miserable existence, but they are categorically in that category. And the, I suppose, benefit is some kind of promise of release at the end of the war? Or is there no real practical benefit to the category? Yes, that's the benefit. I mean, if you look at the ship I talked about beginning this, Mehmed, the merchant who persuaded the ship to surrender, the crew of that ship are released when the war ends. On the other hand, I think something like 35% of them have died of disease in the meantime. Again, this is a horrendously high death rate. And yet it's not an order of magnitude different from what you'd find of soldiers in the field in the 18th century because disease is a tremendous killer on ships and in armies in this period.

They probably had a higher chance of dying in Ottoman captivity than they would have had they stayed on that ship at sea, but not immensely higher. And for those who survived, yes, they were released. Now, whether they wanted to go back to Russia is another question that some did, some didn't, but there is that benefit. Whether, on the other hand, if they've been sold into slavery one could argue that they would have i don't know if the death rate would have been higher or lower i mean this kind of reminds me of a point in the book that captured my imagination but you know moving into the 19th century and as the Ottomans are maybe becoming more imbricated in European affairs

they take these Russian prisoners of war that they're keeping in the arsenal and move them off to Heveliada in the you know sea of Marmara one of the prince's islands and my initial reaction was like that sounds great like jackpot but then as you describe, actually, the conditions there were quite, quite miserable and tough as well. But so maybe through the lens of imagining life as a POW on Hebeliada for a minute, we can talk about as the Ottomans sort of, I guess we can just say, have less and less success in all of their military confrontations with Russia and with Western European countries. And so they have to kind of become more familiar maybe with Western European international law. You know, how are things changing, would you say,

between 1780, or excuse me, yeah, 1787, early 19th century. Yeah, so it's in 1828, they start moving captives to the Princess Islands. And I think the conditions there can be quite harsh, they can also be better at times. But the key there is that they are being taken out of the arsenal where it was kind of a legacy move to hold them there, because once upon a time, captives would have been state slaves rowing on galleys. The Ottomans keep POWs in the arsenal for quite a while, just kind of out of inertia, even when they are clearly going to go home

and not be used for galley rowing. In 1828, taking them out and sending them to the islands is a really clear marker that they are thinking, why are they even there? We should put them somewhere else. Was it a security thing at all? Partly. I think, although actually,

Sultan Mahmud seems to have been worried they would escape. He ordered that precautions be taken and the island's Greek population be watched to make sure they didn't collaborate with Christian ships to get the prisoners off. I think getting them out of the arsenal just kind of gets them out of the way and allows them to be kind of out of the way in a place where they might have a little more space. So I'm not sure it necessarily is a security benefit. I don't see these moves as being really driven by trying to imitate Western European international law yet, though. The Europeans really, I mean, there are not articulated codified legal standards of how you're supposed to treat prisoners until the 1860s, 1870s among the Western Europeans. The Ottoman impetus for treating prisoners better comes about, I mean, the Europeans are critiquing they don't treat them very well, but I don't see this coming up at all in internal Ottoman discussions. Instead, what does come up is that in the 1820s, what's critical is in 1826,

the Ottomans formed their first disciplined conscript army, the Assyri-Mansudey. And this gives Mahmud suddenly an understanding of kind of what it takes to run a conscript army, and the incentive structure changes. So, for example, conscripted soldiers who are released from captivity generally are supposed to return to service in their conscript army, whereas Ottoman volunteers, which is kind of essentially what the army was, as Virginia Oxon has shown, or volunteers kind of informally conscripted, whatever, they would often simply arrive and then disperse and go home, and if they're released from captivity, they'll probably never come back to central state attention. They'll slip away to their homes. So Mahmoud suddenly finds that his army looks like

the Russian army, and he wants to keep his soldiers in service. And that means he wants them not to die in captivity and to come back from captivity. And so one way to achieve that is to treat Russian captives better in the hope that the Russians will treat Ottoman captives better so they'll survive. At the same time, Ottoman officials, and this is one of my favorite parts of what I discovered in researching the book, Ottoman officials hope that if they treat Russian prisoners well, Russian soldiers will surrender more readily or maybe even desert in hopes of better treatment. And so they actually at one point convene a focus group of prisoners to try to say, you know, can we send some propaganda with you back to the Russian army to get your friends to come dessert? And it's not clear this works very well, but there's a kind of

a sense of reciprocity here that works to the benefit of captives because it's in both states interest to kind of treat them better in hopes of incentivizing surrender and also incentivizing the other state to treat their captives, their their prisoners better so they'll come home to service again. So kind of a morale campaign. Yeah, morale undermining, undermining the other guy's morale, boosting your own morale. I think one of the really interesting things that you're doing is to show all the different ways in which law is moving. And like we've already said a couple of times,

it's not just moving in one direction as we might have expected. times, it's not just moving in one direction, as we might have expected. But so just kind of rounding things out from the Crimean War into the war of the 1870s. You know, what are the what are the sort of culminating transformations? Or why do you end your story with the Russo-Ottoman War of 1878, 1876, 1878? One of the kind of big meta-narratives of international law that we all hear is that non-Western powers or states or cultures are either dragged into it kind of against their will by colonialism, or they are kind of forced to accept rules they didn't make, again, by growing Western power. And it seems to me that in the story of Ottoman captivity and law, this kind of thing happens actually quite late, much later than we'd expect. As late as the 18-teens, you see that as the Ottomans fight wars against France,

against Britain, those states, in dealing with the Ottomans, essentially accept Russo-Ottoman rules, the Russo-Ottoman law of release, down to some of its details. This situation, so the Ottomans are in some ways kind of generating the law they live by. This really changes only in the, as you say, the 1850s to 1870s. The story still, though, is not about so much the Ottomans kind of generating the law they live by. This really changes only in the, as you say, the 1850s to 1870s. The story still, though, is not about so much the Ottomans kind of reluctantly accepting rules they didn't make, but instead that Europeans start codifying laws of war really in the 1860s, 1870s. The key moments here being in 1863 in the United States during the Civil War, Francis Lieber writes a set

of rules for the Union Army about conduct and warfare based on European customary law, but kind of writing it down in a codified way for the first time. Is there a reason why then in that context? John Witt's written a good book about this. A large part of it comes down to actually the question of whether the Union can liberate slaves and making a legal argument for that since the U.S. position for a long time has been, for that, since the U.S. position for a long time has been, not surprisingly, when the U.S. had slave owner interest, that they could not be liberated during wartime. The Union didn't want to follow that. So that's one reason that Lieber writes these rules. But he goes on to elaborate the rules much more generally. Again, John Witt has a great book on this. Simultaneously, almost a year later in Europe,

Henry Dunant leads the fight for a Geneva Convention on the status of wounded and of non-combatants of medical personnel. These are the codifications kind of for the first time of like limiting suffering of humanitarian efforts to help those suffering, not necessarily from state interests, but from a sense of we recognize as humanitarian, especially Dunant's view. And when the Ottomans become aware of these initiatives, their response actually is largely to say, okay, because from their view, the substantive rules of how they're treating captives are already generally on the same page.

This is not to say they're always complying perfectly, which they certainly are not. Then when the Libra rules are codified in 1874, the Ottomans again kind of shrug at this. And so when you come around to the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman War, I don't see major changes in how the Ottomans are actually dealing with captives because they think that what they're doing is already consistent with Geneva Convention, think that what they're doing is already consistent with Geneva Convention, with the Brussels rules which they accept as binding. The arguments come when Russian jurists, especially Martins and also Western Europeans, claim the Ottomans aren't complying.

And the Ottoman response is not to say, we don't have to follow these rules, they aren't our rules. It is instead to say, yes, we accept these are the rules, but we're already doing this. And whether they are or not, again, becomes a big factual dispute. The Ottomans then countercharge that the Russians aren't following the rules. But what you get is a very modern-looking debate over compliance with rules that everyone accepts. And what's missing here is kind of what we'd expect to see, which is some moment at which the Ottomans surrender to Western European rules. Instead, it's almost much more of a seamless kind of acceptance of a new basis for substantive rules that they already

think exist. And that's what kind of, almost the dog that didn't bark. It's almost like you wake up in 1878 and the Ottomans are talking about Western European rules without any clear moment of them breaking down and saying, okay, we'll accept these rules in place of something we're going to throw out. They never throw out their tradition. The tradition follows right through. I think that's it. So in 77-78, the big debates happen in, for example, the Institute of International Laws, a newly founded body of international lawyers. So I mean, international lawyers are becoming kind of an established international constituency at this point in Western Europe, as Marnie Koskinen talks about. And this is also a moment in which, as Jennifer Pitts, Peter Holquist would show us,

that membership in the family of nations is really critical to diplomatic standing. And being accepted as a full-fledged member of that family of nations compliant with international law is very dependent on one's level of civilization, which goes along with kind of religious biases and racial stereotypes. And so for the Ottomans, being a full-fledged member of this concert of Europe, being a civilized nation is really crucial in many different ways diplomatically. And treating captives properly because it's now a matter of codified law is something that's at stake, which is why the Russians and Ottomans are trading accusations about civilized status. I mean, they've had debates about captivity before, but they always came down to if you don't treat your prisoners well, we'll treat ours the same way. Or if you don't release captives, we won't release captives.

Now, these things take on a much bigger meaning about civilizational standing in a way they never had before, which is why these debates, although, again, I don't think the substantive rules are all that different, what's at stake is suddenly much more, and it's much more abstract than just the concrete matters of what happens to prisoners. I want to throw in here as well that something I haven't said much about is that in internal rebellions, the Ottomans don't apply most of these rules. And the Greek War of Independence, as a result, becomes incredibly bloody, marked by massive enslavement, because the Ottomans deliberately carve it out and say it's not going to be treated as a war against the Russians will be. The kind of lines of sovereignty matter a lot. Does that change at all as the 19th century wears on?

I mean, do we have I mean, because there are increasingly sort of movements for independence. And I mean, how does this look maybe if we pushed it up even to right before World War One or something? Yeah. So later in the 19th century, you don't see that kind of enslavement. And the key there is that after the Crimean War, as John Don Badem and Hakan Erdem show, Ottoman attitudes towards slavery itself start to shift. And they start to kind of try to limit slavery itself, not just the enslavement of captives, especially enemy soldiers, but slavery itself. And that kind of closes off pathways to slavery. So when you get depredations by Ottoman irregulars, the famous Bashebozouks in Bulgaria in 1876, for example, they kidnap people, but it's not enslavement,

and it's certainly not state authorized. And so that is kind of a change in Ottoman law and policy, and that does seem to owe something to European pressure. But this has already been done for enemy soldiers long before. By the time of World War I, what we see is really more of what I see in 1877-78, which is that the Ottomans begin to talk much more about Western European international law as a source of rules. And other scholars like Amy Janell talks about how much this matters to Ottoman diplomatic efforts. So they're talking about Western European sources of rules, but what they're actually doing

doesn't change a lot. What does change is, again, as wars break out, they start to ask legal advisors, what are the rules on captivity? And they don't change what they're doing in such large ways, but they change why they say they're doing it okay because talking in terms of western european values of international law now has a huge diplomatic weight weight to it and a huge diplomatic benefit uh to the point where they get you know memorandum in the beginning of world war world war one about what to do with captives i mean i really love this kind of like long duray um study that you've done just because especially for this period. I mean, you start really in the sort of early 18th century, bring us all the way up through 1878. And that's such an unusual chronology.

So I think that that's like a huge, huge gift that you've given to the field. And also, I mean, the book is so well positioned for people who are, you know, more familiar maybe with Russian history or European history, because it lays things out very clearly. My, I think, final question, and this has been on my mind, like, even before I read the book, I wanted to know, could you have written this book if you hadn't done the JD? Could you have written this book if you hadn't done the JD? I don't think the book would be the same. So much of the dissertation was written before I started my JD.

Okay. But the arguments changed a lot and I think were refined a lot by an understanding of how international law works, by distinctions about positivism versus formalism. Certainly, you can approach these issues without going to law school. For me, the JD was a great opportunity to explore some of these issues and think seriously about law with some really great legal scholars to kind of talk to and talk through ideas. For me, that was really helpful. And I probably could have written it without the JD, but the scholar I was before starting the JD couldn't have written the book as it was. And the dissertation talks about a lot of these substantive areas, but especially when I pushed into the 19th century, none of that was in the dissertation.

After 1850s, none of that was in the dissertation. And I think understanding that without understanding kind of the history of international law, legal thinking, and then more kind of picking in points about like contract law and things like that, kind of legal concepts really was helpful for me as a scholar in thinking things through well yeah i mean i can just say as someone who has no legal background whatsoever that i mean the book is it's it's a real gift to those of us without that expertise just because it's it's very clear it's very um precise and really um it's just such a thorough treatment of a really understudied I think again long duray time spans. I will say you can blame my

law school experience for the fact that I use capitalized terms like law of release or law of ransom that's a legal scholar thing like coin new terms that you're going to use in a formalized way as shorthand. I think it helps. I think we all do that. We're all supposed to come up with, yeah, a catchphrase. But I don't think you capitalize them in history. That's the thing. Perhaps no. Well, so your JD was good for that. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Will's book, One More Time, is called From Slaves to Prisoners of War, The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law. You can pick it up now.

As always, if you would like to learn more about the topic, Will will provide us with a short bibliography. He's also mentioned a number of scholars very helpfully throughout the podcast. You can go and check out. This will all be on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. So, Will, thanks again for coming on. It was great to talk to you. Thank you.