Ottoman History Podcast - The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System

Episode Date: October 25, 2026

with Aimee Genell hosted by Ayah Aboelela and Chris Gratien | After the defeat and breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Great Britain and France established colonial mandates that remade the map of the modern Middle East. Yet as our guest Aimee Genell argues in a new book, those mandates had surprising Ottoman origins in the diverse forms of autonomy created in the empire over its last century. Rather than passive concessions to European powers and national movements, the agreements that redefined the empire's relationship to emerging Balkan nations, Egypt, Lebanon, Crete, Kuwait, and other areas with special status were the product of active engagement with an emerging arena of international law on the part of Ottoman lawyers, officials, and diplomats. As Prof. Genell explains, even in the empire's final days, amid the Wilsonian moment of self-determination, they looked to such agreements as a means of limiting rather than extending European influence over Ottoman territory. The flexible Ottoman model of autonomy in this view laid the foundations of the Mandate system, with lasting consequences for the region until today.    « Click for More »

Welcome to the Ottoman history podcast. I'm Ayah Abolaila. And I'm Chris Grayton. We're here today with Dr. Amy Janelle at Boston University. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be here. Dr. Janelle recently wrote a book published with Columbia University Press titled Empire by Law, the Ottoman origins of the mandate system in the Middle East. One of the main things that your book argues is that the mandate system, which happens in the Middle East after World War I, with Britain, in France has origins back in the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, so one of the big arguments, one of the big takeaways of the book is that Ottoman autonomous provinces paved the way for the League of Nations mandate system. The usual story is that Woodrow Wilson shows up. Everybody's gaga for Wilson,

and then the great power imperialists have to pay lip service to Wilson. Susan Peterson and others have said, no, no, no, that's not right. Like, Wilson was just a useful tool for the imperialist. they didn't actually need him. What's kind of missing from that story is, well, what are, what were Britain and France thinking about in terms of what would replace Ottoman sovereignty in the Arab provinces? And what I argue is that there's this hundred-year tug of war over the idea of autonomy in the Ottoman Empire. And ultimately, Britain in particular, works out a form of non-sovereign imperial administration in places like Iraq and Palestine after the First World War. And it makes so much more sense, actually, to think of this period as a continuity and empire,

that the Ottoman Empire, the late Ottoman Empire's reform is sort of a continuity to the mandates. And people who study the mandates kind of observe this, you know, French mandate, British mandate. There's a lot of similarities between how the Ottomans were doing things. Why did it take people so long to think of it this way? I mean, I think part of it has to do with the kind of decline thesis and the sort of idea that the late Ottoman Empire wasn't particularly dynamic or engaged with Europe. My dissertation was on autonomous Egypt and the kind of question of what does Ottoman sovereignty do in Egypt during the British occupation between 1882 and 1914? And it was through that research that I was like, wait a minute, it's not just Egypt, it's Mount Lebanon, it's Crete, it's all of these other provinces that we never really put together.

because they all have a different deal with Istanbul. So I think that whereas Ottomans talked about these things all the time throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, Europeans talked about the autonomous provinces all the time. We somehow have missed it because they look so different from one another. And it seems like this can't possibly be part of the same story. That's what I, that's my supposition. Speaking of Egypt, you mentioned in the book that a lot of times when we talk about Egypt. We just say it was nominally controlled by the Ottoman Empire. You know, one of the things you argue is that we need to actually consider what it means to be an autonomous province or a special or a privileged province. So what does that actually mean? You know, long before the, what we might say,

the imposed autonomies of the 19th century, and I'll get to what that was, there's lots of autonomy in the Ottoman Empire, lots of flexibility. We know about this. I mean, that's how the Ottoman Empire was able to exercise its power over such vast territory for solo. long. But starting with the Greek revolution in 1821, and especially the settlement of that revolution, a new form of administration appears that we've considered to be imposed from the outside. Greece gets independence, as we know, but Serbia, Montenegro, Wallachia, and also the little island of Samos all get autonomy, or they all get kind of privileged status within the Ottoman empire. And what that means is they have enormous amount of local control, but they are still

legally part of the Ottoman Empire. This system could very easily have been a one-off, but with Egypt, it becomes kind of solidified as a go-to option, not just for the great powers, but also for the Ottomans too, to solve various crises across the empire. So this question of nominal sovereignty, I think it's one of the bees in my bonnet. It's like one of the things that really made me angry when I read late 19th century international law textbooks or more contemporary historians, because we're willing to say, when we look at the British Empire, they have a theory of administration that is informal rule. And we see this in places like the Indian princely states. We see this in the Gulf Shakedoms. This is how Britain does empire. But we never ever say, this is how the Ottomans do

empire. We never think about the Ottomans having a theory of administration. And so that's one of my big arguments is that, A, Ottoman sovereigns. really mattered in very unexpected ways, and that this special status of autonomy did all kinds of strange things, both on the ground locally as well as throughout the empire. And a big piece of the book, I guess, is this new way of seeing, relatively new way of seeing modern Egypt that has emerged in the past decades, not as this nation-building project from the first day Mehmed Ali took power, but rather a much more complex process. Can you talk more about what happened in Egypt in 1841 there right after this war with the Ottoman Empire

and right at the beginning of the Tanzamot period and why this is an exception and why this like kind of is baffling. I mean, this is what I find fascinating actually about both the Balkan autonomies that are hashed out in the 1830s and Mehmet Ali's autonomy in 1840, 1841 because you know, they're part of the same story and they're also deeply connected to Tanzimad. I mean, these crises in the empire are happening at the same time, and there are these kind of exceptional solutions that are worked out at precisely the same moment that the state is desperate to centralize. The big option on the table for many of the great powers with the exception of France, but also including the Ottomans, was let's give Egypt some sort of special status in order to push Mehmet Ali back to the confines of Egypt, because of course at this point, you know, his empire has spread off. into the Syrian lands. It's in Crete. It's all over the place. Initially, the sultan actually wants to depose him. He's like perfectly happy to give Egypt autonomy, but he wants to get rid of

Mehmed Ali, and that's part of this kind of negotiation. So again, when we think about autonomy as being imposed from the outside, what we actually see when we look at the debates amongst Europeans and Ottoman diplomats is real negotiation going on. So the Ottomans lose that one battle. Okay, we can't depose the guy, but they sort of win that Egypt can't. gets to stay within the empire. One of the things that distinguishes the autonomous provinces, including Egypt, is that they are all guaranteed in international law by treaties. So they all have a special status in terms of the politics of Europe and the security of

Europe. But the actual meaning of autonomy is hammered out in individual imperial edicts by the sultan. So for instance, the 1841 edict says things like, okay, your family has hereditary rule, Mehmed Ali. That's great. You know, you still have to send troops when the empire requires. And Egypt continues to do to send troops. For instance, there is a contingent of Egyptian soldiers that fought during the Crimean War between 1853 and 6. And very clearly, it says that all subjects in Egypt are subjects of the Sultan. And there's also a huge tribute. so autonomy pays.

So one of the challenges that you've taken on in this book is studying a system that looks rather different from case to case within the Ottoman Empire over the decades you cover. You talk about the autonomy of Egypt, which is reflected essentially in Mehmet Ali maintaining a hereditary dynasty, which was not that strange a few decades before in the Ottoman Empire, kind of how they did things. But anyway, this exception to the Tanzimot rule, And then you run through a series of other cases where autonomy meant maybe something more communal, something different. So can you tell us some of those cases, the years, and just briefly what that autonomous agreement looked like?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So for instance, if we start with the first one, Serbia and Walekeya, Moldavia, and Samos, I mean, the Serbian case, I think is kind of most interesting because Prince Milosh, the guy was not a prince, right? He's basically a rabble-rouser warlord who's elevated to a prince. And if we look at the agreements that he gets, I mean, he just gets an enormous amount of local control. Again, it's hereditary. So it's also like the creation of a sort of mini monarchy within empire or mini principality within empire. You know, Mount Lebanon, of course, is a very different case from 1860, 1861. That's a case where France, you know, in the midst of enormous communal violence between Muslims and not.

Muslims, France intervenes. They're like ready to go to town, but Fouad Pasha shows up first and manages to effectively convince the great powers to, you know, create this special status for Mount Lebanon where there's a Christian governor appointed by Istanbul who will serve for any number of years. There's also, in the case of Mount Lebanon, a mixed council. Crete is another case. One of the strangest cases is actually Kuwait. When I was writing this chapter on autonomy during the era between 1908 and the First World War, I was like, what case do I choose? Because I could have gone with, I could have gone with Armenia. I was really obsessed with Albania for a long time, actually. But I ultimately settled on Kuwait because it seemed like such a strange case and a little bit

different than the others, because it's an agreement that's hashed out between Britain and the Ottomans in order effectively to undercut Mubarak, who's the local on the ground, who has all of this power. So every case is different. Another thing that happens is that the Ottomans themselves preemptively offer autonomy in different cases. And one example we've already talked about was Ibn Saud in 1914, but also Yemen is perhaps a better example of that. And then, you know, places like Mecca and Jerusalem had a special status where they reported directly to Istanbul and that too is I think part of this how do we on one hand how are we centralizing tantzimat you know we're doing tanzimat everywhere but how are we creating spaces of legal

exception in a intensely centralizing empire and so mecca and Jerusalem perhaps not Yemen but do you think mecca and Jerusalem had those I know I guess statuses because of their religious significance yeah yeah and I think it was protecting them from the outsiders, protecting them from the invaders. As Michael Christopher Lowe writes about in Imperial Mecca, what do we see is that the Hajj becomes this opportunity for great powers to intervene in various ways. And so creating autonomy and its sort of special status for Mecca and Jerusalem is about protecting these cities that are under a kind of threat from the outside.

When these treaties are being negotiated, you often describe that there are debates about the meanings of certain terms. And that's a recurring theme, I think, in almost every chapter of your book, there are debates about language, whether that's diplomats debating or lawyers and so on. So for example, what suzerainty means versus sovereignty or autonomous versus decentralized. So can you talk a bit about the importance of language? also the translation between French or English into Ottoman Turkish and what that entails. Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that from the late 18th century, but certainly into the early 19th century, European observers look at the Ottoman Empire. They look at Ottoman administrative practices and they're like, yeah, there's something really weird going on in places like the

Crimean Hanate in places like Egypt. They don't really know how to interpret it, but they end up using feudal terms like suzerainty in order to describe the relationship between those provinces that seem to have an enormous amount of local control and the imperial center. Initially, this isn't a problem, but by the time we get to the 1830s, the word suzerainty becomes a deeply bad word because it undermines Ottoman sovereignty. So one of the huge debates across the 19th century that is part of this back and forth autonomy politicking is about this debate of do we, is the word suzerentie or the word sovereignty. Ottoman lawyers, Ottoman diplomats constantly say, no, no, no, we have sovereign

rights in these territories, not suzeran rights. And they understand that suzerainty is about undercutting Ottoman control and claims to sovereignty in different territories. And, you know, I should say that we generally, when we analyze all of the autonomous provinces, whether it's Eastern Rumalia, Mount Lebanon, certainly Serbia, certainly the Balkan autonomies, we think of them as a kind of stepping stone halfway house to independence. One of the things I'm really pushing back against is that's not how the state saw them. That's also not how lots of locals on the ground and throughout the empire saw these provinces. And I just think it's an important kind of shift for how we think about the late empire.

On the subject of language, you also talk about a transformation that happened, which I had read in documents, but I never picked up on, which is that the capitulations, what we call the capitulations in English, these extraterritorial privileges, largely to European powers, also undergo a transformation and terminology that fits with this story. My argument is that the 1830s are really, really crucial for working out and legalizing Ottoman inequality within the system of Europe. I mean, the capitulations themselves become permanent treaties. Europeans start insisting that there are permanent treaties in precisely this period.

I mean, they try to do so a little bit earlier, but it is really the 1830s, even when we think about something like the Treaty of Baltimore in the late 1830s, all of these things are kind of happening at the same time. So the autonomous provinces, the capitulations becoming permanent rather than privileges. And they all have the same name, right? They're all called MTIAS, the special privileges for non-Muslims, concessions that the, you know, capitalists are running to get all over the empire a little bit later than the 1830s. They all have that same word MTIAS, which tells us something.

are exceptional. Speaking of the debate about language and stuff, often the people involved in these debates were international lawyers. And you have very two interesting characters throughout your book, so Ibrahim Hakka, an Ottoman Muslim, and then Gabriel Nurudongyan, an Ottoman Armenian. And they essentially made their careers as international lawyers debating between Ottoman law and European law. Can you talk about those two characters? I guess they're careers. Another one of the big arguments of the book is that the empire turned to international law as one of its kind of go-to instruments in fighting against Europe in order to preserve the state.

And this happens certainly with the capitulations, but it really happens with the autonomous provinces first, and it's precisely because they're guaranteed an international law by treaty and in the state. The state slowly starts on a very ad hoc basis hiring Europeans. So, hey, can you help us with this border commission? Hey, can you help us with X, Y, and Z, you know, the Treaty of Paris in 1856, we need some help. Even the debates about the Balkans between 1876 and 1878, there are Europeans on hand that are hired out, they're hired guns. And clearly, with the loss of territory in the Balkans, and these are mostly autonomous

provinces that are lost, right? It's Serbia, Wallachia, Moldavia, Romania, and 1878, also, pushes autonomy. So there's a threat to extend autonomy into the six eastern provinces that Europeans call Armenia in the same period. And there's also this switch in Bosnia where the state itself, the Ottoman state, says, hey, now it's autonomous. On the heels of the catastrophe of 1878, of course, Britain invades and occupies Egypt. So the state is in total crisis mode. And there's the sense of we have to formalize international law as part of the diplomatic apparatus. And this is where are two, they're kind of heroes. The two heroes of the story come in in the early 1880s. The foreign ministry creates the Office of Legal Counsel, and there are always two chief legal

advisors. I'm not sure why, but after Gabriel Noor Duncyan gets the post, and soon after Ibrahim Hakopasha, he gets the post in 1890s, it's always one Muslim and one Armenian. I've looked everywhere, and I can't figure out why, but that's just how it worked out. And they really dominate this Hemedian era office. I mean, they're the guys who are really calling the shots, authoring scores and scores of legal opinions that are then sent on to diplomats in places like Berlin and Paris and London. In terms of training, you know, what's interesting is that, for me, is that someone like Gabriel Nordwinkin, you know, he grows up in Istanbul, he ends up going to school for political science and also law and Europe. That was very typical of this kind of first

generation in the 1880s of lawyers. What ends up happening, especially after this kind of the domination of Ibrahim Haka and Gabriel Nore Dunkin, is that they end up training Ottomans in-house. So the Maktabi Hukuk, the law faculty in Istanbul, becomes this kind of a hathouse for training lawyers. And so if you were to study international law, for instance, in the late Ottoman Empire, first off, Ibrahim Hakopasha may have been your professor, so would Gabriel Nurudunki, and before they both become chief legal advisors to the foreign ministry. And you would have studied, you know, you'd learn, it doesn't matter if you're Muslim or non-Muslim, you would have learned Islamic law, you would have learned administrative law, but you also would have learned international

law. There are several years where you had to take international law classes. You make the point that international law as a profession in this time period is much more highly regarded in the Ottoman Empire because of, I guess, the necessity of the situation. There's no question that this is important. This is like central to the Ottoman Empire's future. And you continue to use the term positive international law. What does that mean? Okay, so there's a huge debate amongst historians of international law. there was an old argument that said, if we look at international lawyers or people who write about the law of nations in the 18th century,

and earlier when they talk about international law, they're guided by natural law ideas, meaning that international law or the law of nations is applicable to all people. It doesn't matter your religion. It doesn't matter your race. None of that stuff matters. It's universal. Then something weird happens in the 19th century. And this was the old argument for many, many years.

something weird happens where there's this kind of challenge of, well, what is international law properly so called? This is the famous Austinian challenge to the field that says really, I mean, it's the same argument that we have today. Does international law exist if there isn't an enforcement mechanism? So many, initially European international lawyers start saying, well, what is international law? What counts as international law? And they start pointing to the sources of international law, treaties, existing agreements, practice. There's customary international law. How do we engage in warfare?

How do we make peace treaties? And so for the Ottomans, for Ottoman lawyers, this is like the best opportunity ever because they're like, oh, guess what? We have the longest treaty relationship with these people. I mean, we, and what you see over and over again is Ottoman lawyers and diplomats kind of shaking different treaties at European powers and their negotiations. the most important of which, of course, is the Treaty of Paris in 1856, which invites the Ottoman Empire to enter the concert of Europe and the family of nations. Huge debates about that afterwards, but Ottomans constantly have that in their pocket.

Like, oh, I'd like to return to this moment of 1856 when you invited us to join the family. So my argument about positivism is that the Ottoman lawyers were kind of more positivist than European lawyers. So the kind of more recent history of international law says, no, no, no, positivism and naturalism existed side by side. That's also true in the Ottoman case. But Ottomans really see an opportunity because if one of the main sources of international law is treaties, they've got boxes and boxes of those, which proves their equality

with Europe for them. Just inverts the picture of the Ottoman Empire continually having agreements forced upon it by European powers and then having to work within them, it's kind of a different story, right, that they're taking them seriously and actually being quite litigious in some cases. Yeah, yeah. And you know, what's interesting is they don't always win. And I guess that's the thing. It's like the sometimes there are spectacular wins. Other times there are spectacular failures. But as we know, the late Ottoman Empire was deeply pragmatic. And so these very legalistic bureaucrats would sort of take what they could get.

And yes, they would lose. But guess what? It was better to have an autonomous Serbia than an independent Greece, right? And so there's a kind of pragmatism, I think, that animated these lawyers work. But again, they're also big successes. Like, just to give you a weird example, in 1882, when Britain invades and occupies Egypt, there's this huge question between the foreign office and the Admiralty about, oh my God, how do we treat Egyptians on the ground? What are they? And all of these kind of lawyers

go back and forth in London and they finally say, well, they're Ottoman subjects and we have some agreements about the laws of war with the Ottoman Empire, which means you have to treat all Egyptians on the ground as Ottoman subjects and they have to be subject to the laws of war. So that's kind of surprising, right? Yeah, it's really interesting. Within all the debates about international law. There's also sometimes a bit of frustration. So, for example, when Britain invades Egypt, there are debates between, or there's frustration among French and Ottoman lawyers. I have a quote here. They say, they essentially ask, if longstanding treaties and rights could be trampled on so explicitly without protest, what was the value of international law? So there's a bit of frustration about

that and that sort of reminds me about the way international law works in the world today with the UN and I'm especially thinking about the genocide in Gaza and you know the lack of accountability the frustration with you know international law to do anything about it so what can your study tell us about the state of international law in the world today yeah I mean I think that I have kind of two thoughts about this one of which is that Saad Zahul in his kind of famous letter to Wilson and clementso says the world is now it's too big to have two moralities one for europe and one for the rest of the world we can't do that anymore we need to have a single morality in other words a single legal order and you know i think that that a lot of people learn that lesson during the first

world war the ottoman foreign ministry for instance learns by 1911 with the italian invasion and illegal invasion and occupation of Libya you know all of these ottoman lawyers go absolutely crazy. They draft all kinds of reports. They ask for their case to be heard at the Hague because we signed the Hague conventions. Why isn't someone intervening? And none of the great powers intervene. Lots of people who support the idea of international law saw this is Europeans, and Americans, saw this is hugely dangerous. Like, hey, aren't we totally cutting off the legs of our own project of saying that international law is something that will smooth international relations? when the great powers decide not to defend the Ottomans in Libya, there's a kind of change,

whereas in the 19th century, international law is very much a weapon of the week. We see the shift, especially amongst figures like Ibrahim Hakkapasha, even though he's no longer in the Office of Legal Counsel, where international law is something that has to be a weapon of the strong. Japan learns this lesson in like the 1870s and starts imposing their own extraterritorial treaties on places like China and Korea. It really takes 1911, I think, for the Ottoman lawyers to learn this. In other words, that international law is a fixed game that, you know, technically we're part of the family of nations, but we're not. There's an asterisk next to us. We don't actually have

complete sovereignty because there are all of these European limitations on our sovereignty from the capitulations to the concessions to the autonomous provinces. I mean, and it's one of the reasons why the Committee of Union and Progress, which is like hell-bent on centralizing the empire, especially once they seize power in 1913 all the way through the war. I mean, they're working against all of those limitations. So I think that the story really, really matters. I think in terms of legalized inequality in international relations. I mean, I remember when everything started in Gaza, that there were a number of especially Gulf states, representatives of foreign ministries, sort of saying, hey, are there two international laws here?

And it's almost as though we've returned to this moment, this eureka moment that the Ottomans have. You know, in one of the later chapters we see the Ottomans insisting that we're going to use international law in the way that all great power European states do. So we reject all of the clauses and all of the treaties that limit our sovereigns. in any way. Well, Professor Janelle, you've already foreshadowed the end of the story with the mandate, period, and this system transferring from Ottoman to British and French hands. But can we talk a little more about this hugely important moment when the Committee of Union and Progress takes power after the 1908 constitutional revolution, when they consolidate essentially one party rule in the empire after 1913, how they're approaching the question of autonomy. it doesn't sound like a regime that would be amenable to the kinds of autonomy that had been fostered over previous decades. And yet. And yet. Yeah. I mean, one of the big puzzles for me is that the Committee of Union and Progress presided over the largest expansion of the system of autonomy

and the empire since 1878. I was like, this is a puzzle of what's happening. So I looked at debates from the early, you know, from 1908 until 1913 with the coup d'etat. And one of the things, you know, historians have written about this, but there's this. push and pull between those people who say, we need decentralization. It's the only way to save the empire against both internal and external foes. The only way to do it. And then, of course, the Committee of Union Progress says, no, no, no, no, no. Everyone needs to check their difference at the door and sort of subsume difference under a kind of singular idea of Ottoman citizenship in order to centralize a state and strengthen it against internal and external foes.

So there's this big debate that unfolds really from 1908 to 1913. And one of the things that I find fascinating is that people like Sabahaddin, who's, you know, like the face of decentralization, he will insist every other day, hey, guys, what I'm talking about has nothing to do with autonomy. It has nothing to do with that sad Serbia story, that sad Egypt story. I'm talking about something else. I'm talking about, you know, derogating a level of control to the provinces so that people know where their tax money is spent, right? Like electrification happened here because of my

tax dollars. And it's about buy into the state. That's what Sabahedin says over and over and over again. And then what's interesting is that the CUP is like, nope, you guys are such liars. You are such liars. You say that decentralization has nothing to do with autonomy, but there is no way that that's not what everyone is thinking. And of course, during the same period, there are power brokers across the empire, particularly the peripheries of the Arab land. that are agitating for more and more autonomy. And it's in this context, of course, that Yemen gets autonomy, that Kuwait gets autonomy. Oddly, Ibn Saoud gets autonomy also in May of 1914.

And it's Ibrahim Hakapasha who hammers out the deal. And it's to kind of protect Nedge effectively from Britain. Obviously, the story ends in a different way. But, I mean, the point that I'm trying to get at is that this sort of push and pull, there's a real fight about language in what decentralization versus centralization means. And of course, during the First World War, this is going to, you know, from 1913 onwards, when the CUP pursues, you know, intense, intense centralization, that's catastrophic effects. Now, at least, I mean, they agree to the 1914 Armenian Reform Agreement, which will create the six eastern provinces of the empire to autonomous provinces. And if we look at the Russian lawyer who hammered out what this plan looked like, you know what he's looking at. Like his source material is, hmm, what does the Reglomont look like for Mount Lebanon? What does Crete look like? So he very self-consciously creates an order that is based on the existing autonomous provinces for the Armenian Reform Agreement. Of course,

that agreement is canceled in December of 1914. And it has catastrophic. effects for the Ottoman Armenian population. But during the war, we see the CUP hammering away in other ways in terms of centralization. So for instance, Arabs who wanted decentralization before the war and wanted very basic things like linguistic rights. Like I'd like to be able to write my petition in Arabic and learn in Arabic rather than in Ottoman Turkish. Those guys, when Jamal Pasha goes to Beirut, I mean, we know the story very well and he finds Pico, cache of documents where he's met with all of these different figures, Jamal Pasha says, these guys are seditious. And of course, they're all spectacularly hung in public in places like

Beirut and Damascus. But what's interesting about that cache of documents that Jamal Pasha found because he published them in Ottoman, Turkish, and Arabic and French during the war to kind of justify the judicial execution of these very prominent Arab figures, one of the things that blew my mind was just reading some of the critiques emanating from the Arab provinces because they say things like, hey, CUP, you've given away Kuwait. You've given autonomy to places that shouldn't have it. You're the one who's offering foreign concessions on the Tigris and Euphrates. You're the problem. And of course, the CUP as the war continues, will ultimately switch gears. Like by around 1917, it's like, we made a big, a little bit of a whoopsy. And we need to sort of pull

back. And that's when we start to see the first, it's very puzzling, the first kind of idea of like, maybe this autonomy thing isn't so bad and maybe we can use it to hold on to the state. Yeah. And then after World War I is the whole Wilsonian principles and the hype around that. And so, you know, when we think about that, a lot of times we think about nationalists claiming that the Wilsonian principles support them and their rights to, you know, self-govern. But Ottomans don't see it that way. They see it as a protection for their empire and for imperialism. So can you talk a little bit about that debate and principle 12 especially? Yeah, exactly. I mean, this shocked me because like everyone else, I read Erasminella and was like,

oh yeah, totally. Nationalism is on fire everywhere. This makes perfect sense. These people who are agitating on the street with Vilsom principally. signs all over the empire. What do they care about? They care about a Turkish nation state. But then I start reading the speeches. I start looking at government documents. And I'm like, oh, man, this is not what it means. So first off, when Wilson issues his 14 points, the Ottoman newspapers and the Capitol are kind of hilarious. They're like, oh, look at these imperialists. Why are they always trying to undercut us? And, you know, they literally shrug it off and say, this is just wartime propaganda, forget about these people.

But when it's pretty clear the war is over, and it's also clear that Germany and Austria are going to pursue a peace, according to Wilsonian principles, the Ottomans get on board. But they get on board because they're really excited about Article 12, which is the one that relates to the Ottoman Empire. It looks a lot, actually, like the article that relates to the Habsburg Empire, and it says the Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire will be assured a secure sovereignty, whereas the other nationalities under, I can't remember this, Turkish or Ottoman rule,

will be assured autonomous development. So from an Ottoman perspective, they're like, oh, my God, Wilson sees us, he gets us, he knows that this is what we've been doing all of these years. And so right away, Iset Pasha announces in parliament, guys, we are reorganizing the Ottoman Empire as a series of autonomous provinces. Arabs have autonomy. There's, you know, nothing is said in those debates about, well, what about the status of non-Muslims? what about, you know, and of course, you know, as we know during this period, there's also

lots and lots and lots of intense discussion about the Armenian genocide also in the immediate Ottoman press. But the point is, is that the state says, hey, we're going to have autonomy. When they prepare to go to the Paris Peace Conference, same thing. There are all of these legal opinions that say, okay, what should we do? Well, you know, we could look, we could do like, we could pull a United States of America, do this federal thing. But honestly, we don't need to do that, right? We don't need to like adopt a foreign model because that's always so dangerous in the Ottoman case.

We don't need to adopt what the foreigners do. We have our own thing. And it's based on our own constitutional history. We can take the model of Egypt, the model of Mount Lebanon, and apply it everywhere in the empire. And we know that there's always the kind of danger with that system,

but it's the best system that we have now. And then, of course, the Ottomans go to Paris in the summer of 1919. And, you know, it's announced, you guys aren't fit for empire. So the subtitle of the book is the Ottoman origins of the mandate system. Where does this leave us? What are those Ottoman origins more precisely?

The mandate system is established over the course of 1920 to 23. And there's a little negotiation that takes place in the years to come as people resist the imposition of the system. What's the Ottoman dimension besides what you've already said with this longstanding tradition of like autonomy as an approach to imperial rule? Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple of things. If we look at debates during the 1920s, especially at the League of Nations, about the question of where sovereignty resides in the mandates, huge like drag down, knock down fights. I mean, Susan Peterson talks about this, too,

that Quincy Wright identifies something like nine different theories of where sovereignty resides in the mandates. And one of my big arguments is that Britain, Britain in particular, really learns we don't need to have sovereignty in order to have control. So we don't need to do what we did with the Indian princely states. We don't need to offer sovereignty within empire. We can actually have a kind of internationalized form of control and be okay with it and still get all of the benefits without the burdens of governance, basically. That's part of the story. Also, one of the great, because you're right, that the mandate system is something that is hashed out, worked out. I mean, it's announced, of course, in

what is it, January 28th, I think, 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. It's announced pretty early. It's fascinating to see how people in Istanbul react to that announcement. A lot of people think, oh, this is European great power intervention. As usual, this looks a lot like autonomy that we've seen before. So in other words, locals on the ground see a relationship. But very critically, the big missing actor in the story of establishing British and French rules, across the Arab Middle East is the Ottoman Empire. And it drives me nuts. It's like the empire doesn't die until 1923. And, you know, I think that we end up getting taken into the story of Mustafa Kamal and we don't pay as much attention to what's happening in Istanbul. Those two stories

are clearly deeply connected. But just the fact of Ottoman sovereignty shapes what is possible in terms of the mandates themselves. And it's really only when the Turkish delegation decides, okay, we're abandoning the empire in favor of the state, that those claims begin to fall apart, the extending the empire claims. So in 1920, Chapter 6, Gabriel Nurudjongyan makes a reappearance, and he kind of argues for the right for Armenians to have a national home. So can you talk a little bit about his career and what that moment looked like for Armenians? Yeah, well, I think it's a really, really crucial.

moment. So Gabriel Nordunkin at the second conference at the Lausanne conference from 1922 to 1923, he shows up and he's like hanging out with his former employee, Munir Bay. I mean, I can't even imagine what this must have been like. At this point, he's living in exile in France. His property's been confiscated. I mean, this is one of the most, you know, elite, educated superstars of the late empire who'd been a guardian of empire. And here he is asking, begging, you know, is it possible to establish an Armenian home in the six eastern provinces? And it's interesting. He uses the same language as the Balfour Declaration, home. He doesn't say homeland. He's the exact same language. And he's at Pasha rejects him outright. And he says, there's absolutely no way, because autonomy

is incompatible with sovereignty. So ultimately, you know, I think that the story shows a huge change in terms of the Ottoman into Turkish foreign ministry, where we can't have multiple competing overlapping forms of sovereignty. We can't allow there to be mechanisms and instruments which allow the great powers to intervene in the state. I mean, it's why the caliphate will be voted out of existence via the parliament in 1924 in just a few short years. But of course, for someone like Gabriel Nordunkien, this is a massive crisis. And you can actually trace this story a bit in the League of Nations archives because he's talking to the Minorities Commission

and saying, you know, how can we protect Armenians that continue to exist? I mean, this is, you know, Larna Mecchiolus, incredible work as well. And of course, as we know, Turkey will sign a minority rights treaty, but it's much, much, much more kind of circumscribed than say what Poland has to sign in 1919. What was the most surprising thing you learned while working on this?

Honestly, the most, well, there's two big surprising things. I mean, they're basically my two big arguments. The most surprising thing was, oh, my God, there's a bazillion Egypt's. It's not just one story. And to realize, because I had thought, well, maybe it's about occupation. So maybe Egypt and Bosnia makes sense together. And then what I realized is, oh, my God, no, there's this whole weird autonomy story. And the surprise was really seeing the institutional development around

autonomy in order to keep these provinces in the state. So for instance, there's a special office of autonomous provinces, the way in which autonomy was increasingly sort of codified as part of the Ottoman legal order. That shocked me. Professor Janelle, thank you so much for your time. This was a really good read. I tend to be intimidated by legal histories, but this, you broke everything down so nicely and I was excited to like you know follow the characters and the narrative you very well written. Thank you so much for having me. And that's so lovely to say thank you. I really enjoyed this. Thanks guys. Yeah. So thank you so much for your time. Our listeners should check out the book and also our website where we will have a bibliography and other resources.