Ottoman History Podcast - WWI and the End of the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

with Mustafa Aksakal hosted by Chris Gratien and Sıla Önder | The First World War brought an end to six centuries of Ottoman imperial rule and in many ways, made the Middle East region as it is known today. In this episode recorded live at the University of Virginia Institute for the Arts and Humanities, we are joined by Mustafa Aksakal, author of two books about the Ottoman Empire's involvement in WWI. In his new book The War That Made the Middle East, Prof. Aksakal takes a fresh look at the fateful decisions of the empire's last days, as well as how the First World War transformed Ottoman society and politics with devastating consequences for the people who lived it and lasting implications for the future Middle East region.    « Click for More »

I love this Georgetown connection, but never have I really thought of you guys as students, but I've always thought of you as peers. And that's how we've always thought of you as well, but we do like to own you in front of this audience of students. Definitely. So be there at 2 p.m. for Kate Dhanes, and then at 3.30 p.m. This is the Ottoman history podcast. I'm Chris Grayton, and that was a clip from a conversation with Mustafa OxyCol.

recorded in front of a friendly crowd of longtime colleagues and collaborators during a workshop on the theme of Ottoman society at the end of empire held at University of Virginia. As a scholar who studied virtually every aspect of the Ottoman Empire's experience of the First World War, Professor Aksical was the perfect guest to get things started. In this conversation, I sat down with my former Georgetown University professor, Mustafa Aksacol, and my own student, Sulla-Undar, to talk about his new book, the war that made the Middle East, World War I, and the end of the Ottoman Empire. Just out from Princeton University Press, it's billed as a new history that tells the story

of how European imperial ambitions destroyed the Ottoman Empire during the Great War and created a divided and unstable Middle East. And it delivers that and so much more. Our conversation with Professor Aksicol in an audience of some two dozen historians explored the history of the First World War as both a productive and destructive event on an imperial scale, the political debates and transformations that the war generated and its many legacies for post-war society. Hi, Chris, hi, Sala.

Thank you so much. Thank you for that kind introduction that I'm not sure I deserve, but I very much appreciate it. Thank you for this opportunity to talk about the book. Thank you for organizing this workshop and symposium. Thank you for using an old picture of a much younger me on the

symposium announcement poster. Well, you haven't changed very much and I'm glad that that's the case because you have been one of our most elusive guests. We started the autumn history podcast at Georgetown University in 2011 and that was just

when you had published your first book, I think. And we wanted you to sit down with us and you were elusive. It took me a moment to gather and collect my thoughts. Yeah, exactly. Well, you've collected them now in this great book, The War, that made the Middle East. I want to start off by asking you to talk about what you were trying to do in this book.

There are many books about the end of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War and a lot that have come out in recent years. But one of your contributions is you're really trying to further a narrative of the war that overcomes a problem with previous generations of scholarship that, is often segregated into ethno-nationalist groups. So, you know, how each community experienced the war and with this teleology of the nation-states that would emerge out of the Ottoman Empire. You try to bring them together in a single Ottoman story rather than what you call separate dramas.

So tell us what that story is. So maybe the first thing that I could say is that the history of the Ottoman First War remains, of course, an intensely contested ground, contested history. The national cultures, national stories in the Middle East today, for them, this history, the history of the First World War often plays a very crucial part. But maybe more importantly, one reason this is such contested ground, such contested history,

is the fact that the war was experienced so differently by so many different groups and populations across this. vast and diverse Ottoman population. So religious affiliation, ethnicity, language, class, gender, geography, environmental conditions. All of these factors obviously structured and determined how the war was experienced. And so those disparate experiences of the war in turn produced very disparate histories or multiple histories. So writing a holistic or an integrated history of the Ottoman First World War proved to be such a challenge precisely because doing justice to the great variety of experiences

is obviously not an easy or straightforward task. And so for me, the way I tried to address that challenge was not by attempting to tell the history of all the future national groups that would come out of this, but instead to have tried to tell the story of empire rather than the story of all the various religious and national groups. So I've tried to keep the focus on imperial stories, imperial dynamics, imperial sensibilities, imperial institutions, on imperial ways of being.

Of course, one doesn't have to go searching far and wide for such stories. they are abundant. But one does have to sort of clear a lot of the national and nationalist noise that tends to come with this period. So in the book I tried to really emphasize the point that the nationalities and the national identities

that dominate understanding of the Middle East today had not yet crystallized in 1914. And while national and national religious identities, of course, existed long before 1914. I tried to show that they meant very different things in the pre-1914 period, in the pre-war period. So the meaning of these national and religious ethnic identities was transformed in wartime. And the new identities coming out of the war were born in this period of great violence. So I argue that it was not the empire's diversity

or the ethnic and religious differences among its populations that led to some sort of natural breakdown of social relations in the empire, but rather that it was the unionist's policies in the context of global war against the Entente and against populations at home whom they affiliated with the Entente, that in the end the Empire was destroyed. So pre-1914 domestic political contestation and strife fused after August 1914 with global conflict and global war. The way I think of it now is that it was this fusing of the external

sort of global crisis and the very contested internal politics before 1914 that destroyed the empire. And a lot of this sort of unfolded in the month between, say, August, 1914 and March and April 1915. So I think that period is really very pivotal and crucial in turning on the mechanic for the subsequent policies that would be unfolding. To go back to the question of the Ottoman entry to the First World War, so in your first book, the Ottoman wrote to war, you beautifully illustrated why many in the empire saw the war as an opportunity to further certain political goals and how that ultimately led to the alliance with the central powers in Germany. Yet, as you described in this book, Ottoman officials also

sought potential alliances with the Entente, I would be interested to know how that fateful choice to make the alliance with the central powers ultimately came to be. The unionists anti-imperialism was quite complicated. Their anti-imperialism was not one of rejecting Western European states and the great powers sort of outright, but rather their objection was to not being part of that European-based state system and international society. And of course, in many ways, they were part of that system, but not on their own terms. And they thought they did not exercise the same degree of power and authority as the great powers, of course. This contradiction being in confrontation with European power, but also

wanting to be part of it produced what often seems like sort of contradictory or paradoxical kind of behavior. So after the 1908 Ottoman Revolution, Young Turk Revolution, Constitutional Revolution, they actually pursued closer economic integration with European states rather than to cut themselves off from this system. They especially pursued agreements. with repeatedly and alliances repeatedly with Great Britain. These were rejected for various reasons on the British side that we can go into in the Q&A. But maybe here I'll share a quick story.

Just one week after the Ottoman Revolution in 2008, at the end of July 1908, the British Foreign Secretary Edward Gray writes in some detail that a functioning constitutional system in the Ottoman Empire that functioning a sort of parliamentary, a deliberative system in the Ottoman Empire would pose a problem for British Empire

and British imperialism in Egypt and India. So he was actually quite interested in seeing the unionist, the CUP government, collapse after that revolution, and to sort of reverse, roll back constitutional movement just as Britain had done before, say in 1881 in Egypt, during the Urabi rebellion, or in Iran,

you know, in that case, working together with the Russians and the North, they're rolling back the Iranian constitutional movement there. The attempt to get sort of into some kind of agreement or alliance or closer cooperation with the British really got no traction. From the end of June to the end of October 1914, so for four solid months, right, before the Ottomans entered the war at the very end of October 1914, the unionists try again and again to reach some kind of agreement and alliance with the Entente. In fact, after 1908, the Unionists in 1909, in 2011, 1913, and again in 1914, had approached the British for possible alliances. So in that four-month period, the Unionists both approach repeatedly, constructively, I think, the British, but also the French and also the Russians. There's a story of an intercepted Russian telegram that the Russian ambassador, in Istanbul is sending back to his boss, the Russian foreign minister in St. Petersburg.

And in this telegram that the Ottomans sort of end up intercepting in early September 1914, in that telegram, the Russian ambassador says, we should keep talking to the Ottomans until that point in time when we can set foot into Istanbul ourselves. So in other words, we can string the Ottomans along. And in fact, the unionist experience in these negotiations from August till October or November, very much sort of they were getting the feeling that they were being thrown along. I could add just sort of one point also that the union is, of course, just like many revolutionaries and statesmen, political leaders, intellectuals in 19th and early 20th century Europe,

were also very much affected by these ideas of social Darwinism, right? This idea that nations and states, they're sort of entangled and constant struggle and that they sort of have to be moving and acting. And so passivity, neutrality, sitting back, sitting on the sidelines, was not really something the unionist sort of, in terms of their disposition, were inclined to do, right? they had fought in Macedonia, they had gone to Libya when Italy invaded in 1911, so that these were, they thought of themselves as men of action and as sort of in this age

of science and progress and modernity, you don't just sit back, but when the moment comes, you sort of, you show your metal, you go to the battlefield and you do what needs to be done. Right. I think also very much of their worldview at the time. And it wasn't just them. This was sort of a global discourse or a global practice among certain groups and parties at this time. Right. War as a driver of political and social change, the military as an institution, as a driver of political and social change.

A lot of the leadership comes directly up through the military, right? And you sketch that out excellently. During the war, especially after 1960, there are all sorts of attempts to sort of build new things, right? whether it's infrastructure or sort of adopting new technologies, or whether it's just sort of reforming, legislating, modernizing institutions and law and society, so that there's both, of course, terrible destruction, but there's also building, right?

And this is what you're pointing out, that war also sort of opens sort of avenues to doing new things. I like that you describe it as a revolutionary war in one of the chapters because, and this kind of builds on, I think, what a lot of scholarship has been doing in the past decade. But, you know, as we talk about in the First World War class here at UVA, yes, the First World War is a geopolitical conflict, but for each of these countries, it's a major domestic event, a period of immense domestic change. And the book is your new book really has a strong domestic story that really, while this is a war between allies and, adversaries, it's also a war at home. And this is building towards a more integrated story of the war than we had from previous generations. So what do you think are some of the most important domestic developments that we're talking about with the First World War and the Ottoman Empire

that people should be paying attention to? Yeah, so I think telling a more holistic story really, sort of I really take my cue from the most sort of recent scholarship over the last 10 or 20 years or so that has really sort of in a way sort of blurred or done away with the the boundaries between, you know, what used to be sort of various subfields, you know, political, social, economic history and then sort of merge those of some of the newer fields of, you know, environmental history and sort of techno-legal histories, then it sort of made possible, you know, seeing the connection between these various sort of dynamics and forces.

Another thing that's really sort of helped telling a more integrated story is the fact that I think in the field of late Ottoman history, we're now using archival and non-archival sources in a variety, in a range of languages, and are able to tell sort of a much, sort of a fuller picture. Of course, research in these languages always existed, but I think we see them now sort of being brought together in a new way. And I think that's a real accomplishment of the field in late Ottoman history, that we're now seeing that kind of integrated history, not for the First World War, but more broadly.

And by other languages, you mean like... The local language is Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Ladino or Judeo, Spanish. So these capture not just the other communities experience, the non-dominant communities experience, but also their memory of the war and how that's different, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, and it should also, of course, not,

in a way, it should not come at the surprise that a multilingual... empire have or should have or must have a history written from multilingual sources. It seems kind of obvious, but it's a ton of work, right? It's not an easy task to do that. And I think we're struggling with that, but I think we're doing much better. Speaking about language, you ask about internal development. So in 1916, beginning actually in 1915, there is then,

There's an incredible debate in the parliament about requiring Ottoman Turkish to be the language of the way in which sort of businesses, companies interact with the central state. And that debate on language, on whether Ottoman Turkish should be a requirement to engage with the Ottoman state, really lays bare so many of the internal dynamics at that moment. Varkas, the Armenian representative, says, you cannot tax me or you cannot find me, you cannot punish me, an Ottoman Armenian for speaking Armenian. And he clearly sort of identifies himself as an Ottoman Armenian and having the right. And then the Arab representative says,

we've always been able to speak the local languages. So they tried to make an amendment that says, you must use Ottoman Turkish or one of the local languages, right, in order not to sort of spell them out. Of course, already the 1876 Ottoman Constitution had said Ottoman Turkish is the official language of the state, but that didn't restrict the language in the way that was attempted in the war years. Yeah, not only languages, but so many important figures

like members of the parliament can be left out of broader surveys of the First World War. So, yeah, it would be very interesting to talk a little bit more about the parliament and also the head of the Ottoman parliament, Ahmed Razaa, emerges as like a very fascinating person. Ahmed Razaa is a really interesting character in that he is this elder statesman of the unionists but have turned against them after the 1908 revolution. He has distanced himself from them

and he continues to be sort of a constant critic, scathing critic and a thorn and the side of the unionist, not afraid to really use very harsh language, criticizing unionist policies from the hunger crisis to the deportation of Armenians to the confiscation of property of Christian Ottomans. He says really a number of really sort of important things. He says, Ottoman sense of justice and Ottoman consciousness would never permit would never tolerate the expulsion of Armenians

and the confiscation of their property. And he says that a captain of a ship may be incredibly patriotic, right? But that ship, but he may not be able to know how to navigate the ship. And once that ship hits the cliffs, right, that it's too late for us here in the parliament to ask any questions.

So he's sort of urging his fellow representatives, and then later in the Senate to sort of engage in challenging the unionists throughout the war. He also says explicitly that he wants his criticism of the unionist to be recorded in the minutes. He does not think, he says, I cannot publish this anywhere, right, in the remaining newspapers. I cannot say this anywhere. I can only say it here. And so the parliament during the war years becomes this incredible imperial space. I mean, it remains one of the truly imperial institutions that survive the war.

Actually, one other sort of maybe most obvious point that's rarely made when we talk about the parliament is the fact that the parliament keeps meeting during First World War. This is not even the case in all of the sort of belligerent countries of Western Europe. The normal session, the meeting session is from October, November to about March. That's when the parliament is supposed to meet, and then in the summer month they're off. This also means that when sort of the greatest destruction in terms of policy begins in the spring of 1915, that the parliament has just shut down and everybody has gone home. So the parliament is not in session between March 1915 and October 1915.

And when they get back in October 1915, they ask all sorts of questions. They immediately ask about famine and hunger. They immediately ask about what is happening to our Armenians. And so the other important thing, I think, in studying the parliament and the debates is in the wartime period anyway, it gives us a sense of what is known in Istanbul. What do people know? What kind of, I mean, the unionists have clamped down on, they have shut down newspapers, they control the news, they control communication. But the parliament is this one place where apparently for some people, you can say you have a certain freedom to say what you want and you can have it, recorded in the minutes. I expected a hall of sort of yes men. I expected a hall of people who would

just kind of rubber stamp whatever the union is spring. And of course, I think the better sort of, we do know well that the union is they passed these temporary laws when the parliament was not in session. So a lot of legislation was made when there was no parliament, when there was no sitting parliament in session, right? So a lot of legislation was made that way. So the parliament couldn't act at the complete sort of break or hold on what laws were being passed. But I think it's fascinating that the parliament keeps meeting throughout the war years,

that it keeps having folks who stand up and criticize the unionists very explicitly, that they are Armenian, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, members of the Senate and of the Chamber of Deputies who keep serving throughout the war, Manuk Azarian Afandi serves in the Senate. He gets up and he says, I have been serving the state as an Ottoman for 46 years.

And no one can doubt that I want only the best for this Ottoman state and for the Ottoman Empire. But this law, they were talking about some law at that time, this law is not appropriate. I find that incredibly sort of exciting, surprising, counterintuitive that this Ottomanism continued to, some extent in the parliament throughout the warriors. Yeah, the parliamentary minutes are incredibly evocative and you're right, it's so interesting

to think about people having these imperial level conversations while things like the Armenian genocide, the famine in Mount Lebanon, and the movement, the mass movement of property is taking place that all of this is a conversation, right? people are debating it and there's competing blocks in these conversations. Yeah, I might just add that. It doesn't only start with the First World War, of course, that the parliament become such an interesting place. Even in the spring of 1914, Emmanuel Lides-Evente, elected from Smyrna Ismir, he gets up,

and he says this is during the period when a lot of Greek Orthodox are being ethnically cleansed or expelled from the Aegean coast. After the Second Balkan War, after the great powers have awarded a number of islands to Greece, and so this is supposed to be kind of a retribution for that. Emmanuel Lides-Effendi says, look, some of you are collectively accusing Greek Orthodox Ottomans as being unancafala, right? as being Greek-headed or being pro-Greek, right? And he says, give those Greek Orthodox,

give them justice, and they will become Ottomans, or they will become Ottoman Kauffalo, right? And I find those kinds of interactions to be incredibly powerful. So Professor Aksakal, to go back to the opposition, so outside the parliament, there was also this opposition that was taking place in the entente in like European capitals to the unionist policies.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that opposition that was taking shape outside the Ottoman Empire and the parliament. I thought it was really fascinating to see that opposition figures from various communities, but also Muslims and Turks, right? This is not some kind of Christian Muslim confrontation or contest. at all. But they're Arabs, their Kurds, they're Armenians who are working together or who are meeting and talking together.

Sabat Dinbe is also in the mix, a central opposition leader. They meet in Geneva. They meet in Paris. And the unionists are incredibly worried about this. There's one quote in the book by Talat who says, you know, Arabness, Armenianness, and other Thedishishishish.

activities, you know, are being perpetrated in Geneva. And the point of that message is that he wants the consul or the ambassador there, he wants to sort of, he wants him to sort of clamp down on those kinds of, those kinds of meetings. And so there was an imperial opposition that sort of was trying to unite and sort of express, you know, challenges to the unionist hold and policies and the way the unionists were waging war. I actually have a question about something that you were mentioning in the beginning of the podcast about this multi-ethnic vision for the empire that persisted till 1914. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that like multi-ethnic possibility

that the empire had prior to war. This is kind of counterfactual, I know, but... I love counterfactuals, but I also am very interested in the... this Ottomanism before 1914, and then it even continues, and then there's residual Ottomanism even continuing after 1918 into the 1920s, right? Michael Provence has written about this to some extent. There are movements in Egypt and Palestine. Nagupe Mahfuz, in his trilogy, you know, he makes references about what it would be like if Egypt would still be part of the Ottoman Empire. Of course, that is the kind of

Ottomanism that all at the same time primarily anti-British, right? So it's not just we want to be Ottoman, but we also want to get rid of sort of British control. But I think this Ottomanism is fascinating. What makes it complicated and interesting to study, I think, is that there were, of course, many Ottomanisms. There wasn't just a single Ottomanism, even after 1908. So the 1908 Unionist program says, this is what we understand by Ottomanism. race, ethnicity, language shall not be used to divide society. So it's a very assimilationist, and it is an Ottomanism intended to erase difference,

an Ottomanism intended to erase ethnic and religious difference. Whereas a lot of the non-Otomans, or the non-Muslim, non-Turkish communities, of course, understood under Ottomanism a way in which all of these different sort of identity identities or ways of belonging in which these communities could not only be sort of maintained, but could be foster, nurtured, strengthened, and would have a future within this Ottoman thing. I think one really important thing that the war does is that while politics before 1914 is contested

within the Ottoman state, after 1918, that contestation becomes demanding rights, outside of this Ottoman state in some other state, in some separate state or somewhere else, but not within this Ottomanist fold. I have a question about the anti-colonial state building that you mentioned in your introduction that the unionists engaged in after they came into power, this sort of anti-Western stance, but at the same time they were engaging in semi-colonialist activities. within the borders of the Ottoman Empire themselves. I was wondering if that practice carried on to the Turkish Republic,

because you briefly mentioned that in your conclusion, too. Yeah, for sure. I mean, in a sense, for a little bit anyway, not nationalism, but imperialism was the ideology that won out. And by that I mean that empire expanded into the Arablands, and the Turkish Republic, too, in many ways, functioned like an empire, right? It was still multi-ethnic, multilingual. It set about on sort of erasing those differences by various means.

In fact, the new government in Ankara set up these governing regions, right? Mutafeshikik governorates, districts that were in many ways. These were meant to be ruled like little enclaves, directly by the state. And so I think we can certainly talk about colonial policies in the Turkish Republic. That theme colonial, if for no other reason than those receiving those policies, felt that they were living under a colonized regime. Thank you, Professor OxyCall.

We'll talk lots more about the book with our audience, but I want to ask you one more question to get that conversation started. You know, we've kind of been talking about dissatisfaction that a lot of people have with earlier scholarship on the war. And one of the things that for me has always been frustrating is the teleology of how it's narrated, that whatever happens with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East that is created out of it, that's the story, as if that was the only outcome that could happen and sort of following the threads that lead to that outcome.

You obviously tell a much more complex story, but because the title is, the war that made the Middle East, what is this Middle East that was made? How do you see it? What's your contribution to this conversation about the making of the Middle East out of the First World War? I'm thinking not primarily, actually, of the making of the borders, of the new political boundaries. That's important, too. but to me that's not the central story. To me, it's a making of sort of entirely new sensibilities.

And in a technical sense, many of you will know that the phrase, the expression of the Middle East, really is also a product of the war. It really comes into sort of usage only after, sort of in the 1920s and then even later. The Middle East wouldn't have sort of made sense to a lot of contemporaries at the time. So in a technical sense, there's an invention, right,

that people have talked about of the Middle East. In my mind, that blanket geographic designation replaces a history, replaces institutions, replaces a legal culture of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multilingual empire that distance the region begins to distance that region in the 1920, then 1930s, the Arab length of the empire, also the Republic of Turkey,

from that past in a very explicit and deliberate way. Of course, Turkey sort of pulled the way, rejects that past. The new sort of Arab policies and societies begin to reject that past and very sort of important ways and begin to then replace it with their own national symbols and national stories.

And I think that is why, you know, the frustration that you're talking about that we, that the history of the 20th century gets read into the first part, the late 19th century, and then the pre-World War I think that's probably very much connected and related to that. Thank you. There's so much more to say, and we will say it. We have lots of time over a half an hour to keep the conversation going with the Q&A and comments from the audience. My name is Graham Pitts, and I followed your work for a long time,

and I'm interested in this dialogue between your first book and this one, specifically a question about how we resolve or understand the tension between the agency of the unionists and this structure of British French and Russian imperialism that left them cornered as you write in your new book. I really appreciate that question. Thank you. I want to keep agency on the unionists. They have agency in the way that they respond to the external pressures. The external pressures, imperialism, the policies of the British, the French, Germany, Russia, the Habsburgs,

I think we should take these seriously also without losing sight of the unionist's agency. and I guess we want to be sure that the unionists are seen as the historic actors that they are when it comes to the very destructive policies that they implement during the war. Those who have tried to negate that or deny the role of the unionists and have tried to ascribe their policies to the effects of imperialism have tended to sort of shift the responsibility, right, away from the unionists. unionists to imperialism. But I also don't think just because people have used imperialism, I've talked about empire and imperialism, to sort of exonerate or lift the burden from the unionist,

that we too should sort of not pay attention to the international context. So I think the international context is actually really important part also of the story that produces this, they're a very destructive convergence in 1914 and after. The international context also matters in that, I think, for the unionists, modernity, westernization, being a powerful state means being able to do some or all the terrible things that the British and the French and the Germans were doing. So modernization in the early 20th century, as a unionist saw it, didn't mean sort of building a more just and equitable society or having democracy,

but it meant having, in many cases, ruthless empire and being able to meet out punishment against sort of insubordinate subjects when necessary in the way that the British and the French were doing. So, or the Americans, for that matter, they also make reference to U.S. policies in North America, which I think is also really important. So their models were sort of ruthless empires, right? Not Western democracies. Hi, I'm Kate Dany's. I am very interested in this idea of the generative nature of the war,

the revolutionary nature of the war that we touched on at the beginning of this podcast in terms of infrastructure, et cetera. One of the things I've thought about a lot in the context of this history is also how the war created a space in this time of crisis for the implementation of more extreme policies that had lasting negative effects, such as genocide, the family law of 1917 that restricted women's divorce rights,

things of this nature. So I'm curious if you could talk more about how the CUP saw this moment, where they consciously aware that this is a space, in which we can implement these policies, we can do things we couldn't do before, or is this just part of the contingencies of the wartime period? I think on a number of levels that clearly, they even articulated explicitly. Talat is one of the times when he's called to the parliament. He explicitly says, I think there's a 1916,

he makes a reference to Frederick the Great to Prussia and the Prussian reforms. And he says a lot of that done was a lot of those reforms, and modernity or modernization of institutions was done during period of war. And we too, and now I'm paraphrasing, he says, we too have the opportunity during this war to climb to this pinnacle and transform Ottoman society. The confiscation of property clearly was one way in which it was supposed to be a long-term effect of creating a Muslim class of businesses and middle class. that people have written about.

And so both destruction and then construction, also literally in terms of infrastructure, there was a lot of investment in that. Hello, I'm Audrey's PhD candidate in the history department. I don't work on Ottoman history, but interested in international history, so that's why I'm here. My question has to do with economic challenges to the Ottoman Empire.

So recently scholars like Adam Tews and Stephen Kotkin have written about on macroeconomic challenges of the UK, France, Russian Empire, Germany phased during World War I. Could you talk maybe a little bit about how macroeconomic pressures affect the Ottoman ability to wage total war and also the government's relationship with its people, but kind of like more large scale rather than than microscale? Thank you. Thank you so much. I had hugely affected the Ottoman and then the unionist policies and the way in which the unionists wage war eventually. 19th century is a way of

they're bringing the Ottoman economy into some kind of balance with the European economy so the tariffs are a big part of this story that the Ottomans keep not unlike today I suppose that the Union is or the earlier in the 19th century

Tanzimant statesmen are trying to sort of raise tariffs and create some kind of more what they would deem fair sort of economic trade commercial relationship. The capitulations are a huge part of this question. Capitulations are, of course, economic, legal rights that non-Ottomans or Ottomans with foreign passports could take advantage of. I think in some ways, sort of the economic disparity and the sense of economic

exploitation that Ottomans began to articulate throughout the 19th century and then in the early 20th century. And for the unionists, this is both mantra, right? There is one section of the book called Ottoman money must stay in Ottoman hands. There is talk about the economic pressures as sort of a chains around our neck, right? So they're very sort of evocative language that also mobilized society in that way. In some ways, I think the social cost of the capitulation was actually higher, was actually greater than the economic cost. What the social cost of the capitulations did was it pitted Muslim populations against non-Muslim populations.

It cast non-Muslims as the economic allies of European companies and European powers. And I think in the end, even greater than the economic cost of the capitulations, was this social costs that deteriorated the stable relations among various communities in the empire. And then after 1908, there are a number of boycott movements, of course, that are very important to take into consideration in the way policy then later is made after 1914. Hi, my name is Judy De Aten. Thank you so much for this conversation. So I was wondering if you could talk about how famine in the late Ottoman era affected the later policies

for controlling agricultural production as well as population. So, yeah, there's very good work on how this was the moment, the birth of modern humanitarianism, how the British and the French basically sort of set the stage in the famine and hunger that they intended to create. create in Syria as a way then to step in and bring food relief, bring food aid, and sort of win the loyalty of a very sort of a starving population, right? This was, I think, quite intentional that a crisis was created, that then sort of the Anglo-French humanitarianism could alleviate and resolve, and also gave the British and the French in their mandates an opportunity to create a new kind of local elite that would be that would prove that would prove

cooperative i should note that um the british and the french they they have a correspondence in nineteen fifteen where they actually say that the intention of the naval blockade is to starve of a population in Syria in order to get them to rise up against the Ottoman state. The French Foreign Minister Cambon says, this is very useful. It will make all the Arabs hate the Ottomans. He said that explicitly, openly.

So killing civilians was an adopted British-French policy, killing Syrian civilians in 1950, 1916. was something that, I don't know if we can call it official policy, but the French foreign minister said that David Lloyd George says it. So it's part of the plan. And it creates a population that can then be sort of rescued by the allies. And in a way, kind of the plan for Germany as well, right? That this is how we're going to be Germany is kind of starve them.

They have better military, but we can block the coast. So there's a larger story as well there. Yeah, and the naval blockade of Germany gets so much attention, and they're scholars on that topic, sort of they go back and forth as to whether how many civilians died or if civilians died as a result of this blockade, whereas the real blockade, I think, is in the eastern Mediterranean, and it goes all the way from the Red Sea

all the way up to the Aegean coast, is actually not just Syria. It's also set up immediately in early August 1914. So the idea that the Ottomans chose Germany is also kind of undermined by that. Right, because in August 1914, the Ottomans were still neutral. Yeah, yeah. And as I argue a little bit about sort of the German alliance, the Ottomans alliance with Germany, is that they want this alliance with Germany, but they want to put it in their back pocket.

They want to sit on the alliance. They want to sit out the war. And if necessary, they want this alliance with Germany. in the post-war period to have international security and protection. It's really less preferable than an alliance with the Entente, but if they can't have that, then they'll have this sort of German alliance as a kind of backup. Thank you for this great presentation. This is Jan Gimouche.

I'm curious how do you think the whole experience of the World War I impacted the trajectory of capitalism in Turkey? We know that in the first war context, the Kemalese elite was able to revise the notion of militia, state or national economy as aetism in the 1930s. How you think this experience of the Great War was crucial in the trajectory of capitalism, basically? That was really central. I mean, the idea of the military weakness, diplomatic humiliation, lack of sovereignty, lack of political independence, and lack of economic financial control, I think these became the guiding principles after 1923.

I want to emphasize, though, that my impression is that it wasn't necessarily about cutting off the Turkish economy from the rest of the world, but by making it a full member in it, and that doesn't really happen until maybe until the 1980s. Hi, good morning. My question relates to your point about the post-imperial order introducing new sensibilities. I'm coming into this workshop with an intervention on gender, so women as agents of change. What does that look like in a kind of, in a regional sense? We can probably agree that every society, every state at all times needs reform and change.

That is never a process that is fully completed, right? And so clearly the Ottomans in 1914, they talk about reform. They need reform. As historians, we can look at it. We can see that things have to change if there's going to be some kind of domestic peace. and then the events of the First Boat War sort of overtake that moment. But it's clear that the changes demanded before 1914, there are Ottoman demands and become non-Ottoman demands after 1918.

There's not a single description for every place. If you're interested in a regional answer, I'll have to think a little bit more about that. I mean, for all of these places, certainly for Turkey, gender becomes a central, crucial peace in demonstrating, performing the modernity of Turkish society. And that's something I think that resonates in the mandates as well, but in different ways. And the fact that there is colonial rule in the mandates, I mean, not officially colonial rule, but de facto colonial rule in the mandates, means that women there, I think, are also mobilized in particular ways to sort of address the national well-being, the national future, and also to challenge colonial domination.

I mean, in Turkey, it is so central to Kemalism, to Mustafa Kemal's reform, to, you know, when one looks at the paintings of the 1920s and 30s, you know, they show Taxim Square populated almost exclusively by women with bobbed hair and, you know, looking like American flappers kind of. in short dresses, but also sort of in the, in the, in magazines and journals, women are sort of very much presented as sort of the new woman, the modern woman, but also essential to Turkey's future. I think all of that is really, becomes really crucial of the post-war politics in all of the various, in all of the various places. There's probably another argument to be made that after so much catastrophic destruction, women take on the role as sort of healers and nurturer,

and, you know, sort of healing the nation back into health in this post-war period and into the 20th century. Good morning. My name is Yitakun. I would like to ask about a question about historiography. So after a decade and a half of exciting scholarship and still growing, what else do you think we need to know about Ottoman World War I experience? What new directions should we take? We know there are grad students here.

What do they need to study? You, first of all, thank you for all of your amazing contributions to this historiography. I think there is really so much more to be done. Of course, I would say that. This book is scratching the surface, and I think all of the exciting historiography that you're noting points to a whole set of new and different questions about the empire. So one area clearly that we can do even more work on

is biographies and individual accounts experiences of the war and integrating, connecting those experience of the war to larger development, political, economic, social changes. I could rattle over a list of topics that I wish I could have included, the question of oil and energy, for example. This might sound very boring,

but I think it actually affected a great deal of local populations over the course of time in the immediate aftermath of the war. there is, I think, a lot of sort of new questions that come out of this historiography in terms of institutions, children, gender, class. I think we're still sort of don't have a very good sort of grasp on how class determined and structured the experience of the war in the various parts of the empire. And then, of course, the great diversity of the empire in terms of it, sort of natural endowment,

but the different parts of the empire experienced the war quite differently, and I think there's still a lot of comparisons to be done, and also trying to understand how these various experiences were linked and connected across the empire. There is more that can be done on. on hunger and famine. I see Graham Pitts here, one of the leaders in that field. Yeah, we can start calling on people if you want to. Okay, well, there's lots more we could talk about, and we'll talk about today, by the way. Professor OxyCall, thanks for joining us to talk about your book.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Silla, for helping out with this interview. Thank you for having me. Yeah, and thanks to everyone. We're happy to have all of you. for the listeners who are at home and want to learn more, guess what we have like dozens of episodes related to today's conversation, including some featuring some of the other guest voices you've heard in the room today.

So check out our website, Ottoman History Podcast.com, for lots more episodes and a bibliography, and also to get a link to that new book, Mustafa OxyCol, the War that made the Middle East. That's all for this episode and join us next time on the Ottoman History Podcast.