The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres by Christin Pschichholz

Jerusalem: From the Ottomans to the British

<i>Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire</i>. By Nazan Maksudyan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 232. $39.95 (hardcover).

The Turkish Republic emerged onto the world stage as a secular and centralized nation state in the early 1920s from the remnants of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual Ottoman Empir...

Article The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres was published on December 1, 2021 in the journal Südost-Forschungen (volume 80, issue 1).

The report reconstructs how one hundred years ago the world's largest powers, primarily France, Great Britain, Japan, the Kingdom of Italy, and the United States, began to build a new Versailles-Washington system of international relations, which consolidated territorial changes as a result of the First World War and the collapse of the German, Ottoman, and Austrian-Hungarian and Russian empires. The geopolitical prerequisites and consequences of the Resolution of the Council of Ambassadors of March 14, 1923 regarding Eastern Galicia are analyzed. It has been proven that the principle of self-determination of peoples, proclaimed by world leaders, did not become the basis of post-war national-state demarcation, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, with the support of the Entente, the Ukrainian ethnic territory (conciliar Ukrainian People's Republic) was redistributed by Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Bolshevik Russia, which concluded the Peace of Brest with defeated Germany and was in international isolation for some time. The countries of the West did not believe in the state efforts of the disunited political elite of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Ukraine and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, as well as in the monarchical plans of the Hetmanate, which manoeuvre between German and White Guard post-war strategies. The Entente countries assigned the role of a sanitary border against the possible expansion of Bolshevik Russia (later the USSR) to the revived Poland in 1918, with which France concluded a political agreement and a military convention in 1921. The postwar Eastern European borders, in particular between Poland and the USSR along the Zbruch River, were «legitimized» by the Peace of Riga in 1921, as well as by the resolution of the Entente Council of Ambassadors in 1923, which marked the foreign policy defeat of both the Ukrainian People's Republic and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, as well as the end of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1914–1923 It was established that Warsaw ignored the international demand to grant national-territorial autonomy to Ukrainians, instead dividing the region into three voivodships even before the specified resolution. Keywords: Ukraine, East Galicia, Poland, countries of the Entente, geopolitics, military occupation, political parties.

This chapter applies the book’s main theoretical framework on the combined and uneven development of class capacities to the historical context of Turkish trade unionism. The combined character of structural class capacities makes itself felt in the crippling effects of the late Ottoman Empire’s integration into world capitalism on its nascent industrial sector. World wars, regional conflicts, and global economic crises restrained structural class capacities in the late Ottoman and early Republican era, which added to Turkey’s alignment with US imperialism. The uneven character of structural class capacities is manifested in Turkey’s late and slow industrialization period without experiencing any revolutionary economic leaps. Economic differentiation between the late Ottoman ethnic groups and the dispersed state of the predominantly small-sized early Republican industries can be seen among other factors that marked the uneven development of Turkey’s structural class capacities. As for the combined character of Turkey’s organizational working class capacities, we discern the political alignment of most labour and socialist forces with capitalist–imperialist invaders against the Anatolian National Liberation Movement and TURK-ISṃ’s alignment with US imperialism in the Cold War. Unevenness in organizational working class capacities includes the late disappearance of centralist guild structures permeated by traditional authority relationships and low levels of differentiation of workers from employers; cultural and ideological fragmentation of labour movements dominated by non-Muslim workers in the late Ottoman era; the mixed effects of Turkey’s military coups starting from 1960; and TURK-ISṃ’s co-opted top bureaucracy versus DISK’s increasing militancy, accompanied by closer alignments with left-wing and student movements.

This article focuses on the transfer of the Nazi legal and ideological model to East Central Europe and its subsequent adoption, modification and fusion with local legal-political practices. To illustrate this process, we explore the evolution of the anti-Semitic policy of the Antonescu regime in Romania (1940–1944) from an under-researched perspective: the activity of the Nazi ‘advisors on the Jewish Question’ dispatched to Bucharest. Based on a wide range of published and unpublished archival sources, we attempt to provide answers to the following questions: To what extent did the Third Reich shape Romania’s anti-Semitic polices during the Second World War? What was the role played by the Nazi advisors in this process? In answering these questions, special attention is devoted to the activity of the Hauptsturmführer ss Gustav Richter, who served as Berater für Juden und Arisierungsfragen [advisor to the Jewish and Aryanization questions] in the German Legation in Bucharest from 1st of April 1941 until 23 August 1944. We argue that, by evaluating the work of the Nazi experts in Bucharest, we can better grasp the immediate as well as the longer-term objectives followed by the Third Reich in Romania on the ‘Jewish Question,’ and the evolution of this issue within the context of the Romanian-German diplomatic relations and political interactions. By taking into account a variety of internal and external factors and by reconstructing the complicated web of political and bureaucratic interactions that led to the crystallization of General Ion Antonescu’s policy towards the Jews, we are able to provide a richer and more nuanced analysis of German-Romanian relations during the Second World War.

Immediately following the armistice that ended the World War I in the Middle East, a small group of “Young Turk” leaders, who had led the war-time ruling party of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire, fled into a self-imposed exile in Germany. Although they were wanted internationally as war-criminals and they were practically stateless statesmen without any material resources, they managed to remain all the more relevant for their political exile as rogue revolutionaries. The partition of the Ottoman Empire and the colonial occupation of the Muslim lands caused revolts and protest throughout the Muslim world. After secret meetings in Berlin, they founded in Moscow the Union of Muslim Revolutionary Societies (Islam Ihtilal Cemiyetleri Ittihadi). The aim of this self-proclaimed “Islamic International” was to mobilize and unite Muslim-nationalist insurgencies against European colonialism. The dissertation tells the story of the rise and fall of the Union of Muslim Revolutionary Societies during the aftermath of World War I, 1918–1922. The dissertation makes three interlinked arguments. First, as a transnational political history, the dissertation argues that this political movement needs to be embedded within the global moments of anticolonialism, internationalism, and revanchism of the immediate postwar years. In a fascinating network, the fugitive Young Turk leaders aligned with German revanchists, Russian Bolsheviks, Turkish Kemalists, the Afghan Emirate, Arab and Egyptian nationalists, and Indian and Irish revolutionaries as well as the League of Oppressed Peoples in Rome. Second, by critically drawing attention to the organizational incapacity of this movement, the dissertation argues that dialectic processes of sense-making, including rumors and conspiracy theories, helped this movement to appear as an elusive force in international politics with more conspiratorial capacities than it actually possessed. Third, in explaining the dynamics of transnational contentious politics in international relations, the dissertation argues that the Young Turk leaders, as revolutionary non-state actors, were increasingly isolated and persecuted by revolutionary state actors. Towards the settlement of international relations in 1922, they had lost their available space of action. Based on a vast collection of published and unpublished private papers of the Young Turk leaders as well as memoirs, diaries, newspapers, and state documents from various German, Swiss, French, British, Russian, and Turkish archives, the dissertation illustrates an important episode of the aftermath of World War I that shows the intricacies of transnational contentious politics and the epistemological ruptures that followed the end of the Ottoman Empire.

L'Italia e il primo conflitto globale, 1914-1918

Reviewed by: The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War M. Erdem Kabadayi The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War. By Mustafa Aksakal . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 232 pp. $109.00 (cloth); $34.99 (paper); $79.00 (e-book). Aksakal's book has been published in the series Cambridge Military Histories and suits very well the given purpose of the series to examine warfare from a broad perspective, including political and economic aspects. The book covers a short but decisive time span at the very end of the long-lived Ottoman Empire. It is the result of well-designed research and carefully executed study of the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I and offers the reader a detailed almost day-to-day analysis of the crucial period of 1913-1914. The book ends with the Ottoman entry into World War. Its focus is not on the actual events of the war, but the diplomatic and political maneuvers that preceded it. Four states, the Ottoman Empire, Germany, Russia, and Great Britain and their diplomatic and military representatives, are the major actors of the study. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Italy, and the Balkan states of the time are the other leading political actors. Aksakal's narrative follows a chronological order, which makes it an easy read, and at the same time he provides the reader with synchronal developments and interactions of the period. This is one of the major assets of the book. Geographically the study focuses on the developments in the Balkans [End Page 642] prior to the war, which is another right choice. Ottoman territorial losses in the Balkans had a substantial impact both on the minds of its ruling elite as well as on its geostrategic decision making. The Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), whose leaders controlled and formed the government during the period from 1913 to 1918, also had Balkan roots and consolidated its power toward an authoritarian regime during the Balkan Wars. Aksakal correctly underlines the role desire for revenge of the defeats of the Balkan Wars had in constituting the identity of the Ottoman ruling elite. Especially the fact that a former Ottoman capital city, Edirne, was recaptured by military force toward the end of the Balkan Wars was an important opinion setter. More importantly the CUP leadership was convinced that their agenda of modernization and mobilization of the public could be best achieved under conditions of war (p. 14). In this framework of analysis, Aksakal's book recasts the role of Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister from 1914 to 1918. In the national historiography Enver has been depicted as a war-hungry hawk who drew the Ottoman empire into World War I almost single-handedly. In this regard Aksakal distances himself successfully from the national historiography and masterfully situates Enver and his decisions within the CUP leadership not as a maverick but an essential and very important member of the CUP decision makers. Regarding the source material of the study, Aksakal heavily depends on German, Ottoman, and Russian diplomatic correspondence. He skillfully interweaves valuable information from these contemporary sources to build his narrative. In his selection of sources he almost completely excludes memoirs of the decision makers and members of the CUP for good reasons. Due to the fact that the majority of these works had been penned during the early years of the nascent Turkish Republic, the ways and means by which those authors perceived their recent Ottoman past and their attempts to distance themselves from it weaken if not discredit them as reliable sources. Aksakal does not make extensive use of another category of documentation, the Ottoman press of the time. He clearly states this decision yet surprisingly does not provide an explanation for it (p. 20). The "public opinion"—in quotation marks, as Aksakal puts it—is an important aspect of the study. As he himself points out, it is problematic to envisage an Ottoman public opinion in the modern sense, yet both the public opinion in its existed form and the intellectual climate of the time in Istanbul are...

The aim of this study is to discuss the domestic production and technological development efforts made during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Türkiye between 1860 and 1960, a time period in which political, economic, and military conditions were prohibitive. Despite all of the adverse circumstances of the time, the Ottoman Empire quickly reacted and attempted to make significant initiatives in the fields of domestic production and infrastructure in the age Industrial Revolution which challenged almost all of the existing socio-economic structure. These initiatives were attempted in the period preceding the First World War, when there was no capital, the burdens of capitulation increased, state revenues were transferred to the General Directorate of Public Debt, and a year without a war did not pass. Although these critical initiatives, which began as a result of military and administrative requirements, were disrupted and destructed between 1912 and 1922 due to the war conditions, they were much further advanced with the early Republican industrial Türkiyement. Despite obstacles similar to those experienced during the Ottoman period, the 1929 Great Depression, and the impossibilities encountered during Second World War, Türkiye's claim to domestic production and technological development has not declined.

Reviewed by: Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations by Hasan Kayalı Mostafa Minawi Hasan Kayalı. Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021. Xix + 271 pp. Hardback, $85.00. ISBN: 9780520343696 This is an important book that reflects Hasan Kayalı's decades in the field and the exceptional breadth and depth of his engagement in the historiographical debates concerning the late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman era in the Arabmajority former provinces. Imperial Resilience can be thought of as a much awaited follow up to Kayalı's first book, Arabs and Young-Turks, taking his argument against the nationalist telling of the history of the first decade of the 1900s, through the First World War, and the post-war period up to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. He argues that the potential for post-war Arabo-Turkish political unity endured, reflecting an "Ottoman longevity" lasting even past the end of World War I. He highlights what he believes to be indications of a commitment on both sides of the Syria-Anatolia-Mesopotamia "incidental" border to a "resilient" Ottoman imperialism and an imagined potential of a future federative empire. He posits that neither CUP policies before the war; the horrors of WWI; the Arab Revolt in the Hijaz; the rule of the military commander and governor general of the Levant, Cemal Pasha; the Ottoman defeat in the Levant; or the multitude of post-war treaties and Western-imposed visions meant an inevitable divorce between Arabs and Turks. It is masterfully written, using published sources as well as Ottoman, Turkish, and European military archival records to support its argument. Since it is a revisionist take of popular political history, Kayalı necessarily highlights documentary and circumstantial evidence that shows the alternatives to well-known historical arguments. Throughout the book, Kayalı remains laser-focused on debunking commonly held ideas about the rise of Turkish ethnic nationalism and the end of Arab-Turkish [End Page 331] "Muslim" synthesis under Ottoman imperial rule during and immediately after WWI. Through a detailed analysis of post-war historical events and a masterful multilingual (re)interpretation of several treaties and foundational texts of Turkish nationalism, Kayalı argues that a collective anti-Western colonial struggle of Muslims (Turks and Arabs), whether in "Greater Syria," Mesopotamia, or Anatolia held more political purchase than Turkish or Arab ethnic, racial, or cultural identification. His argument focuses on nine years between 1914 and 1923, with an emphasis on the understudied interaction between Turkish and Arab political and military leadership from 1918 to 1923. This is a bold revisionist argument that stands against the notion that ethnic or racial identification played a determinative role in Turkish nationalism before 1923 and suggests that effective Arab-Turk disengagement on the popular, cultural, or political levels did not exist before the second half of the 1920s. The book is organized chronologically. The first chapter recasts the actions of CUP members—particularly the maligned figure of Cemal Pasha—as "integrationist." He argues that nationalist telling of the draconian measures followed by Ottoman rulers in Greater Syria during the war were not indications of anti-Arab sentiments but a reflection of the CUP's "commitment to the defense, retention, integration and even recovery of the relinquished Arab provinces … to secure the empire's survival and longevity …" (53). The second chapter takes on the post-War victors' vision of the Ottoman Empire, in particular the 1918 British Lloyd George manifesto and Wilson's Fourteen Points statement. While the Lloyd George manifesto erroneously envisioned the "separation of Arabs and Turks as the principal criterion in the partitioning of Ottoman imperial territories," Article 12 of Wilson's proclamation did not necessarily assume the breakup of the empire. Instead, it insisted on the "autonomous development" of the empire's peoples and nationalities, including Arabs and Turks (59–64). Kayalı suggests that many figures that are assumed to have been Turkish nationalists had, in fact, a similar vision to Wilson of a post-war Arab-Turkish federated state. The Armistice of Mudros, for example, did not take the "quest to secure ethnic and linguistic...

Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archaeology, Diplomacy, Art Pera Museum, Istanbul 15 October 2011–8 January 2012 Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 SALT Galata, Istanbul 22 November 2011–11 March 2012 Artamonoff: Picturing Byzantine Istanbul, 1930–1947 Koc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul 25 June–10 November 2013 Three exhibitions that examine ways of looking at the ancient and Byzantine past from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century were recently on display in Istanbul. These exhibitions reevaluated the changing discourses and practices of archaeology as both a scholarly enterprise and a popular endeavor, particularly in relation to the late Ottoman and early Turkish contexts. They explored how contemporaries looked at, understood, and wrote about the culture, art, and architecture of the past from their various and varying perspectives. The exhibition Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 at SALT Galata was curated by Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Celik, and Edhem Eldem (Figure 1). It revolved around a double narrative of an apparently conventional historical account of the birth and development of “modern archaeology” from the founding of the British Museum in 1753 to the establishment of the Ottoman Pious Foundations Museum in 1914 alongside a contested story about some historically renowned archaeological sites that once dotted the former Ottoman lands. As its provocative title Scramble for the Past suggests, rather than presenting a celebratory narrative of archaeological practice, the exhibition put forward a critical interpretation of the history of archaeology. The seemingly neutral time line, highlighting the major dates in the long march of archaeology alongside significant historical political events, constituted a backdrop on the walls and literally encircled the main body of display, which focused on certain archaeological sites within the framework of eight different themes. True to the exploratory and interdisciplinary cultural mission of SALT, the sites were presented through their various historical representations in different media from written texts to oil paintings, from drawings to photographs and films, together with some original artifacts, among which were also dispersed commissioned installations on the nature of archaeology by artists Mark Dion …

The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History

The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East