‘The honoured guests’ of the Ottoman Empire: reconsidering the prisoners of war in the Great War

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines the captivity experiences of approximately 30,000 prisoners of war (POW) captured by the Ottoman army during the Great War. They went through a process of disempowerment and incapacitation while suffering from ill-treatment, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and appalling conditions of the camps located across the Ottoman Empire. In fact, their captivity experience was somewhat like that of the other POWs in Europe in terms of housing, labour, and leisure pursuits. Like other captors, the Ottoman government was not ready to shelter, feed, clothe, and provide medical services to large masses and sought to resolve this issue in an improvised way. While delving into the captivity experience, this study focuses on the dialectical power relationship between the POWs and the Ottoman camp administration. The Ottomans did not manage to establish an absolute power on every single detail of the lives of the captives. Thus, like the POWs detained in Russia and Germany, their fellow prisoners in the Ottoman Empire got the opportunity to cope with the constraints and hardships of the captivity partially and resist the rule of the camp prisons. The Ottoman government sought to treat the prisoners in accord with the international agreements based on liberal values even though the actual situation on the ground did not live up to the expectations of POWs and their governments. Both archival documents and memoirs of the prisoners are elucidative to contextualize their captivity experience. Such sources help us interpret the experience of captivity from history from below.