SECTION I

Late-Ottoman Coexistence: Reforms and Transformations in a Premodern Empire

We can formulate the overarching “late Ottoman question” as follows: How could the hierarchical imperial coexistence, which had suffered many setbacks by the end of the eighteenth century, be transformed into an Eastern Mediterranean future of modern cohabitation of diverse populations? While crises, defeats on the battlefield, economic penetration, Western imperialism and globalization in general had haunted both the late Ottoman Empire—and the notorious Oriental Question in modern Western diplomacy—since the late eighteenth century, the core problem of the Ottoman world was domestic: how to transform a premodern imperial society into a functioning, still religiously and ethnically plural but more egalitarian and peaceful polity? How to make it constitutional and democratic? Did such a comprehensive reform of the Empire—not just certain reforms within its premodern construction—ever stand a chance (Chapter 1)? At the Empire’s end in the 1910s, the elites’ preference for strengthening the state and maintaining power prevailed over the design of egalitarian and constitutional rule.

This section provides an overview of the coexistence of populations and religions in the polyethnic Ottoman world in the globalizing nineteenth century, when the Empire still stretched across three continents, even though its position was becoming increasingly precarious. Transformations with and within the relations with the Jewish, Rum, and Armenian communities of the Ottoman world reflect with clarity the complex changes. Incisive imperial reform efforts in the center and the provinces sought to address the new challenges. However, extreme intra-societal violence in addition to wars and territorial losses in the late nineteenth century bode ill (see Section II). Although nation and nationalism replaced the religious community “as the source of social action, identity, and belonging” during the nineteenth century, religion ultimately proved to be the decisive political factor at the end of the Empire: It impacted the polarization of societies, national belonging, and the displacement of populations (see Chapter 2 on the Rum). This fact became fully evident with the wars of the last Ottoman decade and their outcome, especially at the Lausanne Conference (see Sections V and VI). But, it was already true of the muhajirs, the Muslim migrants and refugees who poured into the Sultan’s shrinking empire, fleeing Russian conquest in the Caucasus and the new “Christian” nation-states in the Balkans (Chapter 5).

Late Ottoman democratization succeeded to a certain extent in the framework of the non-Muslim communities (millets), but not in the Empire as a whole. The Armenian National Constitution of 1863 marked a significant turning point for the Armenian millet, allowing for greater lay participation and reducing the power of the clergy and the wealthy amiras, as Chapter 4 explains. In the changing sociopolitical dynamics of the late nineteenth century (see Section II), however, this new constitutional framework faced challenges from the autocratic Sultan Abdülhamid II as well as from the rising Armenian revolutionary movements. The former sought to reduce or eliminate the modern self-rule of the Armenian millet and opposed constitutionalism altogether, while the latter claimed communal leadership and advocated for radical social changes. Much smaller than the Armenian millet, but highly diverse in linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic terms, the Jewish millet underwent similar transformations. But, unlike the Armenians who openly sought democratizing reforms and constitutional rule, the Jews developed a dominant narrative of loyalty to the state and the sultan (Chapter 5). They sought to improve the integration and status of their community by emphasizing the historical gratitude for the refuge provided by the Ottomans after their ancestors’ expulsion from Spain in 1492. The rise of Zionism and the participation of some Jews in revolutionary movements certainly complicated the leaders’ strategy of “vertical alliances” with the Ottoman rulers.

By highlighting the experiences of muhajirs, Chapter 5 adds a layer of context to the extreme societal violence against non-Muslims, especially against Armenians (treated in detail in Sections II and V). Late Ottoman rulers, from Mahmud II and Abdülhamid II to the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress, had to deal with Muslim immigration into their shrinking empire. At least from the 1890s, they openly used the resettlement of muhajirs to advance policies of demographic Islamization and disfranchisement of indigenous Christians, taking advantage of the anti-Christian resentments associated with the Muslim muhajirs, territorial losses, and other lingering problems. This increasingly comprehensive demographic engineering campaign began with the Kurdish- and Armenian-populated eastern provinces, for which the 1878 Berlin Treaty had postulated special reforms to protect the threatened Christians.

The Intervention in Section I offers a glimpse into how, in the late Ottoman world as well, environmental issues intersected with social and political ones. Examples such as the transformation of swamps into arable land and overcoming malaria demonstrate how Ottoman environmental transformations, partly in response to hundreds of thousands of muhajirs from the Russian Empire, ultimately also served the project of Jewish migrants to Palestine, many of whom were also fleeing Russia.

 

SECTION II

Crises, Violence, and Revolutionism

The late Ottoman Empire was a vast realm with multiple violent crises to which restive European neighbors actively contributed. In the age of Atlantic Revolutions, new Western perspectives highlighted and exacerbated the weaknesses of the premodern Ottoman polity, whose main “social contract” rested on submission to the sultan as well as religious separations and hierarchies. While the dynamics and ideals of the Atlantic Revolutions, including democracy in nation-states, fundamentally challenged the Ottoman imperial self-understanding, the expansion of neighboring imperial Russia directly threatened the Ottoman future.

In the Balkans—the Ottoman Empire’s core region alongside Western Anatolia where it had first established itself in the fourteenth century—Western-inspired revolutionary nationalisms met Russian expansionism. Chapter 6 introduces this catalytic focal point of national revolutions throughout the last Ottoman century. There, not only French ideas but also French boots on the ground had entered in the early 1800s. Other hotspots of the ageing Islamic Empire were situated in secondary Ottoman acquisitions such as Egypt after Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion; the Arab peninsula after anti-Western Wahhabi uprisings; and in the eastern part of Asia Minor with a deepening Kurdish-Armenian crisis after Russian conquest of the Caucasus. In “the century of nationalisms,” as the nineteenth century has often been called, newly established states tended to imagine themselves as empires and/or irredentist entities, while existing empires adopted ideologies of nation-states, as Chapter 6 concludes.

Reacting to external and internal challenges, the changes and reforms of the Ottoman military (Chapter 7) were a central part of the late Ottoman modernization process, which had started with Sultan Selim III’s “new order.” It reached a first peak in the violent dissolution of the Janissaries, an Ottoman army corps that practiced heterodox customs, by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826. In general, late Ottoman modernization was coupled with an effort to justify all innovation as steps in line with, or even a return to, an orthodox Sunni Islam. There was always the need to balance modernization with traditional power structures and doctrines. Non-Muslims were excluded from the conscript army until the early twentieth century, when Muslims had been serving in the Russian and Austrian armies for decades. Thus, in the reorganization of the army, considerations of politics and imperial ideology often overruled military necessity. European military missions, particularly from Germany, played a significant role. Germans were the least likely to interfere in domestic affairs, and often showed the most understanding to Ottoman rulers. German-Ottoman ties deepened under Wilhelm II and Abdülhamid II.

Sultan Abdülhamid II is the icon of the Islamist AKP party, which has ruled Turkey since 2002. He was the last reigning and a long-reigning sultan (1876–1909). Towards the end of the late Ottoman period, before the cataclysmic transformations under the Young Turks, Abdülhamid personified the exhaustion of imperial rule as a sultanate-caliphate (i.e., rule according to traditional legitimation). Domestically, he displayed a skillful but at times extremely violent management of imperial power. In friendship with the new German Empire and in contrast to his immediate predecessors, he fostered a modern Islamic nationalism. Paradoxically, in a modern age of emerging nationalism in the Ottoman world (see Section III), religion became more than ever the dividing line among the diverse populations of the Empire. His politics of Ottoman-Muslim unity came at the cost of non-Muslim groups and of burgeoning civic Ottoman nationalism. In international politics, he turned Islam—Islamism in its pan-Islamic version—into an enduring asset.

“Abdülhamid managed to navigate between his state-sponsored terror and violence and the risk of foreign intervention,” we read in Chapter 8. While under Abdülhamid, extreme societal, often urban, violence gained a new, near-genocidal dimension with the Hamidian massacres, violence was a feature of the late Ottoman period in general (Chapter 9). This internal violence carried the characteristics of a “domestic jihad” against Ottoman Christians, now perceived as agents of a foreign and threatening modern Western-Christian “body.” This pattern of violence first appeared during the French occupation of Cairo around 1800, but it did not remain restricted to contexts of war. Sunni Muslims, the drivers of domestic jihad, sensed that the traditional “imperial social contract” of non-Muslim socio-political subordination was being seriously challenged in a modern age that preached equality and opened new channels of global communication and trade, especially to the non-Muslims.

Section II connects late Ottoman Armenian history with new approaches to the study of the history of violence. The history of violence has become one of the major innovations in Ottoman studies, encompassing studies on forced migration, massacre, genocide, and demographic engineering. Chapter 10 focuses on the Hamidian massacres in 1894–7, which, despite their extraordinary magnitude, had remained one of the least researched and least understood chapters of late Ottoman history for more than a century. More than any other single event, they revealed the polarization of late Ottoman society, coupled with the willingness of the ruling class to use or tolerate domestic violence against agents of modern change. Armenians—the comparatively best-educated, internationally connected, and politically agile non-Muslim community—threatened traditional imperial power structures in the provinces and the capital.

Slavery in the Empire remains an understudied subject within both Ottoman and slavery studies. It persisted in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, although the Ottomans had to rely almost exclusively on importation. Slavery was restricted under European pressure and eventually attacked in the twentieth century by the CUP as a symbol of an overthrown monarchy, but more for domestic political reasons than out of an abolitionist agenda. The Ottomans never abolished slavery as a legal and social institution. Its final demise was a de facto one with the establishment of the Turkish Republic. During the Armenian Genocide, public markets of enslaved Armenian women and children existed throughout Mesopotamia. “Amongst the ultimate avatars of slavery, an institution that accompanied the Ottoman state through its entire history, we can point out the fact that many Armenian children and women were brought into a slavery-like situation as they became forcibly incorporated new family members in Muslim families … thus surviving the genocidal process upon a forced conversion as subalterns,” the intervention argues.

 

SECTION III

Nationalism, Transnational Actors, and International Relations

The emphasis in this Section is on non-state actors and issues that came to prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Domestically and transnationally, these actors responded to opportunities and threats in an empire caught in an existential crisis. In this period, the Armenian Question moved to the center of the Eastern Question, involving non-state, state, and international actors (see Chapters 3 and 10 in Sections I and II).

This section tackles areas of research that have flourished over the past two to three decades, changing perspectives and opening up little explored questions: Ottoman Kurds and their bourgeoning nationalism (see Chapter 11), the Arab national question (Chapter 12), the early foothold of Zionism in Palestine (Chapter 13), and the considerable impact of Western Christian missions (Chapter 14). Having started much earlier, the activities of missionaries intensified in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Although the missionaries and the Zionists were non-state actors, their transformative enterprises in the late Ottoman world also strongly involved state as well as international relations. Another major theme is migration, or “voting with their feet,” by Ottoman nationals who left the Empire for Europe and the USA. Although most of them left the Empire for good, some also prepared for their return and investments at home (see the intervention at the end of this section).

The last decades of the Ottoman Empire thus sent conflicting signals of promise, dynamism, and transformation as well as crisis, violence, and an anti-reform backlash. Transnational actors like the missionaries and the Zionists, as well as constitutional and socialist revolutionaries (primarily Ottoman Christians and Caucasian Armenians), aspired for new, but not necessarily post-Ottoman, futures. Even if some of them cooperated with the imperial state, believing in a transformed Ottoman polity, they mostly underestimated the weight and inertia of the existing state, its social bases, its intrinsic principles, and the diplomatic interdependencies and polarizations in a time of high imperialism. Few could have foreseen a total war with a complete cataclysm of the Ottoman fabric, as happened in the 1910s, destroying most of their hopes and projects (see Section V).

The Tanzimat was a catalyst for both Ottoman centralization and the rise of nationalist sentiments among non-Turkish groups seeking greater autonomy in modern national terms. Intellectuals, inspired by Arab Christians in contact with modern missionary institutions, initiated the Arab cultural renaissance (Nahda) that led to the formation of Arab identity and nationalism in the early twentieth century. The First World War, the Armenian genocide, the famine in Greater Syria, and the deep disillusionment with the post-1918 Paris Treaty system, including the European mandates and the promotion of Zionism, have decisively shaped Arab nationalism to this day.

Sultan Abdülhamid II opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, but his government was ineffective in preventing the First and Second Aliyah and the establishment of Jewish colonies, which laid the groundwork for the expanding Yishuv. The new political environment after the Young Turk Revolution allowed Zionism to gain some legitimacy within Ottoman politics, although it also faced growing opposition from Muslim deputies in the imperial parliament and the local Palestinian population (see Chapter 18, Section IV). The Zionist World Organization, based in Berlin, attempted to influence Ottoman policy through lobbying, newspapers, and pro-CUP propaganda, but with mixed results. By the onset of the First World War, tensions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine had intensified, setting the stage for the future conflicts that would spread under British rule, which implemented the Balfour Declaration under the terms of its League of Nations mandate.

Decades before the First Aliyah, the expansion of Western Christian missions already benefited from the Tanzimat’s relatively liberal conditions for foreign agencies and foreigners in the Empire. Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian policy of Islamic unity could only partially constrain them because the Western powers continued to insist on religious freedom and provided some support for the missions. Missions varied widely in terms of religious and home country affiliations, ranging from Protestant and Catholic missions to secular organizations like the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Common to most of them was a lasting commitment to modern education, also for girls, both within and beyond traditional and confessional frameworks. They were also concerned with health, humanitarianism, linguistic research, printing presses for vernacular languages, and, generally, the valorization of diverse ethnic and cultural heritages. This helped bring about a national renaissance among Arabs, Armenians, and Assyrians.

The missions contributed to the centrifugal particularization of the late Ottoman Empire, although the internationalists in the dynamic Protestant missions articulated and promoted the vision of a constitutional, democratized country from the early twentieth century. Sultan Abdülhamid II, and even more so the CUP party-state and the Kemalists, responded with prohibition and repression to what they saw as a threat to the Turkish-Islamic unity of the state. In the 1910s and 1920s, the missionary world in Asia Minor almost completely disappeared with the extermination and expulsion of its main clientele, the Ottoman Christians. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty confirmed unitary Turkish rule. As a remnant of late Ottoman missionary or para-missionary institutions in the Republic of Turkey, liberal internationalism and cultural pluralism in education were no more than a small and fragile niche plant (see also Chapter 31, Section VII).

Early modern contributions by Kurdish authors played a role in fostering a sense of Kurdish identity, but it took the destruction of the traditional Kurdish autonomies by the Tanzimat’s centralizing policies to spur on Kurdish nationalism. Kurdish tribal leaders and emerging educated elites spread a new national awareness that responded to the renaissance of their Christian neighbors, especially the Armenians. Religious leaders, particularly from the Naqshbandi-Khalidi Sufi order, were instrumental in blending nationalist sentiments with religious discourses.

However, Kurdish nationalism remained an intellectual and political current rather than a mass movement during the last Ottoman decades. The Sunni Kurds, but less so the Alevis, remained attached to the sultanate-caliphate and its policies throughout this period, including during the First World War and the subsequent wars in Anatolia waged by the new Ankara government which claimed to be defending the sultanate-caliphate during the Paris Treaty negotiations. As a result, ambitions for autonomy or an independent Kurdish state remained unfulfilled, leading to continued struggles in the post-Ottoman era. After the Treaty of Lausanne, there was no room left for these Kurdish ambitions, not even for Kurdish language and cultural self-articulation, especially in Turkey. But the nationalist efforts of the late Ottoman period had laid the foundations for Kurdish struggles that continue to this day.

 

SECTION IV

The Constitutional Era: From the Ottoman Spring to Party Dictatorship

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 reinstated and revised the first, sultan-centered Ottoman constitution of 1876, inaugurating the Ottoman Empire’s “Second Constitutional Era” (1908–18). But only 1908–12 can be considered truly constitutional because, in 1913, the leading revolutionaries of 1908, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), established their imperial one-party dictatorship during the Balkan Wars.

Compared to that of its Persian neighbor (1905–24), Turkey’s constitutional period was shorter and less consequential. However, the few years of hope and relative freedom after the Young Turk Revolution revealed the potential for multiple voices, cultures, identities, and new gender roles to come to the fore (on gender, see the Intervention at the end of this section). New public voices included not only the non-Muslims of the predominantly Sunni Empire, but also Alevis (see the Intervention at the end of Section V) and Kurds. The educated elites of non-Turkish and non-Muslim groups reacted against the vigorously emerging imperial Turkish ethnonationalism. “The CUP failed to convince non-Muslims that their Ottomanization was not ‘Turkification’ of minorities and non-Turkish communities,” as Chapter 16 concludes, emphasizing the enduring impact that the lack of any “fully representative and inclusive constitution-drafting processes” (Ergun Özbudun) has had on Turkey.

With the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the Ottoman world entered an era of wars and extremes that tore it up (see Section V). The wars ended only on the eve of the Lausanne Conference. During its last decade, the turbulent Ottoman Empire was both opposed to and included in a Europe at the height of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism. This greater Europe failed to democratize and meet the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world. Instead, driven by national-imperial motives, it slid into its Great War, from which it never really recovered, eventually heading into a second cataclysm.

“One cannot say if a true parliamentary democracy could have governed a far-flung multi-national empire. However, the CUP leadership gave up on the experiment before the question could be answered,” we read in Chapter 15. Within five years (1908–13), these leaders revealed themselves as imperial ultranationalists. Thus, Ottoman Turkey, though a country lagging behind in many respects, emerged as a modern dictatorial polity far ahead of its time in establishing a self-proclaimed revolutionary party-state. With their irredentist war policies and a new exclusionary Turkish-Muslim ethno-nationalism, the CUP dashed the initial hopes for a constitutional, democratic, and egalitarian future for the plural Ottoman world and destroyed the Ottoman social fabric during the First World War (see Section V).

This course was not preordained, either macro-historically or in the biography of Mehmed Talaat, the dominant figure of the CUP. A sometimes hesitant parliamentarian and interior minister until 1912, who maintained close contacts with reform-oriented Armenian colleagues, he emerged as the informal head of the CUP’s rule over the empire. This soul and brain of the party’s ruling committee began to embrace the politics of violence and coercion to implement the radical vision of Anatolia as an exclusive national home for Muslim Turks and of a partisan state that promoted Turkish-Muslim capitalism. “Writing the history of the Committee of Union and Progress amounts in many respects to writing the political history of the final years of the Ottoman Empire,” as Chapter 17, which takes stock of this historiography, puts it. Although the Committee represented political developments and ideological currents larger than itself and only partially controlled them, especially in the provinces, it bequeathed to the modern Middle East and beyond the seminal legacy of a party-state with organic links to the military, a severely curtailed parliamentary system, and the absence of an independent judiciary, and thus of constitutionality.

In 1908, Ottoman Armenians in particular, especially the deputy and writer Krikor Zohrab (Chapter 16), but also many Jews of the Yishuv in Ottoman Palestine, looked to a future in a democratizing Ottoman Empire. Its evolving constitution, based on universal principles, seemed to make ample room for their distinct particularities, including a kind of a Jewish home under an Ottoman roof. Zionism became public after 1908, when it appeared in the press and in lively debates in the reopened Ottoman Parliament, but also because of publicized clashes and conflicts between settlers and natives (Chapter 18). Thanks to its relatively strong support in Berlin, London, and Washington, and its location outside the empire’s Anatolian heartland, the Yishuv survived the CUP’s anti-minority policies much better than the Christians in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Politically exposed since the Berlin Congress and already victims of mass violence (Chapters 3, 9, and 10), the Armenians were the primary target of the enemies of the constitution.

The wide-ranging debates, interactions, and “comings out” of the early Second Constitutional Era, before the cataclysm of the First World War I, have been the subject of intense recent scholarship, as the chapters in this section illustrate. Unfulfilled potentials and paths not taken are enduring legacies, even if they have been eclipsed by those taken which led to war and genocide. No period of the late Ottoman Empire has seen more in-depth and transformative research in recent times than the Second Constitutional Era when the course was set for incisive post-Ottoman developments. The still persistent-political factors of Turkism, Islamism, and Zionism came to the fore when burgeoning democratic constitutionalism went under.

The most influential at the time was Turkish nationalism, a rapidly spreading ideology in the early 1910s that was most vigorously propagated in the CUP by Talaat’s friend and central committee member Ziya Gökalp, and which still incorporated some pan-Islamist tenets. In its post-imperial version, it became the driving ideology of those CUP elites who survived Great War defeat and reorganized in Ankara. They realized Talaat’s exclusively Turkish homeland in Anatolia as a unitary nation-state, recognized by the Treaty of Lausanne and proclaimed a republic in the same year. For Gökalp and the intellectuals of the time, Islam and the Turkish race defined Turkish national identity. Their essentialist use of “race” (including “blood”) oscillated between culturalist and biological, especially social-Darwinist, notions, hence their contempt for small nations such as Armenians and Jews. Turkish Homeland (Türk Yurdu), founded in 1911, was the intellectual organ of the CUP, where the basic understanding of Turkish nationalism was defined (Chapter 19).

 

SECTION V

Wars and Genocide

Extreme violence characterized the final years of the Ottoman Empire under the dictatorial rule of the CUP on the eve of and during the First World War. Section V examines this violence, which for various reasons, mostly political and diplomatic, has long been neglected in academic and public histories of the twentieth century. It is in this area of the late Ottoman Empire that research since the 1990s has been arguably the most dynamic, productive, and paradigm-shifting, as the chapters in this section demonstrate. Based on the resulting insight, we can say that, as seen from Istanbul, the age of extremes and dictators in Greater Europe began in 1914 with the CUP’s self-proclaimed revolutionary policy of total war, genocide, and demographic engineering.

Starting with the establishment of the CUP party-state in 1913, Turkey’s “revolution from the right,” based on ultranationalist principles, preceded the far-left Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the self-proclaimed fascist and Nazi revolutions of the interwar period. Despite stark ideological differences, they all shared dictatorial characteristics, illiberal ideas, and violent, transformative policies.

The Balkan Wars in 1912–13 exposed the vulnerabilities of the Ottoman military and state and led to a definitive breakthrough of radicalism, warmongering, and politics of revenge by the CUP. Territorial losses and mass migrations strained the Empire’s resources. The First World War further exacerbated these challenges, with the Ottoman state adopting increasingly coercive policies to mobilize resources (see Chapter 20). From 1914 onward, the policy of the central government included a war for imperial sovereignty, restoration, and expansion on the external front, and the dispossession, extermination, or expulsion of the indigenous Christians from the Empire’s Anatolian heartland domestically. These Ottoman citizens were now considered alien elements and agents of foreign powers (Chapters 21–23).

After the Ottoman defeat on the side of Germany in the First World War and a brief period of chaotic openness, Turkish politics continued as a redefined and more limited struggle by former CUP cadres and affiliates reorganized in Ankara. Against the peace projects of the victors, they fought for a unitary Turkish nation-state in all of Asia Minor, now excluding other parts of the former Empire. The Bolsheviks recognized this policy in 1921. The Western Powers did the same in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, after Ankara had won its wars in Anatolia and promised in Lausanne to adopt Western standards of “civilization” (Chapter 24, see also Chapter 25 in Section VI).

The Kizilbash-Alevis are a special case in point during the transformative period at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish nation-state (see the Intervention at the end of this Section). Their loyalty remained questioned by the state but, unlike Christians, and despite their non-Sunni and often anti-Sunni heterodoxy, they were not written off and targeted en masse. In the early modern period, the Kizilbash-Alevi community was systematically persecuted by the Ottoman state because of its religious and geographical proximity to the Safavid Empire. Unlike other Alevis, who also reject Sunni doctrine, they lacked the protection of association with the Bektashi order.

The Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II made efforts to assimilate the Kizilbash-Alevis through religious reforms, while also continuing to marginalize them socially and politically. For example, Kizilbash Kurds, were excluded from the Hamidiye Regiments. Despite continuing deep-seated mistrust, some Kizilbash-Alevis supported the Ottoman war effort in 1914–18. Others feared to suffer the fate of their Armenian neighbors or became disillusioned during the Turkish National Struggle when the Koçgiri movement for self-rule was brutally suppressed by the forces of the new Ankara government. The genocidal massacre in Dersim in 1938 was a key event in the Turkish Republic’s ultimately failed efforts to suppress and assimilate the Kizilbash-Alevi community. It closed the circle of extreme mass violence inside Turkey that had begun with the Armenian massacres of the 1890s.

 

SECTION VI

Treaties and Their Defining Impact

As explained in Section V, the Great War and the genocidal policies of the CUP dictatorship had largely destroyed the plural Ottoman fabric by 1918. For this reason, and despite Ottoman defeat, it could hardly be restored. Negotiators meeting in Paris and the new League of Nations projected in vain to rebuild a plural Anatolia, in which displaced persons, especially surviving Armenians, were helped to return to their homes and possessions.

It took until 1923 for negotiations and further regional wars to determine the factual and legal future of the post-Ottoman area—a world now divided into new entities. The outcome reflected the will of both the Western powers and, as far as Anatolia and the South Caucasus were concerned, the new Bolshevik-backed government in Ankara. The temporary League of Nations mandates, enshrined in the 1920 Paris-Sèvres Treaty, postponed the self-determination of the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire and fulfilled the promise of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Many Arabs felt betrayed by the European negotiators. They strove in vain to turn the tables at the Near East Peace Conference of Lausanne in 1922–23, to which diverse Arab representatives travelled but were not admitted (see Chapter 25).

The Turkish nationalists, on the other hand, saw in Lausanne a complete revision of the Sèvres provisions as far as the Turkish-dominated parts of the Ottoman Empire were concerned. They owed this to the successful armed struggle of ex-CUP forces, organized in Ankara, who had launched a Turkish-Muslim war against the claims of the surviving indigenous Christians and the plans drawn up in Europe from 1919–22 (see Chapter 24 in Section V). The Western Asia Minor’s Armenians, Greeks (Rum), and other non-Turks not only lost their struggle and hopes for self-determination, but thereafter they bore the stigma of traitors and a fifth column in the eyes of the Turkish ruling elite, intellectuals, and public (see Chapter 28).

The Treaty of Lausanne is the ultimate legal foundation of the post-Ottoman world. While most other parts of the post-First World War Paris treaty system were rendered obsolete by the outcome of the Second World War, the Lausanne Treaty remains in force. Reflecting the spirit of the time and the conditions of wider Europe in the early 1920s, it continues to define the main borders and political coordinates of the Middle East. The Kurds were particularly affected by this; major rebellions marked the interwar period (Chapter 26). Self-rule in a plural, federal democracy has remained a core Kurdish postulate (see Chapter 34 in Section VII).

The Sèvres Treaty had briefly opened the way to Kurdish independence but, since the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, Kurds have seen themselves as “borderlanders,” their habitat divided among nation-states. The latter’s unitary construction and ethno-national—Turkish, Arab, or Iranian—self-definition marginalized hetero-ethnic and hetero-religious groups. Republican Turkey, proclaimed in 1923, is the model of a post-imperial nationalist polity that emerged from a decade of wars and crises and a close alliance with the Bolsheviks, an emerging anti-Western great power. On the diplomatic and “civilizational” level, Turkey turned to the West in 1923 and belatedly became a member of the League of Nations in 1932. For it was only “after sidelining the League’s mechanisms for minority protection” that the Turkish government took “the final step to become an official member of the international organization,” as Chapter 27 puts it. For the sake of undisturbed relations with Ankara, the Western signatories of the Lausanne Treaty did not defend the very limited rights that the Treaty established for non-Turks and non-Muslims in the new Republic.

Republican Turkey, by 1932 a full-fledged party dictatorship with an institutionalized cult of the leader, Gazi Kemal (Atatürk), was based on the “eradication of ethnoreligious heterogeneity” (Chapter 27), which had started under Interior Minister Talaat and continued under the Ankara government. In the international arena, beginning with the Lausanne Conference, Ankara successfully pioneered a “nationalist internationalism” that forced the Western powers to abandon League principles and smaller nations such as the Kurds and Armenians. In this sense, European appeasement of anti-democratic actors began with Lausanne, when the early Nazis also began to vindicate the Turkish model. They admired Ankara’s revisionist success in 1923 and its military victories.

The financial aspects of the Lausanne Treaty, its prehistory and larger context deserve special attention (see the intervention at the end of this Section). Although the Ottoman public debt and foreign financial control had very mixed results for the late Ottoman Empire and seemed exploitative at times, there was preferential treatment for Turkey. This also applies to the Lausanne Conference and its long aftermath, revealing a long-term Western attitude that, from the nineteenth century to the present, considers Turkey a fragile and crisis-prone middle power, but “too big to fail.” As such, it should never be treated too harshly.

With a few earlier exceptions, notably on the “population exchange” that is part of the Treaty, it is only in the twenty-first century that scholars have begun to fundamentally question the Lausanne settlement, which has long been considered exceptionally stable and beneficial, not only by Kemalist historiography but also by Western diplomacy and academia.

 

SECTION VII

The Quest for Belonging in the Post-Ottoman Space

The post-Ottoman space that emerged in the aftermath of the Great War was not only shaped by treaties and the pushback against them, but also by a different kind of negotiation by the peoples of the region: what to excise and what to adhere to from the Ottoman past. Maintaining a focus on the Republic of Turkey (Chapters 29, 32, and 33, as well as the two Interventions at the end of this Section), but also making forays into the Arab world (Chapters 30 and 31) and refocusing on the Kurds (Chapter 34), this section tackles what some of the region’s peoples—and Western missions rooted there—sought to question.

Nationalism and internationalism emerge as key elements in these contributions as well, the first of which explores the demise of missionary work in Turkey, “but also the hopes that its core legacy might be salvaged by finding common ground with the Kemalists, adjusting the tenets of liberal internationalism to fit the new reality of Turkish nationalism” (Chapter 31). What survived of these institutions, “liberal sanctuaries” such as Robert College and Boğaziçi University, fostered “the practice of critical discussion,” helping pave the way to more critical, inclusive visions of Turkey.

Protests, demonstrations, and other forms of action against authorities—and the pushback against them—permeate nearly all sections of this handbook. The chapter dedicated to protest movements in Turkey (Chapter 33) surveys the dynamics of protest in Turkey from the early Republican years until today, with particular focus on the period since the 1960s. And, while many of the groups and people that drove protests in the late Ottoman period were either decimated or exiled, and others became part of the establishment that defined the first century of the Republic of Turkey, this chapters traces how protesters—from workers unions, leftist revolutionaries, Kurdish activists, to the small Armenian progressive group Nor Zartonk—continue to embody a similar “enduring ethos of collective resistance and the reshaping of organized struggle in the pursuit of change.”

The suppression of the Kurds and the Kurdish movement have been a mainstay of Turkey’s modern history: the state violence that led to the near-erasure of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in the late-Ottoman period was meted out against the Kurds, the new “other” in the Republican era. The Kurdish movement remains robust not just in Turkey, but also in neighboring post-Ottoman Arab countries like Syria and Iraq. As the first Intervention, on the Kurdish question, explains,

The Turkey-based Kurdish movement has significantly shaped the ideological and organizational framework of the Kurdish movement in Syria since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War. Its influence extends to the Kurdish movements in Iran and Iraq as well. Similarly, Kurdish political gains in Iraq and Syria have emboldened Kurds in other regions. Aware of these dynamics, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—countries with otherwise differing agendas—alongside their extra-regional allies, including the United States, united to thwart the Iraqi Kurdish bid for independence in 2017.

The second Intervention in this Section highlights both decisive advances and continuing challenges in the use of Ottoman archival materials for late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman research. It also stresses the full inclusion of other language sources in this field of scholarship (especially Armenian, Greek, Arabic, Kurdish, and Russian), which is an important development of the last three decades.

The memory and politics of remembrance of the First World War play an important role in Turkey in the twenty-first century (Chapter 32). The AKP (Justice and Development Party), supported by the national-conservative segment of society, has been in power there since 2002. Its leaders reinterpret the First World War in heroic neo-Ottoman terms and challenge the Lausanne outcome, including territorial concessions and the abolition of the sultanate caliphate. Thus, state-sponsored memory production is once again distorting historical facts to fit political narratives, especially since the autocratic turn in Ankara in the early 2010s that followed a decade of openness. For example, the Gallipoli campaign, central to Turkish national identity since Talaat Pasha and Atatürk, is reframed and mythicized as a victorious Muslim struggle against Western invaders. Enver Pasha, the CUP’s number two at Talaat’s side, is elevated to a Muslim war hero whose memory the Kemalists have treated unjustly.

Meanwhile, in the Arab world, peoples struggled with the Ottoman legacy as they built states over the empire’s ashes, or reconstituted communities after genocide and exile scattered them across the region. Chapter 31 focuses on the former and explores the ubiquitousness of Ottoman memory in the Arab world showing that Arab historians “provided complex, nuanced and often ambivalent reflections on the imperial period preceding the formation of national states,” whereas Chapter 30 tackles the latter by focusing on architecture and emphasizes “the break with the Ottoman Armenian heritage and the triumphant reinvention of a new religious architecture” through a study of post-Ottoman Lebanon.