Download PDF | (Modern Wars In Perspective) Virginia Aksan - The Ottomans 1700-1923_ An Empire Besieged-Routledge (2021).
401 Pages
Originally conceived as a military history, this second edition completes the story of the Middle Eastern populations that underwent significant transformation in the nineteenth century, finally imploding in communal violence, paramilitary activity, and genocide after the Berlin Treaty of 1878.
Now called The Ottomans 1700-1923: An Empire Besieged, the book charts the evolution of a military system in the era of shrinking borders, global consciousness, financial collapse and revolutionary fervor. The focus of the text is on those who fought, defended, and finally challenged the sultan and the system, leaving longlasting legacies in the contemporary Middle East. Richly illustrated, the text is accompanied by brief portraits of the friends and foes of the Ottoman house.
Written by a foremost scholar of the Ottoman Empire and featuring illustrations that have not been seen in print before, this second edition will be essential reading for both students and scholars of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman society, military and political history, and Ottoman-European relations.
Virginia Aksan’s particular interests lie in the Ottomans in a comparative imperial context, focusing on borderlands, warrior societies, knowledge transfer, intermediaries, and perceptions of the Ottoman evolution in a revolutionary age. Her publications include An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783 (1995); The Early Modern Ottomans, co-edited with Daniel Goffman (2007), and more than 40 edited chapters and journal articles.
INTRODUCTION
The Ottomans 1700-1923: An empire besieged
“War does not determine who is right—only who is left.” Attributed to Bertrand Russell
Empires rise and fall in violence. Nations too, arise from empires mired in violence and turn those catastrophes into national myths. Just over 100 years ago, the 600year-old Ottoman Empire collapsed. The victorious powers, Entente partners Britain and France, along with the newly established League of Nations, immediately began deliberations concerning the future map of the Middle East. The lines of the map that finally emerged in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne were the product of Britain and France’s thinly cloaked colonial ambitions for control of the remaining Ottoman territories in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Greater Syria and the Hyaz. Their territorial negotiations were tempered by demands of the young nation states of Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, and Greece, where unsolved borders and violence continued to be part of the legacy of the war settlements. So too the calls for self-determination of Armenians, Kurds and Arabs might have made for a different map, but it was not to be.
In the midst of these deliberations, while Britain was in occupation of Istanbul, home of the defeated Ottoman sultan, Greek and Ottoman/Turkish forces faced one another in a final thrust to determine sovereignty over Istanbul and the straits. Mustafa Kemal Atattirk (‘‘father” of the Turks), and his nation under arms upended international expectations, drawing a new line around Anatolia, home to countless ancient civilizations, and declared it the homeland of the Turks. The practice of imaginary map-making based on ethnicity and sectarianism has continued since 1923 in the creation of some 40 countries that derive from the original Ottoman territories.
The Middle East/East Europe suffered more casualties (death, disease and wounded) than any other region of the world in that period. The United States losses in WWI amounted to 0.1% of its population, and Canada’s 0.8% to 0.9%; the United Kingdom and colonies lost 1.9% to 2.23% of their populations; Russia 1.6% to 1.9%; and Germany 3.3% to 4.32%. By contrast, Serbia lost 17 to 28%; Bulgaria 3.4%; Greece 3.0-3.7%; and Turkey and Arab countries, former Ottoman territories (now Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq etc.) suffered 13-15%. Behind those numbers is a story about the earliest constructions of the twentieth century’s system of international relations and humanitarian intervention. '
A passage from the London Observer on 18 November 1922, conveys the ongoing horror four years after the armistice that ended World War I:
It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighborhood of Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode. Thus, collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granularly state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.... It is now ascertained beyond a doubt that upon actual experiment of an extensive scale, a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce, and for aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.
In its centennial years, historians of World War I have produced a plethora of new books. These new writings bring, in some instances, the Middle East battlefronts more directly into the story, moving beyond the great heroic tales of Gallipoli or of Lawrence of Arabia, which heretofore have served as the primary story of the Middle East from 1914 to 1918. Military historians now consider the 1912-1913 events in the Balkans—when the Ottomans fought Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia—as the crucible of WWI, equally as important as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 that prompted Austria to declare war on Serbia.
Enlightenment thinkers proposed that the civilizational, progressive teleology of human history was naturally tending toward an end of violence, and that wars were simply interruptions of a peaceful, rational society in the making. Historians have long tended to locate violence outside of historical projects, as military history in the Anglo-American tradition was mostly relegated to a space outside the academy (only nominally present in political history, sociology and philosophy courses). Writing modern military history was often given over to retired generals, whose reading of history included a grounding in the classical Greco-Roman military campaigns and celebrated military heroes as Alexander the Great. Campaign histories emphasizing regimental battles, strategy, and medals continue to be celebratory ways of justifying the sacrifice of generations of young people and the perpetuation of the relationship between conscripted military service and citizenship.
In historical narratives, wars and revolutions have persisted as world-turning, globe-stopping events, but the aptitude to violence is generally assigned to the losers. It is a cliché that the victors write history, but not less valid. Either the losers are presented as turning inwards on their own subjects, or they become militant, militaristic or barbaric, ethnically and religiously designated as innately violent.
For my generation, the Vietnam war upended many of most treasured assumptions about warfare, patriotism and humanitarianism. As with the Crimean War (1853-1856) and American Civil War (1861-1865), when citizens had daily news and pictures of battlefields for the first time, the horrors of the Vietnam War entered American living rooms viscerally as embedded photographers and journalists broke through the carefully scripted White House story of victory and just war. As World War I produced a generation of eulogies and critiques of the awfulness of death in Europe, so too the Vietnam debacle complicated the study of war by a plethora of remarkable literature by veterans. Witnesses to the pointlessness of such colonial wars, they spurred calls for social justice and equity that challenged narratives of good versus evil and civilized versus uncivilized.
Violence became a topic worth studying, considered part of the incomplete revolutions for equity and justice across world-wide spectrums of gender, race, and class. The study of violence in universities has been given further impetus in the past few decades, in part because of the unspeakable violence against peoples evident all over the globe, where neo-liberalism capitalism continues to disrupt relations between governments and citizens, resulting in spontaneous, often leaderless resistance and revolts.
The international human rights movement and genocide studies—both ongoing efforts to deal with the calamities of WWII—also suffered isolation from the academy in part because they were based in victimhood, and most often prompted by or investigated in United Nations organizations, supported by member states, philanthropic institutions, or private citizens groups. As Chris Hedges’ trenchant commentary demonstrates
The ethnic conflicts and insurgencies of our times, whether between Serbs and Muslims or Hutus and Tutsis, are not religious wars. They are not clashes between cultures or civilizations, nor are they the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. They are manufactured wars, born out of the collapse of civil societies, perpetuated by fear, greed, and paranoia, and they are run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect.”
America’s war in Afghanistan, now the longest in the history of United States involvement, is still likened to a civilizational crusade against Muslim terrorists, as the Muslim-Judeo Christian line in the sand continues to be drawn. The intimacy of the globalized world and the extraordinary levels of violence prompted by a set of unprecedented challenges has created a new call for the study of war in history, and a reversal of our insistence that war interrupts peace, when, in fact, peace interrupts war. War can only be captured by studying “the historically contingent and constantly transforming structure of people, government and military with their adherent characteristics of passion, reason and technique.’””*
The Ottomans 1700-1923: An Empire Besieged is a story about peoples, governments and militaries. I have added three new chapters and an epilogue to my original version (Ottoman Wars 1700-1870) to finish the story. It has now also become a book about communal violence. The central narrative concerns the radical transformation and dissolution of a Muslim empire in the midst of an era of imperial rivalry and world economic crises extending from 1750 to 1923, with special emphasis on the reigns of Sultans Mahmud IH (1808-1839) and Abditilhamid I (1876-1909). The perspective is from someone standing in Istanbul looking out rather than from someone in London, Paris, Vienna or St. Petersburg gazing in.
Several themes are central to this story of Ottoman evolution, radical reformation and dramatic collapse. The book is largely a story about organizing men and supplies to manage violence. A related theme considers the ways that mobile (nomadic) tribal and peasant communities negotiated their relationship with a Muslim patrimonial dynasty as it pressed them into service. Settling, counting, conscripting, and taxing populations are assumed to be the primary tasks of the modern state however conceived. In its early centuries, the Ottoman dynasty seemed particularly able to establish a web of loyal subjects across its large and multi-ethnic expanse, networks that grew into elite families and their households after 1750. These networks had extraordinary mobility, be they mercenaries for hire on all frontiers; merchants with long caravans or fleets of goods bound for market; privateers who moved with freedom on the seas; or religious pilgrims, such as Sufis and ulema, for whom knowledge required travel. “Stasis” is not a word I would use to describe the Ottomans during any period of their rule. I use a broad brush with my vocabulary for men available for military service beyond the hapless conscript, not all nomadic or tribal, but bandits, militias or revolutionaries depending on the context: levend, deli, hayduks, armatoles, klephts, akina, fedayi, bashibozuks, sipahis, sepoys, ¢etecis, and komitacis to name but a few.
While what we mean by tribe or nomad is still hotly debated, I am taken by a Rudi Lindner comment that seems relevant to this context:
[t]he medieval Eurasian nomadic tribe was a political organism open to all who were willing to subordinate themselves to its chief and shared interests with its tribesmen. It was a dynamic organism that could expand or contract its fellowship in short order; its growth or decay was intimately related to the wisdom and success of its chief's actions. Its identity was derived from its chief, a fact which implied that its continued and powerful existence over several generations was doubtful. Opportunism directed the economic focus of a tribe, determining whether it would exist on pastoralism, predation, or a mix of the two, while its mounted warriors ensured its political independence and dominance.”
The capacity to deploy manpower and supplies in defense of territories and cities, i.e. mobilizing violence as a geopolitical tool, was a paramount consideration of all pre-modern empires. The Ottomans, located at the edges of Europe, Africa, Central and South Asia, guaranteed that their frontier territories were particularly rife with certain kinds of communities. These were largely pastoral and mobile, and resided in the middle grounds of multiple civilizations, sometimes called the shatterzones of Europe and Asia. For the Ottomans to achieve their extraordinary expansion of the first two centuries required negotiations and contracts with very autonomous and quite independent populations. (By negotiation, I mean the constant “conversation” between ruler and subject, be it expressed through petitions, rebellions, disloyalty or desertion.)
The Ottoman tradition of collaborating with existing networks of martial peoples for the protection of far-flung and poorly incorporated borderlands continued into the nineteenth century. As Ottoman military prowess floundered and European borders started to contract, multilateral international relations became part of Ottoman imperial governance. The Ottomans were obligated to concede “rights” to their subjects, sometimes willingly, but more often as coerced by increasingly extractive colonial powers. The process began with the Greek revolution in 1821 and accelerated until 1878, when disputed settlement lines were mapped out to create Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. This book argues that the habit of militarizing segments of the population to contain a continuous string of uprisings of supposed internal enemies was a particularly volatile strategy in an empire that had lost 75% of its territories by 1900, and turned its violence inward, targeting fellow Ottomans.
This book is divided into four parts and nine chapters with an epilogue. Part I, The Ottoman World Pre-1800, situates the empire in the geopolitical map of Eurasia to explore the spatial and social context that determined Ottoman politics and culture. The emphasis is on the extraordinary web of communal networks and the mobility of manpower and goods. The Ottoman obsession with Russia, the emerging world power on its northern arc, stretching from the upper Danube to the Sea of Azov, is crucial to understanding the wars with both the Austrian Habsburgs and the Russian Romanov dynasties, 1750-1800. Included in this section 1s a description of the classical Ottoman system as it started to unravel: the state of the Janissary army, and the crises of mobilization and supply in an unsustainable economic system.
Part II, The Revolutionary Moment 1800-1840, describes the social transformation engendered by the total military and fiscal collapse of imperial defenses, and by the need to respond to international and domestic demands for reform, negotiation, and inclusion. The moment begins with the new order of Selim III (1789-1807) and the extension of the Franco-British rivalry to the Mediterranean with Napoleon’s landing at Alexandria in 1798. It ends in the reign of terror of Mahmud II (1808-1839) on his own subjects, resulting in a radical reconstruction of Ottoman rule in the new global imperial context. The very first units of a reorganized Ottoman army emerge, part of the struggle that brought Selim III down in 1807.
Part II, The New Muslim Absolutism, 1840-1870, focuses on the Tanzimat era and the imperial reforms embodied in the official decrees of Sultan Abdiilmecid (1839-1861). Ottoman bureaucratic rule that emerged from the civil war with Mehmed Ali of Egypt after 1840 was predicated on innumerable compromises with European powers for survival. The gradual restructuring of the Ottoman economy as a colony of Europe, and the continued profligacy and corruption of the dynasty had an enormous impact on relations between the newly westernized elites (and largely non-Muslim) of the empire and the poorly served Muslim populations, who were conscripted as the backbone of the armed forces. The Crimean War of 1853-1856, considered one of the most pointless and wasteful of world wars before World War I, introduced modern technologies to the battlefield: newspapers, telegraph and photographs, exposing the shambles of Ottoman rule ever more effectively to European readers. It was also the high point of hussar-style cavalries: Highlanders, Cossacks, Bashibozuks, and Zoaves. In this context, Ottoman army reforms continued to model themselves on European versions—first French and then German—but exigencies of battlefield and purse required simultaneous use of volunteer tribal confederations, often for internal security as suggested above.
Part IV, The Final Curtain: Imperial Reordering and Collapse 1870-1923, begins with a mapping of the major Ottoman mercantile cities after several decades of reforms. It then moves to the discussion of the conflicting notions of citizenship and communal identities that arose out of the 1856 reforms during the Hamidian autocracy (Abdiilhamid I 1876-1909). Germane to the theme of mobility, the discussion focuses on the largely untold story of the reverse migration of approximately three to five million Muslims from 1860 to 1914 crowding sensitive Ottoman territories such as Macedonia and eastern Anatolia. There is logic in the argument that the need to settle large numbers of refugees accelerated forced expulsions. It is also true that the new refugees made ready volunteer soldiers for the tribal cavalries and special operations forces of the 1912-1923 period. Abiilhamid’s draconian policies nonetheless reaffirmed the constitutional reforms for Muslim populations by offering land in return for conscription as part of citizenship, guaranteeing the right to property and prohibiting dispossession (Article 21 of 1876 constitution), reiterated in the conscription law of 1886. As observed by Eren Duzgun, the guarantee of property demonstrates that
[ t]he mobilisation of the lowest stratum was no longer based on the relations of a localised and personalised political community but began to be understood within the framework of the universal rights and duties of a new political subject. Geopolitical reproduction of the ruling elite was therefore becoming dependent on the creation of a new political subject from the ranks of the rural poor, which would, in turn, qualitatively redefine the space of bargaining between the ruler and the ruled.°
Simultaneously, huge numbers of Ottoman non-Muslims—such as Armenians, Greeks and Arab Christians—many who broadly speaking were beneficiaries of the market society of the capitulations, with newly minted passports, joined the waves of refugees in international migrations overseas in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
The impact of mobility on military mobilization cannot be understated. Military reforms after 1870 relied exclusively on the German/Prussian model, with demographic engineering determining the settlement of refugee communities of the Caucasus. In retrospect, the military reorganization of this Hamidian period—including educational institutions and command structures such as a General Staff—were to have the largest influence on the post-Ottoman world, especially in the extensive uprisings of Arab nationalists whose leaders included Ottoman battlefield veterans. Abdiilhamid envisioned a pan-Islamic unity with colonized Muslims across the world, while British paranoia constructed the great Muslim threat, inaugurating the modern era of religious propaganda which still operates in the Middle East.
This was also the moment when the Ottomans created a constitution, promulgated for a very short time by Abdtilhamid and abrogated as the era of incomparable tragedies opened with the Berlin Treaty of 1878. The treaty satisfied no one and guaranteed a complete unraveling of the remaining Ottoman territories. The Young Turks emerged as a Jacobin revolutionary organization within the Ottoman forces, precisely in the context of the struggle over Macedonia, just as guerrillas and revolutionaries spread all over the world and whipped up the violence in the Balkans. The Ottoman economy was by this point largely run by French and British bankers and investors through the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. The military had become a counterinsurgency tool rather than a full-fledged battlefield army. The 1909 coup by the Young Turks (Committee of Union and Progress [CUP] or Unionists) represented the first strike against Ottomanism, and the sustained effort by many Ottoman reformers to create a multi-ethno-religious federation.
The end of the Ottomans for this author came in 1913, when a real coup of the Central Committee of the Unionists brought down the government and radicalized the remaining years of the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the complete collapse of the barely reformed army in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. Hence, the war years 1914-1923 are told here in an epilogue that traces in brief the further collapse of Ottoman military capabilities, relying on the plethora of remarkable new WW/ studies to spell out the international context. Also described is the turn from Ottomanism to Turkism under Mustafa Kemal, one of the CUP Jacobins who renounced the possibility of a Muslim federation and a secularized Islam and spoiled the victors’ mandate that outlined a patchwork of ethno-religious nations.
Both Turkish and great power initiatives in fact denied the aspirations of Arabs, Armenians, Greeks and Kurds at the international discussions following WWI.
This book races through a fraught history with broad strokes and select detail for which I make no apology. It is intended for a broad audience in the Englishspeaking world, though the readers will find an international community of scholars in the further reading sections at the end of each chapter. History, however, is not just about the politics and military organization but also about the ordinary. Using the rubric the Ottoman House, each of the chapters includes a couple of portraits and occasional excerpts where appropriate of contemporaries who witnessed, participated in or were victims of the enormous upheavals underway. Who was an Ottoman?’ How did they experience the everyday? What was the understanding of their society? Until recently, these questions have remained largely unanswered. Historical works are now full of biographies, as more and more texts and translations become available to general audiences. Their voices help to fill the amnesia and silences of an otherwise unrecoverable past.
The World War I centennial has refocused attention on the origins of both the idea of the sovereign nation state, based on the Westphalia model, and of humanitarianism as European Christian models in the racialized colonial setting of the pre-modern Ottoman Middle East. The great irony, if it can be characterized as such, is that as Ottoman intellectuals and bureaucrats worked hard at Europeanizing themselves, they were increasingly (or perhaps eternally) “Orientalized,” leading Abdtirrahman Cami, a member of the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, in 1913 to observe that “only Europe stands in the way of the Turk’s Europeanization.”*® The great tragedy is the extent to which the nation state system with its mythic inventions continues to compete with more egalitarian models across the globe in “little wars” that are still couched in terms of the JudeoChristian/Muslim divide.
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