Abstract
My paper resituates the Italo-Turkish War (1911-1912) as the opening battle of a decade of warfare in the Ottoman territories that culminated in the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Histories of the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) abound, especially those that render this war as a “National Struggle” (Millî Mücadele), reproducing an overtly nationalist narrative that continues to dissociate this war from the Ottoman Empire’s earlier conflicts. Further, such narratives elide the significant contribution of a global Muslim community and the Ottoman contours of Mustafa Kemal’s ultimate victory. Analyzing this conflict in conjunction with the preceding Ottoman struggle in North Africa against Italian aggression demonstrates that the participants of both conflicts expressed an identical anticolonial ideology and relied on similar configurations of power to defend their embattled territories. In fact, the majority of the generals and officers that would bolster Mustafa Kemal’s defenses in 1919 cut their military teeth fighting against the Italians. An acute analysis of these two conflicts, while rarely investigated in parallel, illustrates their similar mechanisms of resistance and the global reach of Ottoman ideology in its final years. This paper, therefore, examines the means by which Ottoman officers responded to the threat of invasion by deploying an efficacious appeal for contributions from local volunteers and entreating the broader global Islamic community for aid. In so doing, these Young Turk officers infused Hamidian pan-Islamism with an anticolonial ethos that yielded significant results on the battlefield. Abdülhamid’s overtures to Islamic unity and his subvention of tribal elites in North Africa and Anatolia provided the groundwork for the alliances erected by Ottoman officers in Tripolitania in 1911 and by Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia in 1919. My analysis also extends to the volunteer irregulars that made up the bulk of the resistance in North Africa and Anatolia. Because of the strategic flexibility of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk anticolonialism, the Ottoman Army could elicit the support of thousands of volunteers from the local population and even encourage Muslims of distant lands to take part in these conflicts. In both wars, Ottoman alliances were maintained with local leaders to ensure their support in battle and Ottoman officers and parliamentary deputies preached Muslim solidarity and anticolonial warfare to prospective volunteers. The initial success of the Ottoman insurgency in Libya was thus replicated in Anatolia a decade later.
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