Empires, People, and Power in Ottoman Iraq: New Approaches to the 19th Century
Panel 065, 2014 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 23 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Owing in part to their political and spatial distance from Istanbul, the Ottoman Iraqi provinces—Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul—have remained the least-studied of the empire’s Arab domains. Presenting new case studies that draw from the history of medicine, environmental history, urban studies, as well as draw from emerging techniques in digital humanities and network theory, this panel seeks to introduce new approaches that reconceptualize the creation of political and social power in this region. Our papers consider both trans-regional empires and local dynamics of change that influenced and shaped governance, physical space, and the lives of individuals in the latter half of the 19th century.
By employing a new understanding of the local disease landscape, the first paper calls attention to the role played by epidemic cholera in shaping and defining space and power in the provinces of Baghdad and Basra, linking the lines of disease transmission from British India with the contested administration of public health in Ottoman Iraq. It draws extensively from the lengthy observations of Joseph Svoboda, an Austrian-Armenian diarist employed as a clerk by a British-owned steamship company. The second paper explores the intersections of intellectual and environmental history. It elaborates the manner in which Romantic thought and irrigation-engineering doctrines emerging from British India interacted to create specific conceptual—and eventually physical—reconfigurations of the southern Iraqi marsh landscape.
The third paper works with Charles Kadushin’s premise that the patterns of social networks are both the cause and consequence of human behavior. In order to understand the dissemination of political thought during this period, this paper makes additional use of Joseph Svoboda’s diaries, and explores the changing relationship between the Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company and the social networks of its employees based in Baghdad. The fourth paper shifts its focus north, to Hamidian period sufi lodges in Kirkuk, which served as major anchors in the rapid expansion of the city. Sufi tarikât, often used by Ottomans as means of control and religious-cultural standardization, were planted in well thought-out locations on the outskirts of Kirkuk during the Hamidian period. Their centrality in the life of this growing city, as religious and economic centers, precipitated the expansion of the city in their direction and the consolidation of its neighborhoods around them.
In the 19th century, the world witnessed multiple epidemics of cholera that took countless lives across the globe. In the context of the Ottoman empire, cholera gave literal meaning to the trope of the "Sick Man of Europe." In 1866, the third in a series of International Sanitary Conferences intended to address the issue of cholera was convened at Istanbul in response to an outbreak that killed thousands during the annual Hajj. There, the nations of Europe put pressure on the Ottoman state to adopt new public health practices. In the provinces of modern-day Iraq, distant from Istanbul and late in adopting the institutional reforms of the Tanzimat, the creation of new public health institutions was complicated by the extensive economic and political penetration of the British empire.
Focusing on the second half of the 19th century, this paper draws upon the substantial unpublished diaries of Joseph Svoboda, an Austro-Hungarian resident of Baghdad. As a clerk aboard a river steamer, Svoboda had considerable connections amongst the British political and economic community in Baghdad and Basra. He was a witness to three of the six worldwide cholera pandemics in the 19th century, as well as to the occasionally fraught relationship between the Ottoman authorities and the representatives of the British Empire in the region.
Utilizing the wealth of observations in Svoboda’s diaries allows us to draw two conclusions. First, cholera was a disease that was spread from place to place by human movement. This paper argues that in considering the full disease environment of the Ottoman empire, historical patterns of the spread of cholera indicate that it entered the Iraqi provinces through the port of Basra, environmentally linking it much more closely with Persia and British India than with the rest of the Ottoman empire, from which it was cut off by the vast barrier of the Syrian desert. Second, the contested process of instituting new public health measures between the Ottoman state and representatives of the British empire in the Iraqi provinces reveals that, even after the re-assertion of direct Ottoman rule in the region in 1831, local sovereignty remained fluid. Understanding the process of medical change and the disease landscape of the Iraqi provinces of the Ottoman empire necessitates a reevaluation of established political and environmental realities in the region.
Joseph Mathia Svoboda was born in Baghdad, Iraq to a prominent family of Central European descent in 1840. During the period of his employment with the Lynch Brothers' Tigris and Euphrates Steam Navigation Company in 1862 he began to keep daily diaries, which chronicle in great detail, not just his personal life - living in the Christian quarter of the city - but also the daily life of a steam ship clerk, including the noting of daily weather patterns, river conditions, ship traffic, cargo logs, archeological digs, tribal conflicts, and troop movements up and down the Euphrates between Baghdad and Basrah. The diaries continued until his death in 1908 over a period of 46 years, overlapping the Tanzimat, and Abdülhamid II’s rule. However, one of the richest elements of his journal is the careful log of people, whether passengers, or friends and family. He came into contact with an extraordinarily diverse number of people, from Sheiks and diplomats, Turkish Zaptiye, and Jewish, Christian and Muslim residents. Not to mention his own extended familial network stretching from India, through Iran into Europe.
This paper merges traditional historiography with emerging applications of digital humanities to analyze maps and visualization created by the author - by drawing heavily on the data from his journals, and letters sent back and forth amongst his social and kinship networks - in order to reimagine the experience of empire and the Ottoman-Persian borderland by the individual residents in this remote province of the Turkish Empire. In a period when the Ottoman empire was acutely focused on completely transforming the relationship between the empire and its people, and within and among the classes present in its population, the patterns of social networks explored by this paper offer insight into both the cause and consequence of different social and kinship groups on the empire's slow transition to state. Mapping these interactions help explain the effect of social power on political power in a region so far removed from the Ottoman Capital.
In the 1870s, the Euphrates deserted its channel for one to the west, devastating the rich agricultural countryside around Hillah and causing turmoil for regional finances. In November 1913, the inauguration of the Hindiyah Barrage divided the flow of the Euphrates between the river’s two channels. The inauguration of the barrage represented the culmination of many years of struggle by Ottoman bureaucrats, British financiers, Indian engineers, and local workers to manage the current and silt of the Euphrates.
The barrage could not have been built without the cooperation (and often contestation) of all these actors. Indeed, the contingent circumstances which gave rise to those interactions were fundamental determinants of the work’s final form. This paper will explore the intellectual currents which informed the construction of the Barrage as they were situated within social, economic, and political frameworks. Such an exploration will help illuminate the internal dynamics of the early twentieth-century British imperial project in Iraq.
Focusing on the character of William Willcocks, and drawing both on his publications and the archival record surrounding the barrage, the paper will examine the ways in which British romantic thought interacted with conventions of scientific irrigation emerging from British India to produce specific ways of thinking about and eventually molding the landscape of the Euphrates. For Willcocks, irrigation in the Tigris-Euphrates basin was as much about “restoring” the Garden of Eden as it was about rational scientific water management, and he brought both to bear on his advocacy and eventual plans for the irrigation of Mesopotamia. This powerful combination of religious and scientific fervor has generally been overlooked by historians of Iraq.
Though Willcocks’s master plan was never fully implemented, his ideas continued to serve both practical and inspirational purposes throughout the British period and through much of the twentieth century, heavily influencing dominant conceptions of both existing and ideal Iraqi landscapes. Returning to look more closely at the sources of his ideas and the ways they were positioned within early twentieth-century power dynamics can enable us to better understand why the land of Iraq has been understood and manipulated the way it has.
