Since 2001, the international law of war—and its violation—has been inextricably bound up with U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay are treated as neither prisoners of war nor criminals; U.S. interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria are widely seen as violating the U.N. Charter; new legal theories have justified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan; and both al-Qaeda and the Islamic state abuse, ransom, or execute captives in violation of international captivity standards. In all these debates about violence and law, it is commonly assumed that the law of war is a product of enlightened western European thought, and that it serves to promote humanitarian objectives and limit violence. Law, in other words, is linked with concepts of restraint, civilization, and Europe.
This panel uses the Ottoman Empire’s engagement with the law of war, on land and at sea, to question those assumptions. Our first paper examines debates over what constituted legal maritime violence and who could define it in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean. Mounting disagreements between the Ottoman central government and the North African provinces over their corsairing led Istanbul to disavow the corsairs, leaving them to the mercy of the European states they had victimized. Our second paper explores the legal consequences of the Russian blockade of the Dardanelles during the 1768-1774 Russo-Ottoman War . Russian policies preventing the passage of foodstuffs clashed with European conventions, forcing admiralty courts to navigate between conflicting legal touchstones. In examining the prisoner-of-war system practiced by the Ottomans and Russians in the second half of the nineteenth century, our third paper examines how changing legal rhetorics might be only loosely tethered to actual practice which, despite Orientalist discourses and claims of incommensurability, was broadly similar across Eurasia. Our final paper traces changing legal opinions on the “civilized” conduct of war issued by the Ottoman Office of Legal Counsel in the early twentieth century. These opinions formed the basis of diplomatic protests regarding the 1911-1912 Italian invasion of Libya and the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars. These protests were ignored in Europe, and the Office’s opinions thus carried less weight in World War One. The papers thus show law “in action,” in state policies and individual experiences, rather than only in scholarly discussions and treatises. They argue for the productive use of law as an analytical category, rather than only a source of normative judgments, in approaching the past.
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Dr. Joshua White
Piracy was an early and constant subject of negotiation between the Ottomans and their European treaty partners, who developed a legal and diplomatic framework prohibiting piratical violence and establishing the procedures for redress when attacks did occur. The anti-piracy provisions of these treaties (ahdname) were regularly expanded and modified to meet changing circumstances, even as the club of treaty partners expanded beyond Venice to include France (1569), England (1580), and the Netherlands (1612). However, developments around the turn of the seventeenth century threatened to bring down the entire order upon which the treaty regime was founded. While the predations of English and Dutch pirates and privateers proved vexing to the Ottomans, it was the increasingly independent North African corsairs who posed the greatest political and religious-legal challenge to Istanbul. This paper explores the relationship between Istanbul and the corsairing ports of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli in the seventeenth century, tracing the reasons for and consequences of the diplomatic divergence that led England, France, and the Netherlands to conclude treaties directly with the North African provinces. Unresolved disagreements over what constituted legal raiding and what was piracy, the result of a series of Algerian-Tunisian piratical raids in the 1620s and 1630s, led to a permanent restructuring of the imperial center’s relationship with North Africa. Since the turn of the century, European jurists had been asking themselves whether Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were sovereign, in which case their corsairs were legitimate enemies and their takings lawful prizes, or rebellious Ottoman provinces and nests of pirates? Istanbul resisted acknowledging the former, but the North Africans’ arrogation to themselves of the right to declare war and peace convinced it to wash its hands of responsibility for their corsairs’ predations. Istanbul granted explicit permission by decree and in the treaty texts themselves to its European treaty-partners to destroy any corsairs who threatened them, creating the conditions that led to dozens of European punitive expeditions against the North African port cities beginning in the 1660s and culminating in the French invasion of Algiers in 1830—attacks that Istanbul did not consider to be acts of war against the Ottoman Empire.
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Dr. Julia Leikin
In the first Russian-Ottoman War (1768-1774), the Russian Empire confronted many of the questions raised in the debates over neutral rights to commerce and navigation in wartime that played out over the course of centuries in European publicist literature. Russia’s imposed blockade of the Dardanelles Straits, a misguided effort to put pressure on the Ottoman Porte to surrender by trying to starve Constantinople, was one of the most prominent actions in the maritime theater of the war. In an effort to impose the blockade, the Russian navy and naval auxiliaries captured hundreds of merchant vessels navigating in the lucrative Mediterranean region, bringing them in front of Russian admiralty courts. Faced with new circumstances, Russian admiralty commissions were torn on fundamental questions of blockade, contraband, and neutral vessels’ rights. Among these, the legality of foodstuffs in the blockade was a particularly topical issue, often contested by merchants. The legal expositions on this question placed even the Russian elite at odds with one another.
This paper will draw on original archival research to foreground the practice of imperial Russian admiralty courts in the Eastern Mediterranean during the 1768-1774 Russian-Ottoman War, focusing on the contested question of transport of foodstuffs and provisions during a blockade. While the coherence of European law on many points of maritime warfare was fraught with disagreements, even European norms were largely unanimous on foodstuffs being exempt from blockade. As the paper reveals, Russian practice with regard to this question did not accord to European conventions. The inconsistencies and frequent changes in Russian policy elevated the prize commissions to the role of watchdogs that ensured that merchant prizes were adjudicated according to the most up-to-date laws. Evidence from these admiralty courts reveals not only the peculiarities of Russian practice, but also the influence of orientalist perceptions of the Ottoman Empire on interpretation of the laws. Pointing to the dilemmas surrounding the legal interpretation of this question in a formative period of Russian and European practice of the law of nations, my paper brings to the foreground some of the common legal, practical, and moral arguments that continued to pervade legal interpretations of contraband, blockade, and neutrality through the first world war and persist to this very day.
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Dr. William Smiley
This paper uses the law of war, and particularly the rules on prisoners of war, as a window on Ottoman engagement with Atlantic international law. Between the 1850s and 1880s, the Ottoman Empire increasingly engaged with the customs and scholarly traditions that had long defined rules between states in western Europe and the Atlantic world. At the same time, the Sublime Porte joined the multilateral treaties that codified the modern law of war, such as the 1856 Paris Declaration on privateering, the 1864 Geneva Convention on wounded combatants and military personnel, and the 1899 Hague Convention on the rules of war. Yet the Ottomans had a long history of signing and obeying treaties. How new, then, were these developments? I answer that question by drawing on Ottoman and British archival records to examine Ottoman policies and practices toward prisoners of war in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878). This was a critical moment, as the former conflict marked the first time, in over two centuries of Ottoman-Russian rivalry, that the maritime powers of France and Britain joined the Porte. The treaty ending the Crimean War, the 1856 Treaty of Paris, welcomed the Ottomans into the “Concert of Europe”—though what this meant, in law, diplomacy, or functional politics, remains a matter of scholarly debate. The same peace conference also drew up the world’s first major multilateral agreement on the laws of war (the Paris Declaration), the paradigm for those that followed. During the latter conflict, the 1877 War, the Russian Empire used its (claimed) adherence to the newly codified law of war as evidence that it was more civilized than its Muslim imperial rivals. The Ottomans, however, fought back with their own claims of Russian legal violations. Yet through it all, I will argue, actual Ottoman captivity practices did not change much between the two conflicts, and in fact they generally, though far from universally, resembled those of their Christian allies and rivals. What changed was rhetoric, as the Ottoman state learned to play the same legal game as other major powers. The story of Ottoman engagement with the international order of the high imperialist era, then, is a matter of both continuity and change. Even as its formal legal positions changed, the Ottoman state remained flexible, pragmatic, and committed to both its own customs and to its legal obligations—which conflicted less often than one might expect.
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Dr. Aimee Genell
In 1882, the Ottoman Foreign Ministry established the Office of Legal Counsel (isti?are odas?) to deal with questions related to international law and international relations. This Hamidian era office outlasted the empire and was reconfigured within the Foreign Ministry of the new Turkish Republic. The Office of Legal Counsel produced with a wide range of legal opinions related to issues covered by both public and private international law, including the law of war. At the same time, professors of the Law Faculty at the Darülfünun produced textbooks and analyses of the law to war and the rules governing “civilized” warfare. In the lead up to the First World War, Ottoman lawyers within and without the Foreign Ministry assessed the war in Libya and the Balkan Wars from this legal perspective.
This paper will examine Ottoman legal responses to the Italian invasion and occupation of Libya in 1911-1912, as well as the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Ottoman lawyers argued that Italy’s invasion of Ottoman territory was illegal and unprovoked. Lawyers focused too on Italy’s conduct of warfare and the use of prohibited weapons of war, such as poisonous and asphyxiating gases. Foreign Ministry legal opinions provided the foundation for the Ottoman diplomatic protest against Italy to Europe – a protest that European powers largely ignored. While Foreign Ministry lawyers issued opinions related to the conduct of warfare during the Balkan Wars, these opinions did not carry the same weight as they had during the pervious conflict in Libya. My paper will attempt to explain a shift in Ottoman legal thinking and argument from Libya to the Balkan Wars. Finally, I will argue that the years just prior to the outbreak of the First World War are critical for understanding Ottoman attitudes towards the law of war at the outset and during the course of World War I.
