In 1933 a group of senior military figures in the French colony of Algeria began informal discussions about the foundation of a new organisation to care for and control the increasingly restive indigenous veteran population. Alarmed at both the obvious neglect of indigenous veterans by the colonial state and the rising threat of nationalist, Communist and reformist indigenous political movements, they formed the Comité des Amitiés Africaines. Throughout the rest of the 1930s, the Comité and its network of local centres, the Diar-el-Askri, would combine a system of provision for indigenous veterans and their families with a strict form of supervision that sought to counter any signs of political dissidence among a social group seen as crucial to the stability of the colonial state. This paper explores the early years of the Comités des Amitiés Africaines and its activities in North Africa and the French metropole. It examines the implications of the transfer of responsibility for indigenous veterans from the pre-existing structures, run by a combination of civil society organisations and the French state, to a semi-private organisation under the control of military and colonial officials. It interrogates how this impacted the notion of rights-based provision enshrined in the French legislation designed to compensate veterans. It questions to what extent the Comité and its actions affected the indigenous veteran population in both positive and negative terms. Furthermore, it asks where the Comité fits in the wider history of welfare provision in colonial Algeria. Is s it an aberration or does it mark a continuity with past and future policy? Finally, it considers the legacy of the Comité, tracing its history through rest of the colonial period and the War of Independence and on to post-independence Algeria. The history of the Comité des Amitiés Africaines, largely overlooked in existing scholarship, offers a fascinating insight into the intertwined nature of welfare provision and political-military supervision in the French Empire, especially in Algeria. It also highlights the dilemma facing indigenous veterans who had to balance their desire for just reward for participation in the Great War with the fear of interference in their private and public life by the over-zealous paternalists of the Amitiés Africaines.

Historians of Qajar Iran have traditionally compared the Qajars to European states and empires. To the extent that historians have compared them to the neighboring Ottomans, it has been in the context of the military and bureaucratic reforms, and modernization more broadly, of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The result has been twofold: first, the Qajars are rarely included in the “empire” club, and second, the tendency has been to depict them as “backward” and in decline. This paper begins by posing a modest question: what if one were to shift the comparative framework to other tributary empires – including the Ottoman Empire, but also the Qing, Mughal, and pre-colonial African empires? A change in perspective would reveal that the Qajar Empire shared features with many other tributary empires, including “ruling over vast agrarian regions and relying on the taxation of surplus peasant production” – the definition recently provided by Peter F. Bang and C.A. Bayly. But beyond whether the Qajars should be considered an empire or not, a comparative approach will sharpen our understanding of the socio-political relationships and mechanisms that sustained their power. This paper draws on an unpublished collection of over 200 letters, decrees, and petitions, found in Tehran’s Majlis Library, which were written during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and exchanged between the Kangarlū tribal community in the Caucasus and central Qajar rulers. The paper uses these sources to provide a case study on the politics of frontier administration during the formative period of the Qajar state. A careful reading of the correspondence reveals a multi-pronged approach by Qajar rulers to incorporate tribal khans into the empire: marriage alliances, financial support, and the mediation of tribal disputes. In return, the Qajars expected tributes in the form of gifts and taxes, as well as the supply of troops. The outbreak of war with the Russian Empire in 1804 only intensified the entanglement of the Kangarlū tribal community with the Qajar state. Comparing the frontier administration of the early Qajar state with that of other tributary empires provides insight into one of the central, yet under-explored, questions in Iranian historiography: how and why the Qajars managed to establish one of the largest states in the Middle East following decades of political instability. A key component to answering the question lies in the empire’s ability to draw tribal khans like the Kangarlū into the state apparatus.

Economic Largesse to Palestine During WW I Generated New Realities During World War I, a large amount of humanitarian aid flowed to Palestine mainly from the American Jewish Committee. The organization’s intent was to help ease hunger and poverty in the areas affected by the war. In actuality, under the umbrella of war, the Yishuv was able to utilize this assistance to organize, expand and position itself as a separate Jewish state-within-a-state by 1920. According to Jewish historical accounts, the Yishuv was a decimated, depopulated, and unorganized community by the war’s end. This historical description suppressed the political, social and economic developments that occurred within the Yishuv through the largesse of humanitarian aid transferred through the American Jewish Committee (American Jewish Distribution Committee) and fueled by propaganda of the Zionist Organization. Ultimately, this monetary bonanza brought about considerable economic, financial, social, and organizational a-symmetry between Jews and Arabs by the end of the war that obstructed meaningful gains for the Arab population of Palestine through the 1920s. The fellahin, small businessmen, East European ultra-Orthodox and traditional Sephardic (Spanish) Orthodox populations were marginalized through minimum nutrition and absence of funding necessary to build their future. In contrast, Yishuv leaders transferred money to strengthen and expand Jewish National institutions, feed the colonists, build new Jewish urban quarters, establish industries and further Jewish agricultural production. Collaboration and daily points of contact between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, who had lived together in mahallas (quarters) were disrupted. Humanitarian donations, doled out within the Yishuv, brought about critical changes in employment patterns, decline of inter-communal business partnerships, and diminished personal contacts through new rules and regulations enacted by Yishuv leadership. Thus, the dynamics of inter-communal relations were being replaced by means of communal separation and more independent Jewish communal jurisdiction vis-à-vis the government. As new political and economic realities emerged by the end of the war with the Yishuv able to establish its goal of a state-within-a-state, a stronger Palestinian Arab response was verbally and physically articulated in opposition to Jewish Zionist settlement, fearing more land loss and dispossession. Hence, the extensive financial humanitarian aid transferred to Palestine, which by 1917 was controlled by Yishuv leaders in Palestine with increased public support, exacerbated an already uneasy situation between Jews and Arabs to the point of outright physical attacks and the formation of a more united Palestinian Arab National Movement in the 1920s and 1930s.

One of the most interesting and under-explored aspects of the Young Ottoman movement is the role it played as a participant in the nineteenth-century global public sphere. In the decade leading up to the Russo-Ottoman War (1877-1878), the Young Ottomans were among the first Muslim intellectuals to directly address an audience of European diplomats, scholars, and the general newspaper-reading public. Having taken refuge in European capitals whose press cultures were increasingly preoccupied by Islam and “the Eastern Question,” dissident journalists like Ali Suavi (1838-1878) and Teodor Kasap (1835-1897) took advantage of their proficiency in European languages to put forth a competing Ottomanist account of global affairs. While their interventions were often couched as scathing critiques of the Ottoman government, they also defended the legitimacy of Islamic rule and called for respect for Ottoman sovereignty. In this paper, I present a sampling of contributions to the British and French press made by Ali Suavi and Teodor Kasap between the years 1868 and 1877, in forms ranging from dual-language newspapers to scholarly journal articles and pamphlets. I contextualize these forays into the pages of European journals by framing them as part of two distinct discursive spheres: first, the European debate over Ottoman legitimacy; and second, the Ottoman public discourse concerning constitutional reform and European intervention. By comparing Ali Suavi and Teodor Kasap’s French- and English-language publications with their writings for an Ottoman audience, I intend to draw out differences in their strategies for engaging public opinion in these two spheres. Yet rather than framing these rhetorical differences as evidence of inconsistency or insincerity, I argue for reading them as complementary aspects of the Young Ottoman project, which sought to cast Ottoman constitutionalism as intelligible and desirable within both Islamist and European discourses. By reading these articles written for a European audience as integral parts of the Young Ottoman corpus, I aim to demonstrate the value of a more inclusive approach to the study of Ottomanist thought, one that recognizes and incorporates the movement’s transnational scope.

By scrutinizing practical workings of diplomatic relations, this paper demonstrates for the first time that Prussian Jews played a significant role in conducting financial and cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and Prussia. In contrast to the political and emblematic narratives of conventional diplomatic history, the paper shows the everyday life practices of Ottoman diplomats relying on services provided by Prussian Jews and traces the opportunities carved out by Jews benefitting from growing diplomatic relations between the two regions. In the second half of the eighteenth century, at a time when Berlin was becoming the center of Jewish social life, enlightenment, and commercial activity, the Ottoman Empire dispatched several ambassadors and chargés d'affaires to Prussia. The Ephraim family, who were court jewelers and merchants, and the banker family Oppenheim financed not only Prussian kings and noblemen but also their diplomatic guests. This paper will depict how Prussian Jews from all levels of society offered various services for the city’s diplomatic guests. Current historical research is also silent on the commercial ties of Prussian Jews to the Ottoman Empire, which often operated by the means of direct representatives or associations with trading companies residing in Istanbul. Hence, another contribution of this paper is the disclosure of important agents connecting the two regions such as the Jewish messenger and dragoman Ludwig Groß, who had accompanied Ahmed Resmi Efendi (1763-1764) and of Ahmed Azmi Efendi (1790-91) to Berlin. My sources are reports and petitions submitted by Prussian subjects to their government, aimed to settle open accounts with the Ottoman diplomats or discuss commercial exchange with the Ottoman Empire. Next to responding the diplomats also wrote petitions to the Prussian government – on few occasions on behalf of Prussian Jews in their services. Since in Prussia appeals were often solved by governments rather than courts, the elaborate petitions were one of the main channels for asserting individual rights and thus give an insight into the everyday life of the diplomats in Berlin. Additional evidence comes from the diplomatic correspondence between the Prussian government and its embassy in Istanbul. Joining the various sources and narratives, the paper displays how Jewish brokers facilitated the Ottoman diplomats’ travels to Prussia and their everyday lives in Berlin.