The arrival of thousands of Allied servicemen in occupied Istanbul led to an explosion in the quantity and visibility of alcohol consumption in the city. Alcohol was at the centre of numerous incidents between civilians and soldiers that seemed to alternatingly undermine and strengthen the axes of Allied control. A constrained press, prevented from overt political critique of the occupying powers and complicit Ottoman government, instead focused on the deleterious social effects of the occupation, carrying regular denunciations of alcohol consumption and calls for prohibition, in effect in Nationalist controlled Anatolia from 1920 onwards. Under the influence of such public pressure, the ?eyh-ül-?slam instituted the Ye?il Ay (Green Crescent) under the psychiatrist and physician Mahzer Osman, to promote the cause of prohibition locally, while a broader focused Ahlak Komisyonu (Morality Commission) also examined the question. Alcohol consumption in Istanbul likewise came to concern the Allied authorities, who simultaneously pursued the commercial advantages to be gained by the import of French and British-manufactured spirits while instituting controls over when, where, and what alcohol could be consumed by their compatriots. The paper examines the fate of the drinkers of Istanbul, local and foreign, under the authority of these twin regimes of alcohol control. By combining Allied and Ottoman police and newspaper reports and the personnel testimony of soldiers, officials, and civilians in the occupied city, the paper supplements the small existing literature on Turkish prohibition, which for the most part exclusively focuses on the debate in the Grand National Assembly in Ankara and neglects the impact of restrictions and eventual prohibition of alcohol on its sellers and consumers in Istanbul. In addition, such research complicates historical understanding of the occupation of Istanbul, by examining the often complementary social policies of local and Allied authorities in the city, rather than the struggles for domination and resistance that constitute the majority of published work on the topic.

Nocturnal Encounters: Drinking and Social Control in Galata during the Eighteenth Century While the urban landscape of Ottoman ports offered public spaces where members of different ethno-religious communities ( usually males) could interact freely (the market place, workshops), residential neighborhoods promoted settlement around places of worship and a level of segregation. The port of Galata was the enclave of European as well as non- Muslim communities and had an important Muslim core around the Arab Cami. But as international trade expanded and migration grew,p, residential quarters became more mixed and diverse in the eighteenth century. This paper will examine the impact of Muslim- zimmi cohabitation on the nightlife of Galata during the long eighteenth century. Based on Islamic court records as well as police registers and Ottoman accounts, I will argue that while non- Muslim and European communities enjoyed a degree of cultural autonomy in Galata, the state and communal leaders protected the gender and communal boundaries at times of social and economic crisis. The state created a community watch system to punish breaches of moral code, violation of bans on drinking as well as sumptuary laws. But often these bans were ineffective and Muslims as well as non- Muslims enjoyed the nocturnal life of Galata in taverns and coffeehouses together even when from time to time moralism became a trend and taverns and coffeehouses were shut down as dens of ‘ immoral life’ and dissent at times of political upheavals.

Raki as a "national drink" in the late Ottoman Empire To my knowledge, the first mention of raki - a drink made from grape alcohol flavored with anise - as a "national drink" in the Ottoman Empire first appears in an article published in 1901 in the Revue commercial du Levant, organ of the French Chamber of Commerce in Constantinople. The author of the article deplores the fact that, because of the widespread consumption of this alcoholic beverage, French spirits do not manage to penetrate the Ottoman market. Starting from this remark, I propose to study the validity of the formula during the nineteenth century. The case is remarkable if we think that a century earlier, the raki still seems of limited use in the Empire when compared to wine. What I want to analye is the process by which an alcoholic beverage emerges within the framework of a Moslem State and a multinational society. My research is based on a great variety of sources: Ottoman archives, memoirs, stories of travelers, Ottoman press, etc. It tries to identify the different factors that explain the predominance of raki among the alcoholic beverages consumed in the Ottoman Empire: the political factor (the role of Sultan Mahmud II [1808-1839], the influence of Tanzimat reforms, the impact of the Young Turk revolution of 1908), the technical factor (difficult to prove: progress in distillation and alambics ?), the economic factor (the cost of alcohol, the question of imports) and above all the socio-cultural factor, I mean the desire of the Ottoman elites to "make civilized", while privileging a "native" drink. The development of consumption of raki faces resistance: the appearance of new alcoholic drinks (rum and especially beer); some measures of prohibition taken by Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909); the publication of anti-alcohol articles and brochures written by religious men or by doctors trained in modern medicine. Nevertheless, around 1900, the use of raki becomes widespread and almost public in the big Ottoman cities (Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Izmir, Beirut). Around the drink a new sociability appears, what Ilber Ortayli calls "a culture of tavern" in which the muslim elites and the urban middle classes participate largely, alongside the non-Muslims, Greeks , Armenians, Jews, Levantines and foreigners. In my opinion, we can legitimately speak of "national drink", a legacy among others from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic.

The varied intersections of war and worldwide temperance activism in the early 20th century provide unique contexts for analysis at both national and international scales. Though categorized commonly as part of an “Islamic world”—and thus omitted from many would-be global histories of alcohol, the Ottoman Empire included many sites and situations meriting inclusion. In 1910, when Germany’s emperor declared that, “the nation which drinks the least alcohol will be the winner,” he uttered prophetically the reasoning of many states that implemented diverse anti-alcohol policies during WWI. Though Ottoman leaders pronounced firmer proscriptions and other policies during the war for its military, it often relied on religious and moral arguments when offering justification. Following WWI, added rationale emerged from both state and society. Among leaders in the defeated and internationally isolated Ottoman Empire, legal prohibition appeared as a progressive means to appease the United States and build bridges while negotiations over post-war settlements took place. This interest in enhanced Ottoman-American relations was mutual; Anti-Saloon League leaders and other organizations also looked to Turkey. Oftentimes, their gaze included the Ottoman region not only as a curious site of alcoholic prohibitions; they also sought global allies and inspiration. Though initiatives to bring prohibition before the Ottoman parliament ceased entirely once the legislative body was forced to close, momentum behind this cause carried into the renegade parliament of the nascent Turkish republic. Proposed, debated, and passed in 1920, the republic’s prohibition only lasted until 1924, when the costs of the experiment were more evident and once Kemalists consolidated their authority. In this paper, I examine the dynamic politics of alcohol and anti-alcoholism within the late Ottoman context; a time that witnessed intense internal and external pressures and shifting perspectives. In doing so, my research delves further into the socio-political issues and ideas that enabled a union of religionists and progressive physicians who would induce the republic’s short-lived prohibition. By exploring this transitional period, we can discern that the ban was not just the product of an odd internal coalition between conservatives and socio-medical reformers; it shared profound connections to ongoing temperance narratives and activism observable at the global scale, particularly in the US. Scrutinizing these linkages evident in temperance rhetoric and relationships, the often isolated histories of national experiences become more nuanced and less insular. For this paper, I utilized Ottoman and republican archival documents, contemporary newspapers and periodicals, and temperance literature.