Scholars have portrayed World War I and its aftermath as a key moment of rupture for the modern Middle East. Political and cultural themes have dominated scholarship on the period. New political identities emergent from the war, in particular, have occupied the attention of historians. All but totally neglected have been the environmental, material, and medical legacies of the war in the post-Ottoman world. It is to those concerns that these four papers turn their attention.
The widespread epidemics that afflicted the wartime Ottoman Empire reverberated after the armistice. Our first paper considers the persistent outbreaks of malaria across the Middle East as a key legacy of the war. New national governments fought the disease for much of the twentieth century. That struggle shaped political power at the same time that it worsened conditions for vulnerable populations and especially displaced people. The second paper offers an interesting counterpoint to the narrative of the displaced as victims, arguing that Armenian doctors drew key agency from their attempts to combat disease that helped them shape the Armenian national future. Their medical journals show how the doctors sought to mold women, in particular, as proper mothers of the nation. These two papers reveal the complex inheritance that the post-Ottoman world received from the disease and medical history of the war.
The second two papers assess the legacy of the World War I famine in Syria and Lebanon. Scholars have yet to quantify the famine and its consequences in precise demographic terms. The third first paper attempts to reconstruct the trajectory of the Lebanese population history. Wartime demographic collapse impacted rural areas and agricultural workers severely. That fact undermined schemes to extend commercial agriculture and contrary to French colonial plans, Lebanese and Syrian landholders opted to plant mainly subsistence crops, a decision made with food crisis fresh in mind. The replacement of commercial crops with grain helped serve as a bulwark against famine during World War II. As the final paper argues, the Allied powers that governed Lebanon and Syria during World War II were careful to avoid any repeat of the food crisis. British and French officials were likely aware of the culpability of their own governments in creating the famine by enforcing the blockade. The paper will assess the successful allied provisioning scheme in that light.
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Dr. Graham Pitts
During World War I, disease proved a potent ally of the Ottoman bid to commit genocide against the Armenians. More than two decades later, Armenian refugees resettled by the French Mandate were still vulnerable to epidemic disease. As many as half of those resettled from the Hatay province to ‘Anjar and Tyre perished due to epidemics. During the Mandate period malaria, in particular, remained a fact of life in rural Lebanon until a paradigm shift in global public health that followed World War II. Palestinian refugees, unlike the Armenians, were largely spared epidemic disease and have inhabited camps –in some cases the exact same refugee camps that disease forced Armenian populations to abandon—since 1948. Their status as permanent refugees hinged on the use of DDT and other health technologies that proliferated in the post-war period. That watershed transformed the nature of war in the Middle East, I hypothesize, by prolonging conflicts and their attendant refugee crises. This comparative analysis of disease in Armenian and Palestinian refugee camps seeks to assess the disease environments for refugees throughout the twentieth century in Lebanon. Contrary to the prevailing scholarly understanding that World War I and its aftermath saw disease ecologies transformed, this paper argues that disease environments post-war were largely similar to those of the late Ottoman period.
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Chris Gratien
For most of the 20th century, governments of the Middle East waged war against malaria. The eradication of malaria was touted as the modern nation's struggle against a primordial scourge. In Israel/Palestine, one scholar has described this struggle as "healing the land" in the eyes of its proponents. Scholarship on Turkey emphasizes the biopolitical dimensions of the new Republic's sometimes paternalistic approach to public health, which involved medical interventions into the lives of peasants while waging a "war on malaria." The fixation on geography or backwardness of peasants belied more recent proximate factors also contributed to disease risk, however enduring and old the presence of malaria may have been in the Middle East. This paper examines how the prevalence of malaria in the Middle East grew markedly during the First World War period. Displacement, famine, and sudden shortages of medical supplies in the particularly vulnerable Ottoman Empire all contributed to the spread of malaria. As the breakdown of the late Ottoman public health regime left the populace vulnerable, the movements of refugees and soldiers further provided the means of malaria's spread. As I argue, the presence and virulence of malaria in post-Ottoman nation-states and mandates was in part a lasting legacy of the First World War that would affect local societies for decades after the fighting had stopped.
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Sara Pekow
The famine in the Levant during World War I left an indelible impression the region. While the collective memory of the survivors changed the way Syrians and Lebanese thought about food and hunger, the institutional memory gave rise to a new way of governing food during wartime
There are multiple explanations for the famine, including poor harvests, requisitions by the Ottoman military, and the interruption in trade. But it was the Entente blockade that turned a terrible situation into a tragedy, resulting in at least 500,000 deaths. Neither the British nor the French acknowledged responsibility for the famine, but both powers sought to avoid a recurrence.
The vivid memory of the famine and fear of shortages led to grain hoarding and speculation in Syria at the start of World War II, sending the cost of bread and flour soaring. The Vichy-controlled government, isolated and underfunded, faced a series of food riots fomented by local nationalist leaders, putting French rule of Syria in jeopardy. When the Allies took control of Syria in 1941, grain collection and distribution was taken over by the Office du Céréales Panifiables (OCP), created by Edward Spears and backed by British money and personnel under the auspices of the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC).
In order to obtain local support, British and Free French troops promised independence prior to their 1941 invasion of Syria, but the bureaucratic apparatus of the MESC seemed to fortify the colonial presence, supported by a large number of troops. Under the Spears Mission, 30,000 additional acres were put under cultivation, local industry was expanded, and a new system of taxation was implemented.
Based on an analysis of the archives of the Spears Mission, Mandate supply records, and the local press, this paper will examine the significance of the famine of World War I in determining the Allies' food policy in the Levant during World War II as well as how the reforms instituted by the MESC affected everyday life for Syrians. In conclusion, this research will explore whether increased Western intervention in Syria during World War II informed nationalists' demands for ending Mandate rule without granting a privileged position to France, a stipulation in independence agreements the French had successfully negotiated prior to the war.
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Mr. Hratch Kestenian
During the First World War, Ottoman-Armenian medical professionals played a strategic role in saving lives. Armenian nurses and doctors attended soldiers, but most importantly helped deportees in surviving the genocide. Both war and genocide created the environmental crises threatening the policies and projects of the Ottoman Empire. The historiography of the region and period has described the Armenian doctors, nurses and pharmacists as passive and depressed actors. In my opinion, they were the opposite. Their profession gave them power and allowed them to negotiate and compromise with officials. This power provided the Armenian medical personnel with agency in deciding their future, the future of their compatriots and overcoming the genocidal procedures. After the war, these doctors remained powerful and exercised their power on a more national level. Through their function, as official experts and practitioners of social technology, they achieved prestige and respect within society.
In this paper, I will argue that through the professionalization of medicine the Armenian community became highly medicalized during the post-war period. During this period, and until the advent of the Turkish Republic, Armenian medical journals such as, Hay Puzhag (Armenian Healer), and Tarman (Remedy) played prominent roles in describing the socio-medical problems of the community. These journals propagated a new discourse of domesticity and created medical authority. As such, doctors viewed themselves as healers of both individual and national bodies. They penetrated the productive and reproductive spheres of society, and tried to shape the behavior of the common people through medicine. With this new authoritative language, they instructed women in general and mothers in particular in their own medical projects in order to revive the nation. According to this discourse, Armenian women were given a specific role in saving the nation from degeneration. While rape victims were encouraged to be reintegrated back to the community, other women lost their independence over their bodies. Therefore, doctors not only medicalized concepts such as abortion, procreation, cleanliness, and hygiene, but also politicized them for the sake of rebuilding the nation.
