An important recent topic of historical investigation has been the professionalization of the Ottoman police force, particularly the urban police in Istanbul. Much of the work that has been done on this question revolves around the structure of the police force, its organization and leadership, who was leading the changes and for what purpose. This tendency characterized the single early work on the subject, Glen Swanson’s 1972 “The Ottoman Police,” and is continued in more recent works such as Ferdan Ergut’s State and Social Control and Noémi Lévy Aksu’s “Une institution en formation: la police ottomane à l’époque d’Abdülhamid II.” Another part of the question, however, is what this professionalization meant to the police officers themselves. There were five ranks in the late Ottoman police, and while organizational restructuring affected all of them, little or nothing has been said in the historical literature about the lowest of them, the nefer, the patrol officer. In this paper, I discuss all ranks, but focus on the patrolman. What did it mean to be a policeman in the late Ottoman Empire? What were the requirements to be a policeman? What were their regular duties? What difficulties did they face? This paper begins to address these questions. I do this by working from a variety of sources. One very important archival source consists of exams that were given to police officers testing their knowledge of such fields as police ranks and organizational structures, criminal law, and proper procedures. Other sources include memoirs, newspaper accounts of police activities, and disciplinary reports on police officers who failed to conform to proper procedures. The Ottoman case parallels others in that the police officers often, although not necessarily, shared many of the beliefs and attitudes of the groups associated with criminal activity. While they could show discipline, devotion to duty, and sometimes remarkable courage in pursuit of that duty, they were also at times known to drink, gamble, brawl, and consort with prostitutes. Understanding what the street-level officers were faced with and what their attitudes were will help us understand the effects of the structural changes being undertaken in the late Ottoman Empire. This paper represents a step toward removing the study of the Ottoman police from a purely institutional, state-centric study and expanding it into the increasingly important realm of Ottoman social history.

Scholarly interest in the Anatolian peasantry under the single-party regime of the interwar years conventionally focused on the state economic policies and agricultural structures. Due to the historians’ emphasis on organized/institutional politics, the absence of massive and organized peasant movements led even critical accounts to portray the peasants as passive observers of the social and political change. Turkish historiography has long assumed that the peasants under the single-party regime did not rebel against the rural exploitation, oppression, and increasing state intervention in their lives, except for a few well-known religious or Kurdish uprisings. Both official-nationalist accounts and critical literature have seen such a few cases as tribal or religious backlash in the face of the modernization process, an outcome of the Kurdish nationalism or the remnants of the chaotic war years. These accounts detected neither the widespread rural crimes that took the forms of theft of crops or livestock, smuggling, violence against government agents and oppressive landowners, small uprisings and banditry plaguing the entire Anatolia nor the local, social and economic dynamics that gave rise to them. The daily rural conflicts that pervaded the countryside during the 1920s and 1930s have remained unknown. Based on the newest archival documents, local newspapers, and theoretically on history from below approach, this paper unveils and examines rural crimes, violence and banditry during the interwar Turkey. First, it explores peasant’s violent attacks on and intimidation tactics towards their exploiters and oppressors such as tax collectors, district governors, gendarme officers, village headman, oppressive landowners and usurers. Second it describes and analyzes peasants’ “anti-property crimes” such as appropriation of public and private lands, fight for scarce resources such as fertile lands, water, forests and salt mines, and smuggling as a resistance to the state monopoly system. Third, and most importantly, it explores the banditry by closely examining from which social background, for what reasons, in which ways and against whom the peasants took up arms. This paper, showing how the peasants’ daily struggles escalated into banditry, argues that the banditry was a last survival method for oppressed peasants and was pervasive in all parts of Anatolia. It argues that the major force fueling the rural conflicts was the social injustice which was common to all parts of the country. It also points out how the peasants’ everyday politics affected the Turkish state-building modernization process and paved the way for the Kurdish resistance of the following decades.

In the post-World War I (1918) Turkey, violence and chaos were widespread in Anatolia. The long lasting war had created economic and social difficulties which in turn led to conflicts. The Sultan and Porte were in favour of reaching a peace agreement with the Allies without having another war. However, the occupation of İzmir by the Greek Forces in May 1919, led to a rise of pre-planned resistance movement which became later on the nationalist movement ‘Kuvay-ı Milliye’, in Anatolia. While the Sultan and Porte were still hoping that a peace agreement was possible with the Allies, the nationalists believed that a war with the occupiers was unavoidable, particularly with the Greek Forces. A disagreement between İstanbul and Anatolia in terms handling the occupiers gradually evolved into a Civil war between the two. The north western part of Anatolia, Düzce - Adapazarı region where mainly populated by Circassians, became the centre of the conflict between İstanbul and Ankara in May 1920. The Circassians rose against Ankara due to the impact of Ankara’s policy of establishing hegemony in the region. Interestingly, despite the fact that initially the Circassians did not act in coordination with the government in Istanbul; later on their relationship grew into an alliance. While a significant number of Circassian military officials, bureaucrats and statesmen supported Ankara government, Circassians of Düzce - Adapazarı region remained as loyal followers of the Sultan/Caliph joint to pro – İstanbul side of the Civil War. This paper will attempt to shed light to the Circassian opposition to the nationalist movement of Ankara in Düzce – Adapazarı region. It will also argue that the role of Circassians in the Civil war was neglected in the main stream historiography of Turkey due to homogenization and nation building policies of the early Turkish Republican period. Furthermore, it will also emphasize the impact of intra – Circassian conflict in the region since ironically their uprising was suppressed by a leader of Circassian irregulars, Çerkes Ethem. By using the British National Archive, the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive, and the military archive of Turkish General Staff, this paper will demonstrate that how the Circassian mobilisation in Düzce – Adapazarı region posed a threat to the nationalist movement, when the movement was still in its infancy.

Established in 1920 by medical doctors and supported by religious and community leaders, the Turkish temperance society Yeşilay (the Green Crescent) was a major force associated with the country’s politics of temperance. It also contributed momentum to MPs in the nascent republic’s first parliament and a narrowly achieved prohibition on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol. To this end—and in concert with those MPs sympathetic to its cause, the society relied on a message that focused on public health, morality, anti-imperialism, and nationalism. Though Turkey’s prohibition lasted only four years—with its effective reversal in 1924, it paved the way for the subsequent 1926 introduction of a state monopoly controlling alcohol in the republic. Collaborating with international anti-alcohol organizations, Yeşilay also waged a hard-fought battle to prevent this reversal. To that end, American prohibitionist William Eugene “Pussyfoot” Johnson arrived in Turkey as an invited supporter and observer. Though prohibition was reversed, the society remained a powerful societal force in the republic through the activities of its countrywide branches and its regular publications. Opposing, for example, state profit-generating reductions in alcohol prices during World War II, it actively recruited journalists, physicians, intellectuals, and others to support its causes. Unable to change state policies through most of the twentieth century, however, it was compelled to resign itself to its lower profile role of combating an expanding range of addictions. Amid twenty-first century state initiatives—like the increased regulation of alcohol, however, its wider relevance has returned. This paper focuses on Yeşilay’s establishment and early agenda in order to interrogate Turkey’s early histories of temperance and to provide a foundation for understanding its contemporary role in Turkish politics and society. Sources for this research include historical newspapers, Yeşilay’s monthly magazine, public health journals, parliamentary and other state records, and memoirs.