This paper examines aspects of Syrian collective memory of the Great War with a focus on the catastrophic famine that, together with other war-time calamities (locusts, epidemics), decimated the civilian population. Born out of a toxic mix of causes, the famine cast a deep shadow on the home-front experience and came to be remembered in images that range from the quotidian to the horrific. Many of the remembrances are articulated in the language of a war-time menu that includes blue bread, banana peels, corpses, and children. Many of the tropes involve animals: monkey-like children and creepy-crawly adults too weak to walk who are reduced to eating animal feed and grass as well as animals of the wrong species such as locusts, rats, cats, dogs, and horses. Starving Syrians did not have the exotic choices afforded Parisian elites who, under siege in 1870, “ate the zoo” (Rebecca Stang). Rather, many Syrians became the zoo. Yet, as was the case in Paris, starvation gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that was accented by class, gender, and sect and elaborated in the backward gaze of nationalism. In this paper I analyze the ways in which animals are used to convey the “disproportion and incommensurability” of the experience of the famine (Gilsenan) and the role they play in the construction of identity. My sources consist of a kitchen-sink of genres and include scores of memoirs and histories as well as novels, plays, poetry, and zajal written between 1916 and 2008. I use food as a lieu de memoire to organize this extensive cultural production. This project contributes to deepening our understanding of the civilian experience of the Great War in Syria by exploring sources never tapped before (including poetry and zajal translated by the author) and suggests a novel way to analyze discourses of identity during and following the war. Additionally, it offers a concrete way (a Noah’s ark, so to speak) with which to navigate the wide and contested flood of memories and a lens that invites comparative work on the home-front experience of war in other places and other times. It draws on parallel work on the European experience of famine and the home-front (WWI Germany) and is informed by scholarship on collective memory as well as cultural (and food) history.

The demands arising from the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in the First World War led to dramatic changes in the way the state functioned and its capacity for intervention, a process which resulted in the emergence of a new relationship between the state and its people. For millions of men, this relationship materialized in the form of conscription and long-term military service. For women, it primarily entailed the withdrawal of men from their households and an increasing intrusion by the state into their daily lives. During the war, women, especially soldiers' wives and mothers, were subjected to a variety of state policies and regulations, and, as a result, came into much more frequent and proximate contact with state officials. Focusing on their perceptions of and reactions to the war and the dramatic changes it brought to Ottoman society, this paper examines how the war shaped these women’s relationships with the state and influenced their understanding of gender roles. War brought a profound modification of women’s social identity and the redefinition of their relationship with the state. It was their husbands’, sons’, and fathers’ conscription that initiated this redefinition. During the war years and its immediate aftermath, soldiers and their relatives established a more demanding relationship with the Ottoman state based on the claim for reciprocity in their service and sacrifice in the name of the state and the nation. The documents in the archives –mostly in the form of telegraphs and letters from soldier’s wives and mothers- suggest an internalized sense of entitlement vis-à-vis the state. These women in part justified their demands on the traditional claim of material need, but they also understood payments and provisions as something the state owed them because of their husbands’ and sons’ service and sacrifice. They made incessant demands on state officials to supply basic foodstuffs for them to feed their families and to pay their monthly allowances on time. In this paper, I will examine this complex and dynamic wartime relationship between the wartime state and Ottoman soldiers' families based on the official documents, reports, memories, and also ordinary peoples’ letters, petitions, and complaints.

Arab and Turkish nationalist historiographies usually blame one another for betraying the ideals of the empire during World War I: Turkish historiography focuses on the Arab ‘collaboration’ with enemy states, Arab secret societies and the Arab revolt. Arab historiography emphasizes the so-called ‘Turkification’ of the empire, Cemal Pasha’s policy of public executions of Arab intellectuals and his so-called policy of ‘starving’ off Lebanon during the war. Based on petitions submitted to the Sultan, transcripts of the military court, the Diwan al-Harb, and other sources, this paper offers an alternative to the finger pointing. We learn from the diary of Nasri Bik Lahhud al-Labki from Lebanon, for instance, that many of the judges of the Diwan al-Harb were Arab! Thus you had Arab judges sentencing Arab ‘nationalists’ to public execution. So, too, was much of rank of file of Cemal Pasha’s administration Arab. Similarly, the vast majority of the foot soldiers who served in Greater Syria were also Arab, and we know from a host of sources that they pillaged and plundered from the local population almost at will throughout the duration of the war. I further suggest in this paper that events and behavior often attributed to nationalism resulted, in fact, from other factors. Instead of studying the war in terms of the ‘Arab’ versus ‘Turk’ conflict, I examine moments in which a ‘pro-regime and anti-regime’ analytical framework make much more sense – since there were plenty of Turks and Arabs falling on both sides of the spectrum during the war. Even if they were not represented at the highest echelons of power, many, perhaps most Arabs, still believed in the empire’s existence until the very end of the war, even if they were unhappy about its actions. Indeed, they were the regime in Syria; they worked in its offices and courts, bore its uniform and died in its defense until its final days.

This paper proposes an empire-wide understanding of the scarcity, availability, and employment of food resources during the First World War. Syria suffered the most horrific effects of the empire’s food crisis throughout the war. The famine in Syria, where it claimed as many as half a million lives, and probably more, has attracted some scholarly attention in the field of Middle Eastern history, though it remains far from well-understood. Nor has the famine in Syria made any inroads into the international historiography on the war beyond our field. This is somewhat puzzling, as historians of the First World War have been striving to move away from a focus on the Western Front and to include now the Eastern front, as well as the war’s effects in Africa and Asia and to write a global history of the war. This paper broadens the geographical and chronological context of the Syrian famine by connecting it to the history of hunger and starvation in the empire as a whole. Locusts appeared in Western Anatolia as early as spring 1914, for example, prompting the implementation of laws and regulations on how to fight the destructive insect. The governor of Edirne, moreover, sounded alarm bells in fall 1914, warning the interior ministry of impending famine in his province, as did the governor of Beirut, and, in 1915, the governor of Yemen. Down to the sancak and village levels, the representatives of local government – and often the people directly themselves – turned to Istanbul and described the home front as a battlefield of survival. These interactions were at once calls for help and exercises of resistance against the state’s demands for food and further requisitions. Local governments answered the state’s collection of grains with their own requests for thousands of uniformed soldiers to be used for agricultural labor. The paper examines the hunger crisis across the empire and connects it to the military’s need to feed its army. The paper also connects the home front to the military front, by examining the effects of the Anglo-French naval blockade, and the lack of provisions on the Gallipoli peninsula during 1915, where the scarcity of food threatened the continued conduct of military operations. Often separated by hundreds of miles, soldiers and civilians, the battlefront and the home front, were connected by the food crisis, with death always lurking at the door of both.