The Balkan defeat serves as a historical moment that reformers identified as a wake up call, using it to demand greater cultural rejuvenation. An examination of the physical condition of the soldier’s body was one of the issues that surfaced in these discussions. Ali Seydi Bey, an author of several morality books, blamed the defeat on the soldiers’ lack of agility and physical infirmity. However, the reformists went beyond the barracks in their critiques and included the Ottoman nation in general, identifying the lack of activeness and a propensity for laziness as the greatest enemy within. What were the effects of wars in general, and the Balkan War in particular, on the discourses of subject formation? Did the practices that are related to a new conceptualization of the body change after the Balkan defeat? This paper will explore the possible shifts that took place during the Balkan Wars in the discourses and practices regarding the body of the political subject. I aim to accomplish two tasks: first, I situate these accusations, and subsequent reform propositions as part of a nation-formation process which has been going since the mid-nineteenth century. Secondly, I aim to show that the cultural production of the period, such as the plays, morality texts, and journals display an increasingly exclusionist and militarized language. The militarization that became the marking characteristic of the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without taking into account the process by which the body of the citizens became a site of national anxiety. I take the Balkan Wars ‘not as an event, but as a social process’ that allows us to see how war-making and nation-building were interdependent processes, and how the wars made the critiques that pitted an ideal “able” Ottoman against the “feeble and lazy” real Ottoman more visible. As the building block of a nation, the human body became a topos where both physical and mental infirmities ought to be defeated to establish a “productive nation.' This is a part of a larger project on how the relationship between body and work was reconfigured at a period when series of modern binaries, such as modern vs. traditional and productivity vs. laziness, were becoming hegemonic in late Ottoman society (1839-1920).

During World War One Great Britain incarcerated over 22,000 “enemy aliens” in concentration camps on the Isle of Man. Among these prisoners were many Ottoman citizens who were held in the Knockaloe Camp. Those Ottomans interned reflected the diversity of the empire and included Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Britain is credited as the inventor of the concentration camp, where thousands of civilians would be ‘concentrated’ into a small, ordered area. British officials developed these types of mass detention centers during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa and utilized this system of internment to great effect during the Great War. Based upon extensive archival documents from the Ottoman and British National Archives together with memoirs from prisoners, press clippings, circulars, camp flyers, and Red Cross and Red Crescent reports this paper investigates the living conditions, daily life, regimens, social stratifications, recreation, work, and hardships endured by Ottomans incarcerated abroad simply because of their citizenship. It also investigates treatment of prisoners along ethnic, national, and class lines, especially by comparing Ottoman experiences alongside German and Austrian foreign nationals incarcerated in these same camps. Finally, this paper investigates the diplomatic negotiations between governments who are in a state of belligerency regarding their citizens living abroad. These investigations will enable me to categorize treatment and experiences of these prisoners and situate these concentration camps within a broader literature of civilian incarceration during times of war over the course of the long nineteenth century.

The first decade of the 20th century found the Ottoman Empire in turmoil. Foreign powers were directly and indirectly encroaching on Ottoman sovereignty, domestic elements used terrorism to agitate for independent ethno-nationalist states, and the Empire was beset by financial woes. These issues were precisely what the Young Turks (Committee of Union and Progress) chose to deal with when they came to power in 1908. However, once the afterglow of constitutional restoration had abated and the CUP had failed to bring the many challenges of the state under control opposition began to mount. The very elements that had coalesced around the Young Turks in defiance of Abdulhamid II now opposed them. Some of the groups that were opposed to the Young Turks were minority Muslim groups that had believed that constitutional restoration would result in a federative structure that would ensure linguistic ethnic/religious autonomy. This was particularly true of Albanian and Arab elements within the Empire. From the perspective of the CUP constitutional restoration was not the panacea for the Empire’s ills more radical measures needed to be taken and quickly to ensure the existence of the state. The Ottoman Empire needed to borrow and implement ideas from Europe, most importantly a strong military, modern bureaucracy and the latest technology. Indeed, an ethos can be associated with this project, an Ottoman modernism, which sought to fuse the Sultanic and Islamic characteristics of the Empire with the new ideas of the West. To promote this Ottoman modernism the CUP needed to regularize bureaucratic procedures and ensure the security in the Empire. One of the main obstacles to this goal were an array of administrative relationships that had developed throughout the centuries in peripheral regions of the Ottoman Empire. But the cost of regularizing the administration was high. The numerous rebellions that sparked as a result the CUP’s new policies were difficult to bring to heel and these conflicts lingered. These rebellions greatly impacted the citizens and soldiers involved and inflicted great trauma on areas in the midst of these conflicts.