The pages of the illustrated journals Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), Sevimli Ay (The Adorable Monthly), Resimli Persembe (Illustrated Thursday) and Resimli Hafta (Illustrated Weekly) sought to engage a Turkish public that was learning to cope with a revolutionary time. While each journal had a somewhat different tactic, each strove to educate the reader about the broad world around it and employ the influence of Western culture to aid Turkish society’s advancement towards a modern society. This essay will discuss the birth of these journals through the story of their proprietors, Mehmet Zekeriya and Sabiha Sertel, with the aim of elucidating both the transformation of the Turkish press, but also the diversity of oppositional culture in the Early Turkish Republic. In this time these journals reacted frequently to revolutions of all kinds, massive social and political reform inside Turkey as well as a vastly changing West (and North) in the fallout of World War I. The Sertel’s vision was influenced both by leftist political currents and the development of positivist sociology, and this is evident in their journalistic efforts. This essay delves into the intellectual transformation of the Sertels from 1919, when they were helping formulate an intellectual response to the Greek invasion of Izmir to their return to a remade Turkey in 1923 after a four year journey to New York to study at Columbia University. Upon their return, their views were in both harmony and opposition to the unfolding Kemalist vision coming from Ankara. Where Mustafa Kemal was in many was fashioning Turkey according to an ethnogenerative, and thus anti-Western vision, the Sertel’s proffered a vision of modernity that was a nearly direct translation of Western culture and education. In this way, we can come to understand the origins of a leftist opposition to Kemalism apart from the hard-line Communist elements that have received much more attention in scholarship of this period. By assessing evolution of these intellectuals both in occupied Istanbul and following that in New York this essay intends to broaden our understanding of Western influence in the Early Turkish Republic as well as reevaluate the formative experiences of what would become two of Turkey’s most prominent leftist intellectuals.

Ottoman legislative reforms of the late nineteenth century have variously been narrated as top-down, modernizing, and the result of external pressures. These narratives have posed provincial actors, and especially rural provincial actors, as obstacles to such reforms rather than exploring their contributions to the process of framing new legislation. While recent research has noted cooperation between Ottoman provincial actors and policymakers in Istanbul in initiatives for transformative legislation, such research has focused overwhelmingly on urban centers. This paper will contribute to a growing effort to rethink the impetus for reform by exploring links between events in rural areas of the Ottoman provinces and new legislation emanating from Istanbul. I argue that one of the main obstacles to recognizing rural populations as key actors in imperial reform is a general lack of understanding of the mechanics of rural economies. By exploring the issue of animal theft, this paper will illuminate details of animal sales, identification, and taxation as key elements of rural economies in the late Ottoman period that shaped the language and intent of central reforms. This paper will utilize a case study from the rural district of Salt in the southern region of the province of Syria, where animals were a key element of the local economy in the late nineteenth century. Through a reading of the Salt Shari’a Court records (1880-1915), this paper will investigate the issue of animal theft, the pastoral nomads and merchants mainly involved in claims of animal theft and the court’s attempts to address the issue. I will also discuss what the court records tell us about animal markets, local methods for identifying animals and local actors who were especially involved in these activities. At the same time, this paper will delve into central state archival documents that outline an early twentieth century legislative attempt to curb animal theft, recognized as a key problem all over the empire. New legislation pinpointed the need to identify animals precisely and issue title deeds for use in local markets towards effective taxation and policing of animals as property. By showing the connections between the language of this central legislative initiative and attempts to address the issue of animal theft at the level of the rural provincial court, I will show how rural actors in one corner of the empire contributed to the processes and contours of imperial reform attempts.

Borders write new political geographies. They also bring older fears and anxieties into sharper relief. Perhaps nowhere in the post-Ottoman world was this more the case than in historic Greater Syria, today the Syrian and Lebanese Republics, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Drawing on Syrian newspaper accounts from the 1930s as well as French and British trade agreements, this paper illustrates the fraught process of negotiating and defining a post-Ottoman space. The borders that would outline the new nation states in the region produced not only new political arrangements, but reordered the economic and social environments of this formerly unified space.Whereas the appearance of new borders elsewhere provoked massive transfers of population with commensurate levels of human suffering, the experience in Greater Syria and in the space that would become the Syrian Republic was remarkable for the ambivalent and conflicting reactions these new borders provoked among contemporaries. Borders were at once outrages perpetrated on the Syrian nation by colonial interlopers dividing its constituent parts, strategic frontiers of little concern to anyone save colonial officers, and prized redoubts that formed crucial buttresses against enemies close to home, keeping them out. The ways in which historical actors in Syria navigated borders that were in places extremely permeable and in others hard, fast and bristling with armed defenders defined in large measure the region’s political and economic relationships of the subsequent decades. In this way, investigating contemporary perceptions of borders, how they were imposed, and general sentiment to them, promises to illuminate both the historical origins of the space modern Syria emerged from and its place in the future.

This paper will explore the contestations involved in the establishment of an agricultural school in Selemiye, Syria during the late Ottoman period and the subsequent contribution of the school and its students to shaping the environment and agricultural practice in the region. The paper will draw on archival sources from the Ottoman archives and the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères archives as well as periodicals from both the Ottoman and Mandate periods to trace the conflict that erupted over funding for the school’s initial founding and demonstrate the transitions the school underwent in the wake of World War I under the French Mandate. Disseminating knowledge about emerging technologies through institutionalized agricultural education was a priority for Ottoman administrators. In addition to classes in agriculture that were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire’s elementary, middle and high schools, in certain regions deemed particularly crucial to agricultural prosperity, means were sought to establish schools dedicated exclusively to agricultural education. However, as the case of the Selemiye agricultural school demonstrates the process of establishing these institutions could be contentious. This paper’s examination of the circumstances surrounding the Selemiye agricultural school’s establishment will illuminate how different groups within the local society perceived and valued the purported benefits of agricultural education. It will analyze how this resistance was interpreted by Ottoman officials and this interpretation’s divergence from the reasons given for opposition to the project. The paper will also demonstrate how local groups adopted the state’s own language of reform to justify and defend their positions critical of the school. Despite this contentious beginning, the school continued and, in the aftermath of World War I, was singled out by French officials as one of the only schools that would continue to provide agricultural education under the mandate. While its students undertook a number of projects, by the early 1930s the school had been shut down—a situation which provoked nationalist critique and frustration. Tracing the history of the Selemiye agricultural school from its establishment in the late Ottoman period through the changes it underwent during the mandate demonstrates on the one hand continuities in the insistence on institutionalizing agricultural education, particularly from the perspective of state officials and certain landowners, while also providing insight into how local actors negotiated these changing political structures.

In this talk, I will try to analyze the structural and conceptual changes made to Shari’a within the early twentieth century Ottoman social context through a scrutiny of a legal reform project proposed by Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924). For Ziya Gokalp’s project not only provided a representative template to observe the late Ottoman intellectual discursive trends on legal reform. But as a prolific thinker and political adviser for the Ottoman administration, he made prominent impact on shaping the intellectual predispositions and political reforms of the late Ottoman Empire. This talk will focus on Gokalp’s intellectual and political efforts to refashion Shari’a along the lines of newly emerging social ideals in order to respond to the modern socio-economic changes in the society; and try to make sense of why in his legal thought “family” emerged as the main site to instill social moral ideals. I basically argue that Gokalp’s project was an attempt of social engineering that would turn Shari’a, which was confined to familial issues, into a social technology to fashion new moral/ethical subjects laid within the collective social setting of “nation”. This talk in this framework attempts to analyze how and why in Gokalp’s discourse Shari’a was delimited within the ethical private sphere under the supervision of looming secular state. By examining Ziya Gokalp’s legal reform efforts, this talk seeks to figure out in what ways the reconfiguration of the family as a legal category juxtaposed it with new forms of disciplinary and moralizing techniques and discourses in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire. Along these lines this talk might help us to understand why the modern governmentalities targeted family as their object to regulate. I will in this regard try to understand how in the discursive level family came out to be seen as the private locus of morality within which modern subjectivities will be produced and in what terms modern imaginations of moral subject-formation processes differed from the ones understood and organized in Islamic traditions. This can contribute to our understanding of the changes in Shari’a’s moral and legal role in the familial and social levels in the Ottoman-Turkish context in particular, and in terms of modernity in general. A critical scrutiny of Ziya Gokalp’s thoughts on Islamic law might thereby help us to analyze how in the late Ottoman context Shari’a came to be defined as a “religious law” in the liberal model.