Mobilizations, Mass Politics, and Total War. The Radicalization & Politicization 
of Ottoman Veterans during the “War Decade” (1911-23) The so-called “war decade” (1911-23) proved to be a transformative era for the Ottoman Empire. This period marked the end of the Empire and the establishment of new states in its former territories, such as the Turkish Republic. During the “war decade”, the Ottoman Empire engaged in numerous conflicts and mobilized millions of people on both the war and home fronts. The continuous military mobilizations and the foreign interventions radicalized and politicized a generation of war veterans, pushing them towards profoundly different and often opposing political ideologies. In a series of social and political mobilizations, former brothers in arms turn to each other and fought in support of their opposing political allegiances. With war veterans as the historical subject, my paper will examine how politicization of the masses during a decade of continuous conflicts and mobilizations transformed Turkey into a single-party republic and what role veterans of the “war decade” played in this process. The paper’s causal hypothesis is that war mobilization triggered subsequent social and political mobilizations that transformed the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic. Only the war veterans had the means and the knowhow to mobilize against their political opponents who, in this case, were their former brothers in arms. Through their political identities and their willingness to mobilize, the war veterans either constructed a new social reality or defended the old one by participating in nation building projects, such as forming state institutions, or resisted these transitions. The historiography of the Ottoman and Turkish revolutionary war experiences has expand significantly during the last decade. Moreover, the studies on contentious politics have begun to attract more scholars. However, these new developments primarily concern the periods before and after the “war decade”. The paper will use contentious politics and collective action theories to examine how the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish nationalist movement were organized and mobilized. It will examine how both Ottoman and Turkish nationalists constructed their collective identities, and how they used them during their struggle against their national enemies and their political opponents. The “war decade” veterans were byproducts of these collective identities, which they in turn helped produce and reproduce.

This paper investigates urban life during the First World War in Ottoman Beirut. As in much of Europe, World War I in the Ottoman Empire was characterized by ‘total war’, whereby the classic distinction between the front and the home front became irrelevant as the effects of war pervaded everyday life and transformed society. This paper adopts the concept of total war to consider the experiences of Beiruti women alongside those of men, viewing their roles as intertwined and interdependent as a result of the all-encompassing nature of the war rather than as distinct and irreconcilable due to an artificial division between the front and the homefront. Women’s participation in the First World War, and the war’s impact on gender relations have been key areas of investigation by European historians for some time. World War I has become a popular area of inquiry in Middle Eastern history during the past decade, with historians of the Arab world and the Ottoman Empire publishing work on the wartime experience in various parts of the empire, and engaging actively with scholarship on the First World War in Europe and around the world. Drawing upon Ottoman Turkish and Arabic archival documents, this paper demonstrates the ways in which urban women from all walks of life were active participants in Beirut’s wartime society, and investigates how the war provided opportunities for women to become more directly engaged in the workforce and political life. For many women, particularly from the lower classes, this meant becoming the head of household and primary breadwinner for the first time. Others, especially from the middle and upper classes, left the confines of home to serve as nurses and volunteers, or to take an active role in intellectual life through the publication of opinion pieces and fiction. These new roles necessitated negotiation with a variety of male actors, from individual family members to a more broadly male-dominated public sphere. The emergence of women into the public spaces of Ottoman cities was facilitated by the circumstances of war, and persisted in the aftermath of the conflict, shaping official approaches to gender and social practice in post-Ottoman national states.

This paper explores the reorganization of the terrain of the Sinai Desert by Ottoman military authorities during the First World War, with a particular emphasis on its social- environmental aspects. Ottoman governors had taken several initiatives to expand state control along the southern edges of Palestine before the Great War. In particular, they had sought to reorganize this region starting with the early twentieth century for the purposes of penetrating into Bedouin life, disciplining the nomadic population, and building up the security of the Ottoman-Egyptian frontier against an encroaching British Empire. However, the exigencies of war kindled further the ambitions of Ottoman military governors to expand control over the region and its topography. A particular example of this shift in policy was Beersheba, which became a strategic military point and the main base for the Ottoman army during the war. However, Ottoman attempts at colonizing the landscape had extended farther south of Beersheba to the Sinai Desert. In the case of operations along the Sinai Desert and the Suez Canal, Ottoman forces attempted to re-engineer nature to gain a military advantage through the digging of water wells and the construction of military bases, railways, roads, tracks, hospitals, telegraph lines and even the growing gardens, plantations and eucalyptus trees in the arid region. This paper, in other words, deals with how the Ottoman military governors perceived the environment and landscape of Sinai Desert as a ‘natural enemy’ in the context of war, and how these perceptions led the Ottoman and German military authorities to take a position towards changing the landscape and reorganizing space that prioritized military requirements over civil needs. By focusing on engineering projects in the desert, this paper aims to address the social- environmental aspects of the “occupation of the desert” that impacted the territories and populations beyond the Sinai Desert and reached to the Anatolian provinces of the empire. These projects in the desert required huge amounts of labor and animal forces to be accomplished, and relied on natural resource extraction. Thus, this paper particularly addresses the recruitment of (forced) labor and the requisitioning of camels and horses from the populations of Greater Syria and Anatolia, and the extraction of timber from the forests of Lebanon and Palestine by tracing the larger question of how Ottoman war mobilization shaped the relations between the state and different classes of Ottoman society.

In this paper I examine how the Ottoman government’s deteriorating relations with Great Britain and growing involvement in supporting German foreign policy in Asia impacted Ottoman fortunes in the Arabian Peninsula prior to World War One. In particular, I focus on a series of reports from Ottoman consular officials spread throughout the western Indian Ocean in the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. These reports reveal a profound change in the tenor of the Ottoman government’s relationship with their British counterparts in the region in the final decades preceding the outbreak of the war. Although a growing number of publications have examined Ottoman involvement in the European theater of World War One, events in the Ottoman Empire’s southern frontiers bordering the Arabian Peninsula have been relatively neglected. Yet developments in southern Iraq and the territories bordering the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden proved to be decisive in shaping the Ottoman government’s confrontation with the Allied powers and particularly the armies of Great Britain. My paper utilizes documentary evidence drawn from the Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives produced by Ottoman provincial officials from Iraq and Yemen and Ottoman consular agents in the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. These reports dispatched to Istanbul from provincial governors in Basra and Ottoman consular agents in places like Bombay, Karachi, and Bushehr reveal increasing unease with British designs on the region at the same time that Istanbul's support for German diplomatic initiatives in the region was on the rise. Yet the attempt to substitute the diplomatic support of Great Britain with rival Germany opened a wide swathe of Ottoman frontiers bordering the western Indian Ocean to new vulnerabilities. I argue that increased tension with the British government in parts of the Persian Gulf and the southern Arabian Peninsula combined with an increase in diplomatic cooperation with the German government in Asia undercut strategic relationships that had maintained Ottoman security in the southern Arabian Peninsula prior to the outbreak of World War One.