Despite the upsurge in interest in World War I, the Ottoman battle- and home-front experiences of the war have remained largely unknown, even though they fully replicated and in many respects exceeded the experiences of other belligerent nations. As in other belligerent countries, people living throughout the Ottoman Empire heavily suffered from mass conscription, deportation, massacres, rationing, government requisitioning of grain and livestock, and other catastrophic effects of the war. At the end of the war, Ottoman society was deeply traumatized due to the high number of casualties, devastated economic infrastructure, involuntary displacement, cultural anxiety, ethnic tensions, and political instability. First World War created new economic and social realities in the Ottoman Empire. During the war, governmental and military policies extended state’s capacity of intervention into the distant corners of the empire to extract people and resources to a degree not seen before. In this paper, I would like to focus on the state’s new functions and the political nature and implications of these new wartime realities and their perception by ordinary people at the Ottoman home front. The documents in the Ottoman archives provide a unique perspective on ordinary people’s interaction with the wartime state. While asking for government’s help, these people 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’, sons’ and fathers’ service and sacrifice. They made incessant demands on state officials to supply basic foodstuffs for them to feed their families. This heightened contact with the state during wartime is a good example of how the concept of Ottoman citizenship took shape through the everyday experiences of ordinary people and their relations with official authorities. In this paper, I will examine this complex and dynamic wartime relationship between state, nation, and citizens based on the official documents, reports, memories, and also ordinary peoples’ letters, petitions, and complaints. Studying the wartime interaction between state and society and focusing on daily material concerns of the Ottoman people, I believe, would provide a new perspective on the disintegration process of the empire.

Studies on Ottoman labor history have by and large focused exclusively on strikes. In these studies they discuss workers` demands, employers and government officials` reactions to these demands, and the settlement of conflicts in some detail. However, they usually do not examine workers` everyday experiences within and outside their worksites. Accordingly, they fail to address some critical issues about the organization strikes and the experiences of the striking workers. For instance, the question of how great numbers of workers were organized and mobilized remains unanswered. Those labor historians who tackle this question, on the other hand, tend to underestimate workers` agency. They usually refer to the workers` spontaneous actions, highlight ethnic and religious ties binding them, and overemphasize the role of one single labor leader in the whole process. Some recent studies analyzing different forms of labor activism in relation to workers` everyday experiences within and outside their worksites offer a different perspective. For instance, one of these studies demonstrates how some cultural and social spaces (such as coffeehouses and theaters) provided the workers with a convenient milieu of interaction and how these communication networks contributed to workers` political education, organization and mobilization (Khuri-Makdisi, "Levantine Trajectoires: The Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, 1860-1914"). Drawing on these recent studies, this paper focuses on tobacco workers who were socially and politically one of the most active labor groups in the Ottoman Empire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of the major tobacco processing centers in the Empire –Kavalla, Salonica, Xanti, Samsun and Istanbul- witnessed huge strikes organized by hundreds and even thousands of workers. This paper sets out to analyze these strikes in relation to workers` experiences on the shop-floor. I propose that tobacco workers’ strikes were neither organizational genius of a single labor leader nor the result of the spontaneous actions of the workers. Rather, these were the products of workers` collective, disciplined and organized activities. Finally it intends to show that workers’ collective activities were founded upon their experiences on the shop-floor ranging from recruitment process to wage payments as well as their everyday social interaction with their fellow laborers.

My paper aims to examine the experiences of rural population in Diyarbekir within the context of the changing land regime after the Tanzimat reforms and specifically the Land Code of 1858. I will look at the conflicts revolving around the ownership, use, possession, and dispossession of land in the region. By looking at two interrelated processes, I intend to examine how land relations were redefined, challenged and negotiated among central authorities, local notables, and commoners. To do so, first, I will look at how growing world-wide trends towards the legal recognition of the private ownership of land materialized in the region. In the Ottoman Empire, the Land Code represented the most important episode of the legal regulations on land relations in the nineteenth century. However, the reflections of this empire-wide trend towards private land-ownership on the eastern provinces have not been examined in Ottoman historical writing. Second, I will examine the causes and forms of rural discontent among the commoners in the face of rising claims of both Kurdish notables and the Tanzimat authorities over land. The literature on the social discontent in the Kurdish areas focused their attention solely on the conflicts between the Kurdish notables and the Ottoman state. (Jwaideh 1960, Özo?lu 2004). The commoners who constituted the producing sectors of rural society appear only as the loyal supporters of the Kurdish chiefs in their revolts against the central state. My paper proposes to examine the ways in which introduction of new land tenure and new ways of surplus extraction by Tanzimat regime transformed the livelihoods of the commoners. This also entails an analysis of the ways in which commoners articulated their discontent about rising claims over land and agricultural surplus. Overall, my paper aims to challenge the constraints of the hegemonic center-periphery paradigm and also bring a bottom-up approach to the Tanzimat project by integrating the experiences and the agencies of the commoners into the historical analysis.