During the past decade, new scholarship on the First World War in the Ottoman Empire has expanded our understanding of the significance of this conflict in the making of the modern Middle East. Yet the lived experience of this conflict, and how this experience was shaped by decades of state-driven military, political, and social reforms, remains an area in need of further investigation. This panel probes the social history of the Late Ottoman military from the perspective of identity, asking how what we now know about conflict, reform, and citizenship in the Late Ottoman Empire and World War I provides a way to think about lived experiences of soldiering and military life and the way these experiences were shaped by the individual gender, ethno-religious, and class identities of Ottoman soldiers.
The first paper, “The Ottoman Soldiers Talk: Experiences of Conscripts, Deserters, and Mutineers in the Ottoman Imperial Army, c. 1820-1850” explores how the ordinary Ottoman recruits and junior officers thought about and responded to their new lives as sultan’s soldiers in an age of continuous warfare and political upheaval.
The second paper, “Military Medicine in WWI: Shifting Meanings of the Wounded and Sick Male Body” takes a comparative approach to how the increasingly militarized male body was seen once wounded, sick, or ill-prepared and ill-maintained for battle. As in other combatant nations, a new discourse developed around the scope and type of casualties, and the responsibilities of ruling elites and commanders in the field for violence done to millions of male bodies.
The third paper, “Mourning Fallen Brothers-in-Arms and Lost Youth in the Ottoman First World War,” examines how Ottoman soldiers contemporaneously and belatedly mourned the loss of fellow soldiers on the battlefield. Mourning for the fallen comrades also amounted to lamenting for the survivors’ lost youth because of the same war.
The fourth paper examines how Ottoman military legislation and recruitment policies constructed the male body, its suitability for combat, and its eligibility for disability compensation, elaborating a detailed picture of the relationship between masculinity able-bodiedness, and citizenship in the Late Ottoman Empire.
Based on innovative archival and print media research that provides a new lens on the lived experience of soldiering, these four papers provide a window into the lived experience of soldiering that deepens our understanding of the significance of conflict, reform, and identity during the Late Ottoman Empire and the transition to the modern Middle East.
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Dr. Kate Dannies
This paper examines the gender politics of disability during the First World War in the Ottoman Empire. Able-bodiedness was a basic requirement for both military service and breadwinning, two core aspects of normative masculinity in Ottoman society. Military legislation and recruitment policies paid meticulous attention to the details of the male body, its suitability for combat, and its eligibility for disability compensation, elaborating a detailed picture of the relationship between masculinity able-bodiedness, and citizenship in the Late Ottoman Empire.
During and after World War I thousands of men became disabled and were unable to fulfill this vision of masculine normativity in practice. Yet this reality did not lead to women taking on these roles, or indeed to any significant alteration in the structure of the male breadwinner-led nuclear family and its attendant gender roles. Instead, Ottoman-era disability policies merged with new approaches to gendered bodies in post-Ottoman Turkey, producing a new national masculinity that incorporated the disabled veteran into the ranks of full-fledged men through social welfare policies and gendered discourses that institutionalized and valorized disabled veterans as normative men. Based on archival documents from the Ottoman civil and military administrations, legislation and parliamentary discussions, and social sources including marriage advertisements and life writings, this paper shows that the provision of disabled men with generous pensions that made them desirable marriage partners for widowed women during and after the war was an important way in which the state sought to forge a new national body politic through attention to the interplay of masculinity, able-bodiedness, breadwinning, and the family as a core institution of society. Adding analysis of the role of masculinity and the male body to the robust work on women and the female body in nationalism, this research provides a way of rethinking the role of gender and conflict in shaping the social and political dynamics of the First World War and the forging of institutions and everyday practices in the post-Ottoman Middle East.
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Dr. Veysel Simsek
Facing external and internal threats to their authority and the empire’s territorial integrity, the Ottoman political elite in Istanbul launched an unprecedented agenda of institutional reform, centralization, and military mobilization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1826, Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-39) destroyed the Janissary Corps, a potential threat to these policies, and ordered the creation of a disciplined, European-style army. To this end, the Ottoman state conscripted an unprecedented number of Muslim recruits from the lower classes of urban and rural populations in the following decades. By the end of the Crimean War (1853-56), perhaps as many as 500,000 men in total had been pressed into the regular and reserve formations.
In official papers, Ottoman decision-makers and ideologues, who demanded loyalty and sacrifice from their conscripts, repeatedly framed the era’s armed conflicts as ones waged between the rightful Islamic state and “foreign infidels,” “enemies of Islam,” and “heretics.” But what did the actual conscripts think about their military service? How did they respond to their new, dangerous lives as the sultan’s soldiers? To what extent were the widespread historical and contemporary assumptions about “Islamic fanaticism” or “born-soldier” qualities of the Ottoman/Turkish troops correct? What were the stories of those who no longer wanted to serve, and those who simply escaped from the ranks to become civilians again by their own means and choosing?
Compared to its Western counterparts, history of the Ottoman military in the nineteenth century remains unexplored. Furthermore, Ottoman/Middle East historians have shown very little interest in the experiences of the ordinary Ottoman soldier and junior officers in this era. By utilizing primary sources produced from the Ottoman military tribunals (including statements by the soldiers), civilian bureaucracy, and domestic surveillance reports, this paper will address the questions posed above and attempt to suggest some answers.
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Dr. Elizabeth B. Frierson
This paper takes a comparative approach to how the increasingly militarized male body was treated and seen when wounded, sick, or ill-prepared, ill-clothed, ill-equipped, and ill-maintained for battle in the Balkan Wars and WWI. As in other combatant nations, the numbers of wounded and ill in WWI provided a huge experimental pool demanding more advanced and rapid triage, as well as adaptable modes of treatment for bodies encountering new types of mental and physical wounds. Doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, such as the pharmacists who stepped in where there were no doctors, emerged from these two wars with more authority and legitimacy than they had before, including having wrested from military commanders more rights to treat the wounded. The massive numbers of conscripts, volunteers, and combatant and civilian casualties meant that this war came home vividly to more Ottoman subjects than previous wars. As a result, a rapidly changing discourse developed around the scope and type of casualties in various topographies of battle, and around the responsibility of ruling elites and commanders in the field for violence done to millions of bodies of all genders. Attention must be paid to the damage done to female and children’s bodies, and work by colleagues as well as primary sources from this author’s research on non-combatant bodies will be incorporated into the presentation to make it truly gender history rather than simply women’s or men’s history. Damage to the male body as part of changing conceptions of Ottoman and later Republican Turkish masculinity needs further exploration, however, and that is where we will focus, on problematizing the male body as a tool and an object of modern warfare, and how this resonated through gender identities during and after the war. This paper uses archival records of medical personnel, local and international media coverage of the war, professional journals of medical practitioners, as well as memoirs and photographs. It also incorporates recent scholarly publications (and scholarly internet resources such as http://www.1914-1918-online.net/) on the war in several languages to engage masculinity studies. These sources are analyzed with a mix of military, political, social, intellectual, art, aural, and gender history to give us a fuller conception of the physical realities and discourses of the damaged male body in a time of war.
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Dr. Yucel Yanikdag
Utilizing memoirs, diaries, poetry, war stories in soldiers’ newspapers, and what we might call “commemorative pamphlets” produced by Ottoman soldiers during the First World War and by former soldiers in the post-war period, this paper will explore how these men mourned for the loss of fellow soldiers or brothers who fell on the battlefield. On the one hand, this is a study of how individual soldiers privately mourned their fallen comrades as individuals. On the other, it examines communal mourning of soldiers; once the expressions of grief were shared with other comrades at graveside ceremonies, in conversations, and in poems for others’ eyes or ears, they became part of communal memory and mourning for the dead. In most cases and with the distinct exception of “commemorative pamphlets,” words and acts of mourning were not necessarily intended to be shared outside of the soldierly community. No matter where they were recorded, these words of mourning were expressed both in lament and in praise of the dead. Understandably, mourning involved shedding manly tears—clearly distinguished from “cowardly” tears—for the dead, but, I will argue, the tears shed were also meant for the mourners themselves. Part of a larger project which deals with how soldiers’ own sense of suffering and sacrifice in the First World War allowed them to challenge and redefine normative Ottoman and Turkish masculinities, this paper suggests that rituals of mourning became arenas of articulation for the surviving soldiers to advance claims for the recognition of their own suffering and sacrifice. In other words, mourning for the dead also served to lament for the survivors’ lost youth on battlefields and in enemy prison camps.
