Session Abstract

At the centennial of the Great War, scholars are integrating the less-told history of the Ottoman Empire’s role into general and comparative narratives of the conflict.   For peoples of the Middle East, the war was as traumatic and as definitive as the Civil War has been for American history.   The mass death of civilians in the Ottoman theater stands out both as distinct from patterns of mainly military casualties on the Western front and as a precedent for the mass civilian suffering in World War II.   Literary specialists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists have joined historians in new explanations for the incalculable deaths of 800,000 or more Armenians and some 500,000 civilians in Greater Syria from famine and disease.  These numbers surpass the death toll wrought similarly by Allied blockades of ports in Germany, where up to 750,000 are thought to have succumbed to an early death from hunger, malnutrition, and disease. 

This panel demonstrates ways in which history has engaged with other disciplines to carry explanations for mass death beyond attempts to assign blame.  Response to the calamity was highly politicized in the immediate postwar period, as survivors petitioned the Paris Peace Conference for nation-states as compensation and as protection from rival nations, and as victorious Allies sought justification for the occupation of Ottoman lands as extensions of their colonial empires.  A. Tylor Brand draws on his new doctoral dissertation to peel apart Allied propaganda that blamed famine in Syria and Lebanon on the Ottoman regime. Using local climactic data and market statistics, he argues that the famine was rooted in an environmental crisis rooted in the prewar era.  The environmental data raises different questions about political decisions made in wartime that aggravated the crisis.   Elizabeth F. Thompson analyzes narratives of famine and mass murder in the political context of the immediate postwar period, with a focus on the memoir of the Armenian governor of Mount Lebanon.  He fled his post in August 1915 when he read early signs of famine as evidence that the Ottomans would extend the Armenian deportations to Christians in Lebanon.  She argues that his memoir was likely directed to the Paris peace conference, reflecting narrative strategies similar to those of other Armenians, Turks, and Arabs writing at the same time.   Ariel Salzmann uses a sociological approach in her review of Armenian memoirs, integrating them into the literature on state formation.  Her finding suggest how the mass deaths and deportations of World War I set conditions and precedents for later conflicts in the Middle East.   All three papers use their findings to argue that the Ottoman case was not exceptional, but rather an integral chapter in the global history of mass violence in the first half of the 20^th century.