Famine as a Weapon of War: Allied Intentions for the Blockade

The devastating famine that enveloped Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and above all Mount Lebanon between 1915 and 1918 resulted in the some of the highest localized civilian death rates of any nation involved in the First World War. In both popular memory and scholarly portrayals of the war in the Mashriq, blame for the famine is usually placed on the CUP government in Istanbul, whose policies of forced conscription, requisitioning, and deforestation pushed a fragile food ecosystem towards ruin. Many Arab activists, particularly those in the diaspora, understood the CUP’s policies as a deliberate destruction of the politically difficult Syrian and Lebanese populations of the empire, a view that has persisted in some circles.

By contrast, scholars have been slow to investigate the Allied role in engendering famine in greater Syria. By February of 1915, a French naval presence was already preventing most commercial traffic into Beirut and Syria’s other port cities, sparking Ottoman complaints that the Allies were violating international law governing wartime naval conduct. In August of 1915 the Allies formalized the blockade of the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean coast, preventing all foodstuffs and other materials from reaching Ottoman territory. In his memoirs, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George recalled the argument for this approach: “If we maintained control of the seas without actually breaking on shore, the Central Powers could in the end be starved into submission.” Without seeking to exonerate the CUP, whose policies clearly contributed substantially to the disaster, this paper makes new use of British military archives to demonstrate that the Allied blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean coast was specifically designed to produce serious food shortages among Syrian civilians, with the political purpose of weakening Ottoman control over the Arab provinces.