Blockade, Hunger, and the Ottoman State in World War I

The causes of the hunger that claimed the lives of over half a million Syrians during World War I continue to be highly contested today. This paper draws on Ottoman, French, and German archival sources, Ottoman parliamentary debates, and diaries and memoirs to probe the role of Ottoman authorities in the devastation that swept across the region. How did Ottoman political and military leaders assess and confront the blockade of the Anatolian and Syrian coasts beginning in 1914 and lasting until the end of the war? What kinds of effects did they anticipate and how did they go about addressing them? The paper is focused on the Ottoman state’s reading of the blockade and the measures it took in response. The paper also examines economic and political conditions prevailing in Ottoman Syria prior to the war and how these were transformed by war in 1914. It weaves together the histories of agriculture and food in Syria and the Ottoman empire’s political and military developments. These include the ruling regime’s deep anxieties over the disintegration of the empire and the perceived need to control and put under surveillance certain subject populations – chief among them the Ottoman Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia along the Russian border, but also populations in Syria such as the Maronite Christian population of Mount Lebanon. This paper explores the ways in which Ottoman imperial needs for security and the history of the hunger and famine intersected during the years of the First World War. The legacy of this history today continues to inform national perspectives in the region today and beyond.