Commodities, Revolutions, and Urban Violence in the Early 20th-Century Russian and Ottoman Empires

The Odessa Pogrom of 1905 and the Adana Massacre of 1909 are both widely recognized events within their respective regional historiographic literature. Despite this, little work has been done to place these events within a comparative context. There are fascinating parallels between the two events. Both cities grew explosively over the late nineteenth century driven by the export of raw commodities: wheat in the case of Odessa, cotton in the case of Adana. The economic transformation brought about by commodity exports in these two cities, meant that by the turn of the century, Jews in Odessa and Armenians in Adana wielded considerable, if contested, economic and political power. In both cases, constitutional revolutions challenged autocratic governments in the months preceding the outbreak of violence, and was intended, at least in part, to silence and cow these economically upstart communities in an environment of rapid political transformation. Comparing these two events, this paper is intended to raise a series of preliminary questions about the connection between export-oriented commodity boomtowns and urban violence directed at non-dominant populations at the turn of the twentieth century.