The Ottoman First World War as Revolution

The Ottoman government went to war in 1914 in pursuit of revolutionary goals. That government, popularly known as the Young Turks, had overthrown the sultan in Istanbul in July 1908. That same revolutionary government then conducted empire-wide elections and inaugurated a new period of parliamentary politics. According to most accounts, the government of the Young Turks morphed into a dictatorship by the outbreak of the First World War – and its revolutionary agenda subsequently fell by the wayside. This paper takes a different view. It argues that the government’s entry into the First World War marked a new phase and a continuation of the 1908 Ottoman Revolution. It was the government’s revolutionary agenda that explains its conduct of war. The movement that had launched that revolution, the Committee of Union and Progress, during the war years advanced their revolutionary agenda of centralization and silencing opposition groups. The paper weaves together revolutionary politics of the 1908-1914 period, first, with those of the WWI years and, second, those of the Kemalist revolution after 1923. The paper draws extensively on Ottoman archival material, diaries and memoirs, newspapers accounts, and primary sources from the Turkish Republican period after 1923.