Stateless Revolutionaries and the Aftermath of the Ottoman Great War

Abstract

Stateless Revolutionaries and the Aftermath of the Ottoman Great War

Commonplace European and American impressions of the Middle East focus on disorder and violence. But the Ottoman nineteenth century was less violent than in much of Europe or America. People everywhere experienced the emergence of the modern state and its claims on their resources, bodies, and consciousness. The story was similar in most of the eventual Great War belligerents: mass conscription, citizenship, education and indoctrination into the state, and its collective narratives characterised the long nineteenth century. After 1918 Britain and France partitioned the Ottoman State into more than a dozen new colonial and quasicolonial states. This event is the origin point of Middle Eastern disorder of the past century. Former citizens of the defeated Ottoman Empire did not accept partition and colonialism. The post-war Middle Eastern settlement was everywhere greeted with revolts and revolutions. But lost in the details of both colonial and postcolonial nationalist historiography of these movements, is the legacy of nineteenthcentury Ottoman modernity that both bound them together and facilitated their emergence.