Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Imagination, as an analytical angle, deserves our attention as a political and social force that informs and connects masses, crosses borders, and manifests new socialities. The podcast series will host influential scholars, intellectuals, and artists who study and shape the imagination of Turkey on a global scale from various critical directions. The topics in the following months will include discussions on democracy in Turkey, the politics of religious differences at the border, and the limits of ethnographic research methods. 'Imagining Turkey' is co-hosted by the project PI Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu (UCL), M. Zișan Köker (LUC), and Hazal Aydın (BU). This series is sponsored by the European Research Council, and hosted in collaboration with the UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity and the Middle East Centre.
[00:00:07] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: [00:00:03] Hello everyone. Welcome to the 10th episode of Imagining Turkey podcast series, hosted by myself, Hazal Aydın and Meryem Zişan Köker, sponsored by the UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity and the ERC-funded Takhayyul project. We are very excited to be hosting Eugene Rogan. Today, Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern history at the [00:00:33] University of Oxford and director of the Middle East Centre at St. Anthony's College, a fellow of the British Academy. He has spent over three decades recovering Ottoman and Arab perspectives that European historiography long marginalized. His internationally bestselling books, including The Arabs: A History, The Fall of the Ottomans, and most recently The Damascus Events, have fundamentally reshaped how we understand the making of [00:01:03] the modern Middle East. Today we are talking about Turkey, its Ottoman inheritance, the politics of historical memory, and what the past might teach us about imagining different futures. Welcome, Eugene Rogan.
[00:01:17] Eugene Rogan: Sertaç, it's such an honor to be with you. Thank you for the invitation.
[00:01:19] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Thank you for joining us. So I'd like to start with a conversation on imagination and post-imperial memory, straight into the subject. Um, you have observed that in the Arab world, [00:01:33] um, there is a perception that World War I was someone else's war imposed by the Ottomans rather than part of their own history, with few monuments to their fallen. Um, Turkey by contrast has intensely commemorated Gallipoli and Kut. So how do these divergent ways of imagining the same imperial past shape the present relationship, you think, between Turkey and its former Ottoman geographies?
[00:02:02] Eugene Rogan: It's [00:02:03] such an interesting start and I think, if we go back to 2016 and the centenary of the, uh, the, the end of the siege of Kut, you really can see playing out the tensions between Turkish and Iraqi publics in remembering the war and their respective places. Obviously for modern Turks, Kut is remembered as a really important victory over British armies and the Ottoman Empire had [00:02:33] not had, in the previous two centuries, a lot of victories against European armies that they could be proud of, and this was total victory. They, they had forced the surrender of thousands of British soldiers - an entire campaign force, uh, eight or ten or twelve generals. It was total victory. And so it was natural for a modern Turkish government to go to this site and remember that happy event. But of course, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of [00:03:03] Kut, all of the Iraqi residents of the town were under suspicion of having collaborated with the British during the siege, and they suffered a lot of retribution in the aftermath of the fall of Kut. There were executions, there were people exiled, there were conscriptions of young men. But there was a real sense that the Iraqis who survived could under equally hard circumstances as the British - they were starved, they were under shell fire and [00:03:33] gunfire - then added to their misery, coming back under a very vengeful Ottoman government at the height of the war. For them, there is nothing to celebrate. Kut was a compounding of miseries. And I think this is in a sense the gulf between Turkish and Arab memory of the experience of the war as a whole. When I said that Arabs at the time saw this as someone else's war, there was not a reason [00:04:03] for people in Syria, Egypt, Iraq to be drawn into a conflict that started over Serbian nationalist tensions and their proxy states of the Habsburg Empire, the Russian Empire. This was a European fight, and they thought it was rash of the Young Turk regime, the, the, um, the Unionist regime to, to draw the Arab world into this conflict. And I think that has colored the way in which the [00:04:33] war is remembered from the Arab side. And then, very briefly, I, I still run into people in Turkey who, hearing I've been writing about the First World War, will say that the Arabs betrayed them and stabbed them in the back.
[00:04:47] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Yeah.
[00:04:47] Eugene Rogan: With the, you know, the Sharif's Revolt in Hejaz, that the Arabs turned on the Ottomans and this is not forgotten, and this is not forgiven. So you have these very different experiences at the time and in living memory that I think means [00:05:03] that the war continues to divide Arab and Turkish publics, and this is why I think commemoration of the war is one thing in Turkey and is really quite absent in the Arab world.
[00:05:16] Hazal Aydın: Thank you so much for that. Um, I want to ask a question on historical rupture versus continuity. So you, you have argued that had the Ottoman Empire not entered World War I, it could have survived well into the 20th century, including in [00:05:33] its lands, uh, and this very much challenges narratives of inevitable collapse or inherent, uh, imperial decay. So what does this counterfactual tell us about how we should imagine Turkey's relationship to its Ottoman past? As rupture, as the Kemalist narrative, uh, suggests, or as continuity, as the current government's preference suggests.
[00:05:55] Eugene Rogan: Thank you, Hazal. Well, when speaking in counterfactuals, I can be as irresponsible as I like because of course there's no way to [00:06:03] prove or disprove. Right. I can say anything I like and no one can disprove because it never happened.
[00:06:08] Hazal Aydın: True. We're very much interested in that. Yes, please.
[00:06:11] Eugene Rogan: But it is one of my favorite counterfactuals to imagine what would have become of the Ottoman Empire had they stayed neutral in the First World War instead of getting drawn in. It was certainly not inevitable that they would, and my, my own sense is that the Ottoman Empire in the years leading up [00:06:33] to the First World War was coalescing around Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab lands, bound by a common overwhelming Sunni majority who had for centuries been ruled from Istanbul by the Ottoman Empire and who did not challenge the validity of that state. And the process of reform and then the second constitutional era, both saw greater voice, [00:07:03] greater participation so that such differences or grievances that Arabs might have had against the central government, they had representatives who could take those concerns directly to Istanbul and raise it. We know that in the first decade of the 20th century, Arab deputies from Palestine were raising concerns about the Zionist project.
[00:07:27] Eugene Rogan: Already, you had this - you were into the second Aliyah. There were advocates of the [00:07:33] Zionist movement trying to secure more land. This was causing concerns. They could go to the Parliament and raise it. We have the record of the debates around this. It didn't mean they did anything. But it's just a good example of the viability of the institutions and voice.
[00:07:51] Eugene Rogan: There were definitely separatist policies developing both among Kurds and Arabs. Maybe separatist is too strong, but let us say [00:08:03] identity politics based around culture and language, and this certainly created the tension between the Ottoman centre, and particularly in the Unionist period, their intolerance of any cultural assertion that might lead to separatist movements. The, they didn't go through the 19th century breakup of the Balkans, or,
[00:08:29] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: yeah.
[00:08:29] Eugene Rogan: The wars of 1912/1913, [00:08:33] unaffected by separatist politics. So I don't mean to say that everyone was committed to the Ottoman vision as it stood, but I would say reforms had really made for a viable state on that territory with perhaps only the Armenians standing out as a minority group that might have looked towards, uh, an autonomist or separatist position and that often encouraged by the old enemy Russia, which was very compromising for the [00:09:03] position of Ottoman Armenians. But even saying that, we know that, for instance, the Hunchak and Dashnak movements were very active in support of the second constitutional era and of the Unionist movement itself. So all of this is to say that I don't know that we could really talk about the Ottoman Empire in the first-second decade of the 20th century as a sick man anymore.
[00:09:29] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Hmm.
[00:09:29] Eugene Rogan: In a sense: [00:09:33] the measures taken left the Ottoman Empire more unified with more integrity than ever before, and I think it's a fateful decision to go to war that leads to Britain, France, and Russia determining to kill the Ottoman Empire. The man wasn't sick, he was murdered. And in the course of the war, to see the Ottoman Empire as a source of rewards or war booty for the Entente's [00:10:03] war sacrifices. The First World War was a pointless war. No one was really persuaded that there was a good reason why millions of French and German, and British, and Russians and Austrians should be dying.
[00:10:16] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Yeah,
[00:10:16] Eugene Rogan: the cause wasn't apparent. But if you could take satisfaction in Ottoman territory and say, our sacrifice was rewarded by rich additions to our empires - and these war prizes gave a logic not just for the murder of the [00:10:33] empire, but its dismemberment. But take away the entry into the war, the siding with Germany, I, I think that the Ottomans could have sat out the war, witnessed the ways in which the, uh, European powers weakened themselves, that would strengthen the Ottomans' position in the Mediterranean world. Their traditional support from Britain would have stood up. They would not have put themselves in an enemy position with the British. [00:11:03] So with the British prevailing in the war, their allies would've been stronger. And my favorite is that they, they would've then been the inheritor state of the oil resources, certainly of Iraq, maybe of other parts of the Arab world.
[00:11:17] Eugene Rogan: So maybe instead of the age of oil sheikhs, you would've had oil sultans to redistribute the windfall of oil wealth among an empire that was more diverse than the dry lands where the oil was to be found. So these are the thoughts that lead me to [00:11:33] think that the Ottoman Empire might have been evolving towards a viable state.
[00:11:38] Eugene Rogan: It really is just if the tensions of identity politics were to become openly nationalist, the Young Turks were very bad at managing those differences. Yes, their, their efforts to try and unify people under a common culture and identity probably would have led to repression that could have encouraged popular uprisings.
[00:11:59] Eugene Rogan: So, I mean, I could imagine difficult problems as well, but [00:12:03] those are the thoughts that I have in mind about our counterfactual here. And yeah, I mean, I could imagine an Ottoman Empire of Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab peoples finding a modus vivendi that would have allowed them to last in, you know, another 50 years, depending on how they weathered the various challenges and storms that would've confronted them.
[00:12:24] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Yeah, I, I, I have like, when you are describing it, I'm going to completely go off the script here, uh, but a, a follow-up question [00:12:33] popped into my head actually. Uh, a couple of episodes ago we hosted Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, and we discussed with her imagining Turkey through the Balkans. And for me, Ottoman history and the leadership, and including the Young Turks period and the, and the period after that actually, it's quite like, it's a, it's a, it's a very particular Ottoman way of governance from the Balkan perspective is what I keep seeing.
[00:13:01] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: The more I get to [00:13:03] know, the better I see this. Um, and when you mentioned the kind of this kind of being quite - you didn't say oblivious, but sometimes oblivious to certain differences across the Arab part of the Ottoman geographies. Would it be possible to have a short conversation on that Balkan perspective, Balkan governance perspective in, in ruling the Ottoman lands? I think that the issue of the Balkans is particularly sensitive [00:13:33] for the Unionists because when it came to the, the constitutional revolution in 1908, it, it, it emerges, you know, from Macedonia and from Thrace.
[00:13:46] Eugene Rogan: And it's the, it's the aftermath of this that Albania will finally break from Ottoman rule and have its own nationalist movement. And I think that many of the most idealistic Young Turks coming from the Balkan [00:14:03] regions, having tried to contain Macedonian terror movements, retain the Ottoman position in Thrace, and to preserve the longstanding ties that bound Albania to the empire - losing these territories by the, you know, first Balkan War would have confirmed the danger that separatist nationalism and identity politics posed to the Ottoman Empire. And these guys lost their homes, you know, Mustafa Kemal, the later Atatürk, was Salonican, you know, and, [00:14:33] and these movements cost them their homeland.
[00:14:36] Eugene Rogan: I, I think that that would've had, you know, a, a scarring impact. I think this is part of what convinces the Unionists to really try and impose Turkish as the common language of all peoples. Easier done, I think, among the Kurdish people than among the Arab people who had less exposure to Ottoman Turkish language. And it was certainly a source of tension in the second [00:15:03] constitutional period between Turkish-born Ottoman governors
[00:15:08] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: mm-hmm
[00:15:08] Eugene Rogan: and Arab-born citizens in Arab provinces. They, they just found a language barrier emerged and only their children really had the opportunity by going to state schools to add Ottoman Turkish to their language skills, which, by the way, they did with great enthusiasm, having read the memoirs of Arab children who went to study in [00:15:33] state schools in Syria. You know, even years after the end of Ottoman rule, these old men would get together in the coffee shops and speak to each other in Turkish whenever they didn't want people around them to understand what they were saying, and they felt in that sense bound by a common language and culture and past that was very important to So older people would've really found the language politics of the Unionists, you know, second, uh, constitutional era [00:16:03] a real barrier and an annoyance. Again, as a researcher, I noticed it when I was reading Islamic court records from the, the town of Amman, and up until about 1909, 1910, they were all in Arabic.
[00:16:19] Eugene Rogan: I read Arabic so much faster than I read Ottoman Turkish. It's not even funny. So I'm reading my way through these registers at the end of my time in Amman doing my, my fieldwork research for my doctorate back in the 1980s, and then, blow me down, all of a [00:16:33] sudden everything goes into Turkish. Like not a single hujja is in Arabic anymore, and I was really frustrated. And it made me stop and think, so too were the people who came to court, they now had to hire someone to translate for them.
[00:16:50] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Mm-hmm
[00:16:50] Eugene Rogan: they would be given a decision in Turkish, written in Turkish, that they couldn't read, and it added an expense. It put a barrier between them and their rulers and the bureaucracy and the [00:17:03] administration, and that was repeated at every level. If you were 12 or 15 or 18 and went to school and learned Ottoman Turkish, then of course you adapted. Older people, productive time of their life, found that these measures, you know, made things very difficult. So in responding to the experience of losing the Balkans to nationalism, measures taken by the Unionists might have been engendering even stronger identity [00:17:33] politics than the ones they sought to control or contain. And in that they might have been laying the seeds for future problems.
[00:17:39] Eugene Rogan: Thank you. Thank you very much. I, um, I think it's a, it's a great moment to continue the conversation on. Um, I mean, we, like Hazal's question was on rupture and continuity, so maybe we can kind of expand a little bit more on communal violence and repair. Um, like the Damascus events, um, seems to demonstrate that even after [00:18:03] genocidal moments, societies can reconcile and rebuild as Damascus did for 150 years, and reviewers have noted this relevance to Gaza and, and contemporary sectarian conflicts elsewhere. Um, what lessons, um, does history of Ottoman post-violence reconstruction you think may offer to imagining political futures in the, in the region today?
[00:18:29] Eugene Rogan: Um, within and beyond Turkey, I guess. What made [00:18:33] repair possible then that seems absent now?
[00:18:38] Eugene Rogan: Thank you, Sertaç. It's, in a sense, it was never my intention to be writing about Palestine, but the timing of the book as it was completed going into production, coinciding with the events of the 7th October 2023, meant that suddenly discussions about genocidal moments were not theoretical. It was actual, [00:19:03] and I saw relevance in the Damascus events for the current conflict in Palestine, which was fortuitous but not intentional. What I would say is that the Ottomans actually give us a very important example of how a state's response can actually build [00:19:33] society after a deeply divisive trauma. In essence, when we look at the events in Damascus of 1860, after a period of building tensions that coincided with Druze attack on Maronites in Mount Lebanon, the quarters of Damascus erupted in violence against the Christian neighborhoods.
[00:19:56] Eugene Rogan: The violence rages on for over a week. I mean, I can really count eight days of violence before it is brought to an end. [00:20:03] The crowds were calling for the extermination of all Christians, so they were absolutely genocidal in their calls. The crowds were armed, the Christians were not.
[00:20:18] Eugene Rogan: The only way that 85% of the Christian community of Damascus was saved was through the intervention of a handful of leading Muslim notables of the city who intervened to stop a massacre they thought [00:20:33] was against their religion, against their values, or indeed, practically speaking, for which they would be held responsible.
[00:20:43] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Yes
[00:20:44] Eugene Rogan: as my predecessor, Albert Hourani, wrote in his article on the politics of notables, the whole influence and legitimacy of the ayan - of the notability - rested on the role that they played as intermediaries between the state and the people. They [00:21:03] failed in their duty to control the violent behavior of the people, and they created a scenario that was deeply embarrassing for the state, which fostered foreign intervention and had the Ottoman authorities having to negotiate with the Europeans on the future of key central Ottoman territories. So the notables also were aware that they would be judged harshly for the failures to stop these events from taking place. So it happened, we were [00:21:33] in July of 1860.
[00:21:37] Eugene Rogan: Yeah, 85% of the Christians survive, but with nothing. They have no roof over their head. Their homes have been burnt and destroyed. The, the rubble in the Christian quarters is two meters deep. 5,000 people have been killed. Workshops have been destroyed. Shops have been looted and destroyed. So it's good news that 85% survive, but they need everything.
[00:22:01] Eugene Rogan: The state will have to [00:22:03] provide everything. It comes at a time where the Ottoman Empire was already on the path towards bankruptcy. It was already overextended. So certainly the treasury of the central government had no means to pay for the reconstruction of Damascus. And so what we have is a kind of textbook case study of how a state without lots of means goes about restoring order, [00:22:33] restoring
[00:22:34] Eugene Rogan: Its authority, putting in place a bureaucracy to determine the magnitude of people's losses, putting in place a plan to extract the funds from Syrian society to compensate them, and then creating a mechanism for the distribution of funds on the fairest basis they could under the circumstances.
[00:22:59] Eugene Rogan: The hero of the story is really going to be, [00:23:03] at the time foreign minister, later grand vizier, Fuad Pasha, who as one of the leading officials of the Tanzimat era had written much of the legislation that was creating the tensions. He was one of the authors of the Islahat Fermanı of 1856, which establishes legal equality
[00:23:28] Eugene Rogan: Between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Empire. So [00:23:33] I hypothesize that he took a personal interest in this resistance to the equality legislation. Fuad Pasha was, was furious with the city of Damascus for their response to, uh, equality among Muslims, Christians and Jews. So he comes as Minister Plenipotentiary with all the powers to take decisions on how to resolve the conflict in Mount [00:24:03] Lebanon first and then in Damascus.
[00:24:06] Eugene Rogan: And the first thing he does is to try and impress on the Syrians that the Ottoman state is back. The rule of law is back, lawlessness will not be tolerated. And he comes armed with a large detachment of soldiers he brings, you know, uh, from Istanbul with him. So they're not irregular local soldiers. These are disciplined, well-trained Ottoman troops who are frightening, [00:24:33] and that was the intention.
[00:24:34] Eugene Rogan: They wanted to put fear back in. And then Fuad tries to force the collaboration of the leading ayan in the city to identify those who are guilty. And these, he puts on trial and he makes very quick judgements. He hangs over 50 of them, many of them notables of the city, and he takes 110 of the irregular police and soldiers who were implicated in the violence, [00:25:03] and he shoots them by firing squad.
[00:25:04] Eugene Rogan: And this terrifies the Damascenes, and for a moment it even impressed the Europeans. This buys Fuad a privileged position within which to try and force compliance from the Damascenes towards a project of restoring the Christian community to their midst. I won't repeat all the measures he takes, but this notion that there was some degree of accountability was very important for reassuring the Christians of [00:25:33] Damascus that people would be frightened to do this again because they would face very serious punishment.
[00:25:39] Eugene Rogan: A tax is drawn up. It is collected by the authorities. They then have a bureaucracy for making awards to those who are victims of the attacks. It was in every way insufficient to repay all the losses that the Christians suffered, but it was sufficient to give them the means to rebuild houses, even though the houses were nowhere near [00:26:03] the standard of comfort that they had been before destruction in 1860. Yet, it was enough for people to rebuild their homes, go back to their quarters, and go back to work, and in this way, to revitalize the economy. Now, this work of reconstruction is completed in 1864. The houses are rebuilt, the workshops are restored, but the problems aren't solved yet because there is still deep tension between the Muslim majority and the Christian minority - [00:26:33] the Muslims who are resentful for the measures taken to tax them, punish them and refund the Christians their losses. The Christians are ever fearful. Trust is broken. Trust is broken. Until 1869, there's still worrying. I, I find reports of fear that developments in other parts of the Empire could lead to another round of massacres like we saw in 1860, so for a whole decade afterwards.
[00:26:58] Eugene Rogan: And what ultimately tips the balance in favor of [00:27:03] reestablishing common civic community is massive government investment in building the city of Damascus to the benefit of all Damascenes. And this was done, uh, through another Tanzimat measure that Fuad Pasha was directly involved with, uh, Midhat Pasha. And this is the 1864 Vilayet Kanunnamesi, the, the Provincial Reform Law, where just as they had done in the [00:27:33] Balkans around the Danube province, they created a super province of three former vilayets of the empire. They cobbled together in 1865 the provinces of Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus, and suddenly Damascus had a budget. And with that budget they spend on infrastructure like roads, new markets in the city of Damascus - Souq Midhat Pasha, Souq al-Hamidiyya - all these very beautiful new markets that the Damascenes [00:28:03] loved and created common meeting space where Muslim, Christian and Jewish merchants could have their shops, or the expansion of government offices that came with the super vilayet of Suriya. And suddenly there's a building boom going on in the city and that building boom once again begins to attract rich people back. We have a list of the mansions that rich people begin to build in Damascus. So you can see the confidence-building measures after 1865 beginning to take work. And then they create [00:28:33] schools that will provide the education that allows young Ottoman kids the same opportunities that Christians had through the missionary schools to get a good education that would allow you to compete for a job in this expanded Ottoman bureaucracy. What I'm trying to get at is there was an investment in the city of Damascus that allowed growth and opportunity to the benefit of all, but at the expense of no one. And after 10 years of that, [00:29:03] I would say by the 1880s, you no longer have any concerns about renewed violence between communities.
[00:29:10] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:10] Eugene Rogan: There is no talk about - an extraordinary thing - of Christians being invited to government meetings with Muslims. They were all serving on the same councils together. They were going to the same theatres together or the same cafés.
[00:29:23] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:23] Eugene Rogan: And the other lesson is it's not a quick fix. We're talking about a process that took over 20 years after the violence itself. But when we talk about [00:29:33] Gaza, who believes there's a quick fix to Gaza? And if we could see a process over 20 years in which people were given compensation for what they lost, had homes that they could live in with dignity, and then you move towards an investment that creates opportunities and jobs and education, that people had a common cause.
[00:29:53] Eugene Rogan: What will allow people to turn the page on the past? Belief that they have an investment in the future for themselves and for [00:30:03] their children. And with that, I think people are willing to accept less than total justice, less than complete compensation, but enough to get onto a, a life with a future. And I think that is a lesson from Damascus that is valid in Gaza.
[00:30:19] Hazal Aydın: Thank you very much for that. Yeah. Um, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a grim picture for now, but I, I mean, uh,
[00:30:25] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: and also thought-provoking at many levels. Yeah. So, Hazal?
[00:30:29] Hazal Aydın: I wanna ask a final question, uh, [00:30:33] about decentring European narratives, which, uh, you've, uh, written extensively about.
[00:30:37] Hazal Aydın: So you've been a powerful voice for restoring Ottoman and Arab perspectives to World War I historiography. And you've noted that English-language scholarship long treated the Middle Eastern theatre as a, quote unquote, "sideshow". Um, so your work draws on Turkish, Arabic and previously unseen sources.
[00:30:57] Hazal Aydın: How has working across these linguistic and archival traditions changed your own [00:31:03] understanding of the region? What do you think is still missing from how the West imagines Ottoman and Turkish history?
[00:31:10] Eugene Rogan: Well, thank you, Hazal. I mean, the, the, the really positive development is, at the time I was writing The Fall of the Ottomans, I could see a real gap in the literature, and aside from monographic works that focused on things like health and the Turkish war effort in World War I, or the, um, the Ottoman origins of the [00:31:33] entry into the war, you know, Mustafa Aksakal's work, um, there has been a real growth in the literature written on the Ottoman war experience that has, um, it means that we do have a rich literature today, and I, I wouldn't claim I'm entirely unique in drawing on Ottoman and Arab sources to write that history. But at the time I was writing, that was certainly an important gap to be filled. [00:32:03] And in a sense I felt it in my own personal experience of the impact of the war in the Ottoman Empire on my family. I, I opened the book with a narrative of going to the battlefields of Gallipoli with my mother and my son to visit the grave of my late uncle who died in, uh, in Gallipoli in 1915. And in the process of trying to [00:32:33] find the graveyard where he was buried - he has a known grave - we took a wrong turn and we came across a war memorial for the Turkish soldiers who had died in the very same battle of Gully Ravine. No one in my family had ever talked about the Turks having suffered tremendous losses in that battle.
[00:32:54] Eugene Rogan: It's not even a particularly famous battle, so I was surprised to see the Nuri Yamut Memorial in, in Gallipoli, [00:33:03] and that it was the exact same battle, but it - I, I may have the number - it's about three times the number of British war dead in, in Gully Ravine was suffered by the Ottoman side. Everyone always talked about these poor Scottish boys sent into the Turkish machine guns and mowed down like cannon fodder by their uncaring English officers, which is another myth of the First World War.
[00:33:29] Eugene Rogan: But no one ever said, in defending their land, [00:33:33] you know, 10, 12,000 Mehmetçiks gave their lives against, you know, unwitting invaders like my great uncle - he was 19 years old, a lad from Scotland, had no idea what he was doing in the Ottoman Empire fighting this war. I just felt like if I, after all my years as a scholar of the Middle East, didn't have a clue of the magnitude of the Ottoman side of the story. So preoccupied as I was [00:34:03] by the family telling this narrative - by the way, explains why my Scottish family moves to the United States, why my Scottish grandmother married my American grandfather to produce my mother, without which none of us would've been there. You know, it's, it's one of those moments of contingency in, in your personal life, but just realizing we didn't have a clue as to what the war had meant for the Ottoman Empire. And to get to that story, [00:34:33] we had to talk to the Turkish sources. And at the time I was writing, you know, the access to the ATASE was very difficult - the Ottoman military archives. Uh, now it's forbidden to anyone who's not a Turkish citizen. There's been a period of opening where more scholars have gotten in and accessed material.
[00:34:52] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: I wasn't aware of that. Okay.
[00:34:54] Eugene Rogan: A brand new rule, and quite restrictive.
[00:34:57] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: You have to show your citizenship.
[00:34:58] Eugene Rogan: You do. So, "Ne mutlu Türk'üm diyene", you know, [00:35:03] to be able to go into the archives,
[00:35:04] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: right? Or there's a job opening [laughs] .
[00:35:07] Eugene Rogan: I'll have to naturalise first, but there we go. Um. So the wealth of material in the Ottoman Archives means that we will continue to be able to tell the story from the Ottoman perspective and make important discoveries for years and years to come.
[00:35:27] Eugene Rogan: And for me, the excitement of that is to balance the narrative, get away from [00:35:33] the notion that Churchill or Kitchener are the driving forces of this war, and to see it from the perspective of the people who suffered and fought, survived or died, and whose experience in that war would go on to influence their view of their place in the world.
[00:35:51] Eugene Rogan: You know, to me, the most remarkable outcome of that war is that Mustafa Kemal would be able to rally veterans of the Great War to make one more war, [00:36:03] to consolidate a Turkish state against the Treaty of Sèvres, against the challenges posed not just by the Greeks, but the French, the Italians, the Armenians, the Kurds. And understanding the First World War will help us understand the emergence of the Turkish Republic.
[00:36:23] Hazal Aydın: Thank you so much for that and um, thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing your incredible insights.
[00:36:31] Eugene Rogan: This conversation never [00:36:33] ends and so I look forward to resuming it with you and colleagues for years to come. But thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak on your podcast.
[00:36:41] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Thank you for joining us.
[00:36:42] Hazal Aydın: Thank you.
[00:36:43] Sertaç Sehlikoglu: And helping, supporting our conversations on thinking or imagining in different ways on Turkey, obviously. Thank you very much.
[00:36:52] Eugene Rogan: Thank you