This dissertation explores the transnational dimensions of the Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927. By including the activities of Syrian migrants in Egypt, Europe and the Americas, this study moves away from state-centric histories of the anti-French rebellion. Though they lived far away from the battlefields of Syria and Lebanon, migrants championed, contested, debated, and imagined the rebellion from all corners of the mahjar (or diaspora). Skeptics and supporters organized petition campaigns, solicited financial aid for rebels and civilians alike, and partook in various meetings and conferences abroad. Syrians abroad also clandestinely coordinated with rebel leaders for the transfer of weapons and funds, as well as offered strategic advice based on the political climates in Paris and Geneva. Moreover, key émigré figures played a significant role in defining the revolt, determining its goals, and formulating its program. By situating the revolt in the broader internationalism of the 1920s, this study brings to life the hitherto neglected role migrants played in bridging the local and global, the national and international.

Starting with the Ottoman reforms of 1908, this study first explores the evolving political consciousness of the mahjar in relationship to the growth of international society and institutions. From the late Ottoman period to the Paris Peace Conference and the establishment of the League of Nations, Syrian and Lebanese communities abroad sought to impact the political climate of homeland through the writing of petitions, and the formation of societies and associations. With the bombardment of Damascus in October of 1925, the study shifts its lens to Geneva. Syrians lobbied the League of Nations through numerous petitions calling for justice and intervention. By virtue of residing outside the mandated territories, diaspora groups were able to bypass the censorship of the French mandatory government. Consequently, groups such as the Geneva-based Syro-Palestinian Congress acted as the external representatives of nationalists within Syria. By petitioning the League, Syrian émigrés partook in a civic order that was particular to local concerns within Syria, but which played out in the international circles of Geneva and Paris. In studying the connections between the local and global, the dissertation goes on to consider how the philanthropic engagement of the mahjar in 1925 shaped the civic discourse in south Lebanon. Detractors of the rebellion utilized diasporic networks abroad to wage a campaign for compensation that hinged on the mandate government’s need to protect Lebanon’s Christian minority. While previous histories of the revolt have depicted it as crucial to a popular Syrian nationalism, this study argues that it was also equally meaningful for the assertion of a Lebanese, confessional republic. Even as Syrians and Lebanese mobilized around the League of Nations and French mandate, émigrés also coordinated with various liberal, Pan-Islamist. and Communist networks that operated across state borders. Though the system of nation-states ultimately prevailed, the dissertation highlights how the concerted efforts of divergent networks in connection with the revolt complicate our understanding of the postwar international system. Lastly, the project considers the aftermath of the revolt, and the exile of rebel leaders to Transjordan. As migrants, rebel refugees challenged the borders and states of the interwar period.

The Italo-Turkish War (1911-1912), now remembered primarily as Italy’s war for what is now Libya, swelled from a localized colonial invasion into a significant Mediterranean conflict and a global cause c�l�bre that attracted support and aid for the embattled Ottoman regime from diverse locations both inside and outside the borders of the empire. This dissertation examines the means by which the Ottoman Empire erected an asymmetric defense of its last North African provinces to preserve its territory and empire from Italian occupation and annexation. Drawing on sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Judeo-Spanish, this study demonstrates how the Sublime Porte and the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) initially deployed a rhetoric of unity, constitutionalism, and international law to protect the empire from the Italian invasion. Due to the efficacy of Italian diplomacy, the Ottomans, unable to enlist Great Power support for the preservation of imperial territory, developed a defensive strategy for its North African territories that relied primarily on humanitarianism and volunteerism. This dissertation, therefore, investigates the vital contribution of pan-Islamism and the broad appeal of a loose ideology of Muslim anticolonialism in the empire’s attempts to bolster its forces with international aid and volunteers. While many studies tend to brush aside the importance of early twentieth-century pan-Islamism as either a pipe dream of Wilhelmine champions of German imperialism and their Ottoman collaborators or as merely a rhetorical movement devoid of substantial consequence, this dissertation reveals how global appeals to Islamic unity to combat European expansionism translated into material benefits for Ottomans on the battlefield. Through an examination of documents from the Turkish Red Crescent and the Turkish General Staff archives, it highlights the crucial assistance of global Islamic humanitarian aid to the Ottoman war effort in the form of sizeable financial contributions to the Ottoman Red Crescent from Muslims over the duration of the conflict. The Red Crescent organization provided a means to funnel aid to the battlefield collected in mosques, mass meetings, newspaper subscriptions, and Islamic associations within and without the Ottoman Empire. This charitable aid facilitated the deployment to North Africa of multiple Red Crescent teams which assumed, in most cases, sole responsibility for the medical care of both soldiers and civilians of the Ottoman provinces. Simultaneously, the Ottoman ranks in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica swelled as calls for coreligionist volunteers to take up arms were heeded throughout Africa and Asia. Ultimately, the empire’s anticolonial ideology proved an effective unifier for the many Muslims around the world who shouldered a great deal of the cost of the conflict. While Italy’s expenses for its war for colonial expansion ballooned, the defense of North Africa cost the Ottoman treasury very little.

This dissertation traces the establishment of a binary between work and laziness from 1839 to 1920, the last century of the Ottoman Empire. Over this period, Ottoman society experienced an epochal shift in the discourses and practices of work. This study examines this shift, first, by exploring how concepts of work and productivity were moralized, socially practiced, militarized and politicized in a non-European modernity project, and second, by demonstrating how this emergent discourse, formulated as an issue of `national' importance, became a constitutive element of the general nation-formation process within the last Ottoman century. I examine the configuration and development of the moralistic discourse of an `Islamic work ethic' as an integral part of creating productive citizens. To do this, I consult an underutilized source, morality books, which display the connection between the mobilization for productivity, modern conceptualizations of body and time, and nation formation. Emphasizing the role of social practice in emergent discourses, I investigate how the bureaucratic reforms of the state in the last Ottoman century played a pivotal role in the transformation of concepts and practices of work. By the time of the revolution of 1908, anxieties over work, laziness, productivity and the shaping of the industrious body became not only political but also militarized issues. Debates over the new concepts of self and the body of the political subject reveal the broader conflicts that took place within Ottoman society. Scornful portrayals of the dandy in works of fiction, the development of an exclusionist language in morality texts against the lazy/idle elements of society, and the polemics between various political agents that took place in the political journals signaled a vital debate on what sort of model citizen their standpoint proposed for the nation. By tracing the notion of laziness as a social problem in the last century of the Ottoman Empire, this study places the discourses and practices of work and against laziness, with all of their shared assumptions and conflictual standpoints, at the center of an Ottoman modernity.

This dissertation examines the making of modernity in the late Ottoman Empire by tracing the connections between sports, the body, male subject formation, nation building, and communal and imperial identity. It focuses on the development of a shared Ottoman physical culture amongst upper and middle-class Muslim, Christian, and Jewish men of Istanbul from the 1870s until World War I. My research draws from a diverse array of archives and primary sources written in Ottoman-Turkish, Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, French, English, German, and Greek, such as government reports and documents, school and association records, private correspondence, periodicals, books, and pamphlets, as well as vernacular photographs, in order to present an alternative understanding of cultural transformations and the historical linkages between different ethno-religious communities of the late Ottoman Empire. The central argument of this dissertation is that Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Istanbul engaged sports as a shared civic activity that offered benefits for the individual, community, and empire.

This study investigates how Ottoman physical culture was underpinned by novel understandings of the body and implicated in larger debates and processes concerning the self, gender, ethno-religious communal identity, and the nation by pursuing three principle areas of inquiry. The first area of focus is the institutionalization of Ottoman physical culture in schools, voluntary associations, and government ministries. The study begins by exploring the development of athleticism as an educational ideology in a government lycée, Mekteb-i Sultani, and a foreign missionary school, Robert College. It demonstrates that many of the leading physical culture enthusiasts first encountered discussions about the educational significance of exercise and corporeal development as students in these two schools, and went on to establish voluntary athletic associations, as private spaces, in which young men formed, negotiated, and performed novel male subjectivities and identities. Ottoman government officials in the Ministry of Public Education recognized the success of these institutions in popularizing physical culture and sought to harness its potential in order to create strong and healthy Ottoman young men. In order to achieve this, the Ottoman government created the Physical Training Inspectorate and the position of Inspector to teach physical training to Ottoman teachers and oversee the integration of physical training classes in all state schools throughout the imperial domains. The second area of inquiry is Istanbul’s multilingual physical culture press, which consisted of illustrated magazines, daily newspapers, and sports periodicals. These experimental publications constituted a public forum that offered an aspiring middle-class textual and visual instructions on how to cultivate a modern male subject and community on the soccer field, in the gymnasium, and at the sports club. The final area of inquiry is the public display of sports in newly constructed urban spaces. Two spaces in particular, theatres and stadiums, served as the venues in which schools, athletic associations, and the state exhibited physical dexterity, celebrated sports as civilized activities, and redefined communal divisions separating Muslims, Christians, and Jews during the period.

This dissertation examines the Ottoman Empire's transregional role in global developments in the Mediterranean and Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emphasizes the importance of Ottoman Libya, its coastlines and hinterland, as a critical territory that connected Africa to the Middle East. Consulting primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese, it argues that Ottoman statesmen first targeted Tripolitania and Fezzan and then Cyrenaica to accomplish what I call Ottoman settlerism in North Africa. My dissertation contends that the goal of extending Ottoman sovereignty over these three North African provinces was the creation of the “Second Egypt”—a vast territory targeted to become a cultivated and profitable commercial center along the African hinterland and Mediterranean coast. These imperial efforts led to the creation of newly established settler colonies that laid the foundations for Ottoman expansionism, sovereignty, and security through refugees, migrants, and exiles. I demonstrate that Ottoman Libya was far from isolated, but was organically connected to the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Ottoman-Persian borderlands, the islands of the Mediterranean, and other regions of Africa. This investigation of Ottoman settlerism in the Second Egypt provides a crucial intervention in historiography of the Middle East and North Africa, and, more broadly, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trans-imperial rivalry over the Mediterranean Sea and Africa by focusing on the overlooked role of Ottoman imperial power in Africa.

This study examines British strategies for social control during the Arab revolt in Palestine in 1936-39. It focuses specifically on the British discourse of criminality vis-à-vis the Arabs, and the ways in which this discourse related to British and Zionist representations of Arab Palestinian nationalism. Its primary finding is that British imperial discourse in the 1930s necessitated that nationalist movements such as that for Arab Palestinian independence be criminalized in a particular manner. London tended in the nineteenth century to regard the nationalist movements within its colonial domains as essentially criminal enterprises. Given the terms of the post-WWI mandates system, however, the British were poorly positioned to suggest that Palestinian nationalists in general were criminally inclined. After all, the entire justification for the British presence in the Middle East was the shepherding of its peoples across the threshold of national autonomy. Thus, while the British undoubtedly practiced a form of colonialism in Iraq and Palestine/Transjordan, they did so on an anti-colonial pretext. When the movement for Palestinian national independence threatened their traditional colonial prerogatives in 1936-39, the British could neither plausibly deny the existence of Palestinian nationalism nor suggest that it amounted to mere criminality. In consequence, while privately acknowledging that they faced a nationalist uprising in the mandate, British officials publicly presented the rebellion as the work of a criminal minority masquerading as a national army. In this, they had the full support of mainstream Zionist opinion, both official and popular. By presenting the rebellion as a crime wave, both parties attempted to marginalize what the revolt sought to foreground: the Arab majority's case for national autonomy in Palestine. In neglecting to narrate the events of 1936-39 within this political context, previous histories of the Palestinian Great Revolt have often reproduced uncritically aspects of the British and Zionist criminological framing of the rebellion.

This dissertation explores the connection between telegraphy and the emergence of new institutions, practices, and imaginaries in the modern Ottoman Empire. First established during the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Ottoman telegraph system grew into a complex network of human and non-human actors that shaped both the material and imaginative landscape of the empire. Emphasizing the co-constructive relationship between telegraphic infrastructure and Ottoman society, this study examines how the telegraph was a mode for specific practices and discourses that were unique to modernity as it emerged in the empire, specifically the development of territorial sovereignty; the rising ethos of technocratic authority; the interdependence of the Ottoman state with foreign companies; and new conceptions of time and space among Ottoman citizens.

This study also positions the history of the Ottoman telegraph network within the broader story of global telegraphy. Drawing on sources from the Ottoman state, Arabic and Turkish literature, British telegraph companies, and the International Telegraph Union, it reveals how telegraphy both supported and strained the process of Ottoman state-building in an increasingly connected world. First, this study shows how the development and operation of telegraphic infrastructure contributed to practices and discourses associated with modern governance, specifically territorial sovereignty and technocratic authority. The building and managing of an expansive, grounded, and technical network required the Ottoman state to perform new functions, such as defending remote territory and maintaining a corps of telegraphers who were knowledgeable in the “universal” science of telegraphy. Second, this study demonstrates how the network acted as a site for the empire’s participation in the globalization of the late nineteenth century, which was marked by the transnational reach of British capital and the new epistemic framework offered by electrical communication. From the Ottoman state’s partnership with British companies to manage its submarine cables, to the emergence of new temporal and spatial concepts that could only exist in a telegraphic episteme, the network connected the empire to a world governed by European technical norms and electrical speed.

The study concludes with a brief discussion on the role of the telegraph network in the Armenian Genocide, exploring how the technology’s form and its social practices set particular temporal and spatial parameters for the catastrophe. By offering new possibilities and constraints to the Ottoman state and society, the sociotechnical network of the telegraph undergirded modernity as it emerged in the empire, in its grandest and most brutal forms.