2020 Theses Doctoral

Coping with Transitions: The Connected Construction of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, 1918-1928

Okan, Orcun Can

This dissertation examines how the Ottoman Empire was dismantled and how new political regimes were constructed in its former territories, in practice. It focuses on the construction of a republican regime in Turkey and the League of Nations Mandates in present-day Syria, Lebanon and Iraq in the decade following World War I. It demonstrates that in the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman demise, inhabitants of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were still linked to the Ottoman past through their relations to the former state, to each other, and to the lands they inhabited under Ottoman rule. These links and their significance are evinced in the dissertation by combining methods of diplomatic history with social and cultural history. Attention is paid to structural constraints at the macro-level, such as state policies and interstate competition, and to micro-level frameworks that defined or challenged self-understandings and motives of historical actors. Analyses in the chapters are thus built on the correspondence of states (internal and diplomatic) as well as first-person narratives in the form of petitions and letters submitted to state offices. With a focus on efforts to cope with hardships pertaining to state succession in post-imperial lands, and on questions of nationality rather than nationalism, the dissertation challenges the assumption that Turkey and countries in the Arab Middle East followed separate trajectories once the Ottoman Empire collapsed. It argues that the construction of post-Ottoman Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq in the 1920s were in fact connected processes.