Singapore Middle East Papers

Transcription

1 Singapore Middle East Papers The Politics and Economics of Regime Change in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Mashriq; Ottomans, Mandates, Revolutions by Peter Sluglett In what were once the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, there have been four significant instances of regime change since, say, In chronological order in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these four periods are: the reign of Abd al-hamid II, which began in 1876 and ended in The end of this long reign overlapped with the rule of the Young Turks, who came to power in the 1908 revolution, and stayed in power until the end of the First World War. Needless to say, this history was common to that of the rest of the Ottoman Empire, although this was a period of severe contraction, as I will explain in a minute. In the aftermath of the War came various forms of British and French colonial rule, followed, by the late 1940s, by manifestations of the post-colonial, generally praetorian, state that are mostly still with us. The post-colonial states of the Middle East have generally been buttressed by some combination of a repressive internal security system (the police and the mukhabarat) often inherited from the colonial state, and sizeable military forces, both of which have often been deployed to defend the regime against the people. Most of them became command economies on the eastern European model, until these structures disintegrated in the face of the neo-liberal consensus around the beginning of the present century. 1

2 The Ottoman state during the reign of Abd al-hamid II How should we describe the Ottoman state at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, just before its disintegration, as a result first of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, then of the Balkan wars? The middle part of the nineteenth century had been characterised principally by the legal and administrative reforms of the Tanzimat, which culminated in the granting of the Constitution in Ultimately, these reforms proved inadequate; the retention of most of his absolutist powers enabled Abd al- Hamid to prorogue the Constitution for some thirty years, and the other advances in law, administration, and education were insufficiently attractive, and their provision insufficiently universal, to hold the multi-confessional and multi-ethnic empire together. 1 About 40 per cent of the population was non-muslim in the mid-nineteenth century the figure would decline to 25 per cent by 1900 but this probably mattered less than the fact that the Empire was confronted with the rise of a series of ethno-linguistic national movements, often encouraged by the European powers, as well as with the emergence of more acute economic and political competition between those same powers for influence within the Empire. Eventually, the state could not compete with the siren calls of (in chronological order) Serbian, Greek or Bulgarian nationalism, and was also unable to create an effective Ottoman citizenry or a national monarchy that might act as viable alternatives, 2 with the result that Ottomanism, Osmanlılık, ended up appealing only to Muslims. In the Balkans, individuals were eventually forced to pick a side Muslim or Christian, Greek or Bulgarian. 3 Developments in eastern and southeastern Europe reflected a broader trend in the second half of the nineteenth century (which would appear somewhat later among Armenians and Kurds and in the Arab provinces of the Empire). Whether or not these ethno-linguistically based nationalist movements were authentic expressions of separatist 1 Kemal H Karpat, The Transformation of the Ottoman State, , International Journal of Middle East Studies, 3, 1972, The state formally never losing sovereignty, tried to preserve its multi-national character, and remained opposed to Turkish nationalism almost to the end of the World War I (sic) See Selim Deringil, The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the late Ottoman Empire 1808 to 1908, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35, 1993, Christine Philliou, The Paradox of Perceptions: Interpreting the Ottoman Past through the National Present, Middle Eastern Studies, 44, 2008, , here

3 feeling, they were a particularly effective vehicle for the European powers, particularly Russia and Austria, to enter the fray on behalf of various oppressed minorities. Thus Russia encouraged Bulgarian and Romanian nationalism the Armenian story is part of this, but more complicated because of the physical distribution of the Armenian population and once these states were internationally recognised after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, citizenship became based on religion, language, and ethnicity rather than on domicile. The new states began to engage is what is now called ethnic cleansing, either by straightforwardly expelling their Muslim populations or by making life so difficult for them that they could no longer live there. The Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina had similar, if less drastic, results (since most of the Muslim population stayed where it was). Also at Berlin, Russia annexed Kars and Ardahan in eastern Anatolia; Greece acquired Thessaly in 1881, and the rest of its territory in the north of the modern state in the course of the Balkan Wars ( ; 1913), which also brought a greater Bulgaria into being. Hence on the eve of the First World War the Ottoman Empire had lost all its territories in the Balkans except eastern Thrace, which remains part of the Turkish Republic, and was thus a very different entity than it had been some four decades earlier. The Young Turks seized power in an attempt to avert this decline, but the outside pressures I have described meant that they were ultimately unable to do so. Before and during these major political events, the nature of the Ottoman economy had begun to change. By the third quarter of the century (if not earlier) the domestic manufacture had begun to decline, and the Empire had become became a net importer of goods, and an exporter of primary products; in Iraq, for instance, the area under cultivation in the south increased about tenfold between the 1870s and the First World War. 4 The end of the nineteenth century also saw the Great Economic Depression of , the greatest long-term price deflation in modern history. 5 One of the results of this, as in many other parts of the world, was over-borrowing on the part of the state. This in its turn led to a snowballing national debt, that obliged the state to default on its interest payments in 1875, and brought about the creation, by the European powers, of the Ottoman Public Debt 4 Much of the surplus grain was supported to India and the Gulf 5 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2008, 92,

4 Administration in The OPDA eventually controlled 27 per cent of state revenues, which it directed into the hands of the bondholders. 6 One result of the change in the patterns of trade was the formation of a wealthy comprador bourgeoisie, composed mostly of members of the non-muslim minorities, who had gained various kinds of protection from European powers that largely secured them exemption from Ottoman law and taxation, putting them effectively beyond the reach of the Ottoman state. 7 In addition, it was not the kind of bourgeoisie that could have galvanised an already weakening Ottoman state. Let us look briefly an example of the economy in the Arab provinces, the case of the city of Aleppo. Although the city's economic life had been profoundly disturbed by the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, it did manage to adapt: while the textile industry declined for several decades, the canal did not bring the death blow to the city's prosperity that the British consul had gloomily anticipated in a report in This was partly because so much of that prosperity was bound up with local trade, that is, with Anatolia and northern Iraq, which was not as much affected as long distance overland trade, which the Canal did effectively consign to oblivion. Textiles and cereals continued to form the bedrock of the local economy, as they had throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The cereal producing lands to the east and north east of the city were first put under cultivation in the 1890's and early 1900's, under the influence of the bureaucratic landowning bourgeoisie, many of whom bought up the lands of whole villages during this period. The Young Turks/Committee of Union and Progress In July 2008, a group of armed revolutionaries, essentially the Turkish nationalist faction of the Committee of Union and Progress, staged a military coup that eventually developed into a popular revolution, widely celebrated in the Arab provinces of the Empire 6 Ibid. 7 See James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, p Consul Jago, Report on the Vilayet of Aleppo June 1890, FO 195/1690, quoted in Charles Issawi, The Economic History of the Fertile Crescent : a Documentary Economic History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp

5 and beyond as presaging a new dawn of progress and brotherhood. 9 At least initially, the goal of the CUP was to restore the constitution and to create a real constitutional monarchy, and in that sense its aims were quite conservative. Elections were held at the end of 1908 that made the CUP the largest single party in the new parliament, with 60 out of 288 seats but there was a strong element of opposition from a number of quarters ranging from leftist to liberal, and to religious/conservative that disliked and resented its policies and its hegemony. Some of these groups combined to stage a counter-coup in March 1909, which was quickly thwarted by the CUP, and soon to the deposition of Sultan Abd al-hamid. Over the next four years various other governments came and went, until early 1913, when the CUP effectively turned itself into a one-party dictatorship, imposing law, banning dissent and restricting press freedom measures that seem all too dismally familiar. Thus on 23 January 1913, after the disastrous First Balkan War, in which Greece captured Salonika and the Bulgarian army advanced to within a few kilometres to the west of Istanbul, the CUP generals Enver Pasha and Jamal Pasha forced the resignation of the government of Kamil Pasha. Enver became Minister of War and Jamal Minister of Marine, and their colleague Talaat Pasha, best known as the architect of the Armenian genocide, became Minister of Interior. This triumvirate ruled the Empire until its defeat by the Allies in October 1918 In his prosopographical study of the Young Turk elite, 10 Erik Zürcher suggests that the fact that so many members of this elite were born and grew up in the Balkans, which they realised were evidently forever lost to the Ottomans after Berlin and the Balkan Wars, played a crucial role in their dogged efforts to maintain the integrity of what remained of the Empire, especially, of course, in eastern Anatolia. It is difficult to gauge how much these activities affected the institutions of government in the Arab provinces, although as part of the process of the restoration of the constitution, deputies from each 9 For the celebrations in Jerusalem, see Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians and Jews in early Twentieth-Century Palestine, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2011; for Aleppo, see Keith Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006; for the joyful reception of the news in Irkutsk, see Robert D. Crews, The Russian Worlds of Islam in David Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European Empires, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, p Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turks: Children of the Borderlands? International Journal of Turkish Studies, 9, 1-2, 2003, pp See also Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp

6 province were elected to the parliament in Istanbul in 1908 and Neither the CUP nor its rivals had sufficient time in power to make far-reaching changes in the Arab provinces, 11 whose populations generally remained loyal to the Empire until it ceased to exist. Nor did the advent of the CUP signal any fundamental changes in Ottoman economic policy, although there were some attempts to introduce elements of protectionism and étatism, which would characterise the interwar economy of the Turkish republic. 12 In time, of course, the Turkification policies adopted by the CUP in the Arab provinces became irksome to locals, 13 but even then, in Aleppo, as in many other Arab cities, such events as the news of the Italian annexation of Tripolitania (1911) and of the major Ottoman defeats in the two Balkan Wars ( ; 1913) occasioned large pro- Ottoman demonstrations. 14 In Nablus, the announcement on 5 November 1914 that the Ottomans had entered the war on the side of the Central Powers caused a large crowd to gather outside the mansion of the Nimr family: In a resounding voice they all chanted God give victory to the Prince of the Muslims our Sultan. 15 In spite of its complex and often acrimonious relationship with the Ottoman administration, the Shi i clerical leadership in the atabat of Iraq unhesitatingly rallied to the Ottoman banner at the very beginning of the First World War, instinctively choosing the Ottomans over their would-be British liberators. 16 For a number of reasons, it is difficult to find evidence of any sustained opposition to Ottoman rule in the Arab world before the excesses and privations of the First World War. 11 In an unfootnoted aside, Karpat says It is interesting to note that after 1878 the Arab provinces began to be placed at the head of the list of ceremonies in order to emphasise their importance, and the valis of these provinces received the highest pay. The Transformation of the Ottoman State, p Hanioğlu, A Brief History pp See Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, See al-ghazzi, Nahr al-dhahab, Vol III, pp Muhammad Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 89. See also Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, , Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, See Werner Ende, Iraq in World War I; the Turks, the Germans and the Shi ite mujtahids call for jihad, in R. Peters (ed.), Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, Amsterdam, 1978, Leiden, Brill, 1981, pp A frequent British mantra in Iraq during the First World War was that, in General Maude s words, our Armies have not come into your Cities and Lands as Conquerors, or enemies, but as Liberators [from those] alien rulers, the Turks who oppressed [you], both invoking, and exaggerating Ottoman tyranny to justify the British invasion and occupation. For the full text of Maude s Proclamation to the People of Baghdad, 19 March 1917 see Philip Willard Ireland, Iraq: a Study in Political Development, London, Jonathan Cape, 1937, pp

7 In the first place, the overwhelming majority of Arabs were Muslims; secondly, until the rise of Turkism (= Turkish nationalism) and its implicit adoption as an ideology by the CUP in the late 1900s, most of them would not have regarded Arabs and Turks as categories in some sort of natural opposition to one other, and third, both Muslim and many, if not most, non-muslim Arabs in Greater Syria and Iraq seem to have understood from events just beyond their immediate neighbourhood in Egypt and North Africa that the alternative to Ottoman rule was not independence, but some form of European colonial rule. There have been a number of attempts to explain the Ottoman-German alliance in the First World War; surely, it is often argued, neutrality would have been a much safer option? In general, both the broader CUP and the triumvirate understood that, especially after the scale of the defeats in the Balkan wars, and the enormous territorial losses that it had suffered, the Ottoman state desperately needed the backing of a major European power in order to survive. To that end they made approaches to Austria-Hungary, Britain, France Germany, and even to Russia, during 1913 and 1914, all of which were rebuffed. Eventually the Kaiser yielded to the pleas of the CUP, and insisted, over the heads of members of his own cabinet, on the formation of a German-Ottoman alliance, concluded on 2 August von Wangenheim, the loyal but sceptical German ambassador in Istanbul, long believed that armed neutrality would have been a better option for the Ottomans. 17 It was not until 29 October 1914 that the Ottomans first engaged with the Allies, when the German naval vessels Goeben and Breslau, which had been handed over to the Ottoman navy, shelled the Russian port of Odessa. The war proved devastating both for the Ottoman economy, and for the Ottoman armed forces; 325,000 soldiers were killed and 400,000 wounded. 18 In the course of the war, most of the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia were either killed or died in the course of deportations to Dayr al-zawr in Syria, which began in 17 See Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman road to war in 1914: the Ottoman Empire and the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Previous scholarship has either cast the CUP in the role of puppets in the hands of the Germans, or regarded Enver and his colleagues as irresponsible gamblers. In fact, it seems that the Germans were quite hesitant, and also that Enver, like many of his contemporaries in Europe, thought that the war would be over quickly, and that an alliance with a major European power was entirely rational. 18 Hanioğlu, A Brief History p

8 May Some 80 per cent of the pre-war Ottoman Armenian population of about two million died in the course of the genocide, and their assets and lands were seized and distributed either to the local population or to emigrants from former Ottoman territories. Somewhat later, after the Greek-Turkish war of 1922, there was a forcible exchange of populations between Greece and the Turkish Republic, involving around 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks (and 356,000 Muslims from Greece). 19 This, combined with the Armenian genocide, meant that the Ottoman state, now the Turkish Republic, lost about 90 per cent of its pre-war entrepreneurial class, thus paving the way for the formation of an entirely new, ethnically Turkish, commercial and business elite. 20 This process is too complex to deal with here, but the creation, whether by accident or design, of a religiously homogeneous and almost ethnically homogeneous state, in what became Turkey was clearly one of the major consequences of the First World War. The role of Britain and France in the pre- and post-war Arab Middle East At various points before and during the First World War, the forces of France and Britain occupied the territory that now comprises the states of the modern Middle East. Thus Egypt, Britain s principal military base in the region, had been under British military occupation since In Iraq, British Indian forces landed at Fao at the very beginning of the war, and captured and occupied Basra on 21 November In the years after 1914, the British established an administration in southern Iraq on the lines of an Indian province, and these arrangements were replicated in Baghdad and Mosul as those provinces were taken over. Hence by the end of the war Britain had been building up an embryonic colonial state in the south of the country for four years, constructed, to be sure, on Ottoman foundations, but to serve British wartime and post-war aims. In contrast, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force invaded southern Palestine in late 1916, captured Jerusalem under General Allenby in December 1917, and Damascus in September-October These were purely military campaigns, and in much of Greater Syria members of the Ottoman civil administration had remained at their posts for most of the war. Under the 19 See Renée Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean: an Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, Providence, Berghahn Books, 2003, and Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire , Oxford, Oxford University Press, See Çağlar Keyder, State and class in Turkey; a study in capitalist development, London, Verso, 1987, p

9 Treaty of Lausanne (July 1923) the Ottomans renounced all claims to territory outside Anatolia (except to the Mosul vilayet, whose fate to become part of Iraq was not finally decided until 1925). The Treaty of San Remo of April 1920 formalised British and French rule over Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Transjordan. The connection between the coloniser and the colonial state was regulated by a new administrative concept, the mandate, which proposed what is conventionally described as a tutelary relationship, with the implication that once a certain stage of development had been reached, the colonial state would, as it were, let go of its protégé. 21 By 1930, Britain judged Iraq to be able to stand alone, and recommended it for League membership, which duly came in 1932, although Britain retained military bases in the country. A left-wing French government under Léon Blum proposed something similar for Lebanon and Syria in 1936, but this came to nothing when Blum s government fell. Under British pressure, French troops eventually left Lebanon in 1945 and Syria in 1946, and the Palestine mandate came to an end with the creation of the State of Israel in The creation of the mandated states, and the states which bordered them, was an almost entirely arbitrary process that took very little account of economic realities. The transition from the Ottoman Empire to Republican Turkey and the mandated states fragmented what had previously been a Zollverein, an economic community that had included a large part of the region. In addition, although the eastern Mediterranean as a whole had become increasingly integrated into the world system in the course of the nineteenth century, it was still the case that until the First World War, with the exception of a few purely export commodities like Lebanese silk and Iraqi dates, agricultural and industrial production in the region was directed principally towards satisfying the needs of the local, or Ottoman domestic, market. 22 Hence the creation of Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, 21 See Peter Sluglett, An improvement on colonialism? The A mandates and their legacy in the Middle East, International Affairs, 90, 2014, Frank Peter, (2004) Dismemberment of empire and reconstitution of regional space: the industries of Damascus between 1918 and 1946, in Peter Sluglett and Nadine Méouchy (eds.), The British and French mandates in comparative perspectives/les mandats français et anglais dans une perspective comparative, Leiden, Brill, 2004, pp ; Peter Sluglett, Will the real nationalists please stand up? The political activities of the notables of Aleppo, , in Nadine Méouchy (ed.), Les Ambiguités et Les Dynamiques de la Relation Mandataire : France Syrie et Liban, , IFEAD, Damascus, 2002, pp

10 Syria and Transjordan, as well as Republican Turkey, produced six entities where the natural forces of political and economic integration were not highly developed and were in many ways quite problematic, as well are ensuring that imports (especially of capital goods) and exports, such as Iraqi oil (after the 1950s) and Syrian cotton and grain, went to or from the new imperial metropoles. Again, the example of the city of Aleppo is generally illustrative of post-war developments. The economic, as well as the political, situation of the city changed very radically indeed after the First World War. For much of 1918, foreign trade had virtually ceased, and moneylenders were unable to call in their loans. Some landowning merchantmoneylenders took advantage of the peasants desperate need for food (which had become more acute because of Ottoman requisitions of grain and animals throughout the war) to acquire peasant land: [I]nability to repay these loans then led to foreclosures. Whole villages throughout Syria were annexed to the estates of big landowners and semi-independent village communities were transformed overnight into dependent sharecropping communities. 23 On the other hand, for many of the inhabitants of northern Syria, the imposition of the French mandate (and indeed the French occupation since September 1919) had the effect, to some extent, of bringing what had been a long period of acute insecurity to an end, but major political and economic questions long remained unanswered. For example, it was not entirely clear for some years where the boundary between Syria and Turkey would be drawn. Eventually, under the terms of the Franco-Turkish armistice in October 1921, the former Ottoman province of Haleb (of which Aleppo had been the capital) was effectively cut in half, with the northern Turkish-speaking qadhas (Urfa, Maraș, Aintab) assigned to Turkey. With the new tariff barriers between Turkey and Syria, Aleppo was cut off from its traditional commercial hinterland in southern and central Anatolia. At the same time, the city's population was dramatically swollen by an influx of Armenian and other Christian refugees from Anatolia. 24 In addition, in contrast to the other major cities of Greater Syria, 23 Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism, , Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987, p A British official had reported in May 1921: Commerce is stagnant. Aleppo, which before the war traded with the greater part of Asia Minor lying to the north and north east is now limited to the district lying within 10

11 such as Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem that rose to become national capitals, Aleppo remained a mere provincial centre (as was the case with both Basra and Mosul). For the first time in its recent history it became subordinate to Damascus, within the new state of Syria. Nevertheless Aleppo was able to survive these vicissitudes, and emerge as the principal industrial and agro-commercial centre of the new state of Syria by the 1940s. However, the shakiness of the French franc, to which the Syrian lira was tied, the world economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s and the very limited foreign and domestic investment in Syria in general throughout the mandate period, meant that the economic development or revival of Syria proceeded fairly slowly until the end of the 1930s. Britain terminated its mandate over Iraq in 1932, but the new state was still economically dependent on Britain, 25 and remained so until greater US involvement in the Middle East, and Britain s increasing economic weakness, became realities after During the Second World War, Iraq s general inability to import goods eased its chronic balance of payments deficit, but after the war demand resumed. Between 1946 and 1949, Britain still supplied between 44 per and 49 per cent of Iraq s imports: 26 by the late 1930s, IPC, with its majority British interests, had forced out other competitors and had a complete monopoly over Iraqi oil. The company paid a royalty per ton, so Iraqi negotiators always asked for an increase in production, which the company declared that the state of the market did not warrant. The political downside of the continuing stranglehold of IPC over the Iraqi economy was such that the US ambassador in Baghdad wrote in January 1950: I feel strongly that the British, Dutch, United States and French interests concerned in IPC should, for the sake of the whole Western position in this area, and a radius of some 20 miles from the town. See HM Consul, Damascus, to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, London, 11 May 1921, FO371/6455, E 5774/117/ Joseph Sassoon, Economic Policy in Iraq , London, Cass, 1987, pp Ibid., Table 5.6, p,

12 emphatically in their own interests, give the Iraqis a better deal in the matter of their oil. 27 This period of dependency came to an end with the revolutions and military takeovers that began in Egypt in 1952, continued in Iraq in 1958, and in Syria in 1963, although some would consider that it returned with the end of the command economies in the 1980s and 1990s. It is difficult to draw any general conclusions from this rather dismal catalogue of events, except that the juggernaut of the penetration of the world market, in this and many other parts of the formerly colonised world has continued on its relentless way since the mid-nineteenth century. Freedom, both political and economic, seems as chimerical now as it must have done to Egyptians, Iraqis and Syrians in the 1920s and 1930s. 27 Ambassador Edward Crocker, 30 January 1950, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol v., p. 641 quoted in ibid., p. 254 a hint of the British intransigence which would cause a really serious crisis in Iran a year or so later. 12

13 Bibliography Aksakal, Mustafa, The Ottoman road to war in 1914: the Ottoman Empire and the First World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008 Campos, Michelle U., Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians and Jews in early Twentieth- Century Palestine, Stanford, Stanford University Press, Crews, Robert D, The Russian Worlds of Islam in David Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European Empires, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp Deringil, Selim, The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the late Ottoman Empire 1808 to 1908, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35, 1993, Doumani, Beshara, Rediscovering Palestine, Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, , Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, Ende, Werner, Iraq in World War I; the Turks, the Germans and the Shi ite mujtahids call for jihad, in R. Peters (ed.), Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, Amsterdam, 1978, Leiden, Brill, 1981, pp al-ghazzi, Kamil, Nahr al-dhahab fi Ta rikh Halab, Aleppo, Gingeras, Ryan, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire , Oxford, Oxford University Press, Grehan, James, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, Hirschon, Renée, Crossing the Aegean: an Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, Providence, Berghahn Books, Ireland, Philip Willard, Iraq: a Study in Political Development, London, Jonathan Cape, Issawi, Charles, The Economic History of the Fertile Crescent : a Documentary Economic History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Karpat, Kemal H., The Transformation of the Ottoman State, , International Journal of Middle East Studies, 3, 1972, Kayali, Hasan, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Keyder, Çağlar, State and class in Turkey; a study in capitalist development, London, Verso, Khoury, Philip S., Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism, , Princeton, Princeton University Press, Muslih, Muhammad Y., The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, New York, Columbia University Press, Peter, Frank, Dismemberment of empire and reconstitution of regional space: the industries of Damascus between 1918 and 1946, in Peter Sluglett and Nadine Méouchy (eds.), The British and French mandates in comparative perspectives/les mandats français et anglais dans une perspective comparative, Leiden, Brill, 2004, pp Philliou, Christine, The Paradox of Perceptions: Interpreting the Ottoman Past through the National Present, Middle Eastern Studies, 44, 2008, Reynolds, Michael A., Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Sassoon, Joseph, Economic Policy in Iraq , London, Cass, 1987, pp

14 Sluglett, Peter, An improvement on colonialism? The A mandates and their legacy in the Middle East, International Affairs, 90, 2014, , Will the real nationalists please stand up? The political activities of the notables of Aleppo, , in Nadine Méouchy (ed.), Les Ambiguités et Les Dynamiques de la Relation Mandataire : France Syrie et Liban, , IFEAD, Damascus, 2002, pp Watenpaugh, Keith, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, Zürcher, Erik J., The Young Turks: Children of the Borderlands? International Journal of Turkish Studies, 9, 1-2, 2003, pp Peter Sluglett is Director of the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore. He has a BA from Cambridge (1966) and a D.Phil from Oxford (1972). He has taught Middle Eastern History at the University of Durham ( ) and at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City ( ), where he was Director of the University s Middle East Centre. He has published widely on the modern history of Iraq, including Iraq since 1958: from Revolution to Dictatorship, 3rd edn., (2001, with Marion Farouk-Sluglett), and Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (2007). He has also edited and contributed to The Urban Social History of the Middle East (2008), Syria and Bilad al-sham under Ottoman Rule: Essays in Honour of Abdul- Karim Rafeq, (2010, with Stefan Weber), and Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (2012). He recently completed an Atlas of Islamic History (2014, with Andrew Currie). 14