World War I

I was convinced and energized.  Instead of “covering” everything, I would introduce the enormous changes that World War I brought to the Middle East, emphasizing the big stuff and letting some of the details go by the wayside.  The students could use discuss the details they had read about for the week in sections to verify, refute, or lend color to the big question.

The big question, of course, was the fate of the defeated Ottoman Empire after the war.  The maps shows how dramatic the change was:

I welcomed them with one of the more depressing and relevant videos I will show all semester: Eric Bogle’s “And The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda” illustrated by images of the battle at Gallipoli. 

After briefly reviewing the Thursday (data dump) lecture, I asked the students to help update our mindmap.    I wanted them to think about European interests in the Ottoman Empire (economic, strategic, political), interests that would help determine the future of the empire after its defeat.

I reduced the causes of World War I to three minutes (an outrageous travesty!) so I was able to spend a bit more time on three big Ottoman wartime experiences: the battle of Gallipoli, the siege of Kut, and the Armenian genocide.

My bigger interests were the postwar settlements.  I reminded them about the efforts of the European Great Powers to keep the empire intact in order to prevent conflict over the remains.  In that context, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement made sense: Russia, Britain and France awarded each other control over their favorite places to avoid postwar conflict.  The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres extended the dissection of central Ottoman lands, but it was made moot by the Greek invasion of Anatolia.

The postwar settlement allowed me to return to major course issues: the question of belonging (the Armenian genocide and the Greek-Turkish population exchange), the intervention of outsiders (invasion, occupation and treaty imposition); the lives and livelihoods of the people (devastation of war and the population exchange), and the nature of the state.  There was too little time to explain the long-term implications of Kemalist ideology (to which we will return), but they loved this video synopsis of Ataturk’s life.