The Lausanne Project (TLP)

Ümit Kurt explains to Jonathan Conlin how an innocent question asked in his local cafe launched him on a journey into Gaziantep’s past, uncovering the genocidal violence that gave birth to a new Muslim bourgeoisie.

Ümit is a Polonsky Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

Invited by a friend to visit a cool new cafe in an unfamiliar part of his hometown, Ümit stumbled upon a chapter of Gaziantep’s history of which he was totally unaware. Curious to find out more about the elegant stone building housing the cafe, he approached the owner: “I was just wondering, from whom did you get this place? Who was here before you?” The owner explained that his grandfather had bought the house from some Armenians. “So what happened to them, where did they go?” Uncomfortable at this line of questioning, the owner replied with a shrug: “They left.”

Ümit found out that the house had belonged to Nazar Nazaretian, honorary Iranian consul, and would eventually meet one of Nazaretian’s descendants, whose Turkish was still inflected with Aintab dialect. In this conversation, recorded on 13 January 2022, Ümit discusses his new book The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province, published by Harvard University Press.

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Ryan Gingeras speaks to Ozan Ozavci about his 2019 book Eternal Dawn and the Kemalist mythos in Turkey.

Ryan Gingeras is a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School 

Ryan Gingeras’s new book Eternal Dawn tells us the “fascinating, terrible and inspiring story” of Atatürk’s Turkey “without deference to the mythology that still envelops it”. Ozan Ozavci of TLP talked to Gingeras about how he became interested in Turkish history, the making of the Kemalist mythos in the early republican era, and whether it has precipitated the emergence of counter-cults of personality today. The podcast was recorded on 30 December 2021.

FEATURE IMAGE SOURCE: levantineheritage.com/fire.htm

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Ozan Ozavci talks to James Ryan about early Republican political thought and loyal opposition in Turkey: liberals and leftists from Nazım Hikmet to Sabiha and Zekeriya Sertel. What made these figures the loyal opponents of the republic? And what did Lausanne mean to them?

James Ryan is the Associate Director of Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University and an expert in early republican Turkish political thought. While in the early days of the republic, Turkish intellectuals entertained diverse ideals for the future of the nascent state, within a few years’ time, they all found themselves having to align their thoughts with the aspirations of the authoritarian Kemalist regime. Ryan’s monograph in progress, provisionally titled The Other Republic: The Culture of Dissent Under Turkey’s One-Party State, 1919-1950, explores the narrow(ed) space within which early republican thinkers sought to voice their critiques to the regime’s elites.

Episode 7 – ‘The Other Republic’ with James Ryan and Ozan Ozavci

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Further Reading

The Origins of Kemalism

Yeşim Bayar, The Formation of the Turkish Nation-State, 1920-1938 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Niyazi Berkes The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: Mcgill University Press, 1964)

Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, eds., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997)

Ryan Gingeras, Eternal Dawn: Turkey in the Age of Atatürk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)

Şükrü Hanioğlu, Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)

Behlül Özkan, From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012)

Taha Parla and Andrew Davidson, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004)

Ahmet Seyhun, Competing Ideologies in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic: Selected Writings of Islamist, Turkist and Westernist Writers, [London: I.B. Tauris, 2020]

Erik Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905-1926 (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1984)

Dissent and Opposition

Cem Emrence, Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası: 99 Günlük Muhalefet (İstanbul: İletişim, 2014)

Hakan Özoğlu, From Caliphate to Secular State: Power Struggle in the Early Turkish Republic, (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011)

Ozan Ozavci, Intellectual Origins of the Republic: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the Genealogy of Liberalism in Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 2015)

Christine Philliou, Turkey: A Past Against History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021)

A. Holly Shissler, Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the New Turkey (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003)

John M. VanderLippe, The Politics of Turkish Democracy: İsmet İnönü and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938-1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005)

Walter Weiker, Political Tutelage and Democracy in Turkey: The Free Party and its Aftermath (Leiden: Brill, 1973)

Erik Jan Zürcher, Political Opposition in the Early Turkish Republic: The Progressive Republican Party, 1924-1925 (Leiden: Brill, 1991)

Leftism between Communism and Social Democracy

Şakir Dinçşahin, State and Intellectuals in Turkey: The Life and Times of Niyazi Berkes, 1908-1988 (New York: Lexington Books, 2017)

Nergis Ertürk, “Nazım Hikmet and the Prose of Communism” Boundary 2 47(2):153-180 and “Vala Nureddin’s Comic Materialism and the Sexual Revolution: Writing across Turkey and the Soviet Union” Comparative Literature 73.3: 299-310

Bülent Gökay, Soviet Eastern Policy and Turkey, 1920-1991: Soviet Foreign Policy, Turkey and communism (New York: Routledge, 2006)

Ethnopolitics, Race, and Reaction

Elise K. Burton, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021)

Jacob Landau, Radical Politics in Modern Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1974)

Nazan Maksudyan, Türklüğu Ölçmek: Bilimkurgusal Antropoloji ve Türk Milliyetçilliğin Irkçı Çehresi, 1925-1929 (Istanbul: Metis Kitapları, 2005)

Günay Göksu Özdoğan, Turan’dan Bozkurt’a: Tek Parti Döneminde Türkçülük (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001)

Umut Uzer, An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism: Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016)

Conservatism

Nazım İrem, “Turkish Conservative Modernism: Birth of a National Quest for Cultural Renewal” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34.1: 87-112 and “Undercurrents of European Modernity and the Foundations of Modern Turkish Conservatism: Bergsonism in Retrospect” Middle East Studies 40.4: 79-112. 

Women’s Rights, Women’s Politics

Ayşegül Altınay, The Myth of a Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave, 2004)

Yeşim Arat, The Patriarchal Paradox: Women Politicians in Turkey (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989)

Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility 1880-1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Thinking Transnationally

Nathalie Clayer, Fabio Giomi and Emmanuel Szurek, Kemalism: Transnational Politics in a Post-Ottoman World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019)

Erik Jan Zürcher and Touraj Atabaki, Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004)

FEATURE IMAGE: “Nazım Babıali’de”, nd, Abidin Dino Archive, Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul 

Popular conspiracy theories surrounding the 2023 Lausanne centenary are steeped in oil. Jonathan Conlin invited Zeynep Oguz to discuss how this “absent presence” is invoked in debates surrounding irredentism and national sovereignty in Erdogan’s Turkey.

Cultural, political and environmental anthropologist, before her recent translation to the University of Lausanne Zeynep was Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Northwestern. She has a particular interest in how oil and energy infrastructures shape territorial formations, particularly those surrounding Cyprus and the Kurds, and is currently developing a project exploring how geological and political formations are entangled across the Global South. This interview was recorded on 15 October 2021.

Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Jodi Dean, “Theorizing Conspiracy Theory,” Theory and Event 4.3 (2000).

Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

Kathryn Yusoff, A Thousand Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2018).

Seventy years before Samuel Huntington there was Basil Mathews. Jonathan Conlin and historian Todd Thompson revisit a forgotten text that launched “the clash of civilizations”.

Samuel P. Huntington’s 1996 book made “the clash of civilizations” a catchphrase and bone of contention among scholars of the Middle East and beyond. As it happens, the phrase had first appeared in the 1920s, in the work of the Pan-Asianist Shumei Okawa and of the Christian missionary Basil Mathews (1879-1951). Whereas Okawa is fairly well-known, however, Mathews has been almost entirely forgotten.

Widely read (at the time, at least) by Protestants across the anglophone world, Mathews’ Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations (1926) sketched a future for youth-focused Christian mission in the Muslim world: one centred on the formation of the ‘character’ Mathews felt was needed to resist the competing claims of Panislamism, Bolshevism, nationalism and feminism. In this podcast Jonathan Conlin asks Todd Thompson to situate Mathews in the broader history of Christian mission and Christian-Muslim relations.

Todd Thompson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Biola University, with interests in global intellectual history and the relationship between violence and religion. His study of a later missionary figure was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press/Hurst as Sir Norman Anderson and the Christian Mission to Modernise Islam.

Ozan Ozavci asks Gingko’s founder Barbara Schwepcke about the inspiration and vision behind the foundation, and how its support for TLP fits into its broader agenda. For Gingko it’s not just about fostering connections between scholars in the West and the Middle East, it’s also about prodding them to leave the ivory tower and connect with visual artists, poets and the public at large.

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

The complete, annotated new translation, including Goethe’s ‘Notes and Essays’ & the unpublished poems

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

translated by Eric Ormsby

What will 2023 mean for today’s Turkey? Jonathan Conlin in conversation with historian Nick Danforth.

It’s not only the centenary of the Republic, 2023 will also mean important elections, as well as the Middle East’s own Y2K moment, in which Lausanne’s secret clauses will (so the conspiracy theory goes) be revealed for the first time. Having read his 2014 Foreign Policy post looking ahead to the centenary Jonathan Conlin invited historian Nick Danforth to share his thoughts on how the Erdogan regime might engage (or not) with Lausanne’s legacy in 2023.

Nick Danforth is Visiting Scholar at George Washington University and a regular contributor to Foreign Affairs, Atlantic and the New York Times. His book, The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire has just been published by Cambridge University Press. This conversation was recorded on 16 June 2021.

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

“They All Made Peace—What Is Peace?”

In this podcast James Gifford talks to Jonathan Conlin about Hemingway’s poetic response to the Lausanne conference, winter sports, and a lost suitcase.

As a Paris-based correspondent for the Toronto Star Ernest Hemingway spent three weeks in Istanbul in October 1922 covering the Turkish War of Independence. After a short interval back in Paris he headed east again in November, covering the Lausanne negotiations from 22 November until 16 December 1922. A keen skier, he returned to hit the slopes (and bobsled run) at nearby Montreux in January 1923. 

ALL of the turks are gentlemen and Ismet Pasha is a little deaf. But

 the Armenians. How about the Armenians? 

Well the Armenians. 

These experiences inspired a poem, “They All Made Peace—What is Peace?” subsequently published by Ezra Pound in The Little Review, in the same issue as the vignettes and stories which made up Hemingway’s In Our Time. Professor of English at Farleigh Dickinson University, James Gifford published an edition of these 1923 texts in 2015. In this podcast he reads the poem and discusses its place both in Hemingway’s oeuvre and in Modernism, as well as Hemingway’s view of post-war peacemaking. 

Hemingway (right) at Lausanne with fellow journalist Lincoln Steffens.

Carey Craig, “Mr. Wilson’s War: Peace, Neutrality, and Entangling Alliances in Hemingway’s In Our Time“, Hemingway Review 31.2. (2012): 6-26.

Ernest Hemingway, “In Our Time” & “They All Made Peace-What Is Peace?”: The 1923 Text ed. James Gifford (Victoria, British Columbia: Modernist Visions Project, 2015).

Ernest Hemingway, Dateline, Toronto: The Complete “Toronto Star” Dispatches, 1920-1924 ed. William White (New York: Scribner’s, 1985).

David Roessel, “Rewriting Reminiscences: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Greco-Turkish War of 1920-1922” in Savas Patislides, ed., Hellenism and the U.S. (Thessaloniki: Aristotle University Press, 1994), pp. 33-40.

David Roessel, “New Information on Hemingway’s ‘3 very fine weeks’ in Constantinople in 1922”, Resources for American Literary Study 34 (2009): 107-28.

Image Credits: Courtesy JFK Presidential Library, EH6932P and EH5150P. 

In this podcast Andrew Patrick and Jonathan Conlin discuss the state of play in historical writing about oil. 

What are historians writing about when they write about oil? Although there is a sub-field and even a journal dedicated to “energy history“, otherwise there is surprisingly little consensus. Depending on who you read, it can be business history or “oil diplomacy”, can focus on “energy security” or various nation-states’ adoption of this or that space on a spectrum from the étatisme of “national champion” companies to laissez-faire free-for-all. Environmental concerns (and environmental histories) have challenged the familiar heroic narrative of, say, Daniel Yergin’s The Prize. 

Recorded on 13 January 2021, in this conversation Andrew and Jonathan survey articles and books written in English (as well as French, Russian and Turkish), reflecting on which texts they found most inspiring for their own work on the politics of Middle East oil in the interwar period. In particular they contrast the “energy security”-centred narratives of top-down, state-driven oil policy published in the era of the “Oil Crisis” with work by A. A. Fursenko, Gregory Nowell and, most recently, Timothy Mitchell. To keep things moving they did not stop to give full details of every work cited, but those interested can find the relevant bibliographical information supplied below. Please note that this bibliography is not intended to be exhaustive. 

The Grand Heroic Quest

• Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters (1975)
• Daniel Yergin, The Prize (1991)-and associated documentary series.

Environmental Histories

• Brian C. Black, Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (2012).
• Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).
• Simon Pirani, Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (2018)

Corporate Histories

George Sweet Gibb and Evelyn H. Knowlton, History of Standard Oil Company (NewJersey) vol. 2 The Resurgent Years, 1911-27 (1956)-and associated volumes by Hidyand Hidy, etc.

(retirement projects by insiders)

• F. C. Gerretson, History of the Royal Dutch (4 vols., Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1958).
• Jean Rondot, La compagnie Française des Pétroles: du Franc-or au Pétrole-France (Paris,1962).
• Stephen H. Longrigg, “The Origins and Early History of the Iraq Petroleum Company” (privately printed, 1969).

(multivolume)

Ronald W. Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum Company Vol. 1 The developing years, 1901-1932 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1982).

• T. A. B. Corley, A History of the Burmah Oil Company, 1886-1924 (London: Heinemann,1983).
• T. A. B. Corley, A History of the Burmah Oil Company, 1924-1996 (London: Heinemann,1988).
• James Bamberg, The Anglo-Iranian Years,1928-54v. 2 of The History of the British Petroleum Company (1994).
• Michel Dumoulin, Petrofina: un groupe pétrolier international et la gestion de l’incertitude vol. 1. 1920-1979 (Louvain: Peeters, 1997).
• Stephen Howarth, Joost Jonker et al. A History of Royal Dutch Shell (3 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Oil History as Bank History: the French/German contribution

• Hubert Bonin, La Banque de l’Union parisienne (Paris: Histoire des Outre-Mers, 2011).
• Hubert Bonin, Les activités financières des banques françaises (Paris: Plage, 2000).
• Hubert Bonin, Les banques et les entreprises en France dans l’entre-deux guerres ( 2000).
• Eric Bussière, Paribas, l’Europe et le monde, 1872-1992 (Anvers: Fonds Mercator, 1992).
• Eric Bussière, “La Banque de l’Union Parisienne (BUP) et l’existence d’un courant national dans les milieux pé troliers français dans l’entre-deux guerres”, Relations Internationales 43 (1985): 305-22.
• Bertrand Gille, “Capitaux français et pé troles russes,”, Histoire de l’Entreprise 12 (1963).
• Lubor Jı́lek, “Impasses d’une ‘politique nationale’ d’approvisionnement: capitaux francais dans les pétroles de Galicie, 1918-1926”, Rels. Int. 43 (1985).
• Philippe Marguerat, L. Jilek, Paribas, le pétrole roumain et la politique française (Neuchâ tel: Université de Neuchâ tel Press, 1987).

In the German context: Hans Pohl, Helmut Mejcher, Fritz Seidenzahl…

Post-WW2 American scholarship

• John A. DeNovo, “Movement for an Aggressive American Oil Policy Abroad, 1918-1920”, American Historical Review 61 (1956): 854-878.
• John A. DeNovo, American Interest and Policies in the Middle East, 1900-1939 (1963).
• Gerald Nash, United States Oil Policy, 1890-1964: Business and Government in Twentieth-Century America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968).

The Shadow of the “Oil Crisis”? Energy Security narratives

• André Nouschi, Luttes pétrolières au proche-orient (1970).
• Marian Kent, Oil and Empire (1976).
• Geoffrey Jones, The State and the Emergence of the British Oil Industry (1981)
• Fiona Venn, Oil Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (1986).
• Volkan Ediger, Enerji Ekonomi-Politiği Perspektifinden Osmanlı’da Neft ve Petrol (2007).
• Hikmet Uluğbay, İmparatorluk’tan Cumhuriyet’e Petropolitik (2008).

Oil History for Political Scientists: Colbertisme vs. Laissez-Faire

• Harvey B. Feigenbaum, “France’s oil policy: the limits of mercantilism”, France in the Troubled World Economy (London: Butterworth Scientific, 1982), 114-131.
• Harvey B. Feigenbaum, The Politics of Public Enterprise: Oil and the French State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
• Jean-Marie Bouguen 2013 (to a lesser extent…)

Oil as Episode in Emergence of MNEs

• Geoffrey Jones, Merchants to Multinationals (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
• Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism (Oxford, OUP, 2005).
• Robert Fitzgerald, The Rise of the Global Company: Multinationals and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: CUP, 2016).

Voices in the Wilderness? Challenges to energy security-centred history

• Walter Adams et al,,”Retarding the Development of Iraq’s Oil resources: an Episode in Oleaginous Diplomacy, 1927-39″, Journal of Economic Issues 27.1 (1993).
• A. Fursenko “Pervyi nefianoi exportnyi syndikat v Rossii” in Monopolii i inostrannyu kapital v. Rossii (1962).
• Edward Peter Fitzgerald, “The Power of the Weak and the Weakness of the Strong: Explaining Corporate Behavior in Middle Eastern Oil,” Bus. & Ec. Hist. Rev 23 (1994).
• Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge: HUP, 2007).
• Fursenko, The Battle for Oil: The Economics and Politics of International Corporate Conflict over Petroleum trans. Gregory L Freece (Greenwich: Jai Press, 1990).
• George Philip, The Political Economy of International Oil (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1994).
• William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

(and particularly noteworthy:)

• Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso).
• Gregory P. Nowell, Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel, 1900-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Cultural History of Oil

• Dochuk, Anointed By Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (2019).