With Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria and Egypt in crisis, the Eastern Mediterranean has once again caught the world’s attention. This course offers a historical perspective to current developments by examining the deep social, political, and cultural processes that transformed the Eastern Mediterranean from the mid-19th century Ottoman Reforms to the 1922 Greco-Turkish exchange of populations and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. It explores the interconnected processes of social restructuring, cultural interaction, ethnic strife and sectarian violence and questions the common image of the Eastern Mediterranean as at once a model of cosmopolitan conviviality and an archetype of unbridled violence. Topics include: the modernization of the Ottoman Empire, colonial power in Egypt, the rise of Balkan and Near Eastern nationalisms, communal life and urban coexistence in the port-cities, the multiple presences of the West and its images of the Orient, the Balkan Wars and population movements, and, finally, present-day nostalgic reconstructions of the fin-de-siècle Mediterranean in popular and elite culture.

This chapter discusses the end of the Ottoman Empire, looking at three case studies which illustrate the pattern of change seen in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to nation-states. Greece, the first Ottoman territory to gain independence (1830), set prece dents in establishing government by non-natives, introducing religious and legal institu tions based on European models and working single-mindedly to instill national identity in its population. Almost a century later, King Faysal I (r. 1921-1933) of Iraq followed a similar path, albeit under British direction. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1922 and offered a slight variation on the pattern in that it built on selected legacies from the late Ottoman Empire. It was the only post-Ottoman country founded primarily by internal effort rather than by European intervention, and the national identity it worked to en trench in the population drew upon the political ideas of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which had dominated Ottoman government from 1908 to 1918. Despite that continuity, the republican government pursued the agenda of tearing down Ottoman institutions and rebuilding state and society as national projects. Such nation-building ul timately succeeded, producing its own instabilities; in new post-Ottoman countries such as Greece, Iraq, and Turkey, social and political re-engineering aroused resistance within the population.

The Long World War I of the Eastern Mediterranean: 1910-1923 A flurry of publications accompanied the centennial of World War I and despite the broader scope of research, the paradigm of a war fought for the political goals of the European powers remains the accepted approach to the study of this conflict. This is implicit in the continued periodization of the war from 1914 to 1918; however, this periodization does not fit the reality of the years of war that preceded and followed the war in Western Europe. This panel examines the war in the eastern Mediterranean as a longer and, in many ways, more transformational conflict that ultimately reshaped the political geography of the Middle East and North Africa. This periodization resituates the Italo-Ottoman War of 1911-1912 as the opening battle of over a decade of ongoing conflict in the Ottoman world. The war played out on diverse fronts from the Balkans and Anatolia to the Arabian Peninsula and Iran for more than a decade. The struggle for national and political belonging continued to drive women and men to enter the fray. This long war was marked not by an epic clash of industrial economies on a static, positional front but by insurgent and irregular forces coordinating with the vast human resources the Ottoman Army mustered. Anti-Western and anticolonial ideologies merged with Muslim political activism. They provided a common political framework to bolster the Ottoman war effort and to perpetuate the fight to preserve the empire even after its agreed-upon dismemberment at the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. And later the final settlements of Neuilly 1919 and Lausanne 1923.

This essay aims to describe and analyze the causes of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, its external and internal agents and various historical and ideological components which condensed in diplomacy and Western historiography later would be known as the "Eastern Question." The writing begins by placing the main features that allowed the development and expansion of the Ottoman Empire and how the problems in the control of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and Mesopotamia was the cause of further decline due to the interests of European powers on its territory (Russia and the exit to the Black Sea, England, and the control of the Suez canal) adding to this nascent nationalism in their territories, where Greeks, Serbs and Arabs and even the Turks themselves were not within their national projects in the continuity of Ottoman Empire. Completing these processes with their disintegration and the formulation of the Republic of Turkey.