David March
Wars of Ottoman Succession: How Historians Explain Contested Legacies of Empires

David March - Wars of Ottoman Succession: How Historians Explain Contested Legacies of Empires

- Going to be looking at something called the Wars of Ottoman Succession. And you might ask yourself, you know, what were they? And where have we come across that? And the truth is that I thought I’d made that up myself. But in fact, it’s a historian called Sean McMeekin who has written a brilliant book called “The Ottoman Endgame” and who is a specialist in Ottoman history, who refers in his final chapter of “The Ottoman Endgame” to the War of the Ottoman Succession. And he was talking about the First World War. But in fact, I think we, from the perspective of today, can see that in fact, very many, if not all of the events of the 20th century have some connection with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And certainly since 19, say, 80, all the major events in the news are actually legacies of the Ottoman Empire. So what we’re going to be doing is looking at how historians have looked at this topic and how we try to analyse it in a way that is faithful to the truth. So I just want to start off by saying to people that I want to look at some basics of Western intellectual thinking that puts pay to the idea that somehow someone has the absolute truth. And people have thought that in the past, and nowadays people are concerned whether the truth really exists at all. And the sort of communities that have raised that doubt are actually the people I’ve listed at the bottom, those in the social sciences as to whether history is truthful or not. Positivists, who try to take a scientific view of history, postmodernists, who you may have heard of, who seem to want to undermine confidence in any notion of the truth or to cast doubt on what has been taken as the truth, relativists, people who say, well, it doesn’t really matter, I mean, which side of an argument you are on. They’re both equally valid.

People called, I call alternative practitioners, people who try to say there are alternative facts, and I suppose that is a form of relativism. And then we have people who are informed by aetiology. So let’s just look at the people at the top because I think it’s quite helpful. It enables us to ground ourselves in a notion or a basis for saying that we are dealing with the truth. And the first person I’m going to talk about is Copernicus, because Copernicus, as you know, said that the earth went round the sun. The sun didn’t go around us. And it was a total flip on assumptions that went back to Aristotle. Well, in a way, we can take what he says and apply it to history, the parties as it were being us as we are and the past. And the current view is that we as historians, and in fact as human beings, revolve around the past, the point being that the past will appear differently at different stages of our journey and in different circumstances. The second person to look at is Kant, Emmanuel Kant the great, and probably the greatest philosopher in European history. I know that’s a big claim, but I think in the West we would certainly think that, is that he also saw himself as a kind of a Copernicus in that he said that when we look at the world, it’s not the case that the world impacts on us and tells us what to think. And it’s all about trying to find out from the world what it is, but rather that we can only know what we ourselves think and that our view of the world is formed by our internal minds and our logic and our categories.

This was a major change and informs on most intellectual thinking in the West since the late 18th century. So he basically said, we can never know something in itself. We can only look at what are the conditions under which we can make sense of the world outside? And that is really true of history, which is that we are looking at the past, but we have to look at how our minds think in order to make sense of what we think the past was. And my last favourite thinker is a chap called Gadamer, who is a good egg, as Norman Stone, my tutor, would have said. And he provides a means by which we can look at history and deal with all these kind of background and framework issues. And I’ll talk about him later. But in the meantime, let’s just move on to what historians do. I think you need to know that there’s a range of intellectual activity in the humane sciences or humane bodies of knowledge of which on the, I would say the right-hand side, possibly the conservative side, you have historians, and then in the middle you’ve got human sciences, which many would say are allied to history in trying to make sense of and provide theories about what’s happened. And then on the outer edge of this spectrum are the social sciences, who are like sociology, psychology, economics, suggest that there is a scientific basis for explaining the past and the present and the future.

And there’s always been this tussle between historians on the right-hand side of the spectrum as it were, and the social scientists on the left-hand side as to who’s really talking the truth. And some of this lecture will look at how that tussle has taken place. The one thing one can say is that you probably remember in, I think it was 1999, an American historian called Fukuyama wrote a book called something to the effect of “The End of History” because everything had been resolved because the Soviet Union had passed away and that the western kind of liberal capitalist system had somehow triumphed. But of course, the interesting thing about such a enormous claim is that history hasn’t gone away. It might have been slightly dipped immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, but it has returned with a vengeance. And my understanding is certainly in the education system, people are doing more and more history and perhaps returning to the importance of history as it once was. It’s probably worth just saying that if you look at economics and the collapse of 2008, a lot of the soul searching that was going on was in fact that economists had somehow taken over explaining the economic and commercial and the human world with economic theory, but that they had forgotten to look at economic history. And that is an example of how a social science can claim dominance, predominance or some higher priority over history. And of course, like most theories and most philosophies, they have found that their claims were not correct. So what do historians do?

Well, historians that really are at the, what I call the muddy end of the spectrum in that what we do is we are like archaeologists. We do fact digging. And those facts may be found anywhere and in any form. And whether or not they are facts or not, of course, is part of the issue, which is try to find out whether facts are true or not. And part of history is a constant testing of what are called facts and how we put them together. And these facts change and develop over time because we develop over time because there’s more and more diving into various areas that haven’t been looked at, like archives and the like. And of course, as we move on, our concerns as human beings change in the light of our own experience. So what does a historian do? Well, we are fact diggers. We get down in the mud, we start digging around, we try to identify and certify even that what we find is credible, plausible, credible, or even possibly true. But the next stage for a historian is to actually try and integrate what is a large dataset into a coherent explanation, if that is possible. And that’s what I call interpretation or integration. And that often is where there is difficulties in people taking a different view of what the past was. So here I’ve got a list here of what, I mean, this is basically a history degree on one slide. What interests historians? Well, we’re really interested in actually very often cause and effect. Why did something happen? What were the antecedents?

Can we explain how the antecedents caused the event? And what were the consequences of the event? The interesting thing about cause and effect is that causation, which is the topic, is a really big philosophical issue about how does causation work? Because often we can, or we think we’ve found a link, but how strong is that link? What is the nature of that link between a cause and an effect? And that’s true of all causation. And if you wanted to get deeply into causation, which you know, historians and lawyers are very interested in, you can get yourself lots of books on causation such as “The Oxford Handbook of Causation,” which is a very fat book, but which afterwards you will come out feeling that you know a little bit more about causation than you thought before. But no one’s really nailed it, as it were, given the nature of the problem, which is why it is a problem, what is causation? How deep do we have to go? Do we have all the links? Is it logical? So just going on down the list here, the historians are very much interested in determinism and contingency, which is that a lot of explanation of history tries to set up a cause and effect on the basis that something was inevitable. These are often theories that are either quite old or they are based upon some kind of philosophical ideology. So for instance, Marxism was a determinist ideology in the 19th century in that it claims to provide an inevitable explanation of what was happening in human history. And so in the 20th century and 21st century, historians can counter that really quite implausible theory that things are determined. You know, are we mechanical? Are we clockwork machines?

And that the history is running two o'clock. We have countered that with the concept of contingency and we like to look at the accidental aspects of the past where something could have gone one of, who knows? Five, 10 ways. And looking at why did history take one way rather than another? And that actually returns history to a human, a human reality, which is of course is that life is not determined and it doesn’t follow a linear straight line. It cannot be necessarily explained, but we can certainly look at where were the decision points along the way? And we’ll look at that in a minute when we look at the topics to do with the First World War. Agency and victimhood. Well, agency is something that certainly in my experience has become much more important in that in history, we always want to ask ourselves who’s calling the shots? You know, is someone calling the shots? What are the shots? And who’s taking the shots as it were? And you know, for instance, one of the big historical issues would be in terms of democratic developments, whether it is the politicians at the top, who are the people that call the shots and the populous respond. A lot of Cambridge historians looking at the Victorian period would look at a view of history from the top down and say, for instance, that even with reform acts, the people didn’t decide the reform acts, it was decided in cabinet or in political parties.

And in a sense, it’s a dynamic relationship between those in power and those who are ruled. Periodization is also a very obvious historical question mark, which is that we like to call labels, put labels on periods of time or in events when in fact those labels are artificial. They can be useful, but they may not be true and they may lead us down the wrong path. So an example would be, of course, our usual time periodizations of centuries are naturally not really how the past worked, but we still need to use periodization in order to explain what we’re talking about. So an example would be, the 20th century has been called the short 20th century because when we look at what happened, a lot of what happened happened in 1914 to 18 and its consequences really played out in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, excuse me, the interesting thing about all of that is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the results and legacies of the Ottoman Empire have extended a bit the short 20th century to make it a bit longer. And we therefore start to look at the 20th century with very different eyes, looking at integrated explanations with other of, as I’ve said before, historians take lots of facts and they try to make a good go at trying to integrate everything into one coherent explanation. Of course, that assumes that history is in some way integrated, but so therefore other historians might say, well, we’re imposing our integration, you know, our assumptions on what happened.

And in fact, there can be large levels of uncertainty, confusion, mess-ups, whatever. And we’ll see later how the mess-up theory of history can actually be quite useful. I suppose the mess-up theory of history can be seen as an integrated explanation. It is an integrated explanation of of disintegration. So let’s just go on here. Okay, so what I’ve got here, I put on the screen here some really good books to read for your general edification and diversion. The first two books, Richard Evans, who was a professor of history at Cambridge, and E.H. Car, who is a very famous historian at Cambridge, have written excellent books and very accessible books on what historians do. And all of the issues that I’ve raised on the previous slides come up talking about what is contingency, what is determinism, what is bias? How do we go about trying to provide a truthful explanation? That’s the entry level, I would say, for understanding history. If you have more ambitious aspirations, then this chap, Quentin Skinner, who is, you know, it would strike me as being the greatest historian of the late 20th century from Cambridge, has written a book called “The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences.” This is, if you’re interested in philosophy, literature, you’re interested in theories in the human sciences and the the social sciences, this is a book to read. It’s an exceedingly challenging book. And then finally, I mentioned here the Cambridge Histories ‘cause as you probably know, in the early 20th century, Cambridge started to publish a series called the Cambridge History, the Cambridge Modern History in kind of like, I don’t know, 12 volumes. And they were great big fat books that tried to really capture our understanding of history in one volume.

And it was really informed by an assumption that we could form an objective view of history and even if we couldn’t, it’s worth capturing it and having a snapshot at that particular moment in time. Well, there is now something called the Cambridge, sorry, “The New Cambridge Histories.” And they’ve all got the history word in their titles, but they refer to everything, not just modern European history, but ancient history, histories of religion like Islam and Judaism in multiple volumes. And the one that might be of interest to you is the series in four volumes on Turkey, which take everything from the beginnings of the Turkish state through to now. And you’ll find that these books are actually quite relatively cheap paperbacks in most volumes for about 30 pounds. And they contain up to the moment articles by various historians on the particular topic. Okay, so I want to look at two British historians who I think are, excuse me, particularly good people to talk about. You might remember someone called AJP Taylor, who was probably the first public historian, certainly the first TV historian who lived. He died in 2003, I think, somewhere like that. And he wrote excellent books. He was a controversialist and he was very good at delivering history lectures. And if you want to read a biography of AJP Taylor, Adam Sisman’s biography, which came out about 20 years ago, is a most excellent and entertaining and interesting bibliography, sorry, is an interesting biography.

The thing about AJP Taylor was that he was an Oxford historian. He grew up in Lancashire from a Quaker family who were very wealthy. I think they were mill owners. And he spent his kind of youth, it seems to me, on summer’s days, going around the countryside with parties of people in expensive cars drinking champagne and having a jolly good time. Well, AJP Taylor then moved on to become an Oxford don and one of his specialties before the Second World War was that he’d turn up to a lecture and he would actually think about what he was going to say in the taxi. And then when he arrived at 11 o'clock, he would start, and then he would be able to talk without notes until 12 o'clock when he stopped. And then he walked off. And you may remember if you can, or you can see it on YouTube, that he used to do some marvellous programmes on the BBC on things like the Second World War or the generals or the origins of wars or how wars end. And he did exactly the same thing. He would walk on in front of the camera and do an hour’s talk and then walk off without notes. What’s quite moving about AJP Taylor is that he was a great friend of Beaverbrook, who during the war was the Canadian press baron, who was in Britain, the Minister of Munitions and AJP Taylor became a great friend of his. And AJP Taylor used to go around the factories, particularly, well, all over the country to give talks to the workers in their canteens during lunch hour so that he would understand, so he could explain why we were doing what we were doing and what was happening.

And I think that that’s the first public historian at work, our duty to explain and to be public and to speak out. One of AJP Taylor’s famous books was “War by Timetable,” which explained the First World War was breaking out as a result of all these great powers having train timetables, which meant that they had to get involved with mobilisation very quickly and therefore was an automatic clockwork means of getting into war. AJP Taylor was in fact a CND supporter. And what lies behind his interest in this is the fact that he was concerned in the sixties that we would do the same thing with nuclear weapons. So that shows you how historians are heavily coloured by their own personal concerns, their political affiliations. But the truth is, is that lots of work has been done on train timetables and countries, you know, like Germany extending station rail heads, extending long stations so that they could accommodate trains packed full of troops, which was happening all over Europe before 1914. I won’t go into the Second World War because time’s against us, but he’s a great man. And the second person who was someone I knew personally and taught me was Norman Stone, was a lovely man and actually I think had an immense impact upon those around him.

And Norman Stone was firstly a historian of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And he lived in Vienna for three years, as did AJP Taylor. And one always got the impression 'cause he was a specialist in central and Eastern Europe, that he was a historian of the borderlands. He was interested in the interactions between separate countries and what the influences were and what the problems were. And it’s for this reason that he, first of all, he became a professor of modern history at Oxford, which was not a happy experience for him because what he claimed that it was a different place from what he really wanted to be at. Of course, Norman Stone came from Cambridge, so I don’t know if that’s part of it, but he, first of all, he was a great journalist like AJP Taylor, a journalist for the Sunday Times. And he became Mrs. Thatcher’s favourite historian, particularly on the issue of German unification and on the Soviet Union. So he did really appear at the right time, and he was a public historian and he was very good at very of concise summing up of what he was talking about in a way that would really make an impact and it help people to think. But by the mid-nineties, he gets out of Oxford and he becomes a professor at Bill Kent University. And I think he actually really stays there until the last five years of his life, when he then goes to Hungary. And of course, that totally fits in with his previous interests because he was specialising in looking at the Turkic, Russian, and European relationship, again, the borderlands with Europe and the Middle East.

And if you want to have a really good introduction to Turkish history throughout, he wrote a book, a book called “Turkey: A Short History,” which is an example of his art as a historian and does cover the entire period of the Turkish empire. Norman Stone had a great influence upon some people that you will have probably have heard of, Nial Ferguson, who was the most marvellous, what you would call public intellectual. He’s an academic, but who really looks at key issues such as academic freedom, the whole issue of truth, Israel and Gaza. He takes a very, I would say a very historian’s line, which tends to be going for the facts rather than the theories. The next person who’s actually really good, Sam McMeekin, he wrote a book called “The Ottoman Endgame.” He also wrote a book on Russia called “The Russian Origins of The First World War.” And I have to say he is absolutely brilliant and worth reading if you want to understand how the Ottoman Empire came to an end. And then we have Andrew Roberts, who’s very well-known, and Orlando Figes, who has written extensively on Russia and the Crimean War in particular recently. So Norman Stone had a huge impact on other people. So here’s a short reading, which you can pick up afterwards. Okay, so let’s get on to something that’s called the Cambridge Modern History School. This is a school of historians who really wanted to pull history back from what you call grand narratives that were not valid. In that sense, you might say, well, they sound like postmodernists, but actually they pulled back, going in the historian’s direction rather than in the theoretician’s direction.

And it started actually before the Second World War with Herbert Butterfield and Michael Oakeshott looking at what is called the Whig interpretation of history in which they questioned how we explained British history as some kind of inevitable trend towards democracy and freedom and that we looked at our history and we therefore took from history what validated our belief that we were where we were as the great British democratic country that we possibly were, and therefore started to look at underlying assumptions and prejudices about the past. Since the fifties and sixties, to my mind, the leader of the Cambridge Modern History School is Quentin Skinner and JPA Pocock was a very famous colleague. And what they did was started a series of books on looking at past political thought, in particular, the the big massive tones that are part of the canon, Leviathan, Locke’s two treatises, and so forth. And they would adopt a historian’s approach to the text, which meant that we had to not just read the text itself, but we had to look at the context. We had to look at other surrounding texts that weren’t as famous, but which would inform on generally what, in the age that they were at, what would a person in that time have made of these words? Because obviously when people talk about subjects like the Republic, freedom, liberty, in the 16th century, say, or the 17th century, that would mean something different to and had a different meaning from what it would mean to us today. And excuse me.

Looking at some of the interesting thoughts that they have is that of the concept of a genealogy, which is that perhaps we should see ideas and history, objects in history as being given birth to by a previous generation, which means that we can connect up history not by some kind of cause and effect, which is too fine, too surgical, but looking at things really from a human life point of view as to how liberty, for instance, as a concept travelled through time where the people who wrote about liberty, for instance, would’ve read other texts and previous texts that would give birth to their thinking. So that’s the Cambridge Modern History School, which really was actually part of the attempt to bring to an end Marxist and liberal assumptions about history and helped to take us back to seeing the past as part of human life and that what happens afterwards is not necessarily a direct consequence of what has happened in the past. Okay, so this bit, and we’re going to get on to the Ottoman Empire in a minute, but this bit on Hermeneutics is something that Quentin Skinner has looked at. And I want to just go through these points because I think they are quite comforting insofar as if you want to kind of realise that history is a really good grounding for our looking at the truth. And the first thing is to say that we obviously share the same human condition and the same human social conduct as those in the past, which is why on the one level we can understand the past, but also that we have to be aware of our own condition and how it interacts with the past and our understanding of the past. Yeah, the second point I made here is it’s a framework for commitment to understanding the past.

Now, the important point here is, is that is the commitment to understanding the past, that is to say a commitment to truth. Thirdly, as I probably just mentioned, there is an encounter and a response, as it were, between ourselves and the past, which is circular. We can’t possibly know the objective past because we share the same human condition. But what we are not is like a scientist, someone who, like a scientist has a completely empty mind, as it were, and what we do is we find out what the facts are in a value-free way to come to a conclusion. So there is a degree of interaction as to what really concerns us, you know, what do we select as a topic for history and for understanding history. And so this concept of dialogue between the past and the present enables us to see the past more clearly, but also enables us to look at what’s important for us, but also in what way are we perhaps prejudiced? Are we looking for what we want to look at and to find the answers that we want to find? So, and in fact they would say that it’s our prejudices that we have to be aware of that provides the traction in our engagement with the past. It’s not as if our purpose is to get rid of our prejudices. It’s to understand what our prejudices are and see how they interact.

So we do have here a fusion of horizons where we become aware of our prejudices and encounter the past with an open mind. And so I would ask people perhaps to think about in what way when we look at the past are we aware of what our prejudices are, what our assumptions are? And what would history in the past look like if we took them into consideration? Okay, so just looking at where we are at the moment, it’s 7:46 and I’m going to carry on until probably five minutes to because we’re sort of halfway through here. The case study here is the Sick Man of Europe. How do historians view this assumption that was made back in the late 1840s that Turkey was the Sick Man of Europe? If you know anything about Russian history and Tsar Nicholas I, you might kind be slightly amused that Tsar Nicholas I thought that he was encountering the Sick Man of Europe, when, from our perspective, Russia was, throughout the 19th century in particular, a very repressive, very repressive and brutal regime. The truth is, is that what we now know about Turkey is that, and indeed about Europe as a whole, is that Turkey did undergo a period of what you might call reform, and it’s called the Tanzimat, which had two particular periods in the middle of the 19th century and towards its end. And as Norman Stone was very good at making clear, Tanzimat means house in order. And what prompted the Tanzimat reforms was that Egypt under Muhammad Ali Pasha revolted and seceded from the Turkish empire, which was a major shock.

And then Turkey was involved in the Crimean War, which it succeeded in preventing the Russian incursion into southern, well, into the Crimea with British and French assistance. But it prompted, as wars do, a major rethink on the Turkish Empire’s organisation. And the same thing happened in Russia, as we all know, that after 1855, Alexander II institutes for the first time major reforms in Russian history, which were of the same nature as reforms almost anywhere in Europe, which was about freeing up markets, encouraging industrialization, uniform consolidation of law, equal rights, particularly in, well, in Russia, equal rights was abolition of serfdom, which was actually shared with the rest of Europe, but not Britain 'cause we didn’t have any at that time. So there was this reform, and even in England we had a period of reform. It was really a kind of a delayed French Revolution from 1828 to 35, which included making the law equal for dissenters and Catholics and not just Anglican protestants. We had the Great Reform Act, which reformed the electoral system that had existed, you won’t believe it, since 1650, if not back to the 13th century. You’ve heard about the pocket boroughs and there were like 50 to 60 of them. Well, the 1838 Reform Act abolished them. That abolition had been tabled by the Cromwellian period for some sort of electoral reform. And it was basically binned with the restoration so that Britain’s political system was actually mediaeval, but was eventually reformed, not really in 1838, but subsequently in the 1860s and the 1880s and then in 1919.

So we can easily look at Turkey as some kind of backward or underdeveloped country. But it wasn’t, and it was experiencing the same reforms, although in a different kind of environment. But the same topics were the same, including equality before the law, which came in, I think in 1876, and other economic changes such as the monetization of the economy and the rise of exports. And these we’ve seen happened in Palestine, largely because the state wanted to have taxes paid in cash, which was a major flip to economic liberalisation. So the interesting thing of course is that Tsar Nicholas I said that Turkey was the Sick Man of Europe. Well, was Turkey in Europe? Well, you know, or perhaps Russia was in the Middle East. Who’s to say? Okay, so let’s look at another major area of discussion, which is what I call the blame game and the origins of the First World War. What’s really interesting about the discussions about the outbreak of the First World War during the centenary was really how Eurocentric it was. There are two great books which are definitely worth reading by Christopher Clark called “The Sleepwalkers” and Margaret MacMillan wrote a book called “The War That Ended Peace,” something like that. And if you certainly look at their presentations and you look at their books, what you see is this concept that actually it just happened. And we don’t really know, you know, there was lots of contingency involved. People weren’t aware of what they were getting involved with. Christopher Clark calls his book “The Sleepwalkers.” Well, you know, you try telling that to a German infantryman who’s on day 35 of a 40-day march from Germany into France.

They were sleepwalking 'cause they were so tired. But the idea that Europe was somehow sleepwalking into a major war is a, in my view, a problematic issue. Margaret MacMillan does emphasise very much the contingency of it all and that various events happened that mismatched and were accidental. Like for instance, the Russians wanted to mobilise against Austria-Hungary until the army told them, told the tsar that they had to mobilise against the Germans as well, or that the kaiser wanted to firstly mobilise against the French, but then he decided he wanted to go against the Russians. But he was told by the military in Germany that he had to go against the French first and he had no option. There are all sorts of contingency events going on here. So we’ve gone from who to blame, is it Germany or is it possibly Russia? Because Russia really set the ball rolling in terms of great power mobilisation. And are they all to blame because of imperialism? Or is no one to blame because frankly it was a massive mistake and they didn’t know what was happening? Well, personally, I find all of that not really very convincing. So what I want to look at is something that Sam McMeekin has said, which is that actually perhaps the reason why they didn’t know what was happening was they didn’t really know what the real cause was of the events and did not know the direction that history was taking or what their role was, which is that it is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and great power interest in Turkey that is the major cause of the First World War.

So let’s just have a look at that. It’s not surprising that the trigger for the First World War was in Sarajevo, but over the period from 1876 onwards, there was increasing coming together of rival forces that would result in the First World War. And it was all about imperial competition for the succession to the Ottoman Empire, because as you probably know, I mean, Russia’s intention was to take control of the entire northern part of the Black Sea. And in 1915, one of its generals, Sazonov, provides a demand to France and Britain that Russia’s war aims was to take Constantinople and have control of the Black Sea, which is what its intention was going back to the Crimean War and before. And Austria’s desire to punish Serbia was part of its incursion into the Balkans after Bosnia, Herzegovina had been annexed in 1908. In order to shore up its empire, in particular its South Slav provinces that were obviously likely to be affected by nationalism, German competition, well, Germany was responsible for training the Turkish army and to provide infrastructure, including the railways which were being laid down. And Britain’s interest in the Ottoman Empire was considerable because it already had taken over Egypt in 1882. It was actually a bond holder with France after the Crimean war.

So there was a lot of loans being made to Turkey. And ultimately Britain’s aim was to replace the Turkish empire with French and British imperial holding of the Middle East as we know it, largely to prevent Russia from coming south, but also to secure oil supplies given that the British Navy was converting to oil from coal between 1911 and 1915. And that was very much a Winston Churchill interest. What triggers the First World War is actually Italy’s intervention in Libya when it invades and takes over this province of the Turkish Empire. This is considered to be really the last major lead-up to the First World War because the Italians eventually managed to send their Navy to Istanbul and the Dardanelles to try and stop Russian exports and to stop Russian control of the Black Sea. And what happens then is the Turks close the Dardanelles and lead to a 50% drop in Russian exports, which was a major event. And this was really the trigger for the trigger. It’s the trigger for the Balkan Wars and then of Sarajevo. Now, I can see that we’re almost finished here and I haven’t finished. And unlike AJP Taylor, I have not been able to deliver this lecture with such professionalism as he would’ve done, but I suppose it would be probably a good idea. Can I hand over to the host to let me know how we proceed from this moment onwards?

• [Host] Sure. If you have some more time, we can keep going for like another 15 minutes.

• Okay, fine. Good. Okay, so that was–

• Hi. Sorry. I also just want to jump in and say if you want to add another lecture, I’m sure we can help you there too, so please don’t feel under stress. Whatever works for you.

• No, no, no. That’s very kind of you, Wendy. Really, you’re my favourite kind of client.

• [Wendy] No, very relaxed. And we do everything with gratitude. Thank you.

• Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, well, let me just go through the remaining slides because it won’t take that long. So what is the big issue about the origins of the First World War is that if you look at many of the accounts that explain it, they are very Eurocentric. I mean, they look at what happened in Sarajevo and then they look at the history of the plans where, you know, the war by timetable had been planned and there were lots of contingent difficulties happening largely because the Sarajevo trigger happened in June when everyone was on holiday. And a lot of the outcome of that summer of 1914 can be attributed to the fact that, you know, the tsar and the kaiser are all kind of sailing around the Baltic on their summer holidays and something really terrible is happening in Southeast Europe. It might explain why it is that the British didn’t do what they should have done and normally did do on this kind of event, which is to hold a congress or a conference to sort out the mess. I mean, they’d done that in 1912 and 1913 with the Balkan Wars. This had happened in the Congress of Berlin in the 1870s, but somehow it all happened too quickly and Britain found that a war had broken out when it was actually trying to bring the parties together. So it seems to me quite clear that the outcome of the First World War in 1914 is not in the slightest bit surprising. And of course, it is related to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which was not in demise because it was backward. It was in demise because of the great power interest and their support of nationalist movements in the Balkans, which created insurmountable pressure on the Turkish empire.

So let’s just go further on. Okay. Let’s look at the Ottomans’ performance during the First World War because I’ve set up here that this was not a walkover. It wasn’t a walkover. It wasn’t a collapse. As we all know if we’re British Commonwealth people, the Dardanelles was a complete failure and it was a complete failure because the Turks, Turkish army was trained by the Germans and it had infrastructure that would also have been designed and built by the Germans. When we just move on, after we kind of recovered from that terrible disaster, which of course was intended to link up with the Russians and to get Constantinople and the Black Sea on the Russian side, once the next stage in the war for the Ottoman Empire is that the Germans and the Turks and the Austrians invade Sinai in 1915 to 16 and actually take over the whole of the Sinai to the Suez Canal. And what’s amazing about that is when you read what they had to do to fortify the Suez Canal, you think that you are actually looking at the Yom Kippur War or in fact the 1967 war and how Israel fortified the canal. So all the names that come up are very familiar. It actually takes the allies at least I think 18 months to actually start to push the Turks and the Germans out of Sinai. And interestingly enough, the Sinai is secured by the Battle of Rafah, which we’ve heard about very recently, which completes the capture of the Sinai. And the Battle for Palestine takes a whole year and it is not a straightforward campaign. Then in 1919 to 20, just to give you an example of the impact of British taking over of the Ottoman Empire, is that there is an insurrection in Iraq in 1919 to 20 with 100,000 British troops trying to put down this insurrection when the Ottomans had manned the province with only 14,000.

Then of course, finally we get to the Treaty of San Remo of 1920 and the Treaties of Lausanne and Sevres in 2023, where the mandates are carved up between France and Britain, which is quite familiar. Story is just to say that it wasn’t carved up in quite the way that Sykes-Picot had anticipated, but what this does demonstrate is that the British interest in events before 1914 were successfully concluded and is responsible for the current condition of the Middle East in terms of its political difficulties. So let’s just go on. Okay, so another quick look at a historian’s view on the past is that of modernization, and in particular, I think this is something that people don’t understand a lot about in terms of Arab and Palestinian nationalism. For a start, looking at European history in the 19th century, most states are brought into being by a very small number of people and then it takes another century for that state to become fully formed and for its population to become what the people who started the state off wanted. So in 1976, Eugene Weber writes this wonderful book called “Peasants into Frenchmen,” in which he shows that in the French Revolution, only 25% of Frenchmen actually spoke French, and most of them didn’t know that they were in France. And it took the 19th century with all the industrialization and the railways, plus in particular the experience of the First World War, which it can be said actually created the French nation as we know it, and that can be applied throughout Europe.

So the idea is that states are often created by contingent events in the hands of a small number of people, but they are formed and stabilised only after a long period of often great suffering and difficulties. So for instance, the Russian state, the Soviet State, you know, everyone looks at the Russian Revolution and they think, well, you know, communism came to Russia in 1917. Well, the answer is, is it didn’t. The events of the Bolshevik Revolution were a result of chaos and collapse by a group of people who actually have been totally caught out and were sitting back in Switzerland expecting the revolution to take place many years later. And therefore the purpose of the Russians is to try and work out, well, should we be defending the Russian Soviet state until the rest of Europe turns communist in 1918 to 19? And how long would this take? Well, the truth is, is the Russian Soviet states took at least two decades to come into existence and was made by brutal ideology so that for instance, all the issues about the Ukraine and the peasantry was part of economic policy by the Bolsheviks to create a communist state which would otherwise not have existed. So, and this is an example of modernization theory. If we look for instance at the Balkans, the Austrians actually wanted to create a third-party Austrian Empire of South Slav states that would in a sense shore up the nationalist sentiments of Slavs and to prevent there being a secession or you know, a secession from the empire.

And of course, afterwards, you then get the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which is an attempt to create that kind of independent state. And we get Soviet or communist Yugoslavia after the war. And of course, in a sense, the communist Yugoslavia was actually an attempt to recreate the Turkish empire on a small scale, the Western Turkish empire by keeping all these nationalities in one state. So when we come to look at Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, and both of them are interesting in that, well, Zionism as a formation of statehood has very special characteristics in that Zionism and in fact, the Jewish nationalism and the Jewish people met all the criteria for a nation state many centuries, if not millennia ago, in that they had a single tradition, a language, a history, and a sentiment to be part of one community. But the only thing that they lacked was a state, and in a sense that it was the wrong way round that they actually finally formed a Jewish state from having already formed its contents. The interesting thing about the Arab Palestinian nationalism is that the concept of being an Arab or a Palestinian came very late to the game. And that you are looking at a non-European landscape where it takes external events to push, external agents to push Arab/Palestinian nationalism into being formed. And so the first stage is Arab nationalism, which after 1967 leads to Palestinian nationalism. And it is the slow, one doesn’t want to use the word backward, but it is in fact the fact that Palestinian nationalism is a product of external events that really explains the difficulties currently for Israel in knowing who they’re actually dealing with, because the truth is, is that the Palestinian community are represented by a large number of different people, some of whom are not local, but they are external geopolitical actors.

So my last slide is to do with what you will hear quite a lot of in the media. It’s called settler colonial theory. And this is quite remarkable how, you know, whether you’re looking at demonstrations on the streets or like for instance, there was a talk by someone who was a UN lead in New York for the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, and when you listen to their talk, their discourse, it is a common discourse, which is settler colonial theory as applied to Israel. And I think some people do know this, but this settler colonial theory actually comes from the Soviet Union in the late seventies, really as a result of the failure of the Arab states to basically succeed against Israel. It is the 1967 war that begins a turn in Soviet theory from being supporters of the Arab states to developing in their propaganda machine, which is called, you know, an organisation for something called Zionology in which they really reproduce a settler colonial theory, which is really the theory that supports all national liberation movements. What’s interesting about this is the total kind of mishmash and confusion within the theory because settler colonial theories are often used about first world settlements in empty spaces like Australia, America, South Africa, which often involve some degree of either physical or cultural genocide. Well, the truth is, is that the position, the background position in Israel, I would suggest, is totally different, particularly insofar as whereas these other places were settled by a superpower, the settlement by Jews and Zionism was what we would today called asylum cases, refugees from distress and that it is not at all a intentional colonial purpose.

A lot of the images of settler colonial theories and attacks on Israel and Zionism are a peculiar mishmash insofar as they reproduce the common standard antisemitic memes and trophies of Jewish international conspiracies, but also the accusation of being in some way associated with the Nazis and are responsible for racist doctrines where the imagery often takes antisemitic imagery and superimposes the Star of David and Jewish stereotypes onto their propaganda. And so it’s all very much a mishmash that is completely confused. So what is the purpose of historians in dealing with settler colonialism? There is a very good book. In fact, it’s the only book I’ve found so far on this, which is called “Soviet Propaganda: A Case Study of the Middle East Conflict,” which was published in 1976. But I think that looking at the large numbers of books on colonialism, for instance, the Cambridge History series, a series on genocide in particular, or a series on slavery, for instance, you know, four volumes each, which allow historians to investigate what these claims are.

Okay, so we’ve reached the end. This is a list of what I call the Wars of Ottoman Succession. And Sam McMeekin talked about one war of Ottoman succession, which is the First World War, but I would suggest that actually we can put an S on the end of war and cover almost all the major events of Europe since the First World War, even, may I add, the episode of German Nazism as a link, because of course the whole purpose of the German invasion of Russia was to invade the caucuses and to link up with Rommel in North Africa, in the Middle East in order to secure oil supplies and obviously to overcome the British Empire. So what this demonstrates is how our perspectives change from a Eurocentric view to a broader, deeper, and actually more truthful view on what was really happening in the world in the 20th century. So what I’m going to do now, because it’s 18:16, is I’m going to finish and ask the host if you’ve got any questions or whatever.

Q&A and Comments:

• [Host] Yes. We have a few questions and I think we have just about four minutes before we need to wrap up, so I can go ahead and ask you a few of them. Oh, sorry about that.

Q - Didn’t the Jews write the history we know?

A - Well, the answer to that one is no, not the history I’m talking about. Is that okay?

Q - Okay. Yeah, that’s fine. Someone else is asking if John Grey has an influence on historians.

A - Yeah, well, John Gray’s a well-known writer and he’s written some excellent books on the Enlightenment and on current concerns, but he’s very good at linking them back to historical antecedents as it were. I’m not aware that John Grey has a particular interest in what we’ve been looking at because he looks at things like the history of the Enlightenment, the history of liberalism, or even environmental concerns rather than on Ottoman history. The historians that you really want to look at are people like Norman Stone and Sam McMeekin, who are, well, Sam McMeekin is brilliant and it’s a good decent fat book and that it takes very complex interacting events and explains them.

• [Host] Thank you. Someone’s asking where you would place Simon Shama.

• Say that again.

Q - [Host] Someone’s asking where you would place Simon Schama, S-C-H-A-M-A.

A - Oh, Simon. Yeah, well, he’s another very good historian from the Cambridge School, but I wouldn’t place him at the forefront of the Cambridge Modern History School insofar as he writes and he writes very accessible books as a theorist. I’m not aware that he has contributed to the Cambridge Modern History School’s kind of theory as it were, or practise of history.

• Can I come in, David?

• Yeah.

• That was absolutely superb, but do you know that last slide? We could spend a whole lecture on it.

• Yeah, we could do, yeah.

• And I think, and there was a few questions on it as well and I’m just wondering if you could come back and maybe we could take that last slide.

• As a starter–

• Because I think that’s so important for people to understand.

• Okay, well, if you’ll invite me–

• I’m throwing a challenge at you. We can even do, yeah.

• Yeah, of course.

• Okay. And that was absolutely fabulous, David. Thank you. Welcome back.

• Thank you.

Q - And somebody asked, were you the David March who used to ride the motorbike at the Spiro?

A - Yes.

• Yes, yes.

• But I gave up riding a motorbike the day that I had an interview at a London law firm where I decided that the life of a motorbike rider wasn’t really in keeping with being a London lawyer.

• My brother still rides a Harley, but he’s never been a lawyer. Anyway, David, thank you so much and–

• Well, thank you for listening.

• All right, and I’m on in three-quarters of an hour. Oy. God bless. Take care. Bye.