[James Gelvin]: This is a new year of a multi multi multi year historiography series and I remember when we started and it's been more than 10 years now and we've been doing it 3 times a year so. What we do is we bring together people who are doing doing interesting work, people who are sort of like on the cutting edge and have them talk about their work. I remember when I started graduate school there was this attitude of "Why do you want to study Ottoman history if you're going to be a modern Arabic. That's basically that contribute nothing in the world except years of enslavement. Obviously that's not the way it's being done now or, let's put it this way, that's not the way it's being done by competent historians now although it's still being done that way by natural historians. Michael Provence is someone I've known for a very long time, he's at the the University of California San Diego. He has a book that come out last Ottoman generation generation which describes exactly what the Middle East or the Arab world owe to the Ottoman Empire. Previous work we've done on the Syrian revolt which has been extraordinarily underwritten about for such an important event and he filled in that hole very very well. So without further adieu.

[Michael Provence]: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. So I have a confession to make, I think probably half the people here are UCLA graduate students right? So I wanted very badly to be a UCLA graduate student and in 1994 I was a college graduate, also a high school dropout, working in a in a machine shop and a night shift in San Leandro without a job and not getting into graduate school for reasons that were totally unclear to me and so I came here to Bunche Hall and Sanford Shaw was around and he was very very nice to me and somebody else who is probably known to some of you and she's like a kind of an angel in my consciousness this woman named Sheila Patel who must be retired. She said well you can go to graduate school you'll be able to go but you'd have to do this and this she told me some advice which I don't need to disclose because as you pointed out today without realizing that she'd probably be subject to a lawsuit today with the advice she she told me about my file. Anyway it's kind of you so this is a kind of a very important place for me in a weird way that has absolutely um I mean you know it's like 10 minutes of my life but it was kind of transformative and she was just being nice.

[James Gelvin]: That's the wait of a year, one year.

[Michael Provence]: Well I know you that well thank you very much for that that's a very kind voice going to vote of confidence there. I appreciate that. Um I forgot my jacket and I always wear a jacket you're wearing a jacket I don't have mine it's like a magic cloak I wondered will this work without my jacket you know and I thought I don't know a problem I mean it's pretty hot. If it was January, it would be more conspicuous but so I don't have my jacket and it reminds me of you know the things you forget when you're getting ready the famous book of ... his he wrote the house of many mansions after General Owen that General Owen had dropped a artillery shell on his house so he wrote the book without his library and without his notes and without his archive and so the book came to be so sometimes you know forgetting something so we'll see how it works out. Anyway, so, Professor Gelvin asked me to talk about historiography and I will do that and I I'm happy to do that I was kind of wondering how I should talk about it because I'm not a theoretical historian and I'm not a person who ever felt like I could master ... or the kinds of things that some of my colleagues in graduate school seem to be able to do and so I became a person who loves archives and loves human stories and and so I have a story but first I'll try to say something about about historiography. I think I'm gonna say something about historiography from the perspective - this is a bit self-indulgent and I'm a little worried about it - from the perspective of biography because it seems to me that the stories we tell the history we write the things were interested in is sometimes they choose us without even knowing and sometimes we choose them, so I mentioned that guy who was working the night shift in San Leandro. So I was unable uninterested incapable of writing elite history because I didn't feel like it I had anything to relate to and so I I went I went to Syria in the 90s looking for revolutionary peasants interested in peasant revolutionaries, that's why ... was a person who I was you know reading her work in those years and looking for revolutionary peasants and I found them actually and at the same time Jim had published divided loyalties and so the idea of elite nationalists and Arab nationalism as a sort of I was very dissatisfied with the story of five families who were in charge of everything and had written every single document and every single memoir and in fact the sons of these families had written the history - literally written the history of modern Syria themselves and so I just didn't really I mean there were people all over the place. Surely their grandparents had had some role to play and out in the countryside and so how did this work? And so I started reading to try to find out what had happened especially during times of real upheaval like the great revolt in the 20s and it became clear pretty quickly that there were some, for one thing, people there were rebellious revolutionary peasants and most of them had been veterans of the Ottoman army. They had served in the First World War they were people were politicized in some cases they became literate in the army and that wasn't part of the Syrian nationalist historiography, that wasn't part of the story. Um and so I started digging around and I'm gonna say something about these guys in a minute, but first, about these institutions that were present in memoirs and but not memoirs of fancy people and it it became obvious that there was an entire strata of people who were veterans in the military and people a massive social engineering project that wasn't present in the books at all and yet if you talk to people ordinary down the scenes, they'd say oh well yes well his father went broke and that's why he went to the military academy it wasn't possible to send you know son X to AUB or to the demands of the Syrian university or something like that or ... because the family's fortunes were such that they only could aspire to a subsidized military academy and so I I was living with I had a roommate a German urban historian named Stefan Baylor and who was a kind of a master of the urban archaeology, the modern fabric of the city and I said Stefan where's that where's this military school and he said you walk passed it everyday and he was right it's this thing over here you see there's an Ottoman photograph Ottoman postcard of this school and here's the the modern photograph from a few years ago and this is from behind the minaret there. He said you passed it every day and I realized and I found that the people who had taken part in this revolt in Syria were all or many of them were graduates of this unknown military school and then I started investigating the existence of these kinds of schools and I realized that it was a system. It was a system that spanned the entire empire from from the Balkans to Baghdad and that there were dozens and dozens and dozens of these schools and that all of them were subsidized and that there were tens of thousands of students who you know are famous, many of them, as the leaders of the post-colonial States and none of them were Syrians, Turks, Turkish nationalists, Syria nationalists, Arab nationalists, ... nationalists at the time that they were attending these schools. So the nationalist historiography of the separate post-colonial mandate nation-states disavowed the existence of such people and a group of people and the entire experience actually of what we can call Ottoman modernity and so this seemed unsatisfactory that there was no understanding or coverage of this kind of this world really - this lost world - and at about the same time I had the extraordinary good fortune to get involved with ... who were doing a mandate study group: the Syrian mandate, the ... mandate, Palestine mandate, and so on, and this took place in in Damascus to begin with and then ... and then eventually in France and conferences around and a big big book they published. And the thing that became clear was that the domination of both colonial and nationalist historiography was totaled and that it was impossible to imagine that the mandates didn't represent a decisive break with everything and that, at that moment, suddenly a new nation had emerged, and everything had to change in the way that we imagined. And I found this really impossible to understand how this could have squared with human consciousness including the people I was meeting in Damascus who were talking about you know the the the Turkish army and then this and that and the things that grandpa did and involved in all of it at the same time oh yes and by the way then he went to ... and these kinds of crazy things that weren't possible based on the sort of elite nationalist history that we were presented with. So it came to seem to me that the colonial historiography was deeply invested in the the separateness, the uniqueness of the post-colonial of what became of the colonial state and the nationalist historiography was equally invested and implicated in this this this kind of totalizing story. And the things that were lost, which I found unsatisfactory were the Ottoman past, the experience of continuity, the trans-border or trans-regional connections, because there were many people who were born in one common region served the state all over the place, went everywhere they traveled widely, and then they ended up in some completely different place and now that family may be considered Baghdadis or or Jerusalemites or Damascenes or whatever despite where they came from. So that continuity was lost. And finally the thing that was lost and there were a couple of other things that I found that didn't seem correct to me and one was that the experience of colonialism of the mandatory state the mandates as a unified experience that people understood separately from the individual places that they happen to live. So how was it that Damascenes could be so angry that they would go ahead and put their lives on the line when ... visited Jerusalem. I mean, according to this, the colonial officials of the French mandate the Damascenes couldn't possibly care about what was happening in Jerusalem, it was a different country. And yet they were on the streets, they were angry, they were protesting, and the same thing with the way that people obviously were following the news, involved in politics, moving around, crossing borders to the extent that they could from Beirut to Damascus to Baghdad to Jerusalem to Anatolia to Istanbul and back again, continuing in this period of the two-and-a-half decades of the mandates. So the the mandate or the colonial historiography was was seemed defective and the national historiography seemed defective and I I wanted to try to figure out some way to tell these stories in a way that I hoped would make sense to people who lived through it. So that was sort of what I was frustrated and dissatisfied with the way that and the fact of the matter was of course that from the perspective of mandate history and people who were suddenly mandates we were arguing endlessly about whether when the French were better than the British, no the British were better than the French, and my adviser said, "What difference does it make if whether the boot on your neck is French or British?" which you know kind of seemed kind of true, but on the other hand, I mean there were differences for sure, but the way that the kind of obsessive attention to differences real or imagined seemed a bit of a mistake. So those are my my real I guess my reflections on on the historiography of the period and what what I what I didn't find acceptable or useful. The contingency of war and the colonial structures and how these things came to seem or came to be claimed as durable, permanent, and and and timeless really and that the only language it came to seem that because of this colonial experience that the language of nationalism became the only language of self representation for the people of the region, and we talked a little bit about this. Anyway I can come back to those things. Nobody went to the League of Nations and nobody was discussing or talking about the things that drew the colonial States, the mandatory states together in the period of the 90s and 2000's in terms of the mandatory states and the the structure of the region. I remember I asked some of my teachers and they said no no we didn't go to Geneva but in fact it was the case that the mandatory the the permanent mandates commission minutes, which are the debates about Palestine, about Syria, about Lebanon about Iraq, they were published. And they're in every library of every major research university in the world and so ignoring - I mean this was an example to me that nobody was interested in or paying any attention to the League of Nations itself which had legitimated made possible these these these structures that that existed and that were really the origin point of the modern a modern modern region. So nowadays it's the case that people are studying the League of Nations as an institution but mostly from the perspective of international history and less from a perspective of the Middle East itself and the regional and I think this is unfortunate I hope that I mean that we there have been people recently who have made long and useful trips to Geneva and to use the League of Nations archives so this is a positive development I think it's a good thing. So let me get to the the stories that I wanted to talk about here. So this is I love this picture and of course what do you does anybody have any idea what's depicted here? I mean we could, if we went to the you know to the flea market or the swap market swap meet or something, we could find a picture like this of a family in anywhere really Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, you name it. So of course it's it's Bubba and his sons his three sons and it's course it's ... that's his name he he's not ... but his sons will be, which is to say he is a beneficiary of the modern and modernizing state and so we could find a picture like this of a guy in coveralls with not the pitchfork but you get the idea and his his his sons who might be dressed in the uniform of the state school system that they had been beneficiaries of, whether it was in Europe or North America or many many independent states of the late 19th and early 20th century. So it's actually so it's ... and it's his sons ... I think was the oldest although in this picture it looks like ... was the oldest based on his medals so ... in Baghdad and I have another photograph here of another guy let's see I thought I put this in the order I wanted them, did I mess up? I did mess up, didn't I? How about this guy, anybody recognize him? How about this one? Oh where is he?

(man in audience mumbles an answer)

[Michael Provence]: That's a good guess. How about this guy? Does anybody recognize him?

[man in audience]: Yeah.

[Michael Provence]: So, these people are - I have been out of the order I want them - so ... and I'm speculating because for me history is mostly about imagination.

(audience laughs)

Can we make it up?

[man in audience]: Yeah.

[Michael Provence]: Yeah, okay.

(man mumbles something inaudible)

Sorry?

[man in audience]: Just confirm everything that he thinks.

(audience laughs)

[Michael Provence]: Oh, sociologists are wagging their fingers already huh? So ... you know he was he was a neighborhood head man - the mukhtar - in a neighborhood in Baghdad. Could he write and read? Maybe a little. You know enough to like and he certainly had a stamp, maybe one use on the documents that would need to come through the mukhtar's office, but what he did know for sure was that the modernizing state had benefits that his sons could take advantage of, that he could get them into those new Ottoman schools, those new free state schools and that their their horizons their future their their possibilities would be far greater than being a semi-literate mukhtar in a Baghdad neighborhood. And so all three of them went through first the Ottoman middle school system first the primary school system and then the middle school system which was a like I said a military school ... in Baghdad. And every other Ottoman provincial capital had the same system and in fact these this is the ... military middle school which in today is - this is actually the headmaster today, it's not a Ottoman military school but it's still a Lebanese State High School and that's the headmaster - and here's the inscription that says something that ... couldn't read and this guy can't read because it's in Ottoman and it says the Sultan ... endows this this school for the glorification of the Ottoman state and its people. And so ... made sure that his three sons went to this school and when they got there, they they got to that uniform, which they were very proud of with their woolen coats and their brass buttons with the imperials crest and ... which is quite different from his much more traditional garb and then they went to the secondary school also in Baghdad - this is the one in Damascus here - and spent three more years in these schools. Now the things that they were learning were mathematics, they were not learning religion, they were praying together, they were probably a smattering of non-Muslims we had to go through that as well, but the most part there was no religious instruction of any kind, it was all practical. It was based on - for the most part - the Prussian military academy the Prussian cadet system in Germany and and which was considered by most modernizing States to be the most advanced military - it's also the origin point of our American research university for that matter, the German university systems of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In any case, they were learning mathematics, languages, French in their case, German, Ottoman, Arabic, map reading, geometry for artillery calculations and so on and things along these lines, modern technocratic technological education. And after three additional years in this secondary school, all three of ... sons were sent onward. This is a photograph from the this Damascus military school that's what it says down here ... where they went to the the the ... the Ottoman military academy in Istanbul. Now ... they took a boat a riverboat up the river probably towed by animals up the Euphrates and then when they got to to Mosul they walked to Aleppo or rode donkeys, probably they walked, they took about a month and then from Aleppo they got on the steamship ... and all of this was at state expense they paid nothing and they went by steamship to Istanbul. When they were in Istanbul, they were boarded in this this vast building with their dining hall on the right and the sleeping quarters on the left and they were fully acculturated in to becoming and believing that they were the guardians of of an empire. They were the loyal the loyal guardians, the leading figures, the the the saviors even of the Ottoman state and of course when they got there they met people who had come from all over the place but the language that they had in common was was the Ottoman of their of their education although they spoke other languages of their their origins whether they were Kurds, or Arabs, or or Bulgarians, Albanians, Greek-speaking Muslims, whatever from all over the place. Um now ... son they experienced the Ottoman constitutional revolution most of them ... son ... graduated in 1905 and because he was at the absolute top of his class class in a class of about five hundred young men, he was immediately chosen for something called the Ottoman Staff College which enrolled about fifty students per year or actually fifty total over the course of a two year course of instruction. It was extremely rigorous and very competitive and only that top 10 percent of the graduating class of the military academy were chosen for this. Now the people I'm - we're talking about today - ... also a provincial school boy from a modest middle-class family without a father and this fellow, whose name was ... who graduated at the same year is Mustafa Kemal in 1905. All of them were selected for this Staff College so this is the this is the creme de la creme this is the absolute pinnacle of Ottoman state education. And now what happens to them there is that they graduate as staff captains and they're immediately posted to the places that they had come from to be faculty in the middle in the secondary school of their of their respective regions or other places I mean it's actually the case that that this guy Yousef and and - there's a statue of him - and and ... all go to Damascus where they start secret politics, secret societies and and become members of the what was later called the committee or the committee for Union and progress or its constituent parts at this point. Now this guy Yousef is unusual because he is from not a lower middle class family like many of them most of them. He's from actually a very prominent wealthy Damascene family some of some of us some of you know that scholar ... who is the author Islams and Modernities, this is his uncle and ... so he's from a wealthy family and so he is selected I'm not suggesting it was patronage but he immediately went to Berlin where he became a student in the cleves Academy the Prussian military academy for more education in Berlin for a further couple of years. Now I'm getting ready to kind of conclude here and the final thing that I want to say about these these three young men who I've selected is that all of them become we can say, rhetorically speaking, on some level the fathers of their Nations: Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and yet none of them wanted this job, none of them sought this job, all of them were protectors of this Empire and elite Ottoman officers raised up from in some cases the most modest of circumstances to be the leading generals of the First World War. All of them were fought with distinction during the course of the First World War and and by the end of the war were all of them were senior senior officers mostly on the Palestine front. ... is especially interesting because he's the first to die as the as the chief of staff of the Faisali army in 1920 in Syria when general burrows forces come East from Beirut in July of 1920 and he is the person who along with ... actually who is the - I'm sorry - he's a minister of defense and ... was the chief of staff of the army. And they are the people who told King Faisal Prince Faisal of Syria you have to defend we've got to fight the French we have fight and we have to continue fighting them. We have to deal with what's happening in Istanbul in Anatolia we have to fight them because if we don't fight them we don't have a chance and Faisal says as you pointed out very effectively a long time ago, Faisal says no you know i you know i we we have to we have to get along with the people we have to get along with. We have to maintain our relations with general Allenby the British with the settlement. And so they don't seriously mobilize and ... goes and is killed by or not by a French artillery burst in a place called ... just over the just over the very close to the Lebanese Syrian what becomes the Lebanese Syrian border. Every Syrian school kid goes to the shrine of ... and and it's his grave is there and he's the only person besides there's a couple - ... - there are the only people who have statues in Damascus except for ... He's not only got a statue, he's got a square ... in the middle of the city. But as a paragon of Syrian nationalism he was barely a Syrian, he hadn't lived there for 25 years, he had spent his entire life his whole adult life basically in Istanbul or in Ottoman service, he had published numerous books of military science and tactics in Ottoman Turkish which he had translated from German, and it's only in the very last year of his life then he had returned to the city of his birth to Damascus in the first place. Now when he was killed, his comrade Yasin al-Hashimi, who becomes the the Iraqi Prime Minister in the 1930s, is living in in in old Damascus too and according to the family of ... was killed, somebody came to the house the house of ... and told his his wife and his three daughters the head of the army died and they began to mourn and to cry because they thought that they meant ... not Yousef and then an hour and a half later ... came to the door and said we've been defeated, we have to leave, the French are on the way. we were fleeing. and so they did. So I mean this story of these of these people and what they went through and their their transition from being Ottoman generals from being scholarship boys and people of the lower classes really, to elite Ottomans and generals and refugees and unemployed stateless revolutionaries is something that I really was was was interested in and really the only one that anybody knows I mean every every every every Syrian school child believes that ... was a hero of Arab nationalism except for he was fighting for the Ottoman army at the moment of the armistice until the armistice in fact. And so the Arab revolts and all of the storied events in the first world war that he allegedly took part in are all myth. None of it happened. And so I'm interested in these kinds of stories and the historiography of of Ottoman continuity and the trans-regional experience of people who span this this period and this generation. There's a lot more to say about the career and I there's nothing more than say my perspective about the career of Ottoman-Turk because it's too well-known. There's lots there's many more things to say about the career of ... but I think I'm I should say more because I have some time here. So ... as I say after being decorated by the tiger himself in Ukraine and then becoming the chief of staff of the Faisal army in Syria, he becomes a refugee and ... the British general and commander of the Eastern forces tells the French we have him and the French say well we don't want him and so they release him and he goes back and goes to his comrade ... in Anatolia or attempts to and says I went to come back into the Ottoman army and Kemal says too late. He waited too long. But of course the reason he says this is because he doesn't want another general who's at least as distinguished as he is among his his his ruling coalition and the state that's emerging. So a year or two later, he shows up in in in Baghdad, the city of his birth, a bit like the prodigal son ... and says to Prince Faisal King Faisal now of Iraq, I need a job and Faisal says we have nothing for you and in fact we don't even want you back and then a little later Faisal says okay we have a job for you, you won't like it. That province in the desert that's rebellious and full of brigands, you can be the governor of that place if you can manage. And he said don't you have anything else for me and Faisal says that's what's on offer take it or leave it and he takes it and within two years he's the prime minister so he's a person with skills and talent. And then he's the person that over the course of the 1920s and 30s there's another very well known Iraqi statesman better known today we call named ... is a more more closely aligned with both Faisal and with the British and so there's a pattern that emerges during the course of the 1920s and 30s when the British need when Faisal in the British needed a treaty or a document or a constitution they appoint ... and when they need the legitimacy and the popular consent of the Iraqi public they appoint he appoints ... becomes the Prime Minister and ... in 1935 Yaseen manages to become Prime Minister again on his own terms and he manages to fire and to dismiss almost the entire British colonial officialdom of the of the Iraqi monarchy now it was the case in the 30s that if you were a British colonial official and you were working for the Colonial Office, there was a set salary scale but if you were in Iraq, which was a nominally independent country by this time under the League of Nations after 1932, the salary scales were much higher - three or four times as high and so and they were paid directly by the Iraqi Treasury - and so if you were a colonial official in Iraq, the Iraqis couldn't dismiss you and yet you were paid an astronomical salary far higher than you would be paid if you were under the employ of the colonial the colonial office. So these contracts had to be periodically renewed and ... managed to let them all lapse and in this way he dismissed all of the British officials in 1935. It's a complicated story that I'm going to go through very briefly now at this time after dispensing with most of the British colonial officials including a person named ... , who I'm gonna write about it later hopefully, his fingerprints are on everything, and the great Syria the great Palestine revolt at precisely the same moment, ... is overthrown. The government is overthrown and he's sent into exile first in Damascus and then immediate immediately deactivated and the coup is typically described as the first coup in modern Arab history or the ... but because I'm an archiver addict and because I'm really I want to spend forever in the archives, we can say that this is this coup now I think was definitively a British intelligence operation and that it was staged by this person ... partly in revenge for the fact that he had been dismissed, fired, and and had lost his high income and his position by ... there's a lot of other parts of this story as well and I'm happy to talk about them but now ... as an exile and within a month or a month and a half he was he was dead of a heart attack, an alleged heart attack, at the age of 53 and some people think, I mean there was some suspicion at the time, that he was murdered and I think these suspicions are well taken and it's not very easy to find assassins in the archives but I'm trying.

(audience laughs)

So, I'll stop there and say thank you.

(Applause)