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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N M O D E R N
E U R O P E A N H I ST O RY

General Editors
SIMON DIXON MARK MAZOWER
and JAMES RETALLACK
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

Britain’s Levantine
Empire, 1914–1923
DA N I E L - J O SE P H M AC A RT H U R- SE A L

1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal 2021
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN 978–0–19–289576–9
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895769.001.0001
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

Acknowledgements

Work on what became this book began during my graduate studies at the
University of Cambridge. The Cambridge Middle East History Group and World
History Workshop were wonderful social and academic playgrounds, and my
thanks go out to all their administrators and attendees, particularly Andrew Arsan,
Lou Cantwell, Jesus Chairez, Camile Cole, Guillemette Crozet, Patrick Clibbens,
Mark Condos, Derek Eliot, Devyani Gupta, Mike Golan, Andrew Jarvis, Ali
Khan, Charlie Laderman, Jagjeet Lally, Mélanie Lamotte, Daniel Larsen, Simon
Layton, Elisabeth Leake, Rachel Lowe, Su Lin Lewis, Andrew MacDonald, Chris
Moffat, David Motadel, Jake Norris, Catherine Porter, Sunil Purushotham, Pallavi
Raghavan, Nasreen Rehman, Max Reibman, Tom Simpson, Murat Şiviloğlu, John
Slight, Michael Sugarman, Kate Stevens, Alex Wolfers, and Faridah Zaman. At
home in Brighton, I was lucky to have the advice of Lucy Noakes and Martin
Evans, who I had met thanks to Hannah Abbo, whose companionship helped me
through my university years.
I am thankful to have had such an attentive and supportive PhD supervisor,
Tim Harper, with whom to share and refine ideas. I am grateful to my advisor and
examiner, Christopher Bayly, and external examiner, Eugene Rogan, for their
feedback and encouragement, which set my thesis on the path to publication. For
their useful comments on more recent drafts of this text, I would like to thank
Gizem Tongo, Owen Miller, and Talha Çiçek. I would like to thank Mark Mazower
for suggesting I submit my manuscript to the series Oxford Studies in Modern
European History, where it has found a home, and Cathryn Steele, Katie Bishop,
and the anonymous readers and delegates of Oxford University Press for their
support in the refinement of my manuscript.
My graduate studies and many travels for conferences and research would have
been impossible without the financial support I received from St John’s College, the
Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the History Faculty’s Prince Consort
and Thirlwall and Stanley Baldwin trusts. I would also like to express my thanks to
all the staff at the libraries and archives I have visited and the many friends that
hosted and helped me in the course of my research trips. I am grateful to the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library, and the Master and Fellows of Trinity
College Cambridge, for allowing me to reproduce sources cited in this work.
The slow transformation from thesis to book was made possible by support
from the British Institute At Ankara and Hong Kong Baptist University, and I am
grateful to my colleagues at both institutions for welcoming me. Selcen Güney
enriched my life in Turkey. For their never-ending support, I am forever grateful
to my family, Joe Seal, Alex MacArthur, and Naomi MacArthur-Gliksten.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

Contents

List of Figures and Table  ix

Map x
Introduction 1
1800–1914 27
1. Port to Port: Sea Voyaging and the Logistics of Empire  37
1914–1916  66
2. Exploring the Levantine City  76
1916–1918  100
3. City and Camp: Reordering the Levantine City  109
1918–1920  137
4. Day and Night: Leisure Routines and Regimes  151
1920–1922  191
5. Securing the Levantine Empire  208
Conclusion  237

Bibliography  247
Index  279
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

List of Figures and Table

Figures
I.1. Lieutenant Ernest Brooks, ‘British troops in a sunken road between La
Boisselle and Contalmaison, July 1916’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 813. xi
I.2. Ariel Varges, ‘Naval rating from British Light Cruiser Lowestoft with
men of the 7th Battalion South Wales Borderers having refreshments
at a cafe in Salonika, April 1916’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 31921. xii
1.1. ‘Troops of the 1st Battalion, 4th Gurkha Rifles (1st/4th GR) during
physical training exercise on the upper deck of SS El Kahira
(Khedival Mail) which brought the Battalion from Mudros to
Alexandria, 1915’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 81655. 64
2.1. W. J. Brunell, ‘A British soldier admiring a view in old Constantinople, with a
row of wooden houses in the foreground’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 14192. 99
3.1. Ariel Varges, ‘British troops [sic] constructing a broad gauge railway
through Salonika, January, 1917’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 32690. 135
4.1. W. J. Brunell, ‘Two men of the 9th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment,
share a hookah outside a cafe at Chanak’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 14298. 189
5.1. W. J. Brunell, ‘Royal Navy ratings at the signal station on the top of
Galata Tower, showing the view across the Golden Horn and wide area
of Constantinople’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 14273. 236

Table
I.1. Population by religious denomination for Constantinople (1914),
Alexandria (1917), and Salonica (1913). 30
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

Map 1. Map of Eastern Mediterranean towns mentioned in the Book. Modified from
original at [Link]
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

Figure I.1 Lieutenant Ernest Brooks, ‘British troops in a sunken road between La
Boisselle and Contalmaison, July 1916’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 813.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

Figure I.2 Ariel Varges, ‘Naval rating from British Light Cruiser Lowestoft with men
of the 7th Battalion South Wales Borderers having refreshments at a cafe in Salonika,
April 1916’. © Imperial War Museum, Q 31921.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

Introduction

The First World War in the popular imagination centres on the trenches of the
western front. While capturing one of the most distinct features of the war, images
such as Figure I.1, showing groups of men in the mud-­churned fields of north-­
western Europe, exclude the diverse actors and scenes that composed the full
panoply of the conflict. Turning to the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, a very
different image of the war is frequently encountered, as illustrated by Figure I.2.
Soldiers and sailors sit at cafe tables and walk paved streets shared with combat-
ants from different Allied nations and colonies and civilians at leisure and at
work. They are distinguished by headwear whose classification had long fas­cin­
ated travellers to and rulers of Ottoman towns such as Salonica, captured here,
but also Alexandria and Constantinople, the triad of cities whose occupation by
British forces is the focus of this book.1 The profusion of naval caps, slouch hats,
and forage caps worn by British military personnel and their allies between 1914
and 1923 was symbolic of a new order that bound these cities together, a transi-
tory interlude between the Fez of the Tanzimat era and its replacement by western
styles later adopted in Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. As the journalist and writer
Salahaddin Enis noted on his return to occupied Constantinople from the
Ottoman eastern front, ‘the difference was that the number of hats had increased,
the quantity of flags had multiplied’.2
The scene depicted by this and many similar photographs was made possible
by the mass movement of people and materials across the Mediterranean in the
service of the Entente’s fight against the Ottoman Empire and the other Central
Powers. This book is foremost concerned with the British military personnel
among them, who reached the eastern Mediterranean in unprecedented numbers
and whose testimony is recorded in numerous letters, diaries, and memoirs. Their
lives and the regimes established to govern them on board transport ships, in
military camps, and above all in the cities they occupied formed the basis of a
new empire which radiated out from places where soldiers were concentrated and
imposed itself on residents of these localities and beyond. Though instigated by
the war, this imperial project did not come to an end with the signing of the 1918

1 As this book deals primarily with British thoughts and actions in these cities, I have used the
dominant Anglophone place names from the period (Constantinople for Istanbul; Salonica for
Thessaloniki; Alexandria for al-­ʾIskandariyya; Smyrna for İzmir; Batoum for Batumi). For less well-­
known sites, modern Turkish and transliterated Greek and Arabic names are used for ease of location.
2 Salahaddin Enis, Sara ve Cehennem Yolcuları (Istanbul: Kesit Yayınları, 2016), p. 39.

Britain’s Levantine Empire, 1914–­1923. Daniel-­Joseph MacArthur-­Seal, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Daniel-­Joseph MacArthur-­Seal. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192895769.003.0001
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

2 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

armistices with Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-­Hungary, or Germany.

The British military continued to expand its reach, adding Batoum and
Constantinople to the cities of Salonica, garrisoned since 1915, and Alexandria,
occupied since 1882. These disparate sites, and a number of islands scattered
between them, were connected by networks of military logistics and conflated by
the men who passed between them into a single demographic and geographic
constituency known by the name, among others, of the Levant. This book aims to
establish the significance of this neglected constellation of military power, which
I term Britain’s Levantine empire.

A Levantine Empire

The term ‘Levant’ is suitably ambiguous for this ill-­defined empire. Although the
word is often found in historical sources and occasionally deployed by historians,
its definition and the discourse in which it was embedded have rarely received
academic attention. As an area of contemporary research, its remit has been
largely restricted to the territories now comprised by Palestine, Israel, Lebanon,
Syria, and Jordan, as an English and French synonym for the Arabic Al Sham.3
However, its earlier popularity reflected multiple and more expansive meanings.
The Levant not only referred to a broader ranging geographic region, often
including Salonica, Constantinople, and Alexandria, but described demographic,
social, and cultural features. Evelyn Baring, in his history and description of
Egypt, where he served as consul general from 1883 to 1907, noted that ‘the
Levantines, though not a separate nation, possess characteristics of their own
which may almost be termed national’.4 The Levant was in effect an ethnographic,
as well as a geographic, category.
In recent years, academics have begun to explore these forgotten connotations.
A 1998 conference in Izmir, of which a selection of papers were published in the
2006 volume European or Levantine? marks the earliest critical reflection on the
term by historians.5 Since 2011, editors and authors in the Journal of Levantine
Studies have engaged with the etymology and ambiguity of the term in its his­tor­
ic­al and current use.6 Family histories conducted by self-­identified Levantines,
whose association, Levantine Heritage, maintains a valuable website and organ-
izes conferences for scholars within and outside of the academy, have helped
bring cultural uses of the term to light.7 Philip Mansel’s recent book Levant:

3 The Council for British Research in the Levant, for example, supports research into these coun-
tries, ‘About Us’, accessed 15 November 2019, [Link]
4 Evelyn Baring, Modern Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 246.
5 Arus Yumul and Fahri Dikkaya, eds, Avrupalı mı Levanten mi (Istanbul: Bağlam Yayıncılık, 2006).
6 ‘About Us’, accessed 20 February 2015, [Link]
7 ‘Levantine Heritage’, accessed 21 June 2017, [Link]
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

Introduction 3

Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, and its inevitable discussion of

the term, however, seems overly normative in its definition of the Levantine as an
ideologically flexible, pluralist, commercially driven, libertarian mentality that
‘put deals before ideals’.8 Indeed, the association of these traits with the Levant in
part derives from the more pejorative language of British officers and officials
studied here, for whom the Levantine ‘implied the elevation to a principle of mere
financial success; a blurring of essential standards; a certain moral suppleness,
and probably the wrong attitude during shipwreck’.9 Rather than attempt to con-
duct a retrospective ethnography of the ill-­defined Levantine population, this
book is concerned with British discourse on the Levant and its correlation with
imperial expansion in the region.
Although its etymological origins, derived from the French verb ‘lever’, suggest,
like the Arabic mashriq and Turkish şark, the direction of the rising sun and seem
to make it thereby no more specific than the ‘Orient’, the Levant came to refer
only to the most ‘western’ part of the ‘east’. The years under study saw shifting
English namings for the lands bounding the eastern Mediterranean, each tied to
various political projects. Naval War College lecturer Thayer Mahan coined the
soon to be dominant term ‘the Middle East’ in 1902, while another American
academic, James Henry Breasted, first wrote of ‘the Fertile Crescent’ in 1916, his
ancient history of the region hinting at the prosperity to which it could be restored
under western guidance.10 It was towards the end of the war that use of ‘Middle
East’ flourished, displacing the popular nineteenth-­century appellations ‘Asiatic
Turkey’ and ‘Turkish Arabia’, a neat corollary to the British aim of dividing
Ottoman Turkey from its Arab provinces.11 New names reflected the instability of
regional politics, a point recognized by diplomatic officials in the area like
Laurence Grafftey-­Smith who begins his memoirs of service in what he defiantly
persists in calling the ‘Levant’ with a discussion of place names that changed with
the ‘perpetual kaleidoscope of Time’.12
This linguistic division of the Arab majority provinces from Anatolia came
soon after the Balkan Wars delivered the coup de grace to the decreasingly popu-
lar term ‘European Turkey’.13 This tripartite division of the eastern Mediterranean
rim left British servicemen travelling across these divides with the dialogic prob-
lem of how to group parallel phenomena observed on its Greek, Ottoman, and

8 Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (London: John Murray,
2010), p. 3.
9 Laurence Grafftey-­Smith, Bright Levant (London: John Murray, 1970), p. 34.
10 Thomas Scheffler, ‘“Fertile Crescent”, “Orient”, “Middle East”: The Changing Mental Maps of
Southwest Asia’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire, 10 (2003): pp. 253–72,
at p. 255.
11 James Renton, ‘Changing Languages of Empire and the Orient: Britain and the Invention of the
Middle East, 1917–1918’, The Historical Journal, 50 (2007): pp. 645–67, at p. 646–7.
12 Grafftey-­Smith, Bright Levant, p. 1.
13 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 28–30.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

4 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

Egyptian shores. Common features, at times accentuated or effected by Britain’s

trans-­Mediterranean military presence, straddled national borders, continental
divisions between Europe, Asia, and Africa, linguistic boundaries between
Arabic-, Turkish-, and Greek-­speaking lands, and the proclaimed geographic
units of the Balkans, Anatolia, and North Africa. All could find a home in the
multifarious term ‘Levant’.
Despite the erection of political and terminological borders between them, the
cities of the eastern Mediterranean continued to be bound together by trade,
migrations, and common customs. The word Levant is perhaps most frequently
encountered in the names of the companies implicated in the maritime com-
merce taken to be such a defining character of the region. Liners advertised sail-
ings from major European and American cities to the Levant in order to suggest
that they would stop at multiple ports in the region. Post-­war attempts to estab-
lish a Smyrna service by the Deutsche Levant Linie were blocked by Allied insist-
ence on the armistice’s prohibition of German ships’ entry into Ottoman ports.14
The British-­backed Levant Stevedoring Company Limited’s fees became the sub-
ject of commercial complaints in the crowded quays of post-­war Constantinople.15
During the war, as the international companies operating in the Ottoman
Empire suffered blockade and isolation, Allied military units arriving in the eastern
Mediterranean took up the title. The British Levant Base in Alexandria was the
logistical centre of the Salonica campaign, one part of the much mocked ‘trinity’
of the ‘Mediterranean faith’, as soldiers satirized it, alongside the Army of Egypt
and the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.16 From occupied Constantinople,
French intelligence attached to the Armée du Levant operated under the title of
the Bureau du Levant, producing Arabic propaganda for consumption in Syria.17
The Italian military also opted for the name Division del Levante, with only the
British Army of the Black Sea, the new name given to the Army of the Orient on
its leaving Salonica for Constantinople, omitting the title.
There was such enthusiasm for British commercial prospects on the back of its
military expansion in the eastern Mediterranean that a new Levant Company was
founded in 1918, ‘perpetuating the spirit of patriotism and enterprise’ that char-
acterized the two-­hundred-­year history of the original Levant Company whose
charter had ended in 1825.18 British success in the Levant trade, to which still
surviving merchant families such as the Whittalls bore testament, provided the

14 National Archives (NA), Records of the Foreign Office (FO) 371/5164, ‘Conférence des Hautes
Commissionnaires’, 5 November 1920.
15 NA, FO 371/5131, F. Heald and Rizzo, Steam Ship and Commission Agents, to British Captain of
the Port, Galata, 18 May 1920, f. 229.
16 Middle East Centre Archives (MECA), Loder GB165-­0184, ‘After Morning Parade’.
17 NA, FO 141/480/19, ‘Activities of the French Bureau du Levant in Constantinople’, 12
August 1921.
18 Maurice de Bunsen, ‘The New Levant Company’, Journal of The Royal Central Asian Society, 7
(1920): pp. 19–31, at p. 26.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

Introduction 5

country’s representatives with a collective history, identity, and mission in the

region.19 Within two years of its establishment, the Levant Company’s modern
successor boasted branches in Athens, Alexandria, Beirut, Jaffa, Batoum,
Constantinople, Salonica, Baghdad, Odessa, and Novororossisk. Academic inter-
est in the original Levant Company, seen in the books of A. C. Wood and Gwilym
Ambrose, was revived in the interwar period, when the economic exploitation of
the new mandate states of Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq aroused further commer-
cial excitement.20 The polymorphous connotations of the term Levant, tied to the
region but not associated with the names of existing political units whose future
was so uncertain, explain its recrudescent popularity.
In spite of such interest, there was no consensus on the borders of the Levant
or even whether it formed one contiguous space. Instead, the Levant, like the
‘Orient’ described by Edward Said, remained above all an imagined geography,
one mentally rather than territorially mapped.21 For British soldiers and their
superiors this Levantine world was conceived as coextensive with the highpoint
of Allied military expansion in 1919. This was no coincidence, for the content of
this imagined Levantine geography served as the legitimating underpinning for
British control in the eastern Mediterranean. In its instrumentality to British
political ambitions, the conception of the Levant paralleled that of Arabia, as for-
mulated by scholars and soldiers in the concurrent project of establishing British
domination in the Middle East.22 But while Arabia was expansive, distant, and
penetrated only by the odd intelligence officer, overflown by British pilots, or dis-
sected from afar by orientalist geographers, the Levant was characterized by its
permeability to the wider world and the confluence of people and goods. Thus, it
was the port cities Alexandria, Constantinople, and Salonica, through which
British military material and human resources coursed, that formed the concep-
tual keystones of the Levantine imaginary and are the focus of this study.
The name Levant semantically sequestered these city-­nodes from their hinter-
lands, moving into which British power dissipated. Classical references to
Alexandria ‘ad Aegyptum’ (at, rather than in, Egypt) were repeated by members
of Britain’s occupying forces like the army chaplain E. C. Mortimer who noted
that ‘Alexandria of course is a town of the Levant, rather than a town of Egypt’.23
Likewise, Constantinople, and more specifically the central district of Pera, was
cited as ‘la ville du Levant’, or ‘the capital of Levantinia’, at the moment that British

19 Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant: Trade and Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the
Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 223.
20 Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935);
Gwilym P. Ambrose, ‘English Traders at Aleppo (1658–1756)’, The Economic History Review, 3 (1932):
pp. 246–67.
21 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 55.
22 Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert
Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 13–14.
23 Imperial War Museum (IWM), Private Papers of E. C. Mortimer, ‘Memoirs of E. C. Mortimer’, p. 7.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

6 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

diplomats were rebuffing Turkish petitions to retain the city under the terms of
the forthcoming Treaty of Sèvres.24 Indeed, the term Levantine was rarely applied
to those living beyond Alexandria, Constantinople, Salonica, Port Said, Beirut,
Smyrna, and a smattering of smaller coastal towns and islands. The population of
their hinterlands was assumed to take a more ethnically and culturally homo­gen­
ous character, providing a potential basis for the redemption of the Ottoman
Empire’s supposed ethno-­territorial component parts on national lines. On 18
December 1918, barely a month after British forces had reached Constantinople,
Leader of the House of Lords and later Foreign Secretary George Curzon informed
the war cabinet’s Eastern Committee that ‘those who know the Turk in his own
highlands in Asia Minor and elsewhere always speak of him with respect as a
simple-­minded worthy fellow who dislikes as much as anybody else the system of
corruption and intrigue that goes on at Head Quarters’, followed by arguments that
the Ottoman government should be deprived of its capital and removed to an
inland city such as Bursa.25 Likewise, the vigorous, ‘manly, frugal and hardy’ Arab
was cultivated by ‘the spirit of the desert’, an environment defined by its proximity
to god and nature and distance from the corrupting influences of urban society.26
These at times romanticized rural settings could hardly be further from the large
cities of Salonica, Alexandria, or Constantinople, defined by their decadence and
openness to external influences rather than purity or isolation.
British confusion at social, religious, and ethnic distinctions and observance of
physical, behavioural, and cultural commonalities between the inhabitants of
these cities seemed to necessitate some collective identification. Thus, the abstract
land of the Levant was populated by the equally uncategorizable Levantine. When
applied to the population by historians, the term Levantine has largely been taken
to be an unproblematic, if vague and anachronistic, way of referring to long-­
resident western European populations in and around the Ottoman Empire, yet
the term was equally malleable and invested with as many meanings as its geo-
graphic corollary.27 At times it denoted only the multi-­generational Catholic
population, at others it included culturally ‘westernized’ Jewish, Orthodox, and
Muslim residents. The ambiguity of its definition prevented its systematic use in
official census data,28 although the Association Catholique pour la Protection de
la Jeune Fille had no problem including it as a category, shared with ‘indigenes’, in

24 Bertrand Bareilles, Constantinople, Ses Cités Franques et Levantines (Péra, Galata, Banlieue)
(Paris: Bossard, 1918), p. 45; Harold Armstrong, Turkey in Travail: The Birth of a New Nation (London:
John Lane, 1925), p. 79.
25 British Library (BL), IO/L/PS/10/623, War Cabinet Eastern Committee, 23 December 1918.
26 William Muir, The Caliphate: Its Rise, Decline and Fall, from Original Sources (London: Religious
Tract Society, 1892), p. 596.
27 Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 147, 164, 218.
28 In the 1917 Egyptian census, those who might be thought of as Levantines were categorized as
‘foreigner’, ‘other [as opposed to Muslim] local subjects’, or according to religious denomination. See
The Census of Egypt Taken in 1917 (Cairo: Government Press, 1920), pp. 20–1; 460–1.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

Introduction 7

tabulations of the ‘nationalités’ of the young women it annually claimed to have

rescued from prostitution.29
The ambiguity of this Levantine population provoked racial anxieties centred
on miscegenation and assimilation. Nineteenth-­century ethnographic theory had
raised fears of racial decomposition and the dissolution of the racial order that
underpinned British imperial dominance.30 The Levantine was a designation that
straddled different races, religions, and nationalities and its amorphous form
threatened to incorporate even the British soldier or civilian, let alone members
of more susceptible nations bordering the Mediterranean. Harold Armstrong, a
staff officer in Constantinople, ‘realized’ that whenever the ‘hardy honest and
steady’ Anatolian Turk was ‘taken and educated’ in Constantinople ‘he in­stinct­
ive­ly absorbed that which was superficial and he became a levantine’, a people
who were ‘the evil results of the mating of the East and the West’.31
These fears were shared by Ottoman officials and public opinion-­makers, for
whom the word ‘Levanten’, defined as ‘Those who display themselves in European
style though being from the Eastern people, Christian imitators of the Franks,
sweet water Franks’,32 gained popularity in the early twentieth century. A long-­
running literary and press discourse critical of the western affectations of members
of the Muslim urban bourgeoisie identified the Levantines as key intermediaries
in the partial introduction of European thoughts and fashions.33 Ziya Gökalp, the
principle ideologue of Turkish nationalism, criticized Ottoman elites whose
‘understanding of European civilization did not go beyond that of the Levantines
of Pera’ and accordingly ‘simply imitated the superficial lustre, the luxury, the
ornateness, and such other rubbish of Europe’.34 Conservative journals urged the
utmost vigilance against the ‘sordid manoeuvres’ of these ‘nationless Levantines’
lest Muslim youth be corrupted by their ‘sorcery and charms’.35 The rise of ethnic
nationalism and the increasingly outspoken hostility to the position of non-­Muslims,
and in particular the ‘comprador’ bourgeoisie that included many notable
Catholic and Protestant families, in the political economy of the late Ottoman
Empire and early Turkish Republic further marked out the Levantine population
and their ‘confused lineage’ as a target.36

29 Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN) 20PO/1/22, Association Catholique

Pour la Protection de la Jeune Fille, ‘Deuxième Rapport’ (Alexandria, 1915), p. 7.
30 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge,
1995), pp. 18–19.
31 Armstrong, Turkey in Travail, p. 78.
32 Raif Necdet Kestelli, Resimli Türkçe Kamus (Istanbul: Ahmet Kâmil Matbaası, 1928), p. 667.
33 Köksal Alver, ‘Züppelik Anlatısı ve Toplum: Türk Romanında Züppe Tipi’, Selçuk Üniversitesi
Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, 16 (2006): pp. 163–82, at p. 180.
34 Ziya Gökalp, ‘The Programme of Turkism’, in Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization:
Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 287.
35 Rumeli, ‘Gençlerde Milliyet Hissi Ölüyor! Levantinizim’, Sebillürreşad, 2 May 1912.
36 Türk Ansiklopedisi, vol. 23 (Ankara: Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1976), pp. 12–13, quoted in Edhem
Eldem, ‘“Levanten” Kelimesi Üzerine’, in Yumul and Dikkaya, eds, Avrupalı mı Levanten mi, p. 17.
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8 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

British observers shared the conviction that the Levantine population were not
true Europeans, whatever passport they happened to carry. Baring had warned
readers of making assumptions on the basis of nationality when ‘the Frenchman
resident in Egypt is only technically a Frenchman’ or ‘the Italian may in reality be
only half an Italian in so far as his national characteristics are concerned’.37 Even
European-­born residents in the Levant were at risk of losing their national char-
acter. French General Albert Defrance’s long service in Macedonia and
Constantinople had caused him to become ‘partially Levantinised’, according to
one British officer.38 While some expressed a comic confidence in how ‘The
Britisher in the Levant insists on remaining a Britisher though the heavens fall’,
who would tell ‘the climate and customs of the country to go to the devil and
breakfasts on bacon and eggs’, the prospect of acculturation and assimilation
remained a widespread concern.39 Baring’s faith that ‘Germans’ and ‘Englishmen’
‘rarely become typical Levantines’, was doubted by some of his successors and by
German authorities in the same period, who feared their co-­nationals in the east-
ern Mediterranean would be ‘Levantinized’.40 Consular officials and other
‘upstanding’ foreign nationals found the category of Levantine to be a useful tool
to police the boundaries and maintain the prestige of the designation ‘European’,
a concern of imperial authorities across Asia and Africa.41
In rare instances, this Levantinization was welcomed as a marker of adaptabil-
ity to new surroundings, though not without reservation. Loder wrote home how
‘I am getting to be quite a passable Levantine now . . . . For me there is something
very attractive about it all, though taken as a whole I don’t suppose a more
­scallywag collection of human beings ever was gathered together before’.42 Soon-­
to-­be-­famed writer E. M. Forster too seemed pleased to adjust himself to what he
called ‘the slow Levantine degringolade’ during his work as an ambulance driver
in Alexandria, a city that symbolized ‘a mixture, a bastardy, an idea which I find
congenial and opposed to that sterile idea of 100% in something or other which
has impressed the modern world and forms the backbone of its blustering nation-
alisms’.43 Forster’s romanticization of the Levantine is echoed by numerous mod-
ern writers looking back on turn-­of-­the century Alexandria and its sister-­cities
across the Mediterranean, often lapsing into a nostalgia that has distorted research

37 Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, p. 246.

38 MECA, Loder GB165-­0184, Loder to Father, 23 December 1917.
39 ‘The Athens Exhibition’, Orient News, 4 November 1919, p. 1.
40 Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, p. 248; Malte Fuhrmann, ‘Cosmopolitan Imperialists and the
Ottoman Port Cities: Conflicting Logics in the Urban Social Fabric’, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 67
(2003): pp. 149–63, at p. 154.
41 Julia Clancy-­Smith, ‘Marginality and Migration: Europe’s Social Outcasts in Pre-­ Colonial
Tunisia, 1880–1881’, in Eugene Rogan, ed., Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 154.
42 MECA, Loder GB165-­0184, Loder to Mother, 1 July 1917.
43 King’s College Archive (KCA), E. M. Forster Papers, E. M. Forster, ‘The Lost Guide’, ff. 99–101.
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Introduction 9

agendas in the region’s urban history,44 and it is important to note that his was a
lonely voice among British visitors.
For most, the Levantine represented social and racial disorder in a setting of
urban degradation. Her experience of Pera made the journalist Grace Ellison
realize ‘the danger of losing oneself in the ambition to be truly cosmopolitan’, and
signalled a ‘terrible warning’ that ‘people belonging to all nations . . . have the soul
of none’.45 Personal encounters with the uncategorizable masses of the Levantine
city seemed to confirm the ‘pessimistic and fearful understandings of modernity’
that permeated the ethnographic and eugenic sciences popular in the period, par-
ticularly when dealing with the Orient.46 This pessimism distinguished British
projections for the future of the eastern Mediterranean from the utopian visions
encapsulated by the Greek Megali idea of the unification of the Hellenic world,
Turanist aspirations for a Turkic empire linking Constantinople and Central Asia,
Muslim scholars’ hopes for a renewed pan-­Islamic caliphate, or Bolshevik predic-
tions of world revolution.47 Early optimism that British intervention could
reshape the region on a ‘stable and friendly basis’, without prejudice to its existing
privileges, relations with its allies, and good standing in Muslim, Jewish, and east-
ern Christian opinion, quickly evaporated, to be replaced by a pervading sense of
crisis and potential catastrophe as Britain’s Levantine empire struggled to contain
these rival political projects.48

Interpreting Britain’s Rise

Histories of British expansion in the eastern Mediterranean have regarded the

strategic imperatives of empire as the key drivers of policy. Debates on British
encroachment on the Ottoman Empire in imperial history have largely been con-
ducted with this broad assumption, with academic disputes centring around which
interest or set of interests were most significant, be it strategic communications,

44 Will Hanley, ‘Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies’, History Compass, 6 (2008):
pp. 1346–67, at p. 1346.
45 Grace Ellison, An English Woman at Angora (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1923), p. 294.
46 Susan Bayly, ‘Racial Readings of Empire: Britain, France, and Colonial Modernity in the
Mediterranean and Asia’, in Leila Fawaz and Christopher A. Bayly, eds, Modernity and Culture: From
the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 285.
47 Anastasia Stouraiti and Alexander Kazamias, ‘The Imaginary Topographies of the Megali Idea:
National Territory as Utopia’, in Nikiforos P. Diamandouros, Thaleia Dragōna, and Çağlar Keyder, eds,
Spatial Conceptions of the Nation: Modernizing Geographies in Greece and Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris,
2010), pp. 12–28; Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-­Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-­
Islamic and Pan-­Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 99–111; Şuhnaz
Yılmaz, ‘An Ottoman Warrior Abroad: Enver Paşa as an Expatriate’, Middle Eastern Studies, 35 (1999):
pp. 40–69.
48 NA, Records of the Cabinet Office (CAB) 24/72/6, ‘Memorandum on the Settlement of Turkey
and the Arabian Peninsula’, p. 10.
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10 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

trade, resources, or great power rivalry.49 A broad range of political sympathies

have been accommodated within this approach, with apologists for Britain’s role
emphasizing the harmony of British self-­interest with local economic and political
development, while critics have followed the suit of contemporary anti-­imperialists
in emphasizing the harm done by economic exploitation and accompanying
political repression.50
This framework of understanding originated with the earliest memoirs of those
who had accompanied British forces or had been engaged in implementing policy
in the region, with Baring’s defence of the British decision to occupy Egypt and
long-­term British resident W. S. Blunt’s excoriation of the policy setting the tone
for future sides in the debate.51 First World War campaigns in the eastern
Mediterranean were well-­ represented among the large number of memoir-­
histories published from the 1920s onwards.52 Those writing on personal experi-
ences in the Salonica campaign, such as the soldiers Harold Lake and Arthur
Griffin Tapp and the nurse Jane Dare, were keen to stress the campaign’s impact
on the course of the war and their and their compatriots’ hardships, in order to
counter criticisms of the Salonica front as a strategic diversion and an easy post-
ing.53 Soldiers serving in Egypt, such as Hector William Dinning and M. S. Briggs,
attracted readers with their combination of war memoir and exotic travel guide.54
Most saw little need to criticize the course and conduct of the war itself, though
lower level incompetence was a frequent target.
Britain’s post-­war presence in Turkey, a policy publicly acknowledged to have
failed and therefore devoid of the obstacles to critique presented by 1914–18 and
the weight of the British war dead, was more readily criticized by memoirists and
political commentators. Dissension in the British coalition government over the
extent of Prime Minister Lloyd George’s secret support of Greece burst into the
open with its collapse, sparking a public debate that drew attention and protest
across the empire.55 Arnold Toynbee, the former Foreign Office political intelli-
gence department official, led the attack on British policy in his The Western

49 Marian Kent, ‘Great Britain and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1900–1923’, in Marian Kent,
ed., The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 189;
V. H. Rothwell, ‘Mesopotamia in British War Aims, 1914–1918’, The Historical Journal, 13 (2009):
pp. 273–94 at p. 294.
50 Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 2.
51 Baring, Modern Egypt; Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Atrocities of Justice under British Rule in Egypt
(London: T. F. Unwin, 1906).
52 Jay Murray Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914
to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 13.
53 Jane Dare, Letters from the Forgotten Army (London: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1918), p. 25; Harold
Lake, In Salonica with our Army (London: A. Melrose, 1917); Arthur Griffin Tapp, Stories of Salonica
and the New Crusade (London: Drane’s, 1922).
54 Hector William Dinning, Nile to Aleppo: With the Light-­Horse in the Middle-­East (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1920); M. S. Briggs, Through Egypt in War-­Time (London: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1918).
55 Daniel-­Joseph MacArthur-­Seal, ‘Intelligence and Lloyd George’s Secret Diplomacy in the Near
East, 1920–1922’, The Historical Journal, 56 (2013): pp. 707–28, at p. 725.
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Introduction 11

Question in Greece and Turkey.56 Toynbee introduced the familiar critique that
western misunderstanding of the peoples of the region was responsible for the
failure of foreign policy. His similarly harsh admonition of Greek expansionism
and crimes against civilians cost him his recent appointment to the Greek
government-­funded Koraes chair at Kings College London.57 The sculptor Clare
Sheridan, whose association with Bolshevik trade delegates had brought her into
conflict with the British High Commissioner in Constantinople, was also unsur-
prisingly hostile.58 Robert Graves, the Times journalist in the city, saw Britain as
having ‘undoubtedly put our money on the wrong horse’.59 Greater sensitivity
around publication inhibited most former diplomatic officials from publishing
their accounts until years later. The discussion of British policy in former consul
at Smyrna Harry Luke’s 1924 memoir Anatolica had none of the candour of the
harsh rebukes he issued in correspondence while in his post, for example.60 Those
that published later, such as Andrew Ryan, were happy to lay bare divisions
among Foreign Office staff on British policy, however.61
Turkish officials and observers also wrote memoirs on the British occupation
in the interwar period, which began to appear in Turkish newspapers once they
were released from Allied censorship.62 The official history of the War of
Independence, as the conflicts of 1919–23 are known in Turkey, was defined by
president Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in his sprawling 1927 speech, of which innu-
merable editions have now been published.63 Dissenting accounts of these critical
years were largely prohibited. The prominent author Halide Edib’s memoirs were
published in the United States during her exile following the closure of the op­pos­
ition Progressive Republican Party, which her husband was a founder of.64
Another member of the short-­lived opposition party, the Ottoman and later
Turkish National Movement general, Kazım Karabekir, attempted to publish his
memoirs of the War of Independence in 1933, but was prevented after police
raided the publication house and burnt the first editions of the book, with a
limit­ed reprint not published until 1951, after his death.65 Recent interest in
memoirs of the First World War has prompted the collection and publication of

56 Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of
Civilisations (London: Constable, 1922).
57 Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London: Frank
Cass, 1986).
58 Clare Sheridan, A Turkish Kaleidoscope (London: Duckworth, 1926), p. 14.
59 Robert Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East: Personal Memories, 1879–1929 (London:
Hutchinson & Co., 1933), p. 330.
60 NA, FO 371/5130, ‘Memorandum by Commander Luke on Future Peace with Turkey’, enclosure
to de Robeck to Curzon, 7 April 1920; cf. Harry Luke, Anatolica (London: Macmillan, 1924).
61 Andrew Ryan, The Last of the Dragomans (London: G. Bles, 1951), p. 134.
62 A collection of transliterated articles can be found in Mevlut Çelebi, Ahenk ve Halk Gazetelerinde
İşgal Hatırları (1919–1922) (Ankara: Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi, 2015).
63 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nutuk, 3 vols (Istanbul: Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1969).
64 Halide Edib Adıvar, The Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York: Century Co., 1926).
65 Kazım Karabekir, İstiklal Harbimizin Esasları (Istanbul: Sinan Matbaası Neşriyat Evi, 1951).
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12 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

numerous diaries and memoirs that at times include sections on the period of
Constantinople’s occupation.66
Writing on the Mediterranean was enlivened by new crises in the later 1920s
and 1930s, when Italian expansionism provoked tensions with Britain, France,
Greece, and Turkey, and outbreaks of anti-­colonial protest and violence mounted
in Algeria, Palestine, and Syria.67 The entire sea seemed on the brink of conflict, a
situation contrasted with a purportedly peaceable history. In the preface to one
such work, Lord Edward Gleichen warned that ‘the kaleidoscope has shifted’ and
that ‘No longer is the European coast-­line the only one that matters’.68 The
German journalist Margaret Boveri, like Gleichen, felt the passing of an era, writ-
ing that ‘an abrupt change has come about. The Mediterranean peoples have
become dynamic’ and a region that had ‘appeared to exist solely for the sake of
tourists and those interested in art’ had been transformed by the ‘parade of mili-
tary force’.69 Elizabeth Monroe, publishing in the same year as the English edition
of Boveri’s work appeared, provided an account of strategic competition in the
Mediterranean between France, Britain, and Italy. She remarked how each coun-
try’s ‘statesmen proclaim “we must defend our vital interests in the Mediterranean”.
We repeat it, like a creed, without enquiring into the nature of the interests.’70
Numerous subsequent historians, however, have not taken Monroe’s warning
to heart. British expansion in the eastern Mediterranean is still frequently
explained as a logical conclusion to the defence of Britain’s strategic interests, the
assumptions behind which evade deconstruction. Thus, Stephen Joseph Stillwell
has asserted that the occupation of Constantinople and the straits was ‘the cul­
min­ation of the traditional British policy of defending this vital waterway’, while
Kaya Tuncer Çağlayan in parallel argues that Britain occupied Batoum and
Transcaucasia because it ‘had vital interests to protect’.71 Marian Kent likewise
presents the division of the Ottoman Empire as Britain ‘exacting the traditional
compensation of a victor’.72 Such observations raise the question of why Britain’s

66 İbrahim Hakkı Sunata, İstanbul’da İşgal Yılları (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları,
2006); Agah Sırrı Levend, Acılar (Ankara: Birleşik Dağıtım Kitabevi, 2012); Mefharet Çetinkaya,
İkbal, Yıkım ve İşgal: İstanbul’lu bir Genç Kızın Anıları (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları,
2013); Cevat Rüştü, İstanbul’un İşgalinde İngiliz Hapishanesi Hatıraları (Istanbul: Sebil Yayınevi, 2009);
Cavid Bey, Meşrutiyet Ruznamesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014); Yorgos Theotokas, Leonis: Bir
Dünyanın Merkezindeki Şehir: İstanbul, 1914–1922 (Istanbul: İstos Yayınları, 2013); Nissim M. Benzera,
Une Enfance Juive à Istanbul (Istanbul: Isis, 1996); Hagop Mıntzuri, İstanbul Anıları (Istanbul: Aras
Yayıncılık, 2017).
67 John Darwin, ‘An Undeclared Empire: The British in the Middle East, 1918–39’, The Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27 (1999): pp. 159–76, p. 170–2.
68 Edward Gleichen, ‘Foreword’, in E. W. Polson Newman, The Mediterranean and its Problems
(London: A. M. Philpot, 1927), p. vii.
69 Margret Boveri, Mediterranean Cross-­Currents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938),
pp. 416–17.
70 Elizabeth Monroe, The Mediterranean in Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 2.
71 Stephen Joseph Stillwell, Jr, Anglo-­Turkish Relations in the Inter-­War Era (New York: Edwin
Mellen Press, 2003), p. 40.
72 Kent, ‘Great Britain and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1900–1923’, p. 195.
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Introduction 13

interests were configured in such a way that eventually untenable occupations

appeared to be a desirable strategic policy. After all, British forces evacuated
Salonica in 1919, Batoum in 1920, Constantinople in 1923, and significantly
reduced their presence in Alexandria and the rest of Egypt in 1922. It is here that
British concepts of the nature of the occupied territories and their inhabitants, in
this case the Levant and the Levantine, are crucial, making this series of occupa-
tions both necessary and possible while determining their shape and duration.
While offering plausible answers as to why Britain chose to occupy or evacuate
any given territory, the national interest framework that has dominated discussion
of Britain’s presence in the eastern Mediterranean is more limited when asking
how Britain ruled. The military regimes established in Alexandria, Salonica,
Constantinople, and Batoum developed with little central direction by senior states-
men. The British state’s local representatives were frequently infuriated by having to
improvise while a ‘policy of drift’ prevailed in London.73 The cabinet continued to
discuss ‘the future of Constantinople’, prevaricated on expanding or evacuating
Batoum province, and remained deadlocked over the fate of the protectorate and
army of occupation in Egypt. Meanwhile, ad hoc regimes formed by a cocktail of
army, navy, and Foreign Office representatives, with varying levels of cooperation
with local authorities, constructed a military-­imperial regime that, though infor-
mal, impacted on the lives of thousands, with at times fatal consequences.
Given the shortcomings of this historiography in addressing the themes pur-
sued by this study, it has been necessary to engage with a broader literature touch-
ing topics which are absent from discussions of the locations and years under
investigation. Readings from the broader literature on Mediterranean history,
urban history, imperialism, orientalism, and cosmopolitanism have been central
to grounding understandings of source material, which are assessed using the­or­
et­ic­al approaches borrowed from across the social sciences. Such an approach
seems particularly suitable for the study of the eastern Mediterranean city, where
the exchange and overlap of different worlds is so commonly remarked on, from
the writing of nineteenth-­century travellers to the guidebooks of the present day,
that it has become cliché. These cities’ position within overlapping histories poses
challenges for the historian, for the same sites are encountered in divergent litera-
tures: in Greek, Turkish, and Egyptian national historiographies, and are shared
between Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Ottoman studies, or, increasingly,
incorporated into a global focus on selections of cities united by the prefix ‘port-’
or ‘world-’.74

73 King’s College London (KCL), GB 0099 KCLMA Maurice F B, Harington to Maurice, 23

August 1923.
74 Peter Taylor, ‘West Asian/North African Cities in the World City Network: A Global Analysis
of Dependence, Integration, and Autonomy’, The Arab World Geographer, 4 (2001): pp. 146–59, at
pp. 146–7; Charles Cartier, ‘Cosmopolitics and the Maritime World City’, Geographical Review, 89
(1999): pp. 278–89, at p. 278.
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14 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

Histories of the Mediterranean, the most obvious unifying feature between

Alexandria, Salonica, and Constantinople, have benefited from renewed interest
in the past two decades, reflecting on and critiquing the model of Mediterranean
history set by Fernand Braudel in the mid-­twentieth century.75 The sea’s material,
ideological, and emotional significance in the establishment of Britain’s Levantine
empire cannot be ignored. Sea lanes were central to the imperial logistical net-
work constructed between Alexandria, Salonica, and Constantinople. The con-
tinual transfer of men and material between these ports underpinned Britain’s
Levantine empire and reconfirms the significance of the Mediterranean as a basin
of redistribution whose material circulations shape the polities of its coastline,
which Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell argue to be key to its character
from the classical to the early modern period.76
Maritime dominance gave Britain more than just material sustenance: the
Mediterranean was the germinating pool of the ideas that compelled Britain to
conduct this impossible enterprise. Britain gained confidence of its might, organ-
izational capacity, and social superiority on the ships and quaysides from which
its authority radiated outward to newly occupied lands. The romance of the
Mediterranean that so moved Braudel affected Britons too;77 a culmination of the
‘Mediterranean passion’ whose influence in British high culture increased during
the course of the nineteenth century.78 Britain’s Levantine empire would take the
form of a vast archipelago, linking island- and city-­states across a new Mare
Nostrum. Its geography echoed that of earlier maritime powers: the Venetian,
Genoan, Roman, and Hellenic empires whose monuments, from the Galata tower
in Constantinople, to Pompey’s pillar in Alexandria, to the Arch of Galerius in
Salonica, drew crowds of British servicemen. These ancient empires were fre-
quently recalled in debates on British policy by classically minded officials like
Baring and his colleague in the Egyptian administration, Ronald Storrs.79 Others
turned to a more recent history of martial conquest, labelling the campaign
against the Ottomans a ‘new crusade’, countered by the Ottoman sultan’s call for
jihad and later by Mustafa Kemal in his appeal to Muslim solidarity against the
invader.80 Rather than acting as an autonomous historic force, the sea was an

75 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
(London: Harper Collins, 1992); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and
“the New Thalassology”’, The American Historical Review, 111 (2006): pp. 722–40, at p. 723.
76 Nicholas Purcell, ‘The Boundless Sea of Unlikeness? On Defining the Mediterranean’,
Mediterranean Historical Review, 18 (2003): pp. 9–29, at p. 19.
77 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, p. x.
78 John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1987), p. 2.
79 Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity
from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 156–8.
80 Eitan Bar-­Yosef, ‘The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18’,
Journal of Contemporary History, 36 (2001): pp. 87–109, at p. 87; Mustafa Aksakal, ‘“Holy War Made
in Germany”? Ottoman Origins of the 1914 Jihad’, War in History, 18 (2011): pp. 184–99, at pp. 185–6;
NA, FO 371/5045, ‘Text of a Proclamation Issued by Mustapha Kemal’, 19 March 1920.
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Introduction 15

instrumentalized concept, a specific interpretation of which made Britain’s im­per­

ial project logical and coherent. Recognizing the interrelation of narrative and
material significance is to affirm how, in the words of the Croatian writer Pedrage
Matvejevic, ‘The Mediterranean is inseparable from its discourse’.81
The importance of the Mediterranean to the creation of new forms of empire
and discourse reveals its role to be more than that of a ‘great artery’ between
the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.82 The decline and peripheralization of the
Mediterranean posited in readings of world systems theory and histories of
globalization should not be read as implying its irrelevance to the twentieth-­
century world.83 Sadly, much literature on the Mediterranean suggests this to
have been the case, resulting in ‘surprisingly little scholarly work that undertakes
to apply Braudel’s vision to the modern Mediterranean as a space of historical
interaction’.84 Julia Clancy-­Smith agrees that ‘for the medieval era, we have a more
finely grained portrait of Mediterranean commerce and social relations than we
do for later periods’, though her study, among other recent works, has extended
the period for which a detailed picture is available through to the end of the nine-
teenth cen­tury.85 Although the neglect of oceanic units of analysis has perhaps
been lamented so many times now as to be self-­effacing, this scholarship is still in
its infancy.86 While it may have lost its primacy as the locus of world capitalism,
the Mediterranean continued to play host to critical events such as those
described herein, impacting thousands of lives on the coasts of a sea no less inter-­
connected and influential than in the ‘golden ages’ identified by Braudel and sub-
sequent historians.
Although the sea may make ‘a more suitable frame’ for research seeking to
challenge the predominance of territorially bounded history writing, it would be
wrong to see oceans as analytical units free of the imperial and orientalist baggage
of nations, continents, or any other geographic division.87 The assumed neutrality
of the Mediterranean, while ‘just about every other known category has been

81 Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999), p. 12.
82 David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), p. 573.
83 Şevket Pamuk and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Globalization, Challenge and Economic Response in
the Mediterranean’, in Şevket Pamuk and Jeffrey G. Williamson, eds, The Mediterranean Response to
Globalization before 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 4.
84 Edmund Burke III, ‘Toward a Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean, 1750–1919’,
Journal of World History, 23 (2012): pp. 907–39, at p. 908.
85 Julia Clancy-­Smith, ‘The Maghrib and the Mediterranean World in the Nineteenth Century:
Illicit Exchanges, Migrants, and Social Marginals’, in Michel Le Gall and Kenneth J. Perkins, eds, The
Maghrib in Question: Essays in History & Historiography (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1997), p. 222.
86 Sebastian R. Prange, ‘Scholars and the Sea: A Historiography of the Indian Ocean’, History
Compass, 6 (2008): pp. 1382–93, at p. 1382.
87 Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008), p. 27.
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16 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

deconstructed’, is one of the reasons for its growing popularity in scholarship.88

Studies that emphasize the Mediterranean as a model of commercial and cultural
reciprocity should remain mindful of its potential as a conduit for domination
and the degree to which conflicts could radically reroute the networks that
spanned it.89 Rather, understandings of the Mediterranean should accept that it
too is a ‘cousin of orientalism’ and equally implicated in the aggrandizing projects
of past empires.90
Increasingly the ‘eastern Mediterranean’ has been used by historians analysing
places that might otherwise be situated within the ‘Middle East’. In his study of
the middle class of Aleppo, Keith Wattenpaugh prefers the term over the Middle
East which ‘carries with it residues of colonialism and an obvious eurocentrism’,
although these likewise cling to the Mediterranean considering the word’s Latin
etymology.91 Even when not explicitly stated, the use of ‘eastern Mediterranean’
seems to function as an indication of an attempt to fracture the Middle East as a
unit of analysis, imbued with a unity and uniqueness by first orientalist and later
area studies scholarship, and stress the region’s interconnection with worlds
beyond.92 In addition to these connotations of connectedness, which I am happy
to share, I use the term ‘eastern Mediterranean’ as a pragmatic way of signalling the
area under study, in contrast to the ‘Levant’ and ‘Levantine’ which I use to denote
the geographic imaginary of the servicemen and officers that I am investigating
here. This practical distinction is not to suggest the superiority or neutrality of the
Mediterranean as an analytical term.93 How regions are de­lin­eated, populated,
and essentialized is a major theme of this study.
At the centre of the Braudellian Mediterranean is the ‘urban network’ that con-
nected towns on different shores in a dense web of exchange.94 The Mediterranean
port city as a node of commercial and cultural exchange or, even more broadly,

88 Michael Herzfeld, ‘Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to

Eating’, in William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 46.
89 Yaacov Shavit, ‘Mediterranean History and the History of the Mediterranean: Further
Reflections’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 4 (1994): pp. 313–29, at p. 319.
90 William V. Harris, ‘The Mediterranean and Ancient History’, in Harris, ed., Rethinking the
Mediterranean, p. 2.
91 Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism,
Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. ix.
92 Examples include Christoph Schumann, ‘Introduction’, in Christoph Schumann, ed., Liberal
Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 2; Ilham Khuri-­Makdisi, The Eastern
Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 1.
For a discussion of the definition of the Middle East as a distinct and at times isolated and essential-
ized unit, see Andrew Arsan, John Karam, and Akram Khater, ‘On Forgotten Shores: Migration in
Middle East Studies and the Middle East in Migration Studies’, Mashriq & Mahjar, 1 (2013): pp. 1–7,
at pp. 2–3.
93 Manuel Borutta and Sakis Gekas, ‘A Colonial Sea: The Mediterranean, 1798–1956’, European
Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire, 19 (2012): pp. 1–13, at p. 4.
94 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, pp. 201–3.
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Introduction 17

contact, has now become a familiar trope.95 This connectedness is difficult to

deny—it is, in effect, as Driessen surmises, ‘a constant in Mediterranean his-
tory’—but the language employed with reference to port cities, of ‘contact’, ‘flows’,
and ‘exchange’, risks ignoring the continued struggles for dominance and oppres-
sion that took place within them.96 Cognizant of such a tendency, urban his­tor­
ians of architecture and planning such as Zeynep Çelik, Janet Abu-­Lughod, and
others have moved beyond merely assessing the impact of new influences on the
construction of the built environment and instead look at architectural and urban
forms as technologies of colonial power.97 The theoretical rigour of urban history
has been strengthened further by the increased recognition of Marxist spatial
theories of the likes of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey.98 But this has been a
selective reading, neglecting the sources and breadth of Lefebvre’s theory and the
subsequent development of critical geography of which Harvey is but one im­port­
ant representative. Lefebvre drew on the ideas and practices of surrealist and situ­
ation­ist movements, whose vision of the city gave the urban environment agency,
dynamism, and affective power over its populace, but also the reverse, merging
people, objects, and buildings into an aesthetic text that was at once read and
participated in.99 Based on his critical appreciation of these writings, Lefebvre’s
avowedly dialectical theory related the consumption of space to its production,
presenting a simultaneous process of the internalization of social space and exter-
nalization of psychic space. The case for such an approach is strengthened by the
fact that historical actors themselves appreciated this process of structuration. The
servicemen this study is based on demonstrate an awareness of their participation
in the wartime reshaping of the eastern Mediterranean while at the same time

95 Robert Ilbert, Alexandrie, 1830–1930: Histoire d’une Communauté Citadine, vol. 1 (Cairo:
Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1996), p. iii; Edhem Eldem, ‘Istanbul: From Imperial to
Peripheralized City’, in Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Alan Masters, eds, The Ottoman
City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 137.
96 Hans Driessen, ‘Mediterranean Port Cities: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered’, History and
Anthropology, 16 (2005): pp. 129–41, at p. 130.
97 Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), p. xvii; Janet L. Abu-­Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). For a discussion of debates around the history of plan-
ning in the Middle East and elsewhere, see Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait, ‘Introduction: Transporting
Planning’, in Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait, eds, Urbanism: Imported or Exported? (Chichester: John
Wiley, 2003).
98 Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press,
2003), p. 15; Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford:
Clarendon, 2005), p. 10; Samuel Y. Liang, Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual
Culture in the Sojourners’ City, 1853–98 (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 15.
99 Kristin Ross, ‘Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview’, October, 79 (1997) pp. 69–83, at p. 69;
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 18; Peter Collier, ‘Surrealist
City Narrative: Breton and Aragon’, in Edward Timms and David Kelley, eds, Unreal City: Urban
Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1985), p. 228.
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18 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

they essentialized and alienated the Levantine world, investing their en­vir­on­ment
with affective power despite their contribution to its constituent features.
The site of the production of spatial order thus becomes personalized and
re­located to the everyday, a concept which Lefebvre had contended with exten-
sively over the three volumes of his Critique of Everyday Life.100 As Michael
Gardiner has argued, the works of Lefebvre and subsequent theorists of the every-
day, such as Michel de Certeau,101 are distinguished by their identification of
‘inarticulate desires and impulses that cannot be fully colonized by rationalized
systems’.102 Applying such theories to colonial history locates the everyday as a
place in which colonial structures are manifested and maintained but also dis-
rupted by unintended provocation and unexpected resistance.103 Such was the
case in the nocturnal off-­duty encounters of British servicemen, discussed at
length in Chapter 4: when drunken soldiers fought with civilians they were at
once breaching the public order demanded by British military authorities while
at the same time enforcing their position of superiority on which the occupation
was dependent.
The epistemic shift in history writing brought about by feminist theory and
cultural studies has made the application of this concept of the everyday to colonial
history increasingly viable, as suggested by recent works on ‘everyday violence’
and bodily practice in India.104 Perhaps evincing some unwritten connection
between the concept and a preoccupation with the Mediterranean, also seen in
Lefebvre’s writing on coastal cities in his essay Rhythmanalysis, Braudel is the his-
torian who developed the concept of the everyday most rigorously.105 To Braudel
and his colleagues in the Annales school, however, the ‘everyday’ is isolated as the
‘parahistoric’, a constant of the long durée distinguished from the unique ‘event’.106
The study of military personnel in the eastern Mediterranean, however, suggests
that an everyday can also be formed that is distinctive of a short period of time
and limited geography. British occupiers found themselves engaged in routines
far removed from home but which soon acquired a regularity reflected in ubiqui-
tous complaints of boredom. Longer-­term residents also noted how occupation
imposed distinct rhythms on the city that divided it from previous or subsequent
periods, with particular attention to the conflicting routines and sounds of

100 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2008).

101 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
102 Michael Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 16; see also Derek
Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 159.
103 Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore, p. 15.
104 Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, p. 2; Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 2; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical
Experience of the Raj, c.1800–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 4.
105 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of
Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London: Collins, 1981), p. 29.
106 Ibid., p. 27.
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Introduction 19

inhabitants and occupiers.107 Later theoretical geography, of the likes of Allan

Pred, Doreen Massey, Steve Pile, Derek Gregory, and Nigel Thrift, who have con-
tinued to develop theories of spatial structuration with attention to the everyday,
remains largely uncited within historical scholarship,108 while their research,
with a growing number of exceptions, has focused on a Eurocentric present.109
By bringing together these typically segregated literatures, this book aims to
incorporate new methodologies for the assessment of the formation of British
imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean.
By centring the experience of imagined geographies in the everyday, the work
of these theorists can be used to reassess Said’s genealogy of Orientalism, whereby
imperialist policies were concocted according to a well-­established high discourse
on the Orient transmitted intact since the seventeenth century and traceable to
ancient Greece.110 Reading from the testimony of the servicemen and other actors
who constructed Britain’s imperial edifice in the Levant reveals a series of differ-
entiated imagined geographies embedded in shifting networks of communication
and encounter between home and abroad. Understandings of the Levant were
conveyed by individuals whose pathways across the sea served up a sequence of
experiences that constructed the eastern Mediterranean as an imagined geog­
raphy, similar to the ‘scripting’ of Egypt by early tourists described by Gregory.111
Servicemen’s readings of the Levantine city percolated up from repeated observa-
tions and encounters in the cityscape that mixed with or at times displaced the
pre-­digested concepts they had brought with them from the metropole.
An aggregated Orient likewise seems insufficient to account for the diversity
and complexity of spatial, social, and racial orderings elaborated by servicemen,
echoing a broader critique of Said’s failure to account for the ‘discursive heteroge-
neity’ of British thought about the Middle East.112 Aggregations were formed on a
series of geographic scales, with the cities studied here as frequently distinguished
from the larger Orient as they were identified with it. Observers at times situated
the Levant between two other imagined geographies attributed varying degrees of
‘orientalness’, bounded by Arabia on one side and the Balkans on the other.113 But

107 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Sahnenin Dışındakiler (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1990), pp. 241–2.
108 Allan Pred, Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden,
1750–1850 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), pp. 20–1; Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London: Sage,
2005), p. 9; Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, ‘Introduction’, in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, eds, Mapping the
Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3–4.
109 For a collection attempting to address this, see Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne, ‘Introduction:
Urban Theory and the West’, in Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne, eds, Urban Theory beyond the West: A
World of Cities (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1–2.
110 Said, Orientalism, p. 68.
111 Derek Gregory, ‘Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel’, in James S. Duncan
and Derek Gregory, eds, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 116.
112 Alexander Lyon Macfie, ‘Introduction’, in Alexander Lyon Macfie, ed., Orientalism: A Reader
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 7; Bayly, ‘Racial Readings of Empire’, p. 308.
113 For explorations of the geographic imagination of these regions, see Satia, Spies in Arabia,
pp. 12–14, and Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp. 27–8.
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20 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

even this tripartite division oversimplifies the geographic thinking evidenced in

servicemen’s testimony. Rather, there was rarely any cohesion to these different
categories, which overflowed into one another. Though servicemen frequently
spoke of such grand tracts of space as the Orient, they equally often drew distinc-
tions on a more micro level, dividing individuals, groups, and neighbourhoods by
employment, religion, ancestry, residence, ­habits, and dress, each of which were
apportioned different positions in geographic and civilizational hierarchies, so
that imagined geographies were granulated and interspersed in the same space.
The category of the Levantine, who presented ‘every gradation of character, from
the European with no trace of the Oriental about him, to the European who is so
thoroughly Orientalised as scarcely to have preserved any distinctive European
characteristics’, dispersed civilizational fault-­
lines, assumptions about which
retain a dispiriting popularity.114

Sources

Acknowledging the centrality of ‘everyday life’ necessitates breaking with his­tor­

ians’ understandable predilection for official sources. Too much of the history of
early twentieth-­century imperialism has relied on a hierarchy of source material
that uncritically reflects that formulated by imperial bureaucracies.115 Too often,
the same agents whose activities are under investigation by the historian have
been allowed to curate the evidence with which they are held to account, with
official collections such as Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939 at
times forming the almost exclusive basis of books on the region.116 By centring
my research on the personal testimony of the soldiers and officials who con-
structed Britain’s Levantine empire, which document experiences and opinions
often excised from official reporting, I hope to reveal alternative influences on
and effects of policy and behaviour.
British military personnel’s appreciation of the significance of the actions of
which they were a part drove them to write of their experiences. F. W. Turpin, a
seaman on board the auspiciously named HMS Agamemnon, part of the British
flotilla that gathered at the mouth of the Dardanelles in October 1918 in anticipa-
tion of moving into the straits they had failed to capture during the Gallipoli cam-
paign three years previously, noted how ‘all feel instinctively that the East is now
soon to be the scene of historic events’.117 Turpin and many of his comrades in

114 Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, p. 248.

115 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 1.
116 For example, see Erik Lance Knudsen, Great Britain, Constantinople, and the Turkish Peace
Treaty, 1919–1922 (New York: Garland, 1987).
117 IWM, Private Papers of F. W. Turpin, F91/11/1, F. W. Turpin, Diary entry, 24 October 1918.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

Introduction 21

arms were both capable, thanks to increases in literacy in Britain over the previous
century, and motivated to document their shared experiences in the eastern
Mediterranean. The resulting texts, photographs, and other testimony has been
sought and welcomed by archives due to the enduring popularity of the First
World War as a subject of interest for historical researchers and family historians,
generating major holdings at the Imperial War Museum, National Army Museum,
Leeds University Liddle Collection, and King’s College London Liddell Hart
Centre for Military Archives.
From these sources, I have gathered notes from over one hundred soldiers,
sailors, and officials whose service brought them to the eastern Mediterranean.
They range from generals to privates, though it is lieutenants and captains that
form the largest group, reflecting class-­contingent distortions in the archive,
which the addition of later memoirs and efforts to collect oral testimony, such as
those carried out by Peter Liddle at Leeds University, could only partially redress.
This social skewing is just one of the problems of voicelessness when considering
available sources. The reticence of families to expose their relative’s lives to unre-
stricted scrutiny also limits access to servicemen’s testimony. The partiality of
personal sources is compounded further by self-­censorship, conditioned by sol-
diers’ understanding of their own and their likely readers’ tastes and morals. One
notable result of this, for example, is that while military authorities were highly
concerned by soldiers and sailors frequenting brothels in the cities of the eastern
Mediterranean, there are few personal accounts of transactions with prostitutes.
The body of evidence is further complicated by the significant variations in
soldier’s individual responses to their service, which presented them with highly
specific experiences even if they shared the same regiment and division.118
Nonetheless, commonalities are inevitable among groups of individuals enlisted
in a corporatist structure such as the army and conveyed en masse by the dictates
of higher authorities, and so British servicemen sent to the eastern Mediterranean
merit the ‘collective biography’ approach adopted here.119 Soldiers’ testimony
requires attentive reading. The narratives they used to understand their sur-
roundings reveal motivations for their behaviours in the Levantine world they
both inhabited and constructed. Meanwhile, their accounts of activities that the
state was either uninterested in or unaware of vary our understanding of the
impact of war and military rule.
Working from personal testimony puts the soldier centre frame, a figure
surprisingly excluded from much of the history of the First World War.120

118 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London:
Reaktion, 1996), p. 27.
119 For a useful discussion of the methodology of writing collective biography, see James Francis
Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-­San: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), p. 21.
120 Winter and Prost, The Great War in History, p. 83.
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22 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

Soldiers’ accounts began to be read largely for the purposes of uncovering the
material and emotional conditions of their lives as relevant to the outcome on the
battlefield.121 Interest in soldiers’ psychology has long been present, from official
inquiries into morale to a flourishing of gender studies and psychoanalysis-­
influenced literature on soldiering and masculinity.122 Research seeking to under-
stand the lives of soldiers away from the frontline is of comparatively recent
origin, pioneered by the work of John G. Fuller and Jay Winter in the 1980s
and 1990s.123
The prose and poetical narratives of the soldiers identified as ‘war poets’ have
long been investigated by literary scholars, and yet this inquiry has remained
largely separate from the questions asked by historians.124 Paul Fussell, in his
seminal The Great War and Modern Memory and its investigation of ‘the curious
literariness of real life’, was a pioneer in bridging this divide.125 By considering all
soldiers as narrators, their writing invites methods of literary criticism which
have been largely reserved for the few who attained notoriety as authors and
poets.126 The concept of the ‘chronotope’, developed by Mikhail Bakhtin as a tool
for understanding the sites for narrative development that recur in the history of
literature, is useful in categorizing the reappearing topoi of soldiers’ narratives.127
In the case of the Levantine world of British soldiers, this was constituted by the
chronotopes of the ship, the military camp, and the eastern Mediterranean city
and the continuities and contrasts they encountered as they moved these sites.
Works focusing on soldiers’ sense of subjectivity, including those of Fussell and
more recently Joanna Bourke, have, however, been understandably focused on
the most distinctive elements of soldiering—the preparation for, experience of,
and recovery from battle—while falling within a persistent broader scholarly con-
centration on the western front above all others.128 Away from the trenches, the
changes wrought by war upon major cities, including Constantinople and
Salonica, has received significant study, but this literature continues to reflect a

121 John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London:
Pimlico, 2004), pp. 269–80.
122 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
p. 169; Bourke, Dismembering the Male, pp. 11–12; Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure,
Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 34.
123 Jay Murray Winter, The Experience of World War I (London: Macmillan, 1988); J. G. Fuller,
Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
124 Winter and Prost, The Great War in History, p. 86.
125 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. ix.
126 Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War (London: Penguin, 1998),
pp. 1–2.
127 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981), p. 84.
128 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, p. 16; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-­to-­
Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare (London: Granta, 2000), pp. 3–5; Alexander Watson, Enduring the
Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 3–4.
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Introduction 23

home/front divide, in which the focus falls on civilians and soldiers in their dis-
tinctive habitats and not on those instances, frequent though they were, of civil-
ian encounters with the front and soldiers’ encounters in the city.129
Encouragingly, the studies of colonial soldiers and wartime labourers which
have blossomed in the last decade have started to decentre the history of the war,
with a natural attention to other fronts in which colonial troops made up a higher
proportion of servicemen.130 The war’s centenary has brought major conferences
and monographs on the war in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East,
incorporating recent wider historiographical trends and uncovering the experi-
ences of neglected groups of civilians and soldiers in the region.131 Studies of the
occupation of Constantinople are also beginning to be rejuvenated by the forward
roll of notable centenaries, with new projects promising to add to major works on
the topic by Nur Bilge Criss and Abdurrahman Bozkurt.132
The experiences of British soldiers in the First World War eastern Mediterranean
have rarely been the subject of systematic investigation outside of the Gallipoli
Peninsula.133 Their understandings of and interactions with these localities
instead appear in individualized biographical studies of major military, intelli-
gence, and colonial officers such as Reginald Wingate, T. E. Lawrence, Mark
Sykes, and St John Philby.134 The literature on Anzac forces is centred on the east-
ern Mediterranean, though some have not interested themselves in the place of

129 Jay Murray Winter and Jean-­ Louis Robert, Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin
1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Stéphane Yerasimos, ed., Istanbul,
1914–1923: Capitale d’un Monde Illusoire ou l’Agonie des Vieux Empires (Paris: Éditions Autrement,
1992); Vassilis S. Colonas, ‘Salonique Pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale’, in The Salonica Theatre of
Operations and the Outcome of the Great War (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 2005).
130 Santanu Das, ‘Introduction’, in Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World War Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 2; Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan
Dähne, eds, The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean
(Würzburg: Ergon-­Verlag, 2006).
131 Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 (London:
Allen Lane, 2015); Leila Fawaz, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The First World War in the Middle
East (London: Hurst & Co., 2014); Hans-­Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem, and Maurus Reinkowski, eds,
World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2015); M. Hakan Yavuz and Feroz Ahmad, eds, War and Collapse: World War I and the
Ottoman State (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016).
132 Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul under Allied Occupation, 1918–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 1999);
Abdurrahman Bozkurt, İtilaf Devletlerinin İstanbul’da İşgal Yönetimi (Ankara: Atatürk Araştırma
Merkezi, 2014).
133 Leila Fawaz, ‘The Soldiers of World War I in the Middle East’, in Ghislaine Alleaume, Sylvie
Denoix, and Michel Tuchscerer, eds, Histoire, Archéologies et Littératures du Monde Musulman:
Mélanges en l’Honneur d’André Raymond (Cairo: L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2009), p. 205;
Justin Fantauzzo and Robert L. Nelson, ‘A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in
Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18’, Gender & History, 28 (2016): pp. 587–603.
134 M. W. Daly, The Sirdar: Sir Reginald Wingate and the British Empire in the Middle East
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997); Jeffrey Meyers, T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer,
Legend: New Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1989); Elizabeth Monroe, Philby of Arabia (Reading:
Ithaca, 1998); Roger Adelson, Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur (London: Cape, 1975). For an
account of the shared world of these intelligence officers, see Satia, Spies in Arabia, pp. 59–60.
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24 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

these campaigns beyond the terrain of the Gallipoli Peninsula.135 Studies of the
Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Salonika Force have given consideration to
soldiers’ experiences of the climate and culture of Macedonia, Egypt, and Palestine,
while a broader chronological study of British, French, and German soldiers in the
Middle East is the subject of a recently commenced comparative research project.136
I study the private papers of British soldiers present in these theatres alongside
a range of official documents. The confusion of administrative divisions that
resulted from the frantic expansion of British rule to new territories is reflected in
the organization of materials within the archive. Alexandria and Egypt, alongside
the unoccupied Ottoman Empire and Greece, remained the domain of the
Foreign Office despite Britain’s colonial ambitions, and thus provide the mainstay
of official documents drawn on here. The Foreign Office was far from the only
relevant department in the eastern Mediterranean, however. The India Office
also maintained major interests in the region. Its control of the Mesopotamia
Expeditionary Force and responsibility over Iraq until 1921, and its regular inter-
ventions in debates on the Ottoman peace treaties are recorded in the India
Office’s Political and Secret Annual Files. War Office files on operations and mili-
tary authority in the eastern Mediterranean have been used to provide evidence
of intelligence and security operations and the functioning of military camps and
divisions. Where the Treasury, Ministry of Trade, and intelligence services con-
cerned themselves with the eastern Mediterranean, these files are also referenced.
Beyond the United Kingdom, the French diplomatic and military archives have
been consulted, revealing valuable information on the shared occupations of
Salonica and Constantinople, while providing consular reports on British-­
dominated Alexandria. The French diplomatic and military authorities showed a
greater propensity to retain original materials, which can be found unaltered
rather than summarized and synthesized as is often the case in British cor­res­
pond­ence between sites in the eastern Mediterranean and London. Research in
the Cypriot state archives shows the island’s integration into maritime networks
through which supplies, refugees, and prisoners were redistributed. Files from the
Ottoman Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs provide an additional per-
spective on the on- and off-­duty activities of British servicemen where they inter-
sected with Ottoman officials and civilians, as well as disputes between the
Sublime Porte and Allied High Commissioners on issues of urban governance.
When the memoirs and literature of Ottoman witnesses to the occupation makes

135 B. Ziino, ‘A Kind of Round Trip: Australian Soldiers and the Tourist Analogy, 1914–1918’, War
and Society, 25 (2006): pp. 39–52, at p. 42.
136 Michael J. Mortlock, The Egyptian Expeditionary Force in World War I: A History of the British-­
Led Campaigns in Egypt, Palestine and Syria (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), pp. 10–12; Alan Warwick
Palmer, The Gardeners of Salonika (London: Deutsch, 1965), p. 14; Alan Wakefield and Simon Moody,
Under the Devil’s Eye: The British Military Experience in Macedonia 1915–18 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword
Military, 2010); ‘Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792–1920’, accessed
15 July 2019, [Link]
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

Introduction 25

note of such encounters these are also drawn on. Egyptian government docu-
ments and publications available at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and Centre des
Etudes Alexandrines have proved valuable when assessing the impact of wartime
occupation in the city. Despite the wealth of material available, frustrations have
been met in the course of research for the present project, most disappointingly,
perhaps, the elusive pathway of the archives of the Alexandria municipality,
potentially lost to fire at the municipal library where they were previously avail­
able. The necessarily multi-­archival research required of a trans­nation­al research
agenda and the imperatives of the theoretical methodologies applied here leave
any sense of archival consummation more elusive than ever.137

Organization of the Book

This book is composed of thematic chapters built around the typical activities on
a British serviceman’s tour in the eastern Mediterranean: (1) the sea voyage; (2)
arrival in town; (3) setting camp; (4) time off duty; (5) security operations. In the
exploration of these themes, places and times from across the geographical and
chronological breadth of this study are referred to, and so five chronological nar-
ratives, the first covering the decades prior to 1914 and subsequent sections
examining two-­year periods between 1914 and 1922, have been added in order to
more clearly set out the sequence of military and political developments in the
region that frame this study. The final months of Britain’s Levantine empire, its
terminus marked by the evacuation of Constantinople in October 1923, are dis-
cussed in the Conclusion.
The first chapter shows how the onset of the First World War rerouted the
material and human circuits that traversed the eastern Mediterranean. The out-
come of this process, though not without challenges, was the establishment of a
British maritime logistical network that linked Alexandria and Salonica, numer-
ous islands between them, and, briefly, the Gallipoli Peninsula. The chapter docu-
ments the extent of the movements of soldiers, labourers, and refugees set in
course by the war and assesses the role of these sea voyages in establishing narra-
tive tropes about the region.
On arrival in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, these soldiers took on
smaller-­scale circulations through the city streets. The nature of the urban land-
scape they passed through, imagined, and fantasized about forms the subject of
Chapter 2. These were far from empty vistas, however, and soldiers’ relationship
with the crowd and their attempt to categorize the diverse population of these
cities is also explored here.

137 Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of
Global History’, Journal of Global History, 1 (2006): pp. 3–39, at p. 5.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/06/21, SPi

26 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

The third chapter investigates how the incorporation of these cities into the
Allies’ military logistical network posed a set of perceived challenges that were
answered with the militarization of urban space. The rapid development of the
military camp was contrasted with the supposed stagnation of the cities they
orbited. Military authorities responded to this dichotomy by attempting both to
segregate the camp, through restricting the interaction of soldiers and local civil-
ians, and to harmonize the city with military standards, a project cemented by the
town plans for Alexandria and Salonica that coincided with wartime occupation.
The fourth chapter moves from spatial to temporal themes, assessing disjunc-
tures between military routines and the patterns of leisure and nightlife in the
cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Military authorities attempted to control
the desires of their subordinates to escape from the confines of the camp through
the provision of leisure activities and the policing and regulating of nightlife,
stimulating a flourishing of entertainment venues that came to occupy a major place
in the topography of the imagined Levantine city. The chapter finally considers
how military time-­keeping regimes were extended to the city through the control
of licensing and lighting in a failed attempt to silence and extinguish the night.
The final chapter traces the struggle of the military authorities to secure their
grip over the cities they occupied. New legal measures and security institutions
were developed to combat the challenges emanating from the permeable, con-
nected character of the Levantine city. Martial law and military police forces,
however, proved insufficient to suppress anti-­imperial movements, while their
institutionalization advanced the militarizing, anglicizing tendencies of military
rule that further alienated local partners who were relied on for the functioning
of this informal empire. Escalating urban and extra-­urban violence resulted in
the major retrenchment and retreat of British military forces in 1922 and 1923,
bringing to an end the distinct Levantine empire that had bound these cities
together over the preceding years.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

1800–1914

Despite their frequent accusations about the region and its inhabitant’s backward-
ness, British servicemen stepped into an eastern Mediterranean world that had
been undergoing tumultuous changes over prior decades. The growth of steam
shipping brought a manifold increase to the maritime trade and migration that
linked Alexandria, Constantinople, and Salonica both to one another and to more
distant ports. Major infrastructure projects better connected each city, both to its
hinterland and to opposing shores of the Mediterranean. In 1854, a new railway
connecting Alexandria with Cairo was completed under the direction of Robert
Stephenson, the son of the builder of the world’s first passenger railway, between
Liverpool and Manchester, twenty-­four years earlier. Construction of railways
from Constantinople to the Balkans and Anatolia began in 1871, with the im­per­
ial capital connected to Plovdiv and İzmit within two years. Simultaneously a
railway began to be laid from Salonica through the Vardar valley, along which
British troops would later advance, to Pristina, while Salonica was finally con-
nected to Constantinople by rail in 1896.1
Railway projects were intimately linked to the development of harbours for the
onward travel of the goods and passengers they carried. The connection was per-
haps most obvious in the case of the Haydarpaşa port, built alongside the grand
railway terminus that had been designed as a testimony to German diplomatic
prowess in the Near East.2 Harbours in Alexandria, Salonica, Beirut, Smyrna, and
Piraeus received similar improvements, carried out by mostly French engineers
whose careers took them back and forth across the eastern Mediterranean.3
Though they by necessity drew on European capital and technical expertise, the
advantages conveyed by this infrastructure in bureaucratic centralization, the
exploitation of resources, and war-­making were prized by Ottoman sultans and
administrators.4

1 Mazower, Salonica, p. 216.

2 Sean McMeekin, The Berlin–Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World
Power, 1898–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2010), pp. 1–3.
3 Vilma Hastaoglou-Martinidis, ‘The Cartography of Harbor Construction in Eastern
Mediterranean Cities: Technical and Urban Modernization in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Biray
Kolluoğlu and Meltem Toksöz, eds, Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 84–5.
4 V. Necla Geyikdağı, Foreign Investment in the Ottoman Empire: International Trade and Relations
in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 78–9.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

28 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

Such developments were prompted by and facilitated the expansion of steam

shipping, in which British firms had a significant share.5 The requisition of these
ships as troop carriers would be essential in maintaining military logistics in the
Mediterranean, with Britain’s civil maritime predominance aiding in its eventual
victory over the Central Powers.6 Alongside large liners, tramp steamers carried
more and more bulk goods at decreasing freight rates, dominated by British com-
panies but with Greek firms from both the Kingdom of Greece and Ottoman
Empire acquiring an important position in the market.7 Britain had vital interests
in their cargos. From the 1880s on the Mediterranean became the most important
export market for British coal,8 and boats returning to Britain imported the lion’s
share of Egypt’s fast-­increasing cotton crop.9 Ships conveying barley and oats
from southern Russia to Britain passed through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles,
where they joined steamers that had transited the Suez Canal, together supplying
almost half of the foodstuffs purchased from outside of the heavily import-­
dependent British Isles.10 These trades contributed to a mass increase in freight
traffic, with imports to the port of Alexandria increasing from 140 to 3,500 tonnes
in the period 1830–1913,11 during which time the tonnage of shipping docking in
Constantinople more than tripled.12 Increasing numbers of waterfront labourers
handled these growing traffics, joining the employees of other new industrial and
infrastructural projects such as rail and gasworks in constituting an emergent
working class that began to assert its political and economic interests through
unionization.13
Economic expansion was accompanied by rapid demographic growth of all
three cities in the context of regional patterns of urbanization. The population of
Alexandria grew fourfold over the nineteenth century.14 Salonica grew from
30,000 in 1831 to 150,000 in 1913.15 Constantinople, by far the largest city in the

5 Gelina Harlaftis and Vassilis Kardasis, ‘Trade, Transport and Domestic Production in the Century
before World War II’, in Pamuk and Williamson, eds, The Mediterranean Response to Globalization,
p. 246.
6 Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 213.
7 Gelina Harlaftis and John Theotokas, ‘European Family Firms in International Business: British
and Greek Tramp-Shipping Firms’, Business History, 46 (2004): pp. 219–55.
8 C. Knick Harley, ‘Coal Exports and British Shipping, 1850–1913’, Explorations in Economic
History, 26 (1989): pp. 311–38, at p. 313.
9 Harlaftis and Kardasis, ‘Trade, Transport and Domestic Production’, p. 238.
10 Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971), p. 1.
11 Reşat Kasaba, Çağlar Keyder, and Faruk Tabak, ‘Eastern Mediterranean Port Cities and their
Bourgeoisies: Merchants, Political Projects, and Nation-States’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 10
(1986): pp. 121–35, at p. 127.
12 Harlaftis and Kardasis, ‘Trade, Transport and Domestic Production’, p. 241.
13 John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt,
1863–1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 197.
14 Khaled Fahmy, ‘Towards a Social History of Modern Alexandria’, in Anthony Hirst and Michael
Silk, eds, Alexandria, Real and Imagined (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 296.
15 Mazower, Salonica, p. 235.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

1800–1914 29

region, expanded less rapidly but nonetheless more than doubled its population,
growing from 391,000 in 1844 to 864,676 in 1906.16 Growth on such a scale was
achieved through immigration, both from the respective rural hinterlands of
these cities but also from further afield. In the course and aftermath of the 1877
Russo-­Ottoman War almost 400,000 mainly Muslim subjects from contested terri-
tories in the Balkans arrived in Constantinople, from where most were transferred
to the provinces, including close to 20,000 who were sent on to Salonica.17 Similar
large-­scale exoduses were set in train by the Balkan Wars in 1912–13, which saw the
Greek capture of Salonica, and the population exchange agreements that followed.
Displaced people from contemporary conflicts joined the descendants of earlier
waves of Sephardi Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 and later Ashkenazi Jewish
migrants from lost Ottoman territories and eastern Europe.18 The imperial capital
also attracted large numbers of Armenian and Laz migrants from the eastern prov-
inces19 and Greek Orthodox migrants from the Aegean islands and Macedonia in
the West.20 As a result of similar processes of urbanization, those born in the city of
Alexandria formed only a quarter of city dwellers surveyed in 1917.21 A plurality of
the population had migrated from other provinces of Egypt, but there were also a
significant number of migrants from Europe to both Egypt and the Ottoman
Empire, comprising not only a cosmopolitan elite of merchants and financiers, but
a wide social spectrum of individuals who found work in industry and domestic
service.22 British subjects arrived in far smaller numbers than those of France,
Italy, and Austro-­Hungary but they made up sizeable and varied communities in
Alexandria and Smyrna in particular.23 Management of these incomers proved a
formative challenge for developing Ottoman municipal and imperial regimes,
creating institutions that would later share the responsibility of managing wartime
refugees with the occupying Allied forces.24

16 Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), p. 37.
17 D. Akyalçın-Kaya, ‘Immigration into the Ottoman Territory: The Case of Salonica in the Late
Nineteenth Century’, in Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, and Nora Lafi, eds, The City in the Ottoman
Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 178.
18 Ibid., p. 185.
19 Florian Reidler, ‘Armenian Labour Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of the 1890s’,
in Freitag, Fuhrmann, and Lafi, eds, The City in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 164–5; Ryan Gingeras,
‘Beyond Istanbul’s “Laz Underworld”: Ottoman Paramilitarism and the Rise of Turkish Organized
Crime, 1908–1950’, Journal of Contemporary European History, 19 (2010): pp. 215–30, at p. 217.
20 Méropi Anastassiadou, ‘Greek Orthodox Immigrants and Modes of Integration within the
Urban Society of Istanbul (1850–1923)’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 24 (2009): pp. 151–67, at
pp. 155–6.
21 The Census of Egypt Taken in 1917, p. 574.
22 M. Fuhrmann, ‘“I Would Rather Be in the Orient”: European Lower-Class Immigrants into the
Ottoman Lands’, in Freitag, Fuhrmann, and Lafi, eds, The City in the Ottoman Empire, p. 228.
23 Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crises 1882–1922 (London: I. B. Tauris,
2012), p. 158.
24 Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, and Nora Lafi, ‘Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity
in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond’, in Freitag, Fuhrmann, and Lafi, eds, The City in the Ottoman
Empire, p. 1.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

30 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

Table I.1 Population by religious denomination for Constantinople (1914),25

Alexandria (1917),26 and Salonica (1913).27

Religion Constantinople Alexandria Salonica

Muslim 560,434 322,437 45,867

Jewish 52,126 24,838 61,439
Orthodox 278,338 a 54,887 40,000
Catholic 13,210 b 34,099 —
Protestant 1,213 3,604 —
Total 909,978 444,617 157,889

a 205,375 Greek Orthodox/72,963 Armenian Gregorian Christians.

b 9,918 Armenian Catholics/2,905 ‘Latins’/387 Greek Catholics.

As a result of these waves of migration, the population of the principal cities

of the eastern Mediterranean remained highly diverse, as can be seen in Table I.1.
The homogenization effected by the Balkan Wars was far from complete, despite
the flight of some 300,000 Muslims from territories occupied by the Balkan
League and 265,000 Greeks from Ottoman Thrace and Asia Minor in 1912–14.28
Through the use of censuses and the developing science of demography, Greek,
Ottoman, and Egyptian states made efforts to calculate the sectarian make-­up of
the cities they ruled.
While British statisticians had seen deficiencies in the Ottoman censuses as
further evidence of the state’s backwardness, a predictable selectiveness marked
the approach of British military administrators, diplomats, and statesmen to the
demographics of the eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps more important than the
statistics that censuses supplied was the impression of heterogeneity gained mov-
ing through the city, a point explored in Chapter 2. This convinced British offi-
cials and officers of the contestable nature of any and all national claims, providing
the advocates of imperial military intervention with the pretence that Britain
could play the role of an impartial arbitrator between diverse groups with diver-
gent interests.
Census statistics weighed lightly on the minds of policy-­makers in a region in
which migration was recognized as having played such a transformative role. In
the metahistorical narratives familiar to policy-­makers, the ethnography of the
eastern Mediterranean had been produced by the mass migrations of Arabs and
Turks from further east. When confrontation with the Ottoman Empire in the
First World War brought Turcophobia to the fore, statesmen and commentators

25 Stanford J. Shaw, ‘The Ottoman Census System and Population, 1831–1914’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 9 (2009): pp. 325–38, at p. 336.
26 The Census of Egypt Taken in 1917.
27 Mazower, Salonica, p. 284.
28 Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Rural Settlement of
Refugees 1922–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 39–40.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

1800–1914 31

raised the hope that these migrations might be reversed. The journalist Edwin
Pears, whose reports on the Bulgarian massacres had moved Prime Minister
William Gladstone in the 1870s to demand the expulsion of Turks from Europe
‘bag and baggage’, suggested that the Turkish residents of Constantinople ‘believe
that as they came from Asia they will one day depart hither’.29
Migration, demographic growth, and economic integration were accompanied
by political transformation. New institutional forms were developed to promote
the economic interests of the cities’ increasingly prominent commercial bour-
geois. Reformist political projects in Khedival Egypt and the Tanzimat-­ era
Ottoman Empire brought additional impetus to urban planning and created new
institutions for urban government. The creation of municipalities began tenta-
tively with the creation of a local council for Galata in 1857, a neighbourhood of
Constantinople where Christian Ottoman subjects and foreigners predominated,
before municipalities were extended to all districts of the city in 1868.30 In 1869,
Salonica likewise received a municipal council, though it was its appointed gov­
ern­or, Sabri Pasha, who was the greater force in the radical redevelopment of the
town in the following years.31 A short-­lived municipality was also created in
Alexandria in 1868, following the Ottoman capital’s lead, but its function was
obstructed by European consuls jealous of their significant role in local govern-
ance.32 It was not until 1890 that a formal municipal council was re-­established,
composed of a mixture of government-­appointed officials and members elected
by property-­holding males, subject to quotas limiting each nationality to three
representatives and thereby ensuring the vast underrepresentation of Ottoman
subjects.33 Despite such iniquities, the creation of municipalities marked a significant
rupture with prior forms of urban governance, part of a pattern of concurrent
urban development in cities across Europe and the wider world.34
Municipal reforms were debated in a growing written public sphere. Newspaper
publication began with the launch of official gazettes, al-­Waqai al-­Misriyya in
Cairo in 1828, Takvim-­i Vekayi in Constantinople in 1831, and later Selanik in
Salonica in 1869. The later nineteenth century saw the flourishing of literary and

29 Edwin Pears, ‘Allied Fleets before Constantinople’, The Manchester Guardian, 9 November 1918.
30 Steven Rosenthal, ‘Foreigners and Municipal Reform in Istanbul: 1855–1865’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 11 (1980): pp. 227–45, at p. 228.
31 Mazower, Salonica, p. 225.
32 Gabriel Baer, ‘The Beginnings of Municipal Government in Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies, 4
(1968): pp. 118–40, at p. 124; Nora Lafi, ‘Mediterranean Connections: The Circulation of Municipal
Knowledge and Practices during the Ottoman Reforms, c.1830–1910’, in Pierre-Yves Saunier and
Shane Ewen, eds, Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal
Moment, 1850–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 43.
33 Baer, ‘The Beginnings of Municipal Government in Egypt’, p. 131.
34 Nora Lafi, ‘Introduction: Municipalités Méditerranéennes: Pratique du Comparatisme, Lecture
des Changements Institutionnels et Analyse Historique de l’Évolution des Pouvoirs Urbains du XVIIIe
au XXe Siècle’, in Nora Lafi, ed., Municipalités Méditerranéennes: Les Réformes Urbaines Ottomanes au
Miroir d’une Histoire Comparée (Moyen-Orient, Maghreb, Europe Méridionale) (Berlin: K. Schwarz,
2005), p. 14.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/06/21, SPi

32 Britain ’ s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923

press culture; Constantinople had forty-­seven journals by 1876, and Salonica had
seen over seventy in the period from 1869 to 1912.35 This growing press became
the site for the discussion of the changing urban environment and wider world.
Newspapers increasingly called on municipalities for action on issues such as
public health, street cleaning, and slum clearances.36 Radical groups connected
with their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere promoted visions of an alterna-
tive political order to urban populations increasingly concerned by the inequality
of their workplaces and the interdependence of the global economy they were a
part of.37 These cities’ later British occupiers attempted to court established press
opinion, and where it was not possible, imposed censorship preventing excessive
criticism of the military’s position and policies.
In an attempt to answer these pressures, municipalities employed men from a
growing pool of city planners, architects, and engineers for whom the cities of the
eastern Mediterranean were part of an expanded global market that included
both colonial cities and their European metropoles.38 The projects they helped
implement brought the hallmarks of modernity in a process of ‘infrastructural
globalization’.39 These included street lights, installed by the French firm Lebon in
Alexandria in 1893, piped water, implemented with Belgian capital in Salonica in
1893, paved roads, like those paid for out of the funds raised by the Alexandria
Commission du Commerce d’Exportation, and tramways, which reached
Constantinople in 1869, Salonica in 1893, and Alexandria in 1897.40 New street
networks for bourgeois European-­style neighbourhoods were laid out around
Salonica’s Boulevard Hamidiye and administrative hubs such as Constantinople’s
Beyazit square.41 Grand barracks, palaces, and civic buildings proliferated, pro-
jecting modernity and imperial power.42 Many of the grandest private and public
buildings, such as the Selimiye barracks and large hotel-­cum-­orphanage on
Prinkipo, would be occupied by British forces or given over to other functions
during the occupation years. Though it was French-­trained engineers and Italian

35 Elisabeth Kendall, ‘Between Politics and Literature: Journals in Alexandria and Istanbul at the
End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Bayly and Fawaz, eds, Modernity and Culture, p. 331; Alexandra
Yerolympos, ‘Conscience Citadine et Intérêt Municipal à Salonique à la Fin du XIX Siècle’, in François
Georgeon, Paul Dumont, and Méropi Anastassiadou-Dumont, eds, Vivre dans l’Empire Ottoman:
Sociabilités et Relations Intercommunautaires (XVIIIe–XXe Siècles) (Paris-Louvain: Peters, 1997), p. 125.
36 Ilbert, Alexandrie, vol. 2, p. 519; Mazower, Salonica, p. 231.
37 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, p. 6.
38 Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Introduction: Global City, Take 2: A View from Urban History’, in Saunier
and Ewen, eds, Another Global City, p. 9.
39 Robert A. Bickers, ‘Infrastructural Globalization: Lighting the China Coast, 1860s–1930s’,
Historical Journal, 56 (2013): pp. 431–58, at p. 431.
40 On Barak, ‘Scraping the Surface: The Techno-Politics of Modern Streets in Turn-of-Twentieth-
Century Alexandria’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 24 (2009): pp. 187–205, at p. 193.
41 Mazower, Salonica, p. 227; Zeynep Çelik, ‘Bouvard’s Boulevards: Beaux-Arts Planning in
Istanbul’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 43 (1984): pp. 341–55, at pp. 346–7.
42 Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), p. 1.
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