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The 1915–17 Armenian deportations and massacres generally referred to as the Armenian Genocide constitute the collective violence committed against the Armenians during this stage. This chapter analyzes the Young Turk denial of the act of collective violence as the Young Turk government argued that the violence was not intentional but rather an unintended consequence of the strategic deportation of Armenians from one location to another during World War I. Such denial of the act, the chapter argues, emerges through the interaction of the Young Turk structure of similarity and Young Turk modernity, on the one hand, and of polarizing Young Turk sentiments with the 1912–13 Balkan Wars, on the other. Selective silences and selective subversions form the twin strategies of Young Turk denial.

This chapter's focus is the Ottoman CUP genocide committed against its Armenian and Syriac populations, in 1915-16. We consider how the ethnic cleansings of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 helped feed the conditions of the ensuing mass genocide, CUP plans to move around entire populations, to Turkify them, or remove them, and how the decision to join the Great War amplified and accelerated drives to 'national' solutions. A key focus is the triangular struggle between Turks, Kurds and Armenians on the east Anatolian plateau and how the contingency of war fed CUP fears of a supposed Armenian fifth column threat in the eastern rear. The decision for mass deportation and extermination however, appears less the result of a blueprint and more the consequence of multiple factors coming together in summer 1915. The chapter concludes with discussion of the perceived economic and political advantages of Armenian destruction to an emerging Turkey.

The Balkan Wars resulted in huge military casualties, and in military terms, were the precursor of World War I. Mass mobilization, large turning movements, and trench warfare all occurred during the conflict. New weapons, such as airplanes and rapid-fire artillery, were utilized. However, few lessons from the Balkan Wars enlightened the European military establishments that would soon find themselves engaged in conflict. One reason was the brief interval between the end of the Balkan Wars and the beginning of World War I. Another reason was that the Balkan states did not welcome foreigners who wanted to observe their operations. Many of those military attaches who did examine the Balkan Wars ignored the tactical lessons that might have had import for the conduct of World War I. Instead, they focused on issues that tended to confirm preconceived doctrines.

This chapter discusses the origins and execution of the mass deportations of Albanians, Greeks and Armenians during the First World War. Rather than emphasize the role of Turkish nationalism in influencing the Ottoman government's decision to deport and murder large numbers of its non-Muslim citizens, the chapter underscores the state's concerns over the internal security of the region. It carefully points out the contradictions found within the state's decision for large numbers of these three groups, as well as the many acts of local resistance to this policy. Most accounts of the Armenian Genocide do not pay close attention to the consequences of the return of thousands of Armenians to the South Marmara after 1918, something which is dicussed in the latter part of this chapter.

The chapter explains the international and ideational context and the conduct of the Balkan Wars. It indicates the divergence of historical knowledge in and about the region, not only between the Turks and the other Balkan nations, but also among the various Balkan peoples. It discusses international policy to disintegrate the multi-ethnic and multi-religious polity of the Ottomans, explaining the strategies implemented by the rival powers to erode the polity from inside and outside. It recalls that the young men of the Balkans fighting the war were taking and losing lives in the name of resurrecting the nationalistic myths of ancient glories as inculcated in them by their schoolmasters. The chapter includes a summary of the course of the Balkan Wars in order to provide the context of the war to which the Indian Muslims decided to send their doctors.

Chapter 1 provides a chronological introduction to the Balkan Wars by presenting the major battlefields, the accompanying political developments inside Ottoman society and the shaping of the Ottoman home front. It mostly relies on Ottoman sources and secondary literature to present and discuss the main events of the war as they were reported to Ottoman audiences through the publishing of formal proclamations and the censored press. Basing the discussion on Ottoman archives, contemporary press and memoirs literature, published in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Judeo-Spanish, this chapter follows the tremendous shift from a jubilant and self-confident society, celebrating the outbreak of the war and mobilization with much enthusiasm, into a defeated one.

This chapter explains how a robust multi-ethnic society was destroyed within a relatively short time frame, which might appear to indicate that communal relations had in fact been tenuous. In fact, the destruction was the result of political violence and not generated by communal differences. The argument forwarded here is that communities were compelled to focus on their differences by ten years of relentless violence perpetrated by agencies (states, politicians, paramilitaries) that were determined created nations as homogenous cultural spaces. The cumulative effect of the violence was to turn Ottomans into Turks and Greeks, although these transformed peoples resisted complete acculturation by maintaining nostalgic memories of a pre-national order of communal harmony. Nostalgia in this case represented a form of resistance.

This chapter examines how shifting borders—due to the Balkan Wars and World War I—resulted in initiatives that homogenized the people of Bulgaria by changing the collective identifications of the country's diverse inhabitants. Between 1912 and 1918, the Bulgarian territory changed four times, and each of these territorial changes culminated in extensive population movements and nationalization campaigns. Many of its new inhabitants, previously accustomed to the ethnic diversity typical of the Ottoman Empire, were transformed into minorities. The new minorities often became refugees, and these refugees exerted pressures on other minority populations in their new nation-states, demonstrating the interrelatedness of homogenizing campaigns and minority policies in the entire area.

International conflict throughout twentieth-century Europe can be divided into three parts. The first phase began with the Balkan Wars in 1912, extended through to the end of World War I, and lasted until 1921 in Europe. The Paris peace settlement proved to be fragile, and after a brief respite of only 18 years World War II exploded in Europe. As soon as a new generation grew to the age of maturity, the conflict restarted. Although the second phase was the shortest in duration, it cost the most lives and did the most damage by far. The third conflict, the Cold War, segued neatly with the end of World War II, given the lack of an effective peace settlement. Although the Cold War was the longest lasting of the conflicts and potentially the most deadly, it was in fact the least damaging in terms of human lives and material losses.

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and World War I shattered the social fabric of Ottoman Europe and led to a radical revision of the region’s political boundaries. How did experiences of successive traumas—expulsions, famine, disease, massacres, and new occupation regimes—shape Muslims’ understandings of the European project and their experiences within it? This chapter analyzes this catastrophic era from diverse Muslim perspectives. It reveals how many Muslims found legal promises of political equality and rights ambiguous and intangible, and instead sought to define their own terms of political belonging. They wanted autonomy, confessional sovereignty, and the protection of Islamic institutions and property.

Chapter I presents the story of origins of modern Balkan paramilitaries which was shaped during the late 19th—early 20th century nation and state building processes in the Balkans. Existing traditions of guerrilla warfare were used during the struggle between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia over Ottoman Macedonia when all three countries initiated sending of small armed bands to Macedonia in order to protect their own and intimidate rivals followers. It also describes appearance of Albanian national movement and how Balkan countries used their respective paramilitaries during the Balkan Wars 1912-1913 and the First World War. It also shows how during the Toplica uprising in 1917 against Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian occupation regimes in Serbia happened yet another bloody encounter of Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian paramilitaries. Situation after the First World War was characterised by adjusting to new realities, by creation of new organizations and by arrival of non-Balkan actors—‘White’ Russians émigrés and former participants in Russian revolutions. Both groups brought their own experiences, visions and rivalries.

This chapter chronicles the initial wave of revolutionary fervor in the Muslim world. It first looks at Persia, the first revolutionary Muslim tendencies arose. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, European political alignments changed, with tragic consequences for the Muslim world under European domination, despite theoretical independence. The new European political alignment, founded on a de facto alliance between France, Great Britain, and Russia, came about directly at the expense of the Muslim world in Morocco, Egypt, and Persia. By contrast, imperial Germany, which felt threatened by a supposed desire to encircle it, more than ever looked like the major power protecting Islam.

The chapter discusses the administration and life of the Muslims in Greece in the turbulent period of the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the Asia Minor War (1919–1922). These wars inflamed passions that often worsened relations between Muslims and state and local authorities and ethnic Greeks. After the end of the Asia Minor War, Greece and Turkey decided to exchange what they regarded as their “religious other” in order to achieve religious and ethnic homogeneity and in this way avoid future intrastate wars. As a result, 1,00,000 Orthodox Christians, many of whom did not speak Greek, were sent to Greece, and around 500,000 Muslims, many of whom did not speak Turkish, were sent to live in Turkey. The only Muslims who were exempted from this exchange were those of Western Thrace and the Albanian-speaking Muslims of northwestern Greece, known as Çams.

Amidst the Balkan Wars and the transition of the port city of Salonica [Thessaloniki] from Ottoman to Greek rule, thousands of Sephardi Jewish women and men sought creative legal footholds in a nationalizing Europe by seeking the status of protected persons, or protégés, from Portugal, Spain, and Austro-Hungary. What legal rights, and what limits, were placed upon those who inscribed themselves on the ledgers of foreign consulates? How did individual Jews and Jewish families come by their protection, and in what ways did this status serve—or work against—them over time? To address these questions, this chapter explores the legal environment of war-torn from Salonica various perspectives: that of Portuguese officials in Lisbon; Portuguese consuls in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; critics of the institution of extraterritoriality; non-Jewish Greek observers and the Greek authorities; and, finally, individual Jewish seekers and holders of Portuguese papers—women and men who acquired Portuguese papers and subsequently sought to leverage this protection to their advantage over the course of the First World War, with the rise of Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar’s authoritarian and corporatist regime in Portugal, and during the frantic lead-up to the Second World War.

As East Central Europe was at the epicenter of the conflagration, in a way starting already with the Balkan Wars in 1912–13, the debate on war aims was extremely vivid in the region. Political conflict occurred over whether to enter the war or remain neutral, or else over the choice between the two alliance systems, which also implied choosing a civilizational model. Perceived war aims shifted considerably over time, particularly among national movements lacking independent nation-states: whereas in 1914 most demanded national emancipation within the imperial framework, by autumn 1918 the postulate of independence became prevalent. Importantly, World War I can be considered the climax of developments in fin-de-siècle political thought: expansion of the political sphere found powerful expression in national mobilization; the war experience was seen as proof that the lower classes and women deserved political rights; and the space for moderate rhetoric shrank further, driving radicals on the right and left further apart.

This chapter studies Mohamad Ali, a Khilafat agitation leader. It reveals the deep tensions surrounding the Hindus and the Muslims despite political connections that were formed after the Lucknow Pact and the Balkan Wars. It also examines Mohamed Ali’s political and intellectual transformation before the war, and shows how this was affected by his imprisonment during the war. Describing Ali in more detail, he is compared to Gandhi. The chapter takes a look at the dismemberment of Turkey, an event the Indian Muslims and the Indian government had feared for many years. It also considers Gandhi’s involvement in the satyagraha struggle against the Rowlatt Bills, and the impact the release of the Ali brothers had on the Khilafat agitation in 1919. The chapter ends with a study of Gandhi’s strategy to move Khilafat agitation into conventional nationalist politics.

The chapter reconstructs the story of the Indian Medical Mission to the Balkan Wars from the beginning until the end as reported by Dr Ansari to the Indian Muslims through his letters in 1912–13. The chapter starts by discussing the motivations and personalities of the main members of the Mission including Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari as well as their interlocutors in Turkey such as the ground-breaking obstetrician Besim Ömer Akalin and the charismatic leader of the Young Turks İsmail Enver Bey. It will argue that the personalities involved in the endeavour have been the main reason why this particular Mission and not the other two missions recorded in Turkish archives had generated interest among both the Turks and more importantly on the Indian Muslims. The chapter chronicles the medical, humanitarian and political activities of the mission.