The Ottoman Empire and Its Eastern Provinces

The Turkish Studies Chair of the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon) and the Gomidas Institute (London), will be hosting a new lecture series entitled “The Ottoman Empire and its Eastern Provinces” (Winter 2012).

The lectures will be given by leading scholars from Turkey, Switzerland, Sweden and the United States on a variety of topics that still resonate with us today. Each month one speaker will make their presentation to a critical audience in Munich, and each talk will be reported for the benefit of the broader scholarly community.

6.02.2013

Prof. Dr. Hans-Lukas Kieser: A Wholly Different Perspective:The Reform Project for the Ottoman Eastern Provinces in 1913-1914

Abstract: The "Kurdo-Armenian Question" became central to both the future of the Ottoman state and the modern West's troubling Eastern Question at the Berlin Congress in 1878. Only at the eve of the First World War however, the reform of the Ottoman eastern provinces rised to top priority in international diplomacy. The interior and exterior efforts then profited from a temporary "Armenian turn" in German Orientpolitik and resulted in a comprehensive, democratizing reform plan signed in February 1914. The retrospectively wholly different, counterfactual perspective of this plan challenges the bloody course the Young Turk Committee government of the Ottoman Empire took after the European July crisis of 1914. This the more so as the same eastern provinces of the Republic of Turkey continued to lack a peace poignantly squandered or unachieved in late Ottoman times.

Hans-Lukas Kieser, Adjunct Professor for Modern History at the University of Zurich specialising on the late Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, and on interactions between the Middle East and the transatlantic world in general. He has authored Nearest East. American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East (Philadelphia 2012, 2d ed.) and Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen der Türkei 1839-1938 (Zurich 2000, in Turkish: Istanbul 2010, 3d ed.); has edited Turkey Beyond Nationalism (London 2012, 2d ed.) and co-edited The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zurich 2003, 2d ed.).

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