Post-Imperial Equivocations: Turkey’s Temperamental Mobilization of the Caliphate, 1919-1924

13.05.2021 | 17.00 CET | A TSN Spring Series Lecture by Isa Blumi

Central to the transformations of capitalist imperialism was the de facto bankruptcy of the old European empires after World War I. Accordingly, the cash-strapped bureaucrats of these dying structures stuck in Africa, the Middle East, China, and India followed a sustainability criterion that precariously tied individual administrative “success” to extracting a maximum amount of wealth at minimal cost. Sadly, this financial dynamic rarely informs the study of the 20th Century imperialism, thus distorting the labelling of Empire as a coherent, monolithic agent of history. The presentation of Isa Blumi addresses such methodological issues by revealing the extent to which the bankrupt British Empire adopted an array of contradictory policies towards often hostile Muslim subjects. Such varying policies often clashed as each reflected the distinctive issues facing administrators of these unique regions.

Isa Blumi is Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies within the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies. . His latest work covers the late Ottoman period and successor regimes, arguing that these events are part of process that interlinks the Balkans, the Middle East, and the larger Islamic world to arenas traditionally seen beyond the relevance of these “regions.” In this respect, it is key to explore in a comparative, integrated manner how late and post-Ottoman communities fits into what is a global story of transition. This was explored in his 2012 book Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State and his Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World, which was published in 2013.