Occupation and Liberation, 1916-1922

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The later years of the First World War involved military occupations by Russian Imperial, German, British, Ottoman, French, Habsburg, and later Soviet forces. Belligerent nations viewed the conduct of the war and the shape of the postwar settlement as necessarily being characterized by occupation and annexations. After the October revolution, German, British, Ottoman, and French occupation regimes proliferated in the territory of the former Russian Empire, while Soviet forces eventually re-captured territory under their own occupying forces. This panel explores the long First World War and the creation of post-imperial states through the lens of worlds of occupation, presenting three case studies of occupation and the political, diplomatic, and cultural environments these occupations created. While occupation regimes often imposed strict military force, they also created opportunities for other actors. The removal of occupation was viewed as liberation, while promises of liberation were often contingent upon further periods of occupation. Through papers on the Russian Imperial military occupation of eastern Anatolia, the British occupation and subsequent Sovietization of Georgia, and the diplomatic and trade negotiations conducted by Ukrainian representatives in occupied Istanbul, this panel will explore the kaleidoscopic intersection of occupation regimes, repression, and revolution in the years of the First World War.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Jo Laycock, U of Manchester (UK)

Papers

• Well-Informed Occupiers in Charge: Russian General Governors of Occupied Ottoman Territories during WWI - Halit Dundar Akarca, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

• The Ottoman-Ukrainian Relations and Visions of (Post)Imperial Order on the Black Sea from the Occupied Istanbul: Sovereignty and International Trade, 1918-1922 - Azat Bilalutdinov, Columbia U

• British Occupation Regimes in Georgia and the South Caucasus, 1918-1921 - Samuel Coggeshall, UNC at Wilmington

Discussant

• Peter Isaac Holquist, U of Pennsylvania