Imperial Collapse and Post-Imperial Transitions in the Black Sea Region, 1917-1926

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

As the Russian and Ottoman Empires disintegrated in the wake of the First World War, numerous scientific, military, diplomatic, and nationalizing projects emerged across the wider Black Sea region from 1917 until the mid-1920s. From imperial to national archaeological and ethnographic expeditions in occupied territories on the Caucasian front in Eastern Anatolia, to disputes over naval vessels and property in Ottoman Istanbul, to pioneering diplomatic initiatives and tensions along the newly established Soviet-Turkish border, this panel explores how a diverse array of historical actors asserted themselves in contested spaces and made claims on contested objects during a period of rapidly shifting borders and political entities. Yet, even as the collapse of empires and sovereignty regimes brought new opportunities, older patterns of contestation—competing nationalisms, issues of reclamation and restitution, echoes of bygone imperial rivalries in new alliances—endured into the post-imperial era. Taken together, these three papers illuminate crucial moments in the reshuffling of political and spatial orders at both ends of the Black Sea.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Charis Marantzidou, Columbia U

Papers

• Archaeological Explorations and Nation Building in the Occupied Ottoman Territories under Revolutionary Turmoil - Halit Dundar Akarca, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

• Revolutionary Transition in the Black Sea: Post-Imperial Property Disputes in Ottoman Istanbul, 1917-1923 - Azat Bilalutdinov, Columbia U

• Friendship Without Borders?: Soviet-Turkish Encounters in the Eastern Black Sea Borderlands in the Early 1920s - Harrison King, UC Berkeley

Discussant

• Michael Anthony Reynolds, Princeton U