Came back to drop this off since we were discussing WWI in an earlier thread today and the subject came up:

How the Occupation of Istanbul Shaped the Modern Middle East

DURHAM, NC - At the end of World War I, the defeated capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, was “a city of poverty and refugees” with a multiethnic population of 1 million, with 100,000 refugees including Balkan Muslims, Russians, Crimean and Caucasian Muslims, Jews, Armenians and Turks.

“Multiple ethnicities and languages mixed and mingled. Each brought with it a separate ideology and vision,” said Duke Associate Professor of Turkish & Middle Eastern Studies Erdağ Gknar, speaking last week as part of the provost office’s Thomas Langford Lectureship.

When the British, French, Italians and Greeks arrived to occupy the city in 1918, they ignored the cosmopolitan space of the city, focusing instead on nationalities. The logic of emphasizing national groups was informed by Wilsonian principles of national self-determination. This was the same logic that led to the greater partition of Ottoman territory that Gknar said reconstituted the Middle East and whose violent consequences can be seen throughout the region today. […]

^{(I’m really leaving this time, I swear…)}