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Economic Warfare and the Evolution of the Allied Blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean: August 1914-April 1917

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Economic Warfare and the Evolution of the Allied Blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean: August 1914-April 1917 ECONOMIC WARFARE AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE ALLIED BLOCKADE OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN: AUGUST 1914-APRIL 1917 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Arab Studies By Lindsey Cummings, B.A. Washington, DC April 14, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Lindsey Cummings All Rights Reserved ii ECONOMIC WARFARE AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE ALLIED BLOCKADE OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN: AUGUST 1914-APRIL 1917 Lindsey Cummings, B.A. Thesis Advisors: Mustafa Aksakal, Ph.D. and Salim Tamari, Ph.D. ABSTRACT On August 25, 1915 the Allied Powers officially declared the entirety of the Ottoman Empire’s Mediterranean coast under blockade after nearly a year of war and several months of direct hostilities with Ottoman troops. This blockade, while acknowledged to have played a role in producing severe shortages and civilian famine, remains understudied as an aspect of Allied policy during the First World War. This thesis critically examines the evolution of the blockade, particularly as it was manifested off the coast of Ottoman Syria where supply shortages and famine was particularly acute, in order to add dimension and depth to an aspect of the war that was both militarily significant and had a profound impact on daily civilian life throughout the war. The blockade of the Syrian coast was not a singular policy that emerged at the beginning of the war and remained constant; rather, it evolved over the first several years of the war in response to changing political and military circumstances and became fixed toward the end of 1915. The Allies had full knowledge that a blockade of the Ottoman Empire’s Mediterranean coast would produce food and supply shortages to the detriment of the empire’s civilian populations; however, this reality was understood as a necessary by-product of their wartime policies. iii This research was made possible by a grant from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. I would like to thank the faculty at CCAS as well as my advisors, Mustafa Aksakal and Salim Tamari, for their advice and encouragement over the past two years. I am also hugely appreciative of the support of my fellow thesis writers: Craig Browne, Erica Vasquez, Gareth Smail, Sacha Robehmed, Faisal Kattan, and Kelli Harris. A big thank you to each of you for reading drafts upon drafts of my work and for your encouragement and solidarity along the way. Thanks are also in order to Vicki Valosik for her diligence in keeping our cohort of thesis writers on track and motivated. Thank you to my family and friends who have been supportive from the very beginning. To my parents, for being my number one fans no matter what the endeavor. Thank you for your love and counseling, as well as your unabated faith in me. And finally, to Greg Roeth, thank you for being on this journey with me. Any sanity and composure I have maintained throughout this process is thanks to your support behind the scenes. Thank you. Lindsey Cummings April 2015 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter I: The Prelude to the First World War…………………………………………………13 Chapter II: The Evolution of the Allied Blockade of the Syrian Coast…………………………37 Chapter III: America and the Blockade…………………………………………………………66 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………95 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….98 v Introduction Was it all a dream? So I ask myself in the wide free security of my own dear country. Were they real, those years of indefinite apprehension, when in very exasperation at the deadly quiet, we fairly shrieked for something to go off with a bang, even if we ourselves should be annihilated in the crash! Anything, we cried, anything but the menacing monotony. Always before us, to the West, the smiling treacherous blue sea, changed by the blockade from a way for us to get out to a means to keep us in.1 In the aftermath of the Great War, Frederick James Bliss penned an account of what he and his colleagues at Syrian Protestant College in Beirut had witnessed during the period from late 1914 to 1919. The opening sentences of his post-war account, quoted above, recall the looming presence of Allied warships that, for the better part of the war, were charged with blockading the coast of Ottoman Syria.2 His astute reference to the blockade highlights the sense of enclosure and isolation that the blockading fleet inspired. The purpose of this thesis is to interrogate and analyze how Allied policies in the Eastern Mediterranean evolved over the first several years of the war and to periodize and contextualize the evolution of Allied policies, which culminated in the declaration of an official blockade on August 25, 1915. In doing so, this thesis assesses, first, the extent to which the Allied powers used economic warfare against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War to the detriment of the empire’s civilian population, and second, it analyzes how Ottoman authorities attempted to secure and control their Mediterranean coast in light of the Allied blockade. Over the course of the First World War between 350,000 and 500,000 of the inhabitants of Ottoman Syria died, the vast majority falling victim to famine and disease. Considering the pre-war population of the region was about 4 million, the death toll ranges between 8.75 and 12.5 percent of the population. Beirut and Mount Lebanon were particularly hard hit by the 1 Frederick James Bliss, “Retrospect: 1914-1919,” AUB Archives, Howard Bliss Papers, AA: 2.3.2.18.3. 2 I use Ottoman Syria to refer to the geographic region that encompasses modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 1 wartime famine with mortality rates as high as 50% in some areas.3 Explanations for the catastrophic loss of human life during the war abound. Frederick Bliss’ account, littered with apocalyptic images of starvation and destitution, points out that the catastrophic level of civilian suffering was made possible by a constellation of factors. Bliss credits “the blockade by sea; the commandeering of transportation facilities for military purposes by land; the breaking down of alleged attempts at government food regulation; the depreciation of currency; profiteering… [and] a swarm of locusts which darkened the land from the South,” with producing and sustaining a famine that “reduced the population of the Lebanon, for example, by one-third, and the lowest calculation.”4 Contemporary studies on the famine have similarly noted that a “perfect storm” of factors played a role in producing and sustaining famine throughout the war years. While scholars like Schilcher, Thompson, and Tanielian have produced nuanced, well-researched studies on the famine which evaluate these causes; narratives that levy blame exclusively on Ottoman authorities who, it has been argued, deliberately starved the population of Syria to rid the empire of a population viewed as having questionable loyalty, still carry a level of currency.5 Historiography of a very different bent pinpoints Allied policy in the Eastern Mediterranean, 3 George Antonius estimates the death toll in Greater Syria to be 350,000 while Schilcher, using German records, estimates the death toll to be as high as 500,000. According to Tanielian, the death toll in Beirut and Mount Lebanon was between 150,000 and 300,000 out of a pre-war population of between 414,800 and 630,000. See Linda Schilcher, “Famine in Syria, 1915-1918,” in Problems of the Middle East in Historical Perspective: Essays in Honor of Albert Hourani, eds. John P. Spagnoo and Albert Hourani (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1996), 229. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 241. Melanie Tanielian, “The War of Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon” (PhD dissertation, University of California, 2012), 6. Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 23. 4 Frederick James Bliss, “Retrospect: 1914-1919,” AUB Archives, Howard Bliss Papers, AA: 2.3.2.18.3. 5 Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 291. In Arab and Syrian/Lebanese nationalist historiography Cemal Pasha is commonly depicted as the main perpetrator of famine. On Cemal Pasha’s legacy as “The Butcher” (al Saffah) see Nicholas Ajay, “Mount Lebanon and the Wilayah of Beirut, 1914-1918: The War Years” (PhD Dissertation, Georgetown University, 1973), 530-531. 2 namely the maintenance of a strict blockade until the bitter end of the war, as a deliberate attempt by the enemies of the Ottoman Empire to produce starvation in Syria, either to push the residents to revolt against the empire or to weaken them in case an Allied invasion took place.6 Neither of these explanations for the famine is sufficient, as it is evident that a host of factors were responsible for producing and sustaining famine conditions in Syria during the First World War. Thus, my aim in focusing on the blockade is not to argue that it was the only cause of famine and civilian suffering during the war; rather, its role in the famine remains difficult to evaluate because very little research has been done on Allied aims and policies regarding the blockade. While several monographs have been written on the British economic blockade of Germany during this period, Ottoman and Middle East historians have comparably little secondary scholarship to rely on to understand the blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean. A number of recent studies on the war in the Ottoman Empire’s Arab domains mention the blockade or evaluate its role in producing supply shortages and famine in Syria, but very little work has been done to substantiate how, why, and when the Allies implemented a blockade of the Syrian coast.
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