From Injury to Impact: Heath Jones on Active and Ageless

Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the new Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Kate Dany's about her book titled "Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire, Family, Law and War", published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026. This book, as the title suggests, helps us understand a whole bunch of intertwined things going on in the Ottoman Empire, sort of mostly long 19th century as the rough time period we're talking about here. And there's a lot going on. We've got kind of this idea of a particular kind of soldier, but soldiers are in many ways of sort of made up distinction, right? There's lots of different kinds of soldiers in different places and times. So this book helps us understand what soldier means in this moment. How did it relate to ideas of what the military is supposed to be doing, about what the Ottoman Empire is supposed to be doing, about how family works, about how supporting one's family works? What does that mean for gender roles? Does the law agree with people's ideas of gender roles? All sorts of things are intertwined here and give us a lot to talk about. So Kate, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What kinds of questions are you pursuing in this project? Absolutely. So I am an Ottoman historian and an assistant professor of global and intercultural studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This book is, you know, a revised and updated and expanded version of my doctoral dissertation and a story that I like to tell about why I wrote this book is the kind of origin story of my favorite document from this book. And so when I was starting out this research, I was looking into, I was interested in World War I and I was looking at Ottoman military laws from particularly the 1914 military law that came out right before the war broke out. And as I was looking through it, I found this table. And the table was a table that listed family relationships of the conscripted soldier and who was deemed eligible for support in that soldier's absence. So from there, I got really interested in this question of why is the military trying to legislate and be reoperatized these family relationships in order to mobilize these men? And that question led to this book. The dissertation focused more on the first world war, but as I did that research, I realized that the story went all the way back to 1826 and the founding of the new army. And so in the book, I do cover that entire history and focusing on that question of why was family so important to the Ottoman military institution? That is a helpful introduction and points to the kind of obvious next question, which is what is going on in 1826? How and why was the modern Ottoman army created at that point? What sort of things were they trying to figure out and what sort of solutions did they come up with? Like tell us about the starting point of your analysis. Yes. So in 1826 was the culmination of a logger term process that went back several decades into the 17th century and the 18th century where in the Ottoman state and the Sultana and his advisors were trying to think about how to bolster Ottoman military power and state power across the empire. And one of the main problems that they saw was the military force, which at that time was the Janissary Corps, which people may have heard of, which was essentially an army of young Christian boys who were taken from their families in the Ottoman Balkans and raised in the army to become professional soldiers. So as a professional army, these men were not allowed to marry or have families. They were supposed to profess total loyalty to the Ottoman state and make the military their life. Of course, over time that changed, right? Like kind of trying to control the lives of this force of soldiers was more and more difficult. They developed a lot of economic and social power in Istanbul around different industries and they had their families. And so they came to be seen as a force that was not reliable and that whether this was true or not, the narrative went that this was integral to the kind of decline of Ottoman power. And so, you know, observing what was going on in other countries in greater Europe, France, Russia, these different armies that were developing along new lines during this time period. The Ottomans saw this as something that they needed to implement. And so 1826 was the moment where there was a massacre of the Janissaries and this new army took its place definitively. After 1826, it took a longer period of time to actually implement that system across the entire empire, but usually 1826 is seen as that moment of kind of definitive action where the new army replaced the Janissaries. Yeah, please continue. That's helpful to know the kind of key moment, but keep going. Right. Yes. And so, what they wanted to do was create, instead of a professional core of soldiers, they wanted to create a recruitment-based army of citizen soldiers. And the idea for this was very, very specific. So the Sultan at the time, Sultan Mahmoud II, was quoted as saying he wanted to recruit strong bachelors of peasant stock. And so this contrasted this idea of the Janissaries as having their own families. He wanted to recruit bachelors who didn't have family ties or wives and children of their own. And peasant, meaning people who did not have an association with city life. So there was a strong emphasis in early sources on the creation of the new army that the soldiers that they wanted to recruit should be peasants who didn't have exposure to the city, who didn't know about the politics and the socioeconomics of urban life. And that should be people that they could mold into ideal soldiers through the military system. And so they recruited men from a very specific area of the Ottoman Empire, which was central in Anatolia. And this was kind of the Ottoman heartland because the model soldier was also seen as someone who was both Sunni Muslim and from kind of a Turkish ethnic background, or it initially. So this was kind of the template of the ideal recruit that they were looking to bring into this system. They started out by trying to recruit people, like trying to convince people that this was a good idea, offering this idea of you'll get pay and rations and a pension. These types of incentives were given. And that was not very successful because people didn't want to leave their families. This was a largely agricultural society. And they immediately ran into this problem, which is one of the central points around which the book revolves is that the same people that they wanted to recruit to be soldiers were the same men that they also needed to engage in the agricultural production that would feed the empire and engage in the family lives that would reproduce the empire. And so very, very quickly within less than 10 years, it became abundantly clear that their recruitment strategy was not working both because these men were not interested in joining the army and had to be taken by force, essentially, those that they were able to bring in, and that there was an overlap of the different roles that these men needed to play in society. I could stop there. There's more I could say, but let me know if there's anything. I think we want to talk a little bit more about this gap between what the army says. This is what's going to happen and what people are like, you know, that doesn't sound so great. So can you tell us more about how widespread this maybe dissatisfaction is and does the army change their ideas on the face of it or do they double down? Okay, yes, absolutely. So, one of the things that happened was that for the families and the men that they were looking to recruit in this very, again, very like small area of the empire initially, people saw the recruitment of these men as tantamount to a death sentence. And so the period of military service was 20 years, but in practice, it was for life. And so nobody, the men or their families wanted to participate in this because they knew that they would be sent away forever and very few of them actually were able to ever return to their families. And so the army found itself having to fight back against this perception. And their initial way of doing that was to just forcibly recruit people. But as the time went on, they started trying to think about, okay, other different ways that we can try to balance these issues, because reproduction, family, and social reproduction as well as agriculture were also very important priorities for the empire at the time period. And as we can get into later, after the 1860s, 1870s, that prioritization shifts, but during this time period, that balance is really important to them. And so in 1834, their solution was to create a reserve force. So they decided that, okay, we can have a reserve force. This will allow us to raise the size of the army, but at the same time, the men will be able to stay at home. They can do their training while also, you know, living near their families and engaging in agriculture. And they thought that would be a good way to balance this, you know, question of how do we do all these different things at once. At the same time, they were trying to expand recruitment to different parts of the empire. And the first place that they do that is to Ottoman Kurdistan. And so in the mid-1830s, there's kind of this, they hire this Prussian general Helmut von Mulkhe to work with the Ottoman army to expand recruitment into Kurdistan. And Mulkhe's memoirs are a major source that I use in the book, and he has a lot of observations about the family and gender dimensions of this recruitment surge. And so they have at this dual strategy of, how can we rearrange the military to be more closely aligned with these priorities? And also how can we expand the number of men that we can draw upon and bring into this system? And so they do that, and it doesn't work out the way that they planned because one of the major problems that comes up is how are we gonna train these reserve forces? Should it be, you know, every week for one day, should it be every quarter for two or three weeks? There was a huge debate about how to set that up, and it proved to be very, very impractical in practice because the men would need to go to the town center. This could, you know, they need a transportation there that would, you know, cause them to lose time from their work schedule. Every, you know, particular region of this area had different agricultural cycles. And so it proved to be very tricky for them to coordinate that initially. And so this setting up of the reserve force was an attempt to resolve that, but it didn't end up working out. And in fact, started to create even more issues. And so all of this culminates in the beginning of the Tanzimap period. So the 1839 Rose Guiljane rescript or Rose Garden decree. And this problem's actually addressed in that document, which is a very famous and important kind of document in Ottoman history, in which they talk about a lot of different things about, you know, citizenship, people's rights, how they're reforming the empire. But one of the things they talk about is this burden of military recruitment and the need to balance recruitment with agriculture and family responsibility. So that's explicitly discussed in that document. And what they did from there is they decided that they were gonna implement a lottery system. So instead of having a recruitment or kind of voluntary or forced recruitment based system, they were gonna have a conscription based system. So everybody in the territories that they could implement this in logistically would be subject to conscription, compulsory conscription. And the idea behind that was, okay, if we can create a broader pool of men, then we'll be able to balance this question of agricultural production, raising the size of the army and taking into consideration family issues more effectively. And that is the origin point, the military law that comes out a few years after that. So first they have the 1843 conscription law and then there's a 1846 military law that includes all this. But that's the first law where we start to see this attempt to bureaucratize and systematize family relationships into medi between responsibilities towards family, towards commerce and agriculture and towards military service in the empire. - Okay, so what does that mean like practically? Like for an individual family, say, what does that mean in the decades sort of that follow this? Say, okay, the Ottoman state is not at war, does that mean just kind of every man is in the army at some point or the Ottoman empire? Is it war? And so you leave your home, like how does that practically work for like a normal family? - Yes. - Great question. So it of course works in different ways at different times depending on whether or not there's a major conflict. And we don't see all of this gets really tested during the Crimean War of 1853 to 56, which I'll come back to in a moment. But during this time period, there's a lot of internal uprising and attempt by the central state to exert control on more distant provinces. And so the armies also used in that. And so these people are continuously being called up to serve to, you know, serve in units that are basically being used as like internal forces. And there's also other smaller conflicts going on. But as kind of the scale of conflict intensifies in the second half of the 19th century, so do these issues. But if we're talking about the 1840s and early 1850s, one of the things that starts happening as they try to recruit people is they start really running into this question of, okay, if we see a man, he's eligible for recruitment and he's an only son. And the family will complain about that and say, you know, you can't take our only son. This is the only person like supporting us. Maybe one or both of the parents are, you know, elderly or have some sort of disability that prevents them from working. All of these kinds of very granular specific yet universal human issues start to come up as they try to engage in this process of universal conscription. And so in the law, we start to see them kind of discussing these different scenarios. And that's why the law is such an interesting source because it's very, very clear that, you know, men were coming to the recruitment center when they were called. And these sorts of stories and scenarios were coming up that then had to be addressed in the legal code. And the, you know, military recruitment officials needed guidance about what should we do with these people. And it seemed to be for them kind of like a commonly accepted idea that, okay, if you're the only son, if you're the only, you know, able bodied man in the family earning a living, then you shouldn't have to go to the military. That seemed to be like, there's this common sense idea that that was unfair and shouldn't happen. And so what we see in practice is a lot of people do get taken to the military for life or for long periods of time and families are kind of broken apart. And so some sources from that period will tell you things like, you know, the whole village was empty of men. All of the households were closed down. People had to migrate to the cities. So it really did involve a huge amount of suffering and hardship for many, many families, particularly in that very central conscription zone where these men were being taken from. But at the same time, we can see that there was a sense of, you know, this being an undesirable outcome and an attempt to try to mediate that through the bureaucracy. And so in some cases, as we go across the decades, we see the development of a more kind of robust infrastructure for managing and mediating these types of issues and a more intensive involvement of not only state officials but also religious officials in kind of fleshing out this set of rules of who is responsible for who and doing what when it came to military service versus family. But to kind of directly answer the question, men were taken often wrongfully or in a way that caused the destruction of their household or village or community during this time period in particular. But this was seen as a problem and that needed to be addressed by the state. - And did they? - So they do. So over time, particularly when during the Crimean War, is when we see all this come to a head, right? Because the Crimean War of 1853 to '56 is the first major conflict in which the new Ottoman army takes part, the first very large scale mobilization. And we see there for the first time, not only this idea of sole breadwinners should not necessarily be required to serve, but if they are called to serve in a crisis, such as this war, the state is responsible for paying their family something to compensate for their absence. So we've seen this development of this idea. as I was just talking about in the 1840s of, you know, solar breadwinners should be exempted from service, men who are, you know, not solar breadwinners can go to the Arne. But at the same time, if a war breaks out, these breadwinners may need to be conscripted temporarily, but the state should pay their families. And so in the Crimean War, we see for the first time, the state offering family members of solar breadwinners soldiers a 10-crush per family payment as compensation. And during this time period, it's not seen as a legal right. They frame it as kind of an imperial beneficence is the term that they use. So it's just the soliton saying, okay, we know this is causing you hardship. So we're going to give you, you know, this money to kind of compensate for the sacrifice that you're making by sending your, you know, head of household off to this war. And so that emerges as another kind of technology of the state that they used to balance this. So on one side, this idea of a system of exemption for solar breadwinners, while bringing other men into the army, and on the other side, in times of crisis, using a financial payment as a mechanism to mobilize manpower on a broader scale. And so they do find that this works to some extent. People do accept that, okay, in a time of crisis, men are needed to mobilize. And with a payment that is accepted by most people. So as we'll see later, when they try to do that without a payment during the Balkan wars, that becomes an issue. But they arrive at this idea of, okay, we can have this breadwinner's assumption and we can recruit those breadwinners for crisis with a financial payment. And that can kind of help us create this balance that we need to see, both from a, you know, government perspective and from a social perspective. So that does sound like a sort of reasonable middle ground to kind of satisfy to some extent whatever one needs, but you just mentioned there that they don't keep doing that. So what happens later? You talk about a great revolt, which doesn't sound great for the government. So what's going on? Yes. So the Crimean War is a pivotal moment in lay Ottoman history because in order to finance this war, the Ottoman state takes out its first foreign loans. And because the Ottoman state is already in a fiscal crisis, taking out those loans basically sets off a massive debt crisis that unfolds over the subsequent decades and creates a situation in which the Ottoman state implements policies of austerity. And so part of those policies of austerity involve, as I talk about in the book, transferring the cost and burden of warfare to the Ottoman population as much as possible, trying to cut costs as much as possible. And so in the Balkan wars, this becomes very, very abundantly clear that they're both trying to do this and that it is not going to work for them if they want to win the war. So essentially what happens during that time period, and this has been unfolding again since the end of the Crimean War through the 1860s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the first decade of the 20th century, they try to mobilize soul-bred winter soldiers for the Balkan wars without paying the imperial beneficence or allowance as they had done in the Crimean War and another conflict, major conflict in which they do that is the Ottoman Russian war in the 1870s. So that had become kind of standard practice through, and they also do it in the Greek Greco-Autumn War in the late 1890s. So it had become established, but because they're so fiscally hard up by the time of the Balkan Wars, they ask themselves, "Okay, can we try to mobilize these people whom we need for this major conflict?" That's an existential and material threat to the Empire's survival without paying this allowance. So they try to do that. It's a disaster because number one, winces or soul-bred winter men still do not think that they have to go to war, particularly without an allowance. And so when that happens, it produces this removal of men who are saying, "You're recruiting us. You're making us leave our families at home. You're not paying our allowance. We're not going to be able to fight in this war and we're not going to. We think that we should be allowed to go home." And so a huge group of men, because the number of soul-bred winter soldiers in the RV, in the mobilization context was very, very large, 30, 40 percent decided, you know, we, they're not paying us. We don't need to be here. And there were kind of stories and rumors about certain men who were soul-bred winners being let go. That became a problem because it spread through the ranks. And then other men thought they should go. And then other men who were not actually soul-bred winners said, "Okay, well, I'm going to say I'm a soul-bred winner and leave as well." And so the military, the Ottoman military had to kind of shut this down because they were literally in the middle of this major, you know, crisis of the Balkan, the First Balkan War. So they said, we're going to do two things. Number one, we're going to abolish legally this idea that winces or soul-bred winter men are exempt from military service. We're getting rid of that entire system. And we're replacing that system again with this, with this allowance. But instead of it being an imperial beneficence, we are going to kind of system the ties this as something that's paid to any soul-bred winner who's recruited for a war. And so that creates the origin of what later becomes the May 1914 military law. And this is taking place around December, January of 1913 in the middle, kind of towards the end of the First Balkan War before the Second Balkan War. And this is effective. So they kind of changed the law. There's still this social idea of, you know, men cannot be taken from their families, leaving these families destitute. But with the payment of the allowance, then again, like we saw on the Crimean War, the Russian War, the Greek War, the rationale is okay. If we're being paid and being supported at least nominally, then we will submit to mobilization. And so this allows the Ottomans to salvage the Balkan campaign and kind of retake some territory in the Second Balkan War with a stronger and more unified military. And just in time, because those years there, if we're talking 1913, 1914, now we've got World War I. So does this work to have the army the Ottomans want at this point? So one of the things that they learned from the Balkan wars besides having kind of piloted this new approach is that the training of the solo breadwinner men or end reservists was very below par. And at this point, they also recognize that trying to have any kind of balance between family, agriculture, or military service has become really untenable in the face of again, kind of this existential as well as very material threat to the literal existence of the empire at this time period. And so the emphasis on military recruitment and what I call in the book Manpower at all costs, mobilization of band power at all costs, just intensifies more and more as a result of what happened during the Balkan Wars. And so the problem as World War I approaches is not only that hundreds of thousands of men have been lost in the Balkan Wars. The problem is not only that a lot of equipment, uniforms, material has been lost in the Balkan Wars, but it's also this continued issue of financing and how do we pay for this war and how do we pay for the social impact of this war. And they simply do not have a huge amount of financial infrastructure to cover this. And they have not raised the amount of the separation allowance at all since the Crimean War. But what they do try to do is, as I've mentioned, create this new military law that tries to, you know, be the definitive take on how do we do this. Who is eligible for an allowance? Who is eligible? Nobody eligible for exemption unless you pay at this point? And how do we expand the army as much as possible? And so just to give a little context for this, it's not only about the sole breadwinners at this time period. I focus on this in the book because a lot of scholarship has focused on, you know, trying to recruit non-Muslims and expand the army in that manner. But very few people have touched upon kind of the massive role of the sole breadwinners in impeding this dramatic expansion of the army in the late 19th century, which was what I was able to uncover with this research. But essentially what auto-memilitaria officials have been trying to do for decades by the outbreak of World War I is, again, expand this pool of recruitable men. And, you know, they did this by taking away in 1909, non-Muslims became eligible for recruitment. In 1909, they also get rid of the exemption for like religious scholars and other categories of people. And the one thing that they couldn't do until the Balkan Wars and until the outbreak of World War I was eliminate this winces or sole breadwinner exemption. Once they do that, that does open up a lot more space for a lot more men to be recruitable. But what they're lacking here is training, equipment, money, as I already mentioned. And even though they eliminate this exemption, the social idea that the state does not have the right to take men without providing for their families still exists. So World War I becomes defined by this tension between the need to fight this war of survival. And who bears the cost of that war? And how much can you extract from and ask for sacrifice from families? And so the way that I approach World War I in the book is thinking about, you know, who is bearing the cost of this? And in a situation where the army is very much unprepared to fight in this war, how do they manage to fight for four years, given that situation at the outbreak of the war? Yeah. Can we talk a little bit more about the sacrifice aspect of this and kind of what the impact of that was? I mean, obviously, as you said, there's the like battlefield aspect. But what about the women and families who are left behind in these circumstances? Yes, great question. So this is something that I think is incredibly important. And one of the reasons that I got interested in this question is because when I was doing initially doing this research, the first, you know, few years of it was around the centenary of the First World War. So there was a lot of like discussion about World War I, the scholarship about the Ottoman First World War was really expanding. There was a lot of just conversations. And one of the things that always came up was what I just referenced, this question of how did the Ottomans fight for so long? And often it was cast in these types of discussions in this sort of kind of, you know, like admiration of, you know, how did they they fought so long and so well, even without these resources. That, you know, made me ask the question to myself of like, okay, how did they actually do that? Because, you know, you don't just fight a war without people supporting it and paying the costs. And what I found and really focused, wanted to focus attention on in this book is that, you know, women and families were the ones covering the cost of this. And this is something we see in like feminist political economy, feminist security studies, kind of literature and scholarship about more contemporary conflicts. But I think it's really applicable also to this time period because what that scholarship shows is that under austerity, which the Ottoman Empire was during this time period, women, children, families are always the ones that pay the cost of that. And how did they pay that cost? They pay it through sacrificing. Thanks. And what do they sacrifice? They sacrifice their own resources, their own food, their own clothing, their own time, their own survival in order to make sure that mobilization can continue. So this could involve things like in the Ottoman case, soldiers were expected to go to recruitment with at least three days worth of food, with lots of supplies that they could bring. And often they were asked to provide their own uniforms, including winter gear, shoes, etc. So you can imagine for the average family rural family in the Ottoman Empire, that burden of generating these resources to send their family in a much more war with would have been very, very difficult to achieve. So the family members would be sacrificing their own welfare and comfort financial situation to provide those resources. That's just one simple example. Another would be that we know from the sources that the Ottoman army actually counted the availability of rations for soldiers to include things available in the local area. So soldiers and the army were requisitioning not only food, not only animals and transport carts and these types of materials that are instrumental to agricultural production and rural labor, but soldiers that passed the brew and kind of be expected to be fed and housed by these communities who were already suffering a great deal during because of the circumstances of war and also the loss of their able-bodied male family members who would have been the ones doing certain types of agricultural labor to produce the food in the first place. And so there's this hidden kind of input into the war effort that comes from these communities, these women, these families that is not discussed in this conversation about how does the Ottoman Empire fight for so long. So you know, semi-successfully, not in the end, but throughout this time period they stay in the war and they're able to continue mobilizing. And I think the answer really lies in those types of things. I'll just give one more example. If we think about agricultural labor, let me look at what that involves both during that time period and kind of more, like a little bit more modern ethnographic accounts. It's really very gender-divided. So men and women have different tasks in agriculture and during harvest times, during planting times, this level of labor is very intense, right? So people could be working, you know, 12, 16 hours during these time periods to just get the harvest in the ground or get it out of the ground. And thinking about how this was done with men off at war is kind of mind-boggling, but somehow the women and those left behind on the front managed to do this. And we have kind of contemporary accounts of journalists who went to different parts of the empire and this time period and they're like the women managed to do the harvest somehow. And so the labor that that involved, the sacrifice that that involved, just like the bodily energy that that involved is all something that is fundamental to explaining the Ottoman War effort in World War I that's usually invisible. Yeah, that's definitely a huge part of what's going on in the home front. We know in World War II, especially, or World War I and II matters a lot. And so we shouldn't ignore it in the Ottoman case, makes sense to talk about. Now obviously there is, as you said, a kind of four-year period here. So there is a lot going on. We're not going to be able to cover all of the details, but could we talk for a moment about what happens in 1916? Yes, absolutely. So one of the things that I wanted to do in this book, and I think that I do this on a number of scales, is to question the periodization of World War I. And as I started thinking about that, I also started questioning the periodization of the Balkan Wars. And in the book, I divide the Balkan Wars between the first and the second, because there's very different things going on. I also questioned this periodization of, you know, the modern army taking this story all the way back to 1826. So the intervention that I make about 1916 is that, you know, the four years of World War I in the Ottoman Empire were not all executed and lived through under the same conditions. And the reason for that is because after 1916, around the end of 1916, early 1917, we do see a major shift and intensification of conditions in the army and all the home front. And instrumental to this is this problem of, again, Ottoman Fiscal Crisis, austerity, and also inflation. There's a whole number of factors that contribute to this, including the allied blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean. And, you know, different economic factors taking place at that time period. But what we start to see from the perspective of, you know, state legislation, state policy is a sh-- shift from a very kind of punitive approach to mobilization and remobilization. So before 1916, when we have desertion, for example, there's much more of an emphasis on public execution, collective punishment for deserters, families. These types of really punitive policies designed to basically scare people into submitting to mobilization. After 1916, they start to see a softening of that and kind of a new direction towards this. And this is because family, social reproduction, their safety comes under threat as a result of these economic and social conditions that take place around this time. And so what starts to happen is that soldiers, men who are recruited into the army start to understand through rumor, through passing through different places, through hearing things from back home or from other soldiers that, you know, the family situation, their safety and their subsistence is really not secure. And they start to feel like the state is not living up to what they said they would do, right? We're here, we're fighting, and they're supposed to take care of our families. And so we start to see a lot of, revolt, a lot of desertion, desertion really starts to intensify during this time period because the men are thinking, okay, well, if my family is not protected, as they said, they would be then I need to go back and make sure they're okay. And so this becomes a crisis for the army because of the levels of desertion that they start to see. And they start to say, okay, we need to double down on these policies that we said we're going to do. We need to re-double our promises to support families, make sure they're safe. We need to do a better job paying the separation allowance because that has become a huge issue amidst Ottoman fiscal crisis. A lot of times the allowance, the separation allowance that families were supposed to get existed in name only, right? Or the value of it had gone down so much because of inflation that it couldn't even buy like a few lows of bread for people. So in the midst of that context, the state says, okay, we need to focus our efforts differently. We need to focus on remobilization, but we also need to focus on making sure that at least in theory, enough to convince people and soldiers to remobilize that these families are being taken care of. So they start to do things like provide amnesties for people who have deserted and say, if you come back, we won't punish you, just come back, remobilize, and we'll make sure that your families are taken care of. They start to give things like in-kind payments. So they'll distribute grain, rice, different foods to families to supplement or in place of the kind of worthless pension money that has now become kind of, has no purchasing power essentially. So they try to do, they focus very heavily on how can we convince these men that their families are taken care of? It's more about that than actually taking care in the families, but it's very interesting because in each side of this, before 1917, in 1960, 1917 and after, the family dimension of this, how can we use family relationships, how do family relationships affect mobilization, are very, very instrumental to the ways that state officials are thinking about the policies that they create and how they're implemented. And an interesting thing that I'll touch on now about this is that there's very much a conversation taking place throughout the war between state officials and religious officials. And people, you know, people, Ottoman men and women and families are all involved in this conversation about how do we, what is the social balance, what is the kind of appropriate and sustainable way to distribute the cost of this war? And what we see is kind of this constant attention to the question of who is supporting, who is responsible for whom in this society, how are we going to pay the cost of that, and how are we going to try to manage the situation all for the purpose of manpower and all costs, right? Mobilizing and remobilizing to engage in this war of survival. - Yeah, that's a very interesting shift indeed. What does that mean by the end of the war? So there's no longer kind of this priority if you must fight or else, what does that mean for sort of state priorities and what they do regarding these questions of mobilization and compliance and family? - Yes, so a very interesting thing happens towards the end of the war, because one of the things that comes very strongly into play, especially in late 1917 through 1918, is this question of, okay, how can we use the family structure to help salvage kind of the social dislocation, upheaval and destruction that this war has brought up until this moment? And so what's very, very interesting about this is prior to that time, especially around kind of the beginning of the war in 1915, there had been an emphasis on, how can we make it easier for women essentially to get divorced and be freed to make new marriages? And this was because, again, because of the wartime conditions, a lot of men were going missing, were being killed, were dying, and there was always this emphasis on the kind of recreation of the marital, a conjugal family, and the relations of dependence and support that that entailed in the military system and in the Islamic legal system, which influenced the military system. So again, to put it in simple terms, there was always a desire for women to remarry so that their husband would be liable for their support instead of the state. So the approach of the state takes to that in 1915 is, okay, free women up, they can get remarried. As the war goes on, and especially in 1917, 1918, there's, again, a lot of men have died, been killed, and there's less availability of men for marriage. And so the policy shifts, particularly in the 1917 Ottoman law family rights, which is a very interesting law because it's the very last part of Ottoman law that is codified into a civil code, which is something that they had been doing since the 1860s, but family law had always stayed in the purview of religious officials and both Islamic legal officials and also their counter parts in the Jewish Christian other religious communities. And so finally in October 1917, and there's enough kind of upheaval in crisis that this Ottoman state is like, we are gonna codify this. And they use that law in order to implement a new approach to this, which is to keep women in marriage, in the structure of marriage, even if their husband is missing in action, even if he has some sort of disability from his war experience, but generally to uphold that structure of the conjugal family and make it harder for women to get divorced or to have indulments for their marriage. And the goal behind that was to make sure that every woman and child which the state saw as dependence of men would be accounted for and therefore not, you know, subject or entitled to some sort of state payment. Again, because of the fiscal austerity under which they were operating. And this intensifies even further in 1918 when the state actually supports this organization that had helped women work during the war. So unlike Western Europe, World War I and the Ottoman Empire did not involve a huge amount of female participation in the labor force because the Ottoman Empire was not an industrial society. Right, I'm talking about urban centers. As I already mentioned, women were taking up that work in the fields, but that's not usually the context in which these types of dynamics aren't discussed. And so the headbandist organization created called the Society for the Employment of Muslim Women. And this is mainly an urban organization and its main goal was to prevent Muslim women in particular from resorting to prostitution to support themselves and their families by providing them paid employment. And this paid employment often involved things like sewing military uniforms. And these women would be paid like a nominal wage but also get rations. So many women chose to participate in these types of programs as a survival strategy, but the scale of it was like relatively limited. And from 1916 on where this happens, but in 1918, the officials behind this program decide, okay, it's no longer acceptable or in line with the emerging policies towards marriage and family that the state is exhibiting for women to just, you know, remain single and be supporting their children through these jobs. Everybody who is involved in the organization needs to endeavor to get married. So they launch a what is essentially a state sponsored marriage campaign in which there are kind of like personal ads, published people trying through the mechanism of the state sponsored newspaper to make these matches. And they have an entire marriage bureau related to this organization in Istanbul and then other kind of privately owned magazines kind of take up this model. And this is something that's also taking place in Europe during this time period. The Ottomans know that and they they're talking about how their system is different how they're kind of vetting the people making sure people are a good match, etc. But the idea behind this campaign is we should ever get everybody married so that these women and their children are going to be the dependence of remaining men not state petchants. And so we end the war with this very interesting emphasis on the reconstitution of these relationships of bread-winning independence that the war had kind of broken down in practice. And we're still remaining, you know, challenged through people's everyday experiences. And the result of that was this interesting situation in which these kind of what we could call traditional roles are being emphasized and enforced in material ways. But at the same time the expectations for what women would provide in a marriage have also changed. Right? So in the marriage ads source, which is a very, very interesting source, which I talk about in the book. And I also have an article about this specific marriage campaign where I go into detail about the personal ads as a source. We see a lot of men asking for a woman to own a house or that she should also garner a salary, things like that that were not part of the pre-war marriage bargain. And we're not spoken openly about necessarily become something that men can demand in marriage due to this kind of gender imbalance that results from the war. And so we end the war with this dual attempt to kind of reconstitute traditional roles while also undermining the woman's kind of ability to focus on child rearing or home labor. And these, you know, additional burdens being placed on them that is again the legacy of the sacrifices that they made for the war effort itself. Okay. I want to talk a little bit more perhaps about the legacies. Are there any other ones of this history you've told us that we want to discuss perhaps as we come towards the end of our discussion on the book? Absolutely. So I think another one of the legacies is the idea of soul bread winning. And this term wins, wins is like that I use in the book is something that actually still exists in, you know, discourse today. So one of the things I came across in my research was a news article from a few years ago in which a journalist was commenting on a newspaper article about a family in Turkey. And Turkey still has universal male military service. And apparently in this family like all five sons have been taken to the military and the journalist was basically saying, you know, there's a thing called winces lick or winces. And there's this thing that this concept of cannot take all of a family's sons. There's a thing called bread winning. And so that idea really persists in society. And we see it also inscribed into the military laws of Turkey as well as other post-automated countries that have come to be their own nation states such as Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt to a certain extent that's a slightly different history. Syria, different places that have either kind of national armies or required military recruitment incorporate some of these ideas about bread winning independence that were kind of piloted and created in this Lee Ottoman period and kind of intensified and solidified as military legal doctrine during the First World War. So we still see the way that these ideas shape conflict specifically. But we also see it in broader ideas about who should bear the cost of care in society. So in Turkey in particular today, we see Turkey has become a very kind of neoliberal economy. It has undergone a lot of IMF structural adjustment programs. And that has meant that social spending has been subject to austere policies that in many ways echo what we saw during the Lee Ottoman period and it's step crisis. And so we see certain policies emerging that really align with this idea that the family and the society civilians should bear the cost of care. And I think that that legacy, and let me just give an example to illustrate. So for example, instead of having like robust state institutions for orphans, for example, there's new policy. Let's shut down the orphanages and pay families to care for the children in their own homes. That way we don't need to upkeep this infrastructure of orphanages and we can kind of pay a smaller amount of money to have to have people use their own infrastructure to raise these children in society. And there's many, many different policies that operate on that logic and contemporary Turkey. And I think that this is in some ways a legacy of these ideas of austerity that come out, these policy approaches that see the family as this resource that can be drawn upon in a time of crisis, whether it's a war or a fiscal crisis, and also just because the structure of society is changing, in order to allow the state to operate on lesser budget and to put that burden of care and payment for these needs of social reproduction on to civilians and families in particular. So I think that's a really, really important legacy and something that again is not often discussed from the perspective of a family or gender analysis. And really takes us from the past right up to the present. So thank you for doing that for us there. And I think that's probably a good place to end our discussion about the book. But if we do peek a little bit into the future, what might you be working on now that the book is done? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of, relate it or not? Yes, so I have a new project, which is taking up some threads of this research, but extending it across a different periodization and geography. So I got very interested in the stories of men, particularly non-Muslim Ottoman men who fled the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and went to the United States and ended up being conscripted into or volunteering for the US Army. And so what we see from their stories is again, this kind of web of care, social reproduction, soldiering, family responsibility tied up in these questions of migration, circular migration, return migration. And so I'm starting to research this history and I'm very excited to be working on this project that touches upon these questions of Ottoman and post-automated US migration, family care, and how all those things come up in the context of changing US migration policy and Ottoman and post-automated migration policy. Yeah, it definitely sounds like a lot of things altogether in that project. So a best of luck with those investigations. And of course, while you are pursuing them, listeners can read the book. We've been talking about Tile's conscripting breadwinner soldiers in the late Ottoman Empire, family law and war published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026. Caves, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much, Miranda. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. 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