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The House Always Wins: Arms Trafficking, Settler Capitalism, and the Making of Ottoman Jolan, 1878-1918
This talk builds on the oral historical trajectory of Abou Shapsugh, a Circassian arms trafficker in the turn of the century Jolan, to reconstruct the sectarian economy of arms trafficking and settler capitalism in the late Ottoman Empire. I first discuss the concurrent settlement and armament of Circassian refugees in Syria. The arrival of Circassian refugees in the region marked an expansion of the imperial settlement policy in 1878. From thereon, growing refugee settlements constituted a social experiment that pitted them against the ahali-i kadime, or, the native inhabitants of the region. The settlers instituted and expanded a new regime of private property and agrarian production. The exclusivity and inviolability of settlers’ property engendered conflict within and outside of the community proper, as inter- and intra-communal relations were brutalised by the state-led introduction, circulation, and distribution of arms.
I then reflect on how the circulation of arms shapes how violence is socially and politically distributed. I analyse the moments when armed violence becomes a constitutive aspect of social relations based on inequity, inequality, and difference. I look at two foundational moments in the distribution of arms and the making of social hierarchies in the Golan Heights: the Circassian-Druze War of 1895, and the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. I contend that these two events came to crystallise the sectarian and racial tensions that exist between settlers/natives, and masters/slaves, in the late Ottoman Jolan. I further argue that the Ottoman government only intervened in and reconstituted these violent intimacies between settlers and natives, masters and slaves, to serve the ends of a securitarian order based on the primacy of private property.
Date:
5 November 2025, 11:00
Venue:
Balliol College, Broad Street OX1 3BJ
Venue Details:
Old Common Room
Speaker:
Dr Ayşe Polat (Oxford)
Organising department:
Faculty of History
Organiser:
John-Paul Ghobrial
Organiser contact email address:
moving.stories@history.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
Moving Stories - Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Alexia Lewis
