Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman EmpireFamily, Law and War

Explores how concerns over family subsistence, labour and care shaped Ottoman military reform and ultimately sealed the empire’s fate during the First World War

• Examines how the sole breadwinner exemption shaped Ottoman military policy and the lived experience of World War I in the Ottoman Empire   
• Places World War I in the 19th century context of Ottoman military reform and crisis
• Uses a sociolegal methodology to analyse the development of military law and mobilisation policy as a product of conflicts over care, labour and distribution of resources
• Argues that women’s labour and family structure were integral to the military both institutionally and practically
• Based on a feminist and bottom-up reading of primary source materials in Ottoman Turkish as well as Arabic and English

This book examines the gender and family dimensions of mobilisation for the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, situating the war in a long-nineteenth-century social history of Ottoman military reform for the first time. It focuses on the military legal concept of muinsizlik (sole breadwinning) and how this concept shaped Ottoman military policy – namely, how militarisation and mobilisation were supported by the exploitation of women’s care and social reproductive labour, as well as the extraction of material and physical resources from Ottoman families.

In exploring how war worked at the level of the body, the individual and the family, this book demonstrates how Ottoman society and war became imbricated through processes of militarisation that led to significant consequences during the First World War and its aftermath. Based on a gendered reading of Ottoman military and bureaucratic archives, it addresses a pivotal moment in the modern history of the Middle East that has long awaited further study from a bottom-up perspective.