The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System

with Aimee Genell

hosted by Ayah Aboelela and Chris Gratien

| After the defeat and breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Great Britain and France established colonial mandates that remade the map of the modern Middle East. Yet as our guest Aimee Genell argues in a new book, those mandates had surprising Ottoman origins in the diverse forms of autonomy created in the empire over its last century. Rather than passive concessions to European powers and national movements, the agreements that redefined the empire's relationship to emerging Balkan nations, Egypt, Lebanon, Crete, Kuwait, and other areas with special status were the product of active engagement with an emerging arena of international law on the part of Ottoman lawyers, officials, and diplomats. As Prof. Genell explains, even in the empire's final days, amid the Wilsonian moment of self-determination, they looked to such agreements as a means of limiting rather than extending European influence over Ottoman territory. The flexible Ottoman model of autonomy in this view laid the foundations of the Mandate system, with lasting consequences for the region until today.   

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After the defeat and breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Great Britain and France established colonial mandates that remade the map of the modern Middle East. Yet as our guest Aimee Genell argues in a new book, those mandates had surprising Ottoman origins in the diverse forms of autonomy created in the empire over its last century. Rather than passive concessions to European powers and national movements, the agreements that redefined the empire's relationship to emerging Balkan nations, Egypt, Lebanon, Crete, Kuwait, and other areas with special status were the product of active engagement with an emerging arena of international law on the part of Ottoman lawyers, officials, and diplomats. As Prof. Genell explains, even in the empire's final days, amid the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, they looked to such agreements as a means of limiting rather than extending European influence over Ottoman territory. The flexible Ottoman model of autonomy in this view laid the foundations of the Mandate system, with lasting consequences for the region until today.

Contributor Bios

	Aimee Genell is an Assistant Professor of International History and International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Her research focuses on the history of the late Ottoman Empire and its entanglements with Europe in the arena of international law. Columbia University Press published her manuscript, Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System in the Middle East in 2026. She has published and co-authored several articles on Ottoman legal history from an international perspective.
	Ayah Aboelela is a PhD Candidate in World History at Northeastern University. Her dissertation explores the environmental history of Muslim pilgrimage in the Hijaz, Levant, and Egypt in the late Ottoman period, tracing interactions between pilgrims, urban and Bedouin locals, state officials, and spirituality. She is also Managing Editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly.
	Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century. His current project, provisionally titled The Book and the Sword: Civil War and Reconstruction in Late Ottoman Syria, offers a global microhistory of the Tanzimat period, centered on the unsolved murder of an American missionary in the Ottoman Empire.

Credits

Episode No. 600
Release Date: 25 October 2026
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Bibliography and images courtesy of Aimee Genell

Further Listening

	Mustafa Aksakal	592 8/22/26	WWI and the End of the Ottoman Empire
	Will Hanley	345 2/9/18	Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Alexandria
	Lale Can	191 4/18/15	Central Asians and the Ottoman Empire
	Uğur Z. Peçe	570 12/29/24	The End of Ottoman Crete
	Ozan Ozavci	526 4/22/22	A New History of the Eastern Question
	Michael Christopher Low	501 4/7/21	Ottoman Mecca and the Indian Ocean Hajj

Images

Privileged and autonomous provinces of the Ottoman Empire, 1830s–1878

Privileged and autonomous provinces of the Ottoman Empire, 1878–1914.


Soldiers in Erzurum, holding a sign that reads “Wilsonian Principles: Article 12,” written in Ottoman Turkish. (Library of Congress/ Official U.S. Army photographs, 1919, /5669 (F) [P&P]/#67342.

Further Reading

Akarlı, Engin. The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Aydın, Cemil. The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in

Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought on Anti-Westernism in Asia and Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Ben Ismail, Youssef. “Uncertain Histories: The Archive of Sovereignty in Ottoman Tunis,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. 11, no. 1 (2024): 123–53. 

Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires,

1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Beverley, Eric. Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and

Minor Sovereignty, c.1850–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Birdal, Murat. The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century. I. B. Tauris, 2010.

Ceylan, Ayhan. Osmanlı Taşra İdarî Tarzı Olarak Eyâlet-i Mümtâze ve Mısır Uygulaması. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2014.

Der Matossian, Bedross. Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire. Stanford University Press, 2014.

Ekinci, Ekrem Buğra. “Osmanlı İdaresinde Adem-I Merkeziyet ve İmtiyazlı Eyâletler,” Türk Hukuk Tarihi Araştırmaları 6 (2008): 30–33.

Fujinami, Nobuyoshi. “Between Sovereignty and Suzerainty: History of the Ottoman Privileged Provinces,” in A World History of Suzerainty: A Modern History of East and West Asia and Translated Concepts. Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 2019.

Hanley, Will. Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria New York: Columbia University Press. 2017.

İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin. Mısır’da Türkler ve Kültürel Mirasları. Istanbul: Islam Tarih ve Kültür

Araştırma Merkezi, 2006.

Kármán, Gábor; Kunčević, Lovro. eds. The European Tributary States of the Ottoman 

Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Kayalı, Hasan. Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918. University of California Press, 1997.

Kayalı, Hasan. Imperial Resilience: The Great War’s End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations. University of California Press, 2021.

Kayaoğlu, Turan. Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Klein, Janet. The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone. Stanford University Press, 2011.

Kuehn, Thomas. Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849–1919. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Low, Michael Christopher. Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj. Columbia University Press, 2020.

Minawi, Mostafa. The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz. Stanford University Press, 2016.

Minawi, Mostafa. Losing Istanbul Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire. Stanford University Press, 2022.

Özok-Gündoğan, Nilay. The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Özsu, Umut. Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 

Peçe, Uğur Zekeriya. Island and Empire: How Civil War in Crete Mobilized the Ottoman World. Stanford University Press, 2024.

Philliou, Christine M. Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution. Oakland: University of California Press, 2010.

Philliou, Christine M. Turkey: A Past Against History. University of California Press, 2021.

Polatel, Mehmet. Armenians and Land Disputes in the Ottoman Empire, 1850–1914. Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

Provence, Michael. The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Smiley, Will. From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and

International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Sohrabi, Nader. Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Thompson, Elizabeth F. How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance. Grove Atlantic, 2021.

Wyrtzen, Jonathan. Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East. Columbia University Press, 2022.