Uğur Zekeriya Peçe’s Island and Empire: How Civil War in Crete Mobilized the Ottoman World is a broad examination of the transnational implications of intercommunal violence in Crete during the 1890s and its influence on the political activism of Cretan refugees in the Ottoman Empire following the union of Crete with the kingdom of Greece in 1908. Different than traditional investigations regarding the Cretan crisis, Peçe’s narrative relegates the politics of the Eastern Question to a secondary position in favor of focusing on the shared experiences of displaced Cretans within a large group that ranges from public figures such as journalists, intellectuals, and political elites to ordinary and unnamed people whose voices are not necessarily recorded in archives. With the active role of refugee Cretans at its center, Peçe’s analysis endeavors to explore the nature of the increasing protest movement against Ottoman Greeks that unfolded following Crete’s annexation by Greece through the lens of the protestors themselves. Rather than treating masses during the protest movements as monolithic entities whose actions were fueled with nationalistic motivations, the author strives to shed a light on the individual participants’ motivations and experiences, as well as how certain sensual elements in the surrounding protest-scape influenced their actions, and “identify the sounds that emblematized mass gatherings in the late Ottoman Empire” (p. 27).
Over the course of the book’s five chapters, Peçe reveals how the gradual breakdown of public security and increasing violence on the island towards the turn of the century transformed into a civil war. In the chapters concerning the civil war itself, the author does not shy away from depicting the gory aspects of this intercommunal violence. However, he does not use violence as a mere rhetorical concept, which distinguishes this book from traditional interpretations. Violence in Island and Empire is an analytical concept. It is not “the inevitable and unfortunate consequence of multireligious societies” but the very reason that triggers societies to disintegrate when instilled with it. Furthermore, Peçe also underlines the traumatic memory of violence and its psychological impact in explaining the active participation of refugee Cretans in protest movements that unfolded in the Empire as economic warfare aiming at the displacement of the Greek community of western Anatolia.
The first chapter of the book vividly captures the gradual transformation of political and social unrest that emerged from increasing demand for reform in the local administration of Crete into violent upheavals organized by revolutionary committees that eventually led to a full-blown civil war with devastating human, economic, and environmental loss. With the collapse of state authority and European military intervention following the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, a policy of “unmixing of the populations” was adopted by the European governments as well as the Ottoman side, which eventually led to mass dispossession and displacement of the island’s Muslim community. Peçe suggests that instead of framing this violent episode as a “revolt” or “revolution” that often results from research through the lens of Turkish and Greek state archives, respectively, the use of the term civil war would better “capture the complexity of this internecine fighting” (p. 9). This approach is aided by Peçe’s linguistic abilities, as he cites sources in both Ottoman Turkish and Greek, in which we see a regular use of certain terms when referring to fighting on the island that would indeed semantically correspond to the more modern concept of civil war.
In the following two chapters, we get a broader overview of the domestic and international setting in which the Empire had further lost its grip on the island despite a military victory against Greece in 1897. Without disregarding the context of the “Eastern question,” Peçe moves away from the prevailing tendency of scholars to interpret the Cretan episode as part of a broader diplomatic crisis. This approach fits well with one of the book’s central contributions, which is to capture the experiences of ordinary people during this tumultuous period. Crete’s rough and mountainous topography provided refuge for native fighters against military intervention, which consequently led to the unwillingness of the European coalition to risk casualties that would result by dispatching troops into these mountains. Peçe concludes that such issues originating from particularities to Crete influenced the coalition’s growing conviction that peace on the island must be achieved through separating the two communities with the departure of the Muslim minority. The supposed incompatibility of the two communities sharing the island as perceived by both Western observers and members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) is further scrutinized by the author as we follow the political trajectory of the island following the arrival of Prince George of Greece as high commissioner in 1898. He provides several narratives that show how in fact the remaining Muslim minority had shown motivation to adapt to the changing political circumstances, as the imagined dividing line between the two Cretan communities was not as sharp as assumed by contemporary observers and later historians. In fact, the chapter provides multiple accounts in which a minority of non-elite Muslim Cretans fought a bureaucratic battle for their future on the island against local and external authorities while Ottoman rule on the island was practically gone in all but name.
Mass protests throughout the Empire occurred after Crete’s declaration of union with Greece in 1908, in which Cretan refugees played an active role. Chapter 4 explores how prominent Cretan public figures in the Ottoman capital had been actively involved in the protest movement by informing and mobilizing people through publications and public speeches with frequent emphasis on terms relating to violence. The utilization of a form of emotional language that Peçe calls “Crete talk” helped to mobilize the masses. The second part of this chapter shifts the focus to the provinces to hear the voices of ordinary Cretan refugees who became important protagonists of political activism in the Empire in the 1910s. Where conventional archival investigations fail to document the crowds on the street, Peçe’s innovative choice of a sensory approach fills in to capture the “soundscape” during mass protests, reflecting on how these events had been experienced by the demonstrators. Slogans such as “Crete, or Death” and speeches heard by the masses, along with other sensory phenomena, provide a unique opportunity to grasp these protest-scape experiences of unnamed protestors. Furthermore, Peçe also reveals how the political activism of the Cretans was also part of a broader movement of increasing bottom-up political mobilization in the post-Hamidian Ottoman public space that was heavily encouraged by pro-CUP publications.
Chapter 5 clearly displays the increasing dominance of the CUP’s role in the Empire’s protest-scape, focusing on the “economic warfare” against Greek trade that eventually included Ottoman Greeks after the annexation of Crete by Greece. Despite mostly endeavoring to unveil Cretan immigrants’ motivations in engaging so actively in this economic warfare, the author points out how the targeting of the non-Muslim bourgeoisie in the Empire aligned with the CUP’s policy of creating a “nationalized economy” that favored Turks and Muslims at the expense of others. The highly energetic participation of Cretan immigrants in the economic boycott against Greeks is reminiscent of their own experience a decade earlier when their forced departure from Crete followed a similar economic warfare that included intentional destruction of their olive trees. According to Peçe, this is more of a tit-for-tat logic in which Cretan refugees had found a way to express and channel their intercommunal resentment and making themselves once again protagonists in a crisis related to Crete.
Peçe’s work is an important contribution that moves our understanding of the political history of Ottoman Crete and the fate of Muslim Cretans beyond the tried and tired tropes of the rise of nationalism and the meddling of the Great Powers. For a variety of reasons, historians have either ignored their agency altogether or have read the experiences of the Muslim minority of Crete as a passive group that is only mentioned in historical records through their victimhood of senseless violence and exile. In the span of less than 300 pages, Peçe provides an expansive snapshot of the multiplicity of ways in which the complex experiences of such non-dominant social groups can be captured with a substantial linguistic and methodological toolset. Peçe has put this toolset to very good use by using a variety of archival sources ranging from personal accounts of contemporaries to various state archives. His choice of examining the social psychology of refugee activists through a focus on the sensory dimensions that influenced their political action is particularly noteworthy.
There are, however, limitations to Peçe’s sensory approach, mostly due to lack of variety in empirical data. Enriching the narrative through the sonic reconstruction of protestors and demonstrators certainly is an interesting, up-to-date historiographical choice. Besides the epitomizing slogan “Crete, or death” this reconstruction of the soundscape of the protests about Crete could potentially be even more deepened and fleshed out with the addition of different kinds of sonic sources to further underline the apparently subtle, but not negligible, agency that perceptions have in history. That being said, these limitations hardly undermine the work’s overall significance. In fact, they are a natural and inevitable byproduct of a work with such a magnitude. Peçe’s study opens many doors in terms of method, as well as structure and scale of research in the field of late Ottoman history. Moreover, it is an invitation for scholars to delve more deeply into how the non-dominant communities shaped the trajectory of political activism in Ottoman society in the Empire’s final decades.
