Melanie S. Tanielian’s The Charity of War is a meticulously researched and well-written history of the famine(s) that ravaged most of the Middle East during World War I. In the book, Tanielian uses Lebanon, Beirut in particular, as her geographic home base and traces the effects of various administrative policies, blockades, aid distribution networks and practices in the region at large. The book is an eye-opener for those who, not being familiar with the literature (and not having read Mike Davis’ seminal Late Victorian Holocausts), still think that famines are God’s Malthusian punishments to the people. There is indeed plenty of evidence in the book (seven chapters of it, in fact) to prove the contrary and that Ottoman administrators – with ill intentions, to put it diplomatically – were to blame for the catastrophe. In addition, Tanielian does a good job in showing that even with much resistance to deadly policies and systematic efforts by the community to relive some of the effects of the disaster, the three of the four horseman (war, famine, and plague) do not let go easily once they grab hold of a region and its people.

The introduction (“Total War”) and the first chapter (“A City and Its Mountain, a Mountain and Its City”) contain focused discussions on politics of provisioning in the Ottoman Empire and situates both the region and food politics within larger discussions on the empire’s modernization/Westernization, transformations of its agrarian structures and its trade relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, rather than a relatively straightforward story of administrative collapse and disintegration that brings about famine at a time of war, we read a complex history of communities, networks of power relations, urban and rural dynamics, and tensions between the state and the society, the center and the peripheries, the foreigners and the locals, etc. Moreover, Tanielian proves herself to be a keen student of food politics as she is able to look for and find relations in seemingly unrelated fields and underline their transformative effects for the politics of provisioning. We read, for example, about the significance of the connectivity railways provided for “the region’s economic well-being” (p. 34) followed by the changes initiated by the Tanzimat reforms, the “replac[ing of] secular allegiances and loyalties based on social hierarchies with religious distinctions and differences as the district’s political organizing frame” (p. 36). Juxtaposing these, Tanielian is then able to show that “the political landscape relevant to the wartime story of provisioning was drawn by the interactions, relationships and competition between Ottoman officials and local players” (p. 45) and that the local elected representative councilors’ “ability to cope with the famine and ensure the wellbeing of the city’s inhabitants was central to preserving their political power and determined whether the Ottoman officials saw them as threats to the legitimacy and the sovereignty of the state” (p. 46)

Chapters 2 (“Wartime Famine”) and 3 (“The Politics of Food”) are I think the crux of the book. They provide a detailed history of how the dynamics of war on the one hand and the dynamics of local politics on the other starved the region. While chapter 2 details the provisioning practices and describes how they changed under war conditions, chapter 3 offers a detailed analysis of the unfolding tug of war between the Ottoman government, municipal councils, and specific people and groups within each. As Tanielian points out, “the famine was a unique event contingent on the caprices of human action in times of war. It was neither a direct result of an absolute absence of food nor an unadulterated natural disaster” (pp. 53–4). While natural causes like drought, floods, and locusts might have had an effect, the famine was not triggered by them; there was a significant amount of governmental intervention, withdrawal, and redirection of food away from both the people who produced it and the people who needed it, as well as the interruption of international trade due to war, both of which were its primary causes. Though, as Tanielian claims, “there is no direct of universal causal relation between war and famine” (p. 54), mobilization for war usually disrupts existing transportation and distribution networks and upsets production cycles (pp. 63–6). On top of that, in war situations food – or more specifically, lack of food – can be (and has been) used to weaken an army and force withdrawal or surrender. What is critical is how the local authorities and the central state use the war (and the food crisis it triggers) for other ends: to garner support for decentralization and local autonomy (p. 81), to eliminate direct challenges to their authority (pp. 81–2), to show that they still have control over territories and peoples, to sideline certain people or groups of people, etc.

Chapters 4 (“Prayers and Patrons”), 6 (“Local Relief Initiatives”), and 7 (“Beneficial Benevolence”) discuss the similarities and differences between the local and the centrally administered relief efforts. Again, the tug of war between the municipal council and the Ottoman government are on stage and we read about how food and provisioning were used to further other political and economic ends. Chapter 6 is particularly noteworthy as it shows how the elite Beiruti women were able to step in when “the state sought to directly or indirectly incapacitate male-dominated local charitable organizations” (p. 175). Unlike the men and their aid activity, women’s aid work was perceived within the confines of their gender and social status and were not registered as threatening or dangerous to the Ottoman state’s authority. Finally, in chapter 5 (“Rats, Lice and Microbes”), the focus of the book shifts from the politics and practices of provisioning to the public health measures of the Ottoman authorities to contain the bouts of diseases that followed the famine. Yet these measures for “improving communal health” (p. 163) and “creating healthy spaces” (p. 161) were also incentives to intervene more directly in people’s lives. Indeed, “whereas the provisioning of food had the potential to fashion new loyalties based on who fed whom, the invasive nature of health provisioning […] facilitated a growing and increasingly militant state intervention in the daily lives of civilians on the home front” (p. 170).

As a scholar of food studies and politics of food provisioning, I found The Charity of War well worth a read. The book is particularly valuable for providing historical insights into the dynamics of provisioning and famine in the empire’s peripheries. As a work of history, attention to and coverage of a wide variety of sources, such as published and unpublished “memoirs, diaries, private correspondence, diplomatic records, and the files of charitable societies, international relief organizations, and religious institutions in and outside of Beirut” (p. 18) collected in Lebanon, Germany, France, and the USA is commendable. What I found wanting was a discussion of the political implications of the provisioning politics of food, of humanitarian aid, and of health beyond the tug of war between the central and the local authorities. What did these concentric dispositif do and did not do for the subjects of the empire? And by doing, and more importantly by not doing, certain things, what sort of a relationship did they foster between the subjects and the sultan, the periphery and the center? Were these dispositif disciplinary, that is, functioning through permissions and prohibitions, or were they constellations of biopolitical security measures and mechanisms? Equally importantly, how did they continue (or discontinue) once the war was over and independence was won? Indeed, Tanielian opens the book with a very short excursion into how the war years and the famine looked to the post-independence Lebanon of the 1950s. How were these dispositif present then? What new relationships were they cultivating this time between the citizens and the Lebanese state? I understand that this is primarily a work of history, and that the primary focus of the book is the war years. However, I do think that such an exploration, even if short, would have made the analysis richer. All in all, The Charity of War is a must read for students and scholars of Ottoman history as well as history of famines and provisioning.