The Interviewees
Interview with Erik Blackthorne-O’Barr, June 2025
1- Your presentation was partially based on your dissertation research on the conceptualisation of Persian cultural influence within the history of Turkish linguistic and literary modernity and in part also based on your earlier work on cholera in the Ottoman Empire. You argue that in the second half of the 19th century the concept of ‘language as organism’ with its own evolutionary tree as postulated by August Schleicher (1863) was revolutionary and you link this to the Ottoman intellectual giant of the time, Namık Kemal (1840-1888). Do you see a similar ‘Darwinian’ angle in the writings of Schleicher and Kemal when dealing with concepts of language, culture, disease and death and their interconnectedness?
Thank you for this interesting question! In short, this depends on how we define the influence of Darwinism. It should be remembered that although Darwinian evolution would, by the twentieth century, win out among the various theories of evolution, the actual reception of Darwinism outside of English (and even within it) was often through mediators like Buchner or Haeckel who conflated the ideas of Darwin with those of earlier writers like Lamarck, or with Social Darwinists like Spencer, or who gave to Darwin a strongly teleological aspect not present in his own theory of natural selection. In France, especially, a sort of Lamarckism remained dominant for quite some time. So, for both Schleicher and Namık Kemal, the notion of evolution or Darwinism was in a certain sense quite diffuse. Indeed, when we look at the Ottoman context, commentaries of evolution begin appearing as early as the 1870s, with Ahmet Mithat’s writings in his journal Dağarcık, but they reference not Darwin specifically but a whole range of evolutionary ideas and motifs, including regarding race, culture, and language. Although the adoption of Darwinism as a unifying theory of everything by Ottoman intellectuals would not take place until late 1890s, already in the 1870s and 1880s we see an increasing usage of organismic metaphors to discuss language, society, and culture in thinkers like Namık Kemal.
2- Do you think Namik Kemal’s assertion in 1874 that ‘the literature of Iran is amongst the most corrupt in the world’ was based less on his deep knowledge of Persian literature but perhaps his antipathy to the ‘Diwan poetry’ where Divani poetry is written in a heavily Persified form of Ottoman Turkish, and concerned with a range of subjects; from the religious, romantic, mythical themes but never political / intellectual / reasoning. Do you think his intellectual rejection was based on his European sense of rational thinking and his belief in that the lack of that was the chief cause of Ottoman decline and perhaps the insufficient depth of the Tanzimat reforms?
Yes, for the most part, this is the case. In the introduction to Bahar-ı Daniş, for example, after heavily criticizing the influence of Persian upon Ottoman, he then writes: “but this is not to say that within it there are no beautiful texts. On the contrary, Iran possesses hundreds of works like [Sa’di’s] Golestan and [Rumi’s] Masnavi, of which only one or two would constitute the eternal pride of Ottoman literature if they were found within it.” Frequently, he will state that his objection is not to the Persian canon wholesale but rather its inferior, inauthentic imitations within Ottoman Turkish. And yet, at the same time, he also does frequently seem to condemn Persian literature and culture as a whole; there is, as we might expect, a certain slippage in where he draws the line between the Ottoman Persianate and Persian literature in general. Clearly, for Namık Kemal beauty in art is derived from truth, from mimesis, and from an underlying social, ethical and political purpose; what he regards as catastrophic about the Persianate aesthetic is not only that it is not interested in the faithful representation of reality but in the elaboration of its own codes of wordplay and metaphor, but also that it forms a rigid system unable to respond to contemporary society. This, for instance, is why Namık Kemal absolutely rejects any association between the staged theater and the passion plays [taziyeh] performed in Iran to commemorate the sufferings of Husayn at Karbala, even though European writers like Arthur de Gobineau had extensively praised these performances as resembling those of the Ancient Greeks. For Namık Kemal the theater was, above all, a means of representing the human condition to ourselves, of transforming a populace into a politicized public; when we look at his patriotic plays like Vatan, yahut Silistre or historical narratives like Celâleddin Harezmşah, he makes clear that his aim is to inspire a sort of political collectivity. Taziyeh by contrast turned the political episode of Karbala into a supernatural drama, removing it from the realm of temporal, historical politics into a sort of cosmic allegory of the triumph of evil over righteousness; likewise, there is no fourth wall, and the actors are all amateurs, and so for Namık Kemal it is also unable to ascend to the level of a true art. At the same time, it has been noted that despite his elevation of realism, Namık Kemal’s own fictional works are hardly realistic, but are on the contrary invariably extraordinarily melodramatic or romanticist narratives; so a common criticism has been that Namık Kemal was unable to implement what he advocated in his own writing and had misunderstood the aesthetic principles of someone like Balzac or Zola, for instance. But I think this is a mistaken reading. As he argues in multiple places, including his 1867 Ramazan Letter and in Bahar-ı Daniş, the Ottoman Turkish populace was accustomed to Persianate fantasy and to remove it completely would be like taking away a crux; it was necessary instead to gradually introduce European aesthetics to avoid popular rejection. So his social and literary project was, I think, quite intentional and methodical.
3- In the wake of the first cholera pandemic of 1817-1824, in 1838 the institution of Ottoman quarantine system was established was framed not with a pure medical assistance idea but from an interventionist governance at a time when the efficacy of quarantine was under dispute. Was there 2 camps in the medical discourse with opposing views and was the idea of a quarantine the winner of this argument for a disease that doesn’t spread by human to human contact? How much was known about the disease and its spread at the time?
As a “new disease,” cholera absolutely constituted a shock to the medical episteme of the time, in both the Ottoman Empire and in Europe. The Mediterranean world had a long and entrenched cultural practice of quarantine for diseases that were regarded as contagious and epidemic: notably plague, yellow fever, and smallpox (notably, of these diseases we now know only smallpox is directly contagious person-to-person). For the most part, this quarantine system was regarded as quite efficacious, particularly since Europe was largely spared outbreaks of plague throughout the eighteenth century, and of course the spread of variolation and vaccination from the Ottoman Empire also offered hope for the defeat of smallpox. But cholera broke through all of these established systems, and its mechanism of spread was extremely elusive. So the end result was that by the 1830s, there was a real crisis of faith not only in quarantine but in the notion of contagion wholesale. Nevertheless, when we look at Ottoman texts on cholera – notably, Mustafa Behçet Efendi’s 1831 Kolera Risalesi, which was published by the Ottoman state, distributed widely, and translated into Arabic, English, and German – we see that they in fact knew quite a bit about the disease, including its origin in India, a certain relationship to unwholesome water, and that treatment should involve fluid replacement in some form. The difficulty, until the discoveries of Robert Koch in the 1880s, was always in proving these intuitive claims; the historian Christopher Hamlin (who, incidentally, is a descendent of the co-founder of Robert College, Cyrus Hamlin, a key source on the 1865 cholera outbreak in Istanbul) has a wonderful study on the various disputes and controversies throughout the period on whether cholera was contagious, endemic or only contagious under certain, very specific conditions.
All this meant that, in implementing an official quarantine system, the Ottoman Empire was making a clear choice in favour of contagion and against the claims of the British state (less so British physicians) that cholera was a wholly endemic disease activated by poverty, filth, and local environmental factors. Sharon Mizbani has an upcoming article looking at this process from an architectural lens, and she argues that when we look at the forms taken by the first post-choleric hospitals in Istanbul and the rhetoric employed in their construction, it becomes clear that the Ottoman state understood quarantine largely ideologically, as a particular mode of hygienic and social governance beyond its medical functions. Birsen Bulmuş has looked at figures like the Algerian exile Hamdan bin Osman and has argued that the court of Mahmud II, which first implemented the quarantine regulations, directly looked to European examples but aimed to adapt these to the Ottoman context, especially by avoiding extremely punitive measures. By the time of Namık Kemal, Ottoman participation in the global quarantine system was essentially unquestioned: what was at stake was whether the Ottoman Empire would be an equal player in this system or the subject of European authority.
4- The Ottoman Empire had a whole number of institutions that were developing post Tanzimat reforms such as the Imperial School of Medicine, the Constantinople Board of Health and the Imperial Society of Medicine, which all served to demarcate the Ottoman Empire as belonging to the ‘epidemiological safe area’ of the Western world. How true was this, was health / quarantine provisioning on a par with European states and to what extent were these institutions based on Western models and staffed by Westerners?
In connection to the last question, this is in some respects difficult to answer. The efficacy of the Ottoman sanitary system, at least in the eyes of Western observers, was always relative: as I quoted in my presentation, in the words of the Gazette Medicale d’Orient in June, 1863, “no one can deny today the progress that Turkey offers us compared to its sister and neighbor, Persia. Constantinople, from the medical point of view especially, is, opposite Tehran, a center of light. It has a school of medicine whose teaching is entrusted to very distinguished European professors.” This last line is telling: what brings the Ottoman system closer to par with those of European nations is the greater presence of European doctors and professors within the Ottoman health system, who are able to instil modern techniques to Ottoman physicians and thus triumph over what would otherwise be a realm of intractable Oriental superstition and endemic disease. Within this rhetorical framework, the fact that the Ottoman quarantine system was first organized by Ottoman physicians, or the pivotal role of Mustafa Behçet Efendi in the early analysis of cholera, or the Ottoman origin of key public health practices like variolation, are entirely elided. At the same time, as I have written about in an article for the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, when the Ottoman system faltered, it was easy for European observers to claim that its faults were due to the lingering effects of Oriental backwardness. So, although the Constantinople Board of Health, for instance, was until 1885 a majority-European institution, when its actions were criticized in the British press it suddenly became a wholly Turkish institution. During the 1871 cholera outbreak in Istanbul, for instance, although the entire council had voted to institute quarantine on certain districts of the city, and although it was the British community of the city that had protested most vigorously against these measures, within the British press the spread of cholera was instead attributed to “the Turks’ own culpable neglect” or their “stupid and vexatious obstinacy.” Within these institutions, there were clear disparities: for instance, European members of the Council received higher salaries, and the language of the medical establishment remained French well into the late nineteenth century, despite increasing protests on the part of the newer generation of Ottoman physicians and medical students. The health system in Istanbul, at least, was comparable to certain European cities, in part because Istanbul also lacked some of the more deleterious effects of industrialization; but across the Empire more broadly the Ottoman health system reflected the relative incapacity of the Ottoman state.
5- Iran in contrast to the Ottoman Empire established a sanitary council much later in 1867 and that only lasted a few months. Yet in 1858 the Frenchman Joseph Désiré Tholozan became the personal physician to Nasseredin Shah. Professor Tholozan trained numerous Persian physicians and performed important observations on the epidemiology of the plague, cholera and was based there for more than 30 years. Why was the sanitary council ‘still-born’ when such a prominent physician was present?
Here again the question of state capacity comes into play. To give a brief example: starting in 1839, the Ottoman state under Abdülmecid launched an intensive smallpox vaccination campaign in Istanbul, with a special focus on vaccinating children. The Ottoman government promulgated a fetve from the Şeyhülislam declaring vaccination permissible and encouraged, opened up free, 24-hour vaccine clinics throughout the city, and in 1846 the surgeon general, İsmail Pasha, composed and disseminated a treatise entitled Menâfiü’l-Etfal outlining the benefits of vaccination for children. By 1847, at least ten thousand children had been vaccinated in these clinics, and more by private physicians and ambulatory vaccinators. By contrast, when the Qajar chief minister Amir Kabir launched a similar vaccination campaign in 1850, he faced extreme difficulties and was forced to resort to imposing fines on those who refused to vaccinate; even so, his entire campaign succeeded in vaccinating little more than a hundred individuals. Now, part of this difference has to do with the prior acceptance and history of variolation in the Ottoman capital, but this pattern was repeated in other areas of medical practice, including the quarantine system. Tholozan is an interesting case. Like Clot Bey in Egypt, he held idiosyncratic views about the efficacy of quarantines, the role of contagion, and the etiology of cholera: notably, he believed that cholera originated in Europe and spread East, a view which has actually received some re-examination recently but was wholly rejected in his time. He viewed his role primarily as an advisor rather than as an active member of the Iranian government, per se: a position in some respects commendable, but perhaps not very conducive towards establishing a comprehensive public health system in Iran. One wonders what might have occurred if someone far less erudite but much more ambitious, such as Malkum Khan, had been tasked with restarting Amir Kabir’s project. In any case, however, the issues were fundamentally structural and were compounded by the Ottoman head start, such that the question of whether Tholozan himself could have acted differently is perhaps somewhat beside the point.
6- Dr Bartoletti, who was born in Istanbul in 1808, started his Ottoman service as a quarantine doctor (1840 and 1888) and became a member of the Sanitary Council. He also represented the Ottoman Empire at the international medical conferences held in Paris, Istanbul and Vienna and performed important duties in Ottoman sanitary affairs during his forty-four years of service. Bartoletti and Tholozan corresponded with each other and Bartoletti’s claim on whether cholera was endemic to Iran was accurate. Clearly this didn’t go down nicely with Tholozan who in 1872 wrote direct to the medical gazette to dispute these claims. Do you think this souring of relations didn’t serve either party as it precluded cooperation and sharing of wisdom on disease prevention methods?
Yes, it should be remembered that the etiology, epidemiology, and treatment of cholera were deeply politicized issues, and although by the second half of the nineteenth century a certain sort of scientific common understanding had emerged (the notion of “contingent contagionism”), this did not mean that there was any unanimity in terms of what measures should constitute the global response to the disease. The memoranda of the cholera conferences were decided as much by diplomacy as by science, and there was a great deal of bargaining, negotiation, compromise and veiled threats which took place. The Ottomans, Iranians, and to a lesser extent the Russians and the British, as the major Asian land powers represented at the early conferences, thus faced considerable pressure from European participants like France and Austria to take special responsibility for managing the disease; naturally, this burden fell particularly upon the Ottomans and Iranians. The souring of relations between the Ottoman and Iranian delegations, while understandable in relation to Ottoman goals at these conferences, nevertheless did preclude the establishment of a coherent united front against what could be considered violations of Ottoman and Iranian sovereignty. There were certain issues, of course, – proposals to postpone or cancel the hajj during plague or choleric years, for example - which both Ottoman and Iranian delegations vigorously resisted. But in other respects the Ottomans frequently used the supposed endemicity of cholera in Iran as a rationale to exert considerable surveillance powers over Iran and to intervene in Iranian affairs; here rhetorical spectres like the “corpse traffic” I discussed offered a powerful means to distinguish between Ottoman vulnerability and Iranian complicity in the spread of epidemic disease. By the 1892 Vienna cholera conference, this relationship had devolved into heated arguments and insults traded between the Ottoman and Iranian delegations. The preceding feud between Bartoletti and Tholozan certainly contributed to this situation, especially since each remained key figures in their respective health establishments for more than four decades. But it was also, again, rooted in the broader geopolitical contestation between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, and their respective statuses vis-à-vis Europe.
7- European criticism that the newly established Ottoman public health authorities needlessly inhibited trade and the free flow of overseas traffic by imposing a ten to fifteen-day quarantine on all traffic passing through the Straits motivated Clot (also known as Clot-Bey) and Aubert-Roche to complete a new study of the plague in Egypt in 1846. They found that Egypt’s most recent plague outbreaks could be explained by environmental factors rather than contagious ones. Yet, the Europeans accused the Ottomans of neglecting the annual pilgrimage after cholera spread from Mecca to Europe in 1865. These issues culminated in the 1894 and 1897 International Sanitary Conferences, which finalised quarantines in the Suez and on the Red Sea coasts. Do you think the European early criticism was ill-founded and yet they wanted the Ottoman Empire to be bulwark against the spread of cholera from the East? Were the Ottomans laxer when it came to pilgrims from the Hejaz rather than Iran, reflecting their own prejudices?
This is an interesting question. On one hand, it is true that Mecca and Medina were, as centres of global trade and pilgrimage, nexus points for the spread of epidemic disease; Mecca was severely affected by the third cholera pandemic in 1846 and the hajj was immediately attributed as the vector for the spread of the fourth cholera pandemic, in 1863. At the same time, this means that most of the cholera pandemics of the nineteenth century did not depend upon the hajj for propagation and instead spread via overland routes or by ships directly travelling from British India. So we can perhaps understand the palpable exasperation of the Ottoman and Iranian delegates when they repeatedly were met with proposals for drastic restrictions upon the hajj, which were completely untenable for both religious, political and practical reasons. Valeska Huber, in her studies of the cholera conferences, has noted how European proposals for a cordon sanitaire around the entire Hejaz ignored the complete practical impossibility of quarantining hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in the surroundings of Mecca and Medina, a situation which would have almost certainly produced more disease outbreaks than it prevented. To be sure, as Gülden Sarıyıldız has described in her detailed studies, over the course of the nineteenth century the Ottomans and Egypt did construct a functioning quarantine system in the Hejaz, spurred on particularly by the increase in the flows of traffic through the Suez Canal. But there is a certain irony, then, that the Ottoman delegations were all too ready to engage in similar rhetoric regarding the flow of Iranian pilgrims to Najaf and Karbala and the “corpse traffic.” As we now know, of course, cholera is spread by infected diarrhea entering into the water supply, meaning that corpses were never a possible vector for widespread contamination. And, indeed, it was already noted at the time that no outbreaks in Ottoman Iraq were directly attributable to the trade in Iranian corpses. Nevertheless, Ottoman rhetoric and demands for the cessation of this trade oftentimes mirrored those of the European powers regarding the hajj.
8- Cholera had a significant impact on the establishment of international cooperation against epidemic diseases. The first International Sanitary Conference was organised in Paris on 23 July 1851 to prevent the spread of the cholera, to overcome the problems encountered in the implementation of modern quarantines and to determine a general quarantine duration to be applied jointly by each country. Therefore, efforts to reduce the long and unnecessary quarantine periods were at the forefront in the organisation of the conference. The Consul General of Paris, Gustave Halphen, represented the Ottoman Empire at this conference for political matters, and Dr Bartoletti, as the “Sanitary Inspector General” for sanitary decisions. At the beginning of the conference, however, the Ottoman Empire was represented only by Halphen. Before leaving İstanbul, a special meeting was organised for the instructions to be given to Dr Bartoletti and he was advised to be cautious about the interests and opinions of the Ottoman government. After six months of work of different commissions and forty-eight sessions, 137 articles of international sanitary regulations were published in accordance with the decisions of the conference which ended on 19 January 1852. However, this regulation was signed only by three of twelve participating states, including the Ottomans. Do you think the stewardship and insights of cholera by Bartoletti, despite his late arrival, meant the Ottomans could no longer be accused by other powers of not doing their bit in epidemic control?
Yes, I think this is correct. Although Bartoletti arrived late to the conference, his participation was crucial to ensuring that the interests of the Ottoman Empire were represented: above all, ensuring that cholera was likewise deemed a transmissible disease (alongside plague and yellow fever) and therefore not endemic to the Ottoman lands. This was important, because it ensured that Ottoman quarantine measures could, in principle, be sufficient to include it within the broader European cordon sanitaire, which would not be the case if the disease itself originated indigenously within the Ottoman territories. The Paris conference had originally been quite riven between those delegates, such as those of France, which regarded cholera as transmissible, and delegates from Britain and elsewhere that regarded the imposition of quarantines for cholera as unjustifiable. But after Bartoletti’s arrival, the delegates voted in the vast majority to declare cholera a quarantinable disease. Bartoletti brought to the conference his own personal observations of the Empire’s hygienic frontiers and worked in a committee with delegates from Portugal, Russia, Britain, Greece and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to establish a general framework for implementing quarantines in the Middle East. So he proved quite an instrumental figure, and ensured that the Ottomans would have to be included in any future discussion regarding the shape of the new hygienic order.
Interview conducted by Craig Encer