Outliving an Empire: Mehmed Ziya, the Former Ottoman Bureaucrat, and His Pension Claim across Post-Ottoman Lebanon and Cyprus in the 1920s

Abstract

This article examines how a former Ottoman bureaucrat claimed his retirement pension in interactions with state officials in post-Ottoman Turkey, Syria–Lebanon and Cyprus in the 1920s. Born in Cyprus in 1856 and in Ottoman state service for more than three decades until 1916, Mehmed Ziya had to make renewed efforts to continue receiving his pension until he died in 1936. His troubles were largely due to the need to reconfigure enduring links to the Ottoman state amidst state succession after the First World War. I focus mainly on the diplomatic and administrative correspondence generated by Ziya's initiatives to examine how he sought to address a pressing, quotidian problem. I stress that nationality, as a pivotal category in the reconfiguration of state–subject relations in former imperial domains, played a key role in shaping how Ziya outlived his empire.

In July 1936, Mehmed Ziya passed away at the age of eighty in a village called Pyla near present-day Larnaca on the island of Cyprus.¹ The empire Ziya had served for much of his life, the Ottoman Empire, had been consigned to history over a decade before him. Following defeat in the First World War, the Ottoman state was no longer around to support the former bureaucrat in his old age. Nevertheless, Ziya sought to retain his Ottoman pension. As he tried to continue receiving it through appeals to officials in the new states of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus, the word ‘Pileli’, indicating his origins in that small village near Larnaca, remained constant in how he qualified his identity. As different states used different languages and alphabets, this word appeared in official documents variously as PILALI, BILALI and at times even as BELALI (literally ‘the troublesome’ in Turkish). Perhaps some pun was intended in the last of these spellings, as officials on different sides of the Mediterranean repeatedly had to address Ziya's attempts to retain his pension. In the last twenty years of his life, this former imperial bookkeeper argued his case with the ability of a seasoned bureaucrat and the determination of an old man in need. Although he found the strength to argue and insist, Ziya was constantly vulnerable due to health problems and poverty. It was unlikely that he would succeed in his endeavour, but he kept at it until his death.

In what follows, I historicise Mehmed Ziya's pension claim in ways that neither trivialise nor aggrandise the agency he was able to exercise. In the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, the lives of many former imperial subjects were still shaped by enduring links to the defunct Ottoman state. In the case of retired bureaucrats like Ziya, this link came in the form of an entitlement to a pension. Tracing Ziya's pension claim helps us to interpret how these specific links to imperial structures were reconfigured after the First World War as part of broader processes of state succession. Nationality, as the legal link of an individual to state authority, was a pivotal category in efforts to navigate state succession. It was an essential category, therefore, in shaping Ziya's experiences of the broader political and administrative changes that took place around him.² His nationality status remained an issue Ziya had to address in interactions with state officials all the way into his seventies, as the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire continued throughout and beyond the 1920s.

In this article, I propose to distinguish between the dissolution and the dismantling of an empire. With this distinction I aim to highlight the difference between an empire's loss of territory over long stretches of time and a process characterised by regime change and state succession. While Mehmed Ziya lived through many unsettling episodes in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in his youth, as an old man in the 1920s he experienced episodes in the dismantling of Ottoman institutions and practices of governance.³ Ziya's home island of Cyprus had been taken over in 1878 by the British Empire following the devastating Ottoman defeat in the 1877–8 Russo–Ottoman war. In the decades until 1918, the Ottoman Empire continued to lose territory in multiple regions on multiple continents. However, after the First World War, there were new dimensions to the challenges Ottoman officials like Ziya had to navigate. By the 1920s, rather than a new episode in a series of defeats that shrunk Ottoman territories in a piecemeal fashion, the wholesale dismantling of the empire was underway through the abolition of Ottoman dynastic rule and treaty stipulations that guided state succession.

In contrast to a vast body of relevant literature that revolves around inter-communal conflicts, nationalism(s) and political loyalties, my analysis of Ziya's pension claim foregrounds this context of empire dismantling, state succession and questions of nationality. While ethnic and religious identity featured significantly in his claim, Ziya managed to continue receiving his pension essentially because he was able to overcome obstacles about nationality status. The discussion below illustrates this by approaching the question of imperial afterlives in terms of ‘supranational or transnational governance’ rather than focusing on ‘nostalgia, or on ethnic conflict, or the internal dynamics and memory politics of the successor states’.⁴ Employing this approach is essential given the premises of Ziya's pension claim. He needed to initiate and navigate interactions with more than one state, not because he sought payment from more than one source but because his circumstances compelled him to request the understanding and support of more than one state to continue receiving his Ottoman pension.

Ziya had earned his pension in return for services to the Ottoman Empire, and was a retiree residing in Beirut when Ottoman forces withdrew from the city in 1918. He would eventually need to receive his pension from the French Mandate in Syria–Lebanon, not as an Ottoman national but with a new nationality status. What made things especially complex for Ziya was that his circumstances forced him to move back to his village in Cyprus in 1919 in search of a less expensive life there with his relatives. After moving back, he would seek to receive his pension in Cyprus. Although he could expect to receive pension payments only from Syria–Lebanon under French Mandate, for reasons elaborated below, Ziya's return to Cyprus undermined the continuation of these payments because his departure from (what became) Lebanon caused him problems in relation to his nationality. In this situation, nationality for Ziya was far from a technicality to be quickly settled and pushed aside after the Ottoman demise. It was central to navigating a situation shaped by diplomatic interactions and movement across land and sea. Moving beyond country-specific narratives of transition from empire to nation-state is essential for interpreting such situations.

Ultimately, tracing a case like Ziya's highlights a layer between ‘international’ spheres of interaction and ‘domestic’ dynamics of successor states. Postwar peace conferences were undeniably important in shaping the economic consequences of the war – and of empire – for individuals like Ziya. However, there is still much to be unpacked in terms of how those conferences were consequential for former Ottomans in specific, ‘mundane’ situations like Ziya's.⁵ Although it remains by and large neglected by historians, pensions for services rendered to the defunct Ottoman Empire were in fact debated at the peace conference in Lausanne. In addition to highlighting the ‘international’ grounds of postwar peace-making and empire-dismantling, this debate underscores how imperial structures were interpreted differently on those ‘international’ grounds. Even among and within successor states to the same empire, there were significant differences of approach to matters of pension. Ziya's case illustrates how ‘topics of discussion’ in peace conferences were pressing issues for individuals to navigate in practice, on a daily basis, at intersections of ‘international’ and ‘national’ spheres of interaction. It is these intersections that reveal some of the most striking insights into how an empire was outlived by one of its many servants, a former bureaucrat whose Ottoman world was indeed shaken before but had never quite collapsed the way it did in the 1920s.

Witnessing Dissolution and Dismantling

In the long sequence of Ottoman losses of imperial territory, which I frame here as the Ottoman Empire's dissolution, the 1870s was a critical stage. Following their alliance with the Ottomans against Russia in the Crimean War of 1853–6, the major states of Europe had sought to avert conflict among themselves by upholding the formal territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire.⁶ By the mid-1870s, however, separatist pressures in the Balkans evolved into a series of crises in ‘the annus horribilis of 1876’, as described by the historian Edhem Eldem, following which the Ottoman Empire suffered a disastrous military defeat against Russia in the war of 1877–8.⁷ While the more immediate consequences of the military defeat were somewhat softened at the expense of Russia at the Berlin Congress of 1878, these years nonetheless marked the beginning of what the historian Amzi-Erdogdular describes as ‘the afterlife of Ottoman Europe’.⁸ The Treaty of Berlin and the accompanying international agreements that formed a wider settlement in the period from 1878–81 led to huge losses of Ottoman territory in the Balkans, the Caucasus and North Africa.⁹ These included Mehmed Ziya's home island Cyprus, which was placed under British administration through a convention signed in the lead-up to the Berlin Congress, in return for a British promise of intervention on the side of the Ottomans in the case of future aggression from Russia.¹⁰

Mehmed Ziya was in his early twenties in 1878. The roughly three decades of service he rendered to the Ottoman state was mostly under the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. During this period, the sultan's modernising autocratic rule increased the power of state institutions and strengthened transportation and communication links across distant provinces. Islam gained a new ascendancy in the use and legitimation of power in this ‘Hamidian’ era, in an empire where Muslims came to constitute an even higher percentage of the population after the displacements that followed Ottoman defeats in the Balkans in the 1870s.¹¹ Ziya also witnessed the rise to power of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) with the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, which restored a constitutional regime in the empire and ushered in an era of political parties and elections. Aspirations to ‘save the state’ and revolutionary ideals about liberty, justice and unity were initially shared by Ottomans from various backgrounds who opposed Hamidian ‘despotism’. Soon, however, these aspirations and ideals gave way to increased state centralisation and violence amidst competing nationalisms.¹²

Although the Ottoman Empire continued to suffer humiliating defeats from 1908 to 1916, the year Ziya retired in his last position at the directorate of provincial treasury in Aleppo, the empire's ultimate collapse was far from a foregone conclusion. True, if the Ottoman defeat against the Italians in Libya in 1911–12 was injurious, the defeat in the Balkan Wars in 1912–13 was mortifying. But on the eve of the First World War, saving the empire and restoring its political standing were still potent motives for many Ottomans, not least for leading members of the CUP.¹³ Moreover, in the initial stages of the war, Ottoman defences did succeed on some fronts, for example in Gallipoli. Yet defeats and losses of territory continued from southern Iraq to northeastern Anatolia.¹⁴ In late 1918, it must have been difficult for Ziya to see that the Allies and Arab forces occupied vast Ottoman territories including Beirut, the home he had chosen for his retirement. Even then, the end Ziya witnessed to the Ottoman rule in Beirut in 1918 did not have to be the ultimate end for the Ottoman Empire as a whole. That ultimate end came about more as a result of what happened after the war.¹⁵

Following the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, the defeated Ottomans began to witness Allied (and Allied-supported) occupations in the territories that had still been under their control at the time of the ceasefire. This included the occupation of Izmir by Greece in May 1919, and that of Istanbul, the only imperial capital to be occupied after the First World War.¹⁶ Fuelled by the resentment and concern these occupations caused, especially among the empire's Muslims, a national resistance movement took shape in Anatolia and grew in defiance of the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres that the Ottoman government signed with the Allies in August 1920. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), this movement mobilised and organised resources to fight foreign occupations as well as the Ottoman government, which had declared the movement's leaders mischievous rebels to be executed.¹⁷ After almost three years of fighting in addition to the First World War itself, the government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT) defeated the Greek army in western Anatolia and signed a new armistice in October 1922 as the victorious side. Following this new armistice, once it was sensed that the Ottoman government in Istanbul entertained the idea of securing a seat at the new peace conference, the GNAT abolished the Ottoman sultanate in November 1922 and sent to Lausanne its own delegation as the only sovereign state authority in Turkey. After long negotiations that necessitated a second round, a peace treaty to end the state of war in ‘the East’ was finally signed in July 1923.

Together, the abolition of the sultanate and this peace treaty set in motion the wholesale dismantling of the empire. This was different from loss of territory or change in the form of sovereignty over particular provinces. These events set the stage for the empire's dismantling as thoroughly as possible, in a context of state succession steered by new political regimes keen to do away with the Ottoman Empire at its core as well as in the provinces.¹⁸

Before the dismantling of the empire, former Ottomans, including state officials like Mehmed Ziya, experienced waves of violence and displacement during the empire's long decades of dissolution. In this regard, while Ziya's experiences were similar to other Ottomans’ in some ways, they were more particular in some other ways. In the years between 1878, the year when Ziya's Cyprus was lost, and the end of the First World War in ‘the East’ in 1923, millions of Ottomans, including (but not only) Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Arabs and Armenians, suffered systematic dispossession, displacement and massacres in lands struck by war, famine and plague. Before, during and after the First World War, forced migration and mass violence made particular portions of Ottoman lands increasingly more homogenous in terms of the inhabitants’ ethnicity and religion.¹⁹ State officials like Ziya were not immune to these waves of violence and displacement. Ties to an imperial state meant that they could rely on a long-term source of support (at least on paper), but the same ties also meant exposure to migration and violence, often at the very forefront of conflicts in multiple locales. Already by the outbreak of the First World War, leaving home behind in lands that eventually became another country was an experience widely shared among Ottoman officials.²⁰ Unlike many leading figures of early republican Turkey, however, when Ziya faced defeat and loss again in 1918 he did not have a career to look forward to as a young man. Nor did he share an ethnic identity and native language with a majority population in either Cyprus or what was to become Lebanon. He left and moved not to recuperate and prepare for the next fight, but essentially to live out what remained of his life in peace.

When Ziya learned of the end brought to the Ottoman Empire by the Ankara government and of the peace treaty thereafter signed in Lausanne in July 1923, he had already left Beirut for his village in Cyprus. By that point, the League of Nations centred in Geneva had ‘entrusted’ France with a mandate over Syria–Lebanon, and Britain with mandates in neighbouring Palestine and Mesopotamia/Iraq. In Turkey, a new republic was founded in October 1923, and Ziya expressed deep respect for its leaders as he sought their help in August 1924 with receiving his Ottoman pension. He could expect pension payments only from the French Mandate in Syria–Lebanon, because his habitual residence in Beirut in 1918 had rendered him a national of the state established there and Article 61 of the Treaty of Lausanne stipulated the following: ‘The recipients of Turkish [Ottoman] civil and military pensions who acquire under the present Treaty the nationality of a State other than Turkey, shall have no claim against the Turkish Government in respect of their pensions’.²¹ This article did not offer quick solutions to specific cases, but it underscored the centrality of nationality in the evaluation of pension claims. Since the question of where one resided at which point in time was directly linked to nationality status, Ziya knew that his postwar movement from Lebanon to Cyprus complicated his situation. He made significant reference to nationality status and Article 61 in his appeals, as elaborated below. To navigate political transformations with large scope, he needed to apply treaty stipulations to his particular circumstances and claims. He sought strength from these stipulations because they were upheld by international agreements that aimed to regulate a crucial broader process: state succession.

Rather than an event, state succession was a long and multifaceted process that unfolded across the former domains of the Ottoman Empire. The interactions former imperial bureaucrats generated as part of their pension claims highlight state succession as a generator of the cross-border ‘international’ dimensions of imperial collapse. This regrettably remains by and large off the radar of studies on transnational and/or international phenomena.²² As in many other cases similar to Mehmed Ziya's, it was essentially problems of state succession that generated the need to navigate an imperial afterlife across new borders. In a context where the nation-state form steadily acquired increasing political force and currency, Ziya was nonetheless compelled to initiate interaction across ‘national’ units to solve problems with concrete, material stakes.²³ While he did manage to reach beyond borders with his appeals, Ziya was far from trying to advance a particular ideology, promote internationalist collaboration or contribute to the work of some international institution.²⁴ In trying to reach beyond borders, Ziya's aim was not to bring about change in the borders of a nation-state or in the world at large. What motived him was not hunger for profit or thirst for discovering new horizons. It was his vulnerability in old age, his need, his pressing circumstances in poor health.

Historicising Mehmed Ziya's pension claim facilitates interpreting the agency of state servants like him. The central figures in narratives on the end of the Ottoman Empire still tend to be military and political leaders, members of affluent families or intellectual figures.²⁵ Retired civil servants remain at the margins, not least because their agency was often significantly constrained after the demise of their empire.²⁶ Ziya remained distant to higher echelons of power throughout his career. He did not play much of a role in a transition from ‘empire to nation(-state)’ in any country. Questions of political allegiance and loyalty do not seem to have been central to his difficulties and dilemmas. Although a bureaucrat with decades of experience behind him by the time he retired, Ziya's problems of pension were of the kind historians tend to consider as ‘mundane’, ‘everyday’ problems; and the means at his disposal were not much more than those available to ‘ordinary people’.²⁷ The reference points in Ziya's appeals for help varied depending on the instance, and at times these did include ethnic and religious identity. However, there was an issue that remained constantly at the heart of his efforts to navigate his vulnerability: his status of nationality.

Zooming in on the Fundamentals: Nationality as a Pivotal Category of State Succession

Mehmed Ziya's interactions with state authorities on multiple sides of the eastern Mediterranean underscore that ethnic and religious identity was far from being the sole factor in shaping individual experiences of transition to post-Ottoman regimes. The gist of Ziya's difficulty in receiving his pension after 1923 involved a type of congruence that states in former Ottoman lands expected by then when evaluating claims to pension for services rendered to the defunct Ottoman Empire. This was the congruence between a pensioner's nationality and (his/her) place of habitual residence. Ziya was aware that his departure from Beirut to Cyprus caused him trouble in this regard. He spoke to this issue as he appealed for help, even in instances when he expected his ethnicity and religion to be decisively potent reference points for him. To reap the fruits of his claims, he needed to articulate reasons more specific than his ethnic and religious identity. Moreover, different addressees for his appeals were conducive to following different paths when raising a claim. While recourse to Turkish nationalism could make more sense in one initiative, appealing to French justice in the name of humanity could make more sense in another.²⁸ The dimension that remained constant in Ziya's claims regardless of the addressee concerned his nationality status. Until the very end of his life, questions about nationality pursued Ziya alongside his financial, logistical and health problems.

Mehmed Ziya certainly ascribed profound meaning to his ethnic and religious identity as he evaluated his problems. In August 1924, he explained to the Ankara government his difficulties with officials of the French Mandate in Syria–Lebanon by expressing his conviction that he was discriminated against because he was a Turk. He appealed to the then Prime Minister İsmet Pasha in Ankara as ‘the Turks’ source of pride’ (Türklerin medar-ı iftiharı) and asked the Ankara government to save a Turkish brother from cruelty and indigence at the end of his lifetime ‘for the sake of Turkishness’ (Türklük namına).²⁹ When narrating his reasons for leaving Beirut after the war, he highlighted financial difficulties that had become unbearable with his wife's poor health. The pension he had been allocated in Ottoman currency was converted and paid to him in new Syrian banknotes, which was frustratingly insufficient to meet even the cost of a month's rent in the city.³⁰ Yet these descriptions of pressing material circumstances were conspicuously accompanied by a mention of the insults suffered by the Turks and ‘the despicable trifling acts by people whom one would call brothers in religion’ (din kardaşlarımız demek olanların mehinane muamelat ve harekatı).³¹ Invoking expectations of ethnic and religious solidarity that were left unfulfilled in Beirut was among the ways in which Ziya alluded to his expectation of diplomatic support from the Ankara government as a Muslim Turk. But of which Muslim Turks was he? After all, the Ankara government's adversaries in the Turkish national struggle included some Muslim Turks as well.

The very same appeal by Mehmed Ziya evinces that Islam and Turkishness were categories too broad to be the sole reference points in navigating his situation. As he wrote to the Ankara government in 1924, he considered it worthy of mention that he asked for retirement in his last post in Aleppo in 1916 with ‘the idea of withdrawing from the former regime (idare-i sabıka) that had become unbearable’, and that ‘this service coincided with the governorship of Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey who is currently the esteemed minister of finance [in Ankara]’.³² Ziya knew that his appeal would be evaluated not solely based on his ethnic and religious identity but also based on his past experiences, affiliations and networks of acquaintances. His appeal for help would be best served by a balance between emphasis on familiarities and maintaining distance to some aspects of the Ottoman past.³³ The government Ziya wrote to in August 1924 had abolished the Ottoman sultanate and had a complex history with the CUP that continued to evolve on the basis of close links as well as deep-rooted competitions.³⁴ Appeals to solidarity in terms of ethnic and religious identity would probably not do much good for Ziya if he were to include in his narratives clumsy eulogies to CUP leaders and/or praises to the Ottoman dynasty. The rapidly evolving political landscape of early republican Turkey set certain boundaries that defined how Ziya could deploy his ethnic and religious identity.

These interactions with the Ankara government represent only some aspects of Mehmed Ziya's broader claim-making effort, as archival records also include traces of his correspondence with French officials. Perhaps not surprisingly, his ethnic and religious identity was not an evident reference point for Ziya when he proceeded on that path. When writing to French officials, he protested in a milder tone and humbly begged justice for his ill-fated family ‘in the name of humanity and French justice’.³⁵ This difference invites reflection on the power relations that shaped Ziya's interactions with particular states. He seems to have perceived his context of appeal to the Ankara government as more suitable for emphasis on what he was entitled to. Writing in his native language, as a ‘brother’ to his addressees, he could more easily amalgamate requests for favour with claims to rights and entitlements. While he asked for the benevolent favour and help (lütuf ve muavenet) of the Turkish prime minister, and kissed his hands at the end of the letter to show respect, he also described his pension as his ‘well-deserved, fair share’ (nasibim ve istihkak-ı sarihim) for which ‘he consumed half of [his] life’.³⁶ With the French officials, however, he seems to have written from a different position. Asking for justice in the name of humanity and French justice helped him resist indifference by expanding the scope and relevance of his problem. It compelled attention and support also on moral terms. When appealing to authorities one did not necessarily identify with, perhaps there was something more conducive to foregrounding appeals in the name of humanity – the need for help was profound, indeed, but its request was framed that way also because channels of redress ‘closer to home’ were either absent or severely limited.

While appeals to nationalist solidarity as well as humanity and French justice featured in Mehmed Ziya's claims, questions of nationality were key to shaping the very grounds of his problems. Ziya's nationality was certainly not all that there was to his identity, but it was a crucial component of it in interactions with states.³⁷ Ziya's legal link to state authority had come undone after the Ottoman demise, and once he left Beirut for Cyprus after the war, reconfiguring that link was more complicated. Ziya was able to receive his pension in Cyprus via an agent in Beirut for several years until the beginning of 1924, but at that point he was requested to present identity papers to prove his Syrian nationality and reside in Beirut to continue receiving his salary.³⁸ As moving back to Beirut was impossible under Ziya's personal circumstances, his appeal to the Ankara government in 1924 defended the idea that he should be able to receive his pension regardless of his place of residence. ‘In the special clauses of the Treaty of Lausanne’, he pointed out, ‘it is written that Turkish retirees/pensioners (Türk mütekaidleri) in the provinces detached from our Turkey are to be considered nationals of those provinces and will receive their retirement salary from those provinces. It is not obligatory to reside in those (former Ottoman provinces); it is only natural that if one has a right, he has that right wherever he is as long as he does not leave behind his nationality’.³⁹ Even though he was not a Turkish national in 1924, Ziya hoped that the Ankara government could take an initiative to facilitate a favourable approach to his pension claim from the French Mandate authorities, despite the fact that he was no longer in Beirut where he was supposed to receive his Ottoman pension.

However, in contrast to Mehmed Ziya's confidence about his Syrian nationality and entitlement to receiving his pension wherever he resided, his move to Cyprus had cast doubt over his nationality status and thus also over his right to a pension from Syria–Lebanon. After receiving Ziya's appeal, the Ankara government did comply with his request and did write to French officials regarding his case.⁴⁰ But the French officials in Beirut and Istanbul would underline to Turkish authorities that ‘no pension could be allocated from local budgets for services prior to 1919 if the persons concerned do not substantiate their habitual residence (établissement) in the countries under mandate on October the 30th 1919, and if they have not become nationals (ressortissants) of the country under mandate by application of the Treaty of Lausanne’.⁴¹ While Ziya grounded his claims in Article 61 of the Treaty of Lausanne, the significance of stipulations like these were often determined in practice. Where one resided at which point in time mattered a great deal in the implementation of treaty stipulations, not least because this had ramifications in terms of that individual's nationality status.

Eventually, something that happened around mid-1925 represented a breakthrough for Mehmed Ziya. The available archival records do not allow for certainty in terms of what made this breakthrough possible, but in the months following his correspondence with Turkish officials and the subsequent correspondence between Turkish and French officials, the question of Ziya's nationality status was addressed in a way that allowed him to continue receiving his pension without having to move back to Beirut.⁴² In 1930, consent was given also to Ziya's request to receive his pension not through the arduous process of relying on an agent in Beirut but through the French Consulate in Larnaca – which must have been facilitated by the fact that the French Consul considered him by 1930 as ‘an old, honourable national dedicated to our [French] interests’.⁴³ The Lebanese authorities, on their part, did not object to taking this ‘exceptional measure’ for Ziya.⁴⁴ It seems that state officials on both sides of the Mediterranean, in Lebanon and in Cyprus, were attempting to make life easier for the old pensioner. Despite this, Ziya's nationality status remained a troubling matter for him up to his late seventies.

Nationality remained an issue for individuals like Mehmed Ziya not least because their experiences spanned across former imperial territories that gradually became multiple countries. In 1934, Ziya's pension payments were once again stopped, as administrative requirements in Lebanon forced him to certify his nationality status again. After the French Consul in Larnaca drew Beirut's attention to ‘the precarious situation’ of the old retiree, he was told by the Lebanese officials that the continuation of Ziya's pension payments was subject to the receipt of a certificate, to be obtained through consultation with authorities in Cyprus, showing that Ziya did not change his nationality.⁴⁵ An issue so essential for Ziya's livelihood thus remained repeatedly subject to doubt and inquiry. The French Consulate in Larnaca sent the certificate and nationality form right away, providing also a recap of Ziya's situation, almost as if with a wish to bring a definite end to these recurring difficulties:

Mohamed Zia Pilali Ahmed has been retired since 1916, and only came to settle in Cyprus since 1919. As he was abroad at the time of the annexation of the island of Cyprus by England, this pensioner cannot obtain British nationality in any way other than through naturalisation. Moreover, since 1925, Mohammed Zia Pilali Ahmed continued to be registered at the Consulate of France and to travel with a passport issued by this Consulate as a French-protected Syrian (à titre de Syrien, protégé Français).⁴⁶

This striking description underscores that the situation Mehmed Ziya had to navigate was not simply a change from one nationality to another. The consul's description in 1934 qualified Ziya's nationality status in 1925 through a somewhat ambiguous, precarious category: ‘Syrien, protégé Français’.⁴⁷ Moreover, even in cases that did not involve questions of protection, ‘Syrian nationality’ itself was a legal category that remained inherently unstable in the 1920s and ’30s. Questions of nationality were directly related to sovereignty and the latter remained a thorny issue in the context of the League of Nations mandates.⁴⁸ There was yet another factor that made Ziya's nationality a complex issue. In the archival records pertaining to the description above, where the French Consul described Ziya's status in 1925 as ‘Syrien, protégé Français’, the word Syrien was later crossed out and replaced with ‘Libanais’, likely in Beirut after the document was received there in May 1934, as there was a Republic of Lebanon in existence since 1926.⁴⁹ The nationality Ziya was invited to prove that he did not change in the 1930s was thus referred to as not ‘Syrian’ but ‘Lebanese’ nationality. In sum, far from a seamless transition from one nationality to another, Ziya grappled with various categories of nationality that remained in flux for years after the Ottoman demise. It was as if multiple layers of transition followed him in the form of doubts and questions – not necessarily over his political loyalties but especially over his nationality status.

Mehmed Ziya managed to clear doubts over his nationality once again in 1934 and continued to receive his pension in Cyprus, but ultimately, one can hardly argue that he had a reliable source of income in old age. Logistical difficulties in receiving his pension checks and chronic late payments remained causes of difficulty and distress for Ziya for much of the period he outlived his empire. Especially in the last several years of his life, he was constantly in precarious situations. Officials in the French Consulate in Larnaca were often concerned about the poor conditions in which Ziya appealed for help.⁵⁰ Chronic delays in his pension payments worsened Ziya's conditions to a degree that was impossible to turn a deaf ear to. ‘Every time the payment is late’, wrote the French Consul Ricard in October 1931, at yet another instance of asking his colleagues in Beirut for the timely dispatch of Ziya's pension check, ‘the pensioner asks me for an advanced payment that is difficult for me to deny him’.⁵¹ Already by late 1931, Ziya had asked if his pension payments could be sent to him with intervals of two months rather than three as he had initially requested, given that he was now living practically from day to day.⁵² By 1934, he was struggling to survive. In all likelihood, logistical difficulties and chronic delays in his pension payments exacerbated his health problems. When Ziya passed away in July 1936, his pension check for the month of June had not arrived. Neither had the one for May.⁵³

Zooming Out: Thinking across Empires and across Former Imperial Domains

Paying attention to the pensions of former imperial bureaucrats involves higher historiographical stakes than we might assume at first glance. The pension-related debate at the Lausanne peace conference underscores that a pension for services rendered to a defunct empire was not a technical matter to be discussed solely by the experts of a particular empire's finances and administrative structures. In January 1923, remarks by the Albanian delegate Frasheri ignited a debate in Lausanne that ultimately involved not only the specifics of Ottoman pension schemes but also stipulations in other peace treaties that sought to address similar problems in the cases of other defunct empires as well.⁵⁴ As the conference at Lausanne convened after a series of conferences with similar goals, there were precedents for comparison. A postwar context that stretched up to 1923 thus shaped the thinking of at least some ‘peacemakers’ at Lausanne, such as the French delegate Bexon in the case of pensions, as they referred to stipulations in the treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye when expressing views on an approach they considered more consistent and even-handed.⁵⁵ This way of thinking, across treaties and empires, was manifest in the pension-related debate at Lausanne.⁵⁶ For retired civil servants like Mehmed Ziya, debates like this were significant in shaping the consequences of the war and empire. For historians, they are significant also as revealing windows onto the broader, interconnected contexts of peace-making and empire-dismantling after the First World War.

At Lausanne, at the heart of the comparison between pension-related stipulations in different treaties was the method of structuring pension funds, such as the capitalisation versus the repartition of contributions from state officials.⁵⁷ With references to pension systems employed in the German and Austro-Hungarian empires as well, it was debated whether or not the Ottoman state had a separate pension fund based on the capitalisation of contributions collected from officials who could now claim those contributions from Turkey. Eventually, it was accepted that the prevalent system in the Ottoman Empire was one of repartition rather than capitalisation; a system that did not entail the transfer of officials’ contributions to a distinct central fund that benefitted the Ottoman treasury at the expense of those officials and their new countries of nationality. It was thus considered unfair, contrary to claims by the Albanian delegate, to expect Turkey to pay the pensions of former Ottoman officials who acquired the nationality of a state other than the one in Turkey.⁵⁸ Attention to these common frameworks of thinking about imperial structures help question reductionist portrayals of the Ottoman Empire as an inherently backward, archaic entity that did not belong to the twentieth century.⁵⁹ At the same time, particularities such as those in structures of pension funds underscore that empires in the early twentieth century were not identical bureaucratic machineries that mobilised and managed resources in a single, uniform ‘imperial’ manner with the same implications for all imperial subjects.⁶⁰

It is noteworthy that not everyone around the negotiation table at Lausanne ascribed the same significance to the pension-related debate. The Greek delegate Venizelos, for example, stated that the issue was of no concern to Greece, as ‘the great majority of the Turkish [Ottoman] officials are Turkish, Syrian, Arab, or Albanian Muslims’.⁶¹ The debate at Lausanne was driven mainly by the claims raised by the Albanian delegate and the counterclaims of the Turkish delegate who found himself in a position to respond. The Albanian delegate pursued the matter knowing that a considerable number of former Ottoman officials had become Albanian nationals. One can only speculate how the debate would have evolved if a vocal presence was allowed in the negotiations to delegates from the former Ottoman ‘Arab provinces’, where the number of former Ottoman officials still alive in 1923 was far from insignificant. It is clear, in any case, that while the matter was not seen as a pressing issue in some successor states to the Ottoman Empire, in some others it was impossible to push aside.⁶² In the debate at Lausanne in January 1923, and later debates at the GNAT in Ankara when this issue came up, the Turkish position was based on the principle of making payments to retirees within the new national borders of Turkey but not to those who remained beyond those borders.⁶³ Yet, as evinced by cases like that of Mehmed Ziya, even when there was no legal obligation for them to intervene, this did not mean total indifference for Turkish officials. Complexities of individual lives often proved too difficult to boil down to basic principles and treaty stipulations. This is, at least in part, why there is still much to be learned from how principles and treaty stipulations were experienced and navigated in specific cases.

Indeed, even a case as complex and abundantly recorded as Mehmed Ziya's falls short of capturing all the different layers of political transition that shaped former Ottomans’ pension claims after the First World War.⁶⁴ Ziya was a former servant of the Ottoman state who had already retired by the end of the war. He was claiming a pension in the 1920s in return for the services he had rendered to a defunct empire. His story did not include affiliation with the short-lived regimes of the postwar period from 1918 to 1923, such as Faisal's Arab Kingdom in Syria.⁶⁵ Not only in Syria–Lebanon but also elsewhere in the post-Ottoman Middle East, political uncertainties of the years between the 1918 Armistice and the establishment of the League of Nations mandates would later result in pension-related disagreements that reflected the dynamics that shaped these new regimes. In Iraq, for example, around the same time Ziya was trying hard to continue receiving his pension, a British financial commission considered it erroneous that service to the Ottoman government between the Armistice in 1918 and King Faisal's accession to the throne in Iraq in 1921 could count for a pension in Iraq.⁶⁶ The British commission's approach to this three-year period was evidently different from that of many Iraqi officials who had served the Ottoman state earlier in their careers and who had a more intimate awareness of the difficulties and dilemmas of the period. This awareness likely made them more tolerant than British officials as they evaluated what service could count for a pension in Iraq and what could not.

Across, and also within, the new borders, therefore, different views on recent political transitions shaped different perspectives on pension-related questions. Those claiming a pension struggled with these competing political perspectives as well as with the evolving domestic and international legal frameworks of nationality. This was not an easy combination to struggle with, especially since many pensioners like Mehmed Ziya carried with them a legal link to state authority that remained somewhat imperfectly reconfigured for years after the Ottoman demise. A modest sum of money that they needed in old age often became troublesome reminders of the imperial pasts they carried with them to new eras.

Conclusion

How much of a ‘winner’, then, was Mehmed Ziya in his struggles? How ‘successful’ was he in navigating ‘everyday realities of post–imperial life’? The audacity to venture into assessing his ‘success’ can perhaps be forgiven if the effort is a genuine one to offer a balanced assessment. It was no small achievement in itself that Ziya used his bureaucratic experience and argumentation skills to convince his interlocutors to help him in the first place. In the 1920s, one could hardly take for granted the availability of interlocutors willing to listen to claims about income earned in return for services to the defunct Ottoman Empire. This was an empire against which the French, the British, the Arab as well as the Turkish republican officials in Ankara had fought; an empire that was in severe disrepute as backward, corrupt and oppressive. His need to move from Beirut back to Cyprus, moreover, placed him in a truly complex situation. It was despite these difficulties that Ziya managed to receive his pension until his death. Yet, he remained vulnerable throughout the process. He could hardly rely on a stable relationship with the officials of any given state in the 1920s and ’30s. For much of the two decades of his retirement, he was in precarious situations. Moreover, in the process of claiming his pension across borders and in interactions with multiple states, a change seems to have occurred in the nature of the money he was able to receive. Rather than a stable source of income he earned in return for past services, it was as if his pension had become a benevolent act of charity. As if it were a favour done to him so he could survive a bit longer, it had come to resemble a kind-hearted blessing for which he was expected to remain in gratitude to those in positions of authority.

There is a key question to be asked in relation to a change of this kind: which aftermaths of war and empire were more conducive to the ascription of political significance to claims about resources after the First World War? Even as one successfully navigated hardships and maintained a grip on certain resources, this ‘success’ could be accompanied by profound losses, including loss of ground in terms of inhabiting a rights-based discourse vis-a-vis state authority – a crucial loss in terms of building relationships of citizenship rather than nationality as subjecthood. In the aftermath of the Ottoman demise, to what extent could men like Mehmed Ziya really demand forcefully, and to what extent could they only accept?⁶⁷ Many former Ottoman state servants like Ziya did not live the final years of their life in a country where they could confidently hold a successor state accountable for what they deserved as part of esteemed relationships of mutual obligations and expectations. Perhaps this was a predicament that took a toll not solely on them. How these state servants could (and could not) sustain confident claims to merit and rights likely shaped not only their experiences of outliving an empire but also the very grounds on which states in former Ottoman territories evaluated the deserving and the undeserving.