The Unionist Governors: From the Balkan Wars to the end of the Great War

The Committee of Union and Progress (the CUP, or ‘İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti’ / İTC in Turkish) played a very significant role not only in the in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire but also during the early-Republican period in modern Turkey. Although the CUP has been a central political organization since the end of the 19thcentury it arguably took the central stage with the Second Constitutional Revolution of 1908. However, the CUP ascension to the ‘driving seat’ of the empire happened only in January 1913 with a successful coup. Once unchallenged, the CUP started appointing Unionist bureaucrats or those who were sympathetic to their cause across the empire. 
 
This project seeks to analyze all the governor appointments between January 1913 and November 1918 (the end of the Great War) to see if there was a particular pattern in the bureaucrat preferences of the Unionists. To that end, the project seeks students who would help compile the list of all appointments between the designated date. The data will be collected from the Ottoman Archives, the access to which is available online. Knowledge of Ottoman Turkish is a plus but not mandatory given the fact that the archives are classified in modern Turkish transliterations. The participants are expected to collect documents about governor appointments and relevant documents about the appointed governors in the designated period.