world war one Archives - Not Even Past

Wrong About Everything

Originally posted on Christopher Rose’s blog on April 12, 2018.

I know, not the best title for my first blog entry, right?

A couple of months back, I presented some of initial findings on epidemic and epizootic disease in Egypt during the first World War at a symposium. (Ok, I’ll tell you the symposium was at Oxford. Yes, you may touch me.) I was flattered to be asked, especially since, as an ABD candidate, I got to be part of a two-panel session with speakers like Khaled Fahmy and Marilyn Booth (I’m still not entirely convinced I didn’t embarrass myself and everyone else, but that’s impostor syndrome for you).

The paper–which you can read here–is a short synopsis of human suffering during the war, especially among the poor, rural classes in Egypt, which are largely undocumented. It’s a works-in-progress presentation, very much based in preliminary findings, as one does at this stage in writing.

My dissertation focuses on breakdowns in public health during the war–the topic sentence could be summed up as “1918 was a deadly year for the Egyptian populace.” Even if one heeds Roger Cooter’s warning about reifying a positivist relationship between war and disease[1] –and I’ve compiled statistics for nearly a decade before and after the war–the demographic anomalies in Egypt between 1914 and 1918 are unmistakable. Four times as many Egyptians died of disease during the war than from military actions.

1918 also saw the birth rate decline to its lowest rate in a quarter century.

BirthDeath — source: Annual Reports of the Department of Public Health, Ministry of the Interior, 1911-1919.

I described a number of issues: food shortages that were documented as early as 1916. As residents complained about shortages of soap, eggs, cheese, and meat the Anglo-Egyptian administration, concerned with keeping the protectorate profitable, maintained a positive trade balance, exporting goods that were dearly needed at home. The cost of some basic household items rose over 200% between 1914 and 1918.

Likewise, relapsing fever and typhus cases increased substantially — both are louse-borne diseases, which can likely be tied to the increased movement of troops and support staff (including the men of the Egyptian Labour Corps). The war ended with the “Spanish flu” outbreak, which killed almost 140,000 Egyptians in just under three months.

There were also epizootics of both cattle plague (rinderpest) and foot-and-mouth disease that lasted over 18 months in large swaths of the country. Is there a relation between this and the soaring price of meat? It’s almost certainly the source of much of the protein that was sold on the black market in major cities.

As I said. Cheerful stuff.

During the break that followed my panel, a member of the audience approached me, identifying himself as a member of the landholding class from the Sharqiyya province in the Nile Delta (for the record, he is not an academic).

He insisted that I was completely wrong about nearly everything that I had said.

“We had hygiene!” he declared. “People didn’t die from these diseases in the 20^th century!”

He suggested that I extend the dates of my study by decades in each direction; for example, he inquired if I had I looked at the number of deaths incurred through the construction work on the Suez Canal (1863-69), or knew how many more people died of disease in Egypt in the 18th century.

I won’t lie. This was my first outing with this material, and this was … not the sort of feedback I had hoped to get. The more I tried to explain the nuance of my argument, the more pushback I got. Having spent 3 months mapping the country from cataract to Delta, I tried to change the subject and ask where he was from–meaning where, specifically, in Sharqiyya. He looked at me as if I might just be the stupidest man on earth and responded, “Egypt?!”

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose, featured in the blog Mapping & Microbes)

As you can tell, I’ve let this episode roll right off my back.

However, I think there is something significant in the greater picture about his defensiveness, one that pushed me to think about the puzzling collective silence in nearly every history book about what I’m looking at. Even the Spanish flu is described in only two medical reports from the time; I’ve seen it mentioned nowhere else.

The notion of Egyptians dying in elevated numbers from disease was clearly distasteful to him–largely, I suspect, for the reason that it was undignified. People—at least not those of his class—did not die from disease in high numbers in the early 20^th century.

In short, Egypt was modern. If it had not ascended, as the Khedive Ismāᶜīl had optimistically pronounced in 1869, to being among the ranks of countries which should be considered European, it had developed more rapidly than much of the Arab east, which languished in such a state that one scholar discussing the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic in the Arabian peninsula (1919) could legitimately wonder whether medical officials in central Arabia were capable of distinguishing the influenza apart from other diseases with similar symptoms, such as typhoid.[2]

Indeed, my interlocutor is correct about that hygiene and medical care had been introduced under Muhammad Ali Pasha in the mid-19^th century as part of a national campaign to improve public health. This has been described by LaVerne Kuhnke and Hibba Abuguideri (although the project had peaked in the 1850s and all but vanished under British administration).[3]

A market scene in Cairo during World War One (via Australian National Maritime Museum)

I struggled to explain in my response that afternoon that my interest was the significance of the war’s anomalous blip in the statistical record. The public health scheme in Egypt had, to a certain degree, brought epidemic disease under control, which is why the fact that infection and death rates soared during the war comprise a factor of interest. So, too, do the numbers of registered prostitutes in Egyptian cities, as well as the number of reported cases of venereal diseases, both of which increased substantially during the war and comprised their own crises in both medical and social health.

During the First World War, Egypt was a nation at war. Its citizens were recruited into the war effort, and many of those citizens faced bodily harm and death fighting for the Union Jack in far-off lands. Those who remained at home suffered from shortages of basic supplies–although production rates decreased slightly, they dropped nowhere near as much as consumption rates. They were forced to eat tainted meat that they purchased at high prices. They died of disease whose effects were exacerbated by malnutrition. Some turned to prostitution or other illicit activity to make ends meet.

There is nothing heroic about the fight against a virus, perhaps. As the First World War and the 1919 uprising became enmeshed together in the national historiographic project celebrating the nationalist movement and Egypt’s strive for self-determination, there was no space for sympathetic portrayal of poor women desperate to feed starving children and elderly relatives, and those who, in sheer desperation, turned to extreme measures to support themselves.

The commemorations held in Egypt from 2013 onward to celebrate the nation’s contribution to the First World War recognize only one of these groups.

I’m hoping to recognize the second.

[1] Roger Cooter. “Of War and Epidemics: Unnatural Couplings, Problematic Conceptions.” The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 16, no. 2 (2003): 283–302

[2] LaVerne Kuhnke. Lives at Risk. Vol. no. 24. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990; Hibba Abugideiri. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013.

[3] Guido Steinberg. “The Commemoration of the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-1919 in the Arab East.” In The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan Dähne. Beiruter Texte Und Studien 99. Würzburg: Ergon-Verl, 2006, 159–60.

Also by Christopher Rose on Not Even Past:

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey
Exploring the Silk Route
Review: The Ottoman Age of Exploration (2010) by Giancarlo Casale
What’s Missing from Argo (2012)

Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945 by John Paul Newman (2015)

By Charalampos Minasidis

The end of the First World War in Europe signified the dissolution of the old empires, the creation of new states, and the triumph of liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. However, this triumph lasted only around a decade. By the end of 1920s and early 1930s, authoritarianism and dictatorship had replaced both liberalism and parliamentarism.

John Paul Newman uses the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a case study to discuss the failed liberal experiments in the successor states of interwar Eastern Europe. The Kingdom was found in 1918 under King Peter, and after 1921 under his son Alexander, of the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty. Although the new state was a result of the panslavist dream of unifying all the South Slavs of the Western Balkans, its name proved to be a very unfortunate idea, as it did not signal the replacement of local nationalisms with a new national identity.

Newman constructs his study around the various veteran associations, their mobilizations and their remembrance and commemorations. Through documents, newspapers, and memoirs, Newman analyzes the political use of remembrance and Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene veterans’ remobilization after the war. For Newman, the veterans’ reluctance to leave the war experience behind led to the defeat of liberalism by authoritarianism. Belgrade’s official policy of “liberation and unification” viewed the period between 1912 and 1918 as a whole and praised the Serbian veterans and their allies that fought during the First Balkan War (1912-1913) against the Ottoman Empire, the Second Balkan War (1913) against their former ally, Bulgaria, and the First World War (1914-1918) against Austria-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria. The Balkan Wars led Serbia to annex parts of the ex-Ottoman territories of Kosovo and Macedonia, while the Great War allowed Serbia to be unified with Montenegro and the ex-Austro-Hungarian territories of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Vojvodina. According to the official policy, it was the acts of Serbia and its army alone that liberated the South Slavs of the Western Balkans. The “liberation and unification” policy excluded the rest of the South Slavs from its remembrance and commemorations. They were viewed as just passively waiting for their Serbian liberators.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Yugoslavia in 1933 (via Wikimedia)

This Serbian “culture of victory” alienated all those South Slavs who as subjects of Austria-Hungary had fought under its army and had instead cultivated a “culture of defeat.” Such contradictions were even stronger for those who participated in the Austro-Hungarian campaigns against Serbia or those Slovenes, who fought against Italy, an Entente and Serbian ally, and its expansive designs into the Slovenian territories of Austria-Hungary. Both opposing cultures negated and undermined the idea behind a unified South Slav state in the Western Balkans.

Newman analyzes successfully how these conflicting cultures undermined the new state and nation building. The officers who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army were reluctant to join the new armed forces, where the official policy excluded them from the system of promotions. On the other hand, Serbian officers neither wanted their defeated ex-enemies to join them nor the official remembrance of the war to be abandoned, as it offered them pride and promotions. Similarly, new Kingdom’s welfare programs and land reform did not satisfy the veterans and ex-members of the Austro-Hungarian Army faced constant discrimination.

The Serbian Army enters Zagreb, 1918 (via Wikipedia)

As Newman demonstrates, the inability to improve their economic well-being quickly disillusioned Serbian, and other, veterans with the new state as well. Even more, Serbian veterans blamed parliamentarianism for the government’s failure to provide for them and viewed it as slow, corrupted, and ready to betray their legacy. Many Serbian and Croatian veterans also started gravitating towards fascism and right-wing revisionism. Nevertheless, cases of cooperation between ex-enemies were not rare. People like Captain Lujo Lovrić, a panslavist Croat volunteer in the Serbian army, who became blind during the war, were used by the regime to propagandize South Slav union and its social policies to the disabled veterans, but those policies were not enough.

Newman overall succeeds in explaining a failed nation-building project through a group of people who were mobilized and politicized during the Great War and could not accept the new state of affairs. Newman’s thorough analysis clarifies the catastrophic impact of divisive cultural and social policies in a divided society. As the crisis deepened King Alexander presented to the Serbian veterans the institution of monarchy as the Kingdom’s unifying symbol. In this way he secured their support, which proved crucial for the establishment of his dictatorship in 1929 and constituted his effort towards a new nation and state building project, Yugoslavia.

Also by Charalampos Minasidis on Not Even Past:

Review of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

by Christopher Rose

Can the microbe speak?

It’s 5:30 pm, and I’ve been staring at my computer screen for over eight hours. There’s a crick in my neck, my breathing is shallow, my blood pressure has elevated, and the entire Giza governorate has just disappeared off of the map the instant that I finished tracing its borders—for the third time. I take a deep breath, utter a few choice unpleasant words under my breath, make sure to save my work, and turn off the computer. Today, the dragon has won.

I am two weeks into what I had originally, and naively, thought would be a one-week project to map the outbreak of epidemic and epizootic diseases in Egypt during the First World War, which comprises a subsection of my dissertation project. It’s not a great time to be working on Egypt, as it’s become nearly impossible to get research clearance from the Egyptian government. Funding has also become a near impossibility: my optimism at being named a finalist for a Fulbright in early 2016 was short lived; the program was suspended due to security concerns before awards were announced.

While online resources are scarce, I did find that the Egyptian government’s official gazetteer has an online index of its entire run since the 1870s. Over the course of several days, I discovered that the gazetteer was a virtual treasure trove of exactly the sort of data I’ve been looking for: reports of disease outbreaks in detailed locations up and down the Nile Valley. Over a week, I compiled a spreadsheet of almost 800 records for the period between late 1914 and mid-1919.

The question, of course, was what to do with this data. I was certain the diseases would tell me something, if I could just figure out how to get them to speak.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)

It was Julia Gossard, a UT alumna now teaching at Utah State University, who pointed me in the direction of the Programming Historian, a website dedicated to helping historians use digital tools to process data through modeling, mapping, and other methods. I didn’t have time to learn a programming language, but mapping was an idea I liked. The site has several columns about creating maps, using open source mapping software. While I’m a big fan of open source, especially when it replaces costly technical software, I was a bit uneasy about the lack of support for the platform – in short, I foresaw the ability to get myself into trouble, but not out of it.

A little digging around led me to the unexpected find that UT has an institutional subscription to ARCGIS, which is the (otherwise very expensive) industry standard mapping platform. Using UT’s institutional subscription to Lynda.com, I started training myself to use ARCGIS.

Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably wouldn’t have dived right in.

Mapping the data required me to tag each record with the latitude and longitude of the reported location. This led me to one of the key stumbling blocks for all scholars of the Middle East who’ve dabbled in the digital humanities—so much data is out there on the web, but much of it is transliterated from the original language. There is no universally recognized Arabic-to-Latin transliteration method, and the potential inconsistencies are well on display in the web’s largest open-source geographic database, Geonames.org. While some of its Egyptian entries contained the original names in Arabic script, most did not, leaving me to guess—frequently incorrectly—how they might have been rendered. Since Geonames is open-source, I added the names both in Arabic and one of the more commonly recognized transliteration systems to Geonames’s database as I went, which will hopefully make someone else’s life a little easier.

People fleeing a cholera outbreak at the port of Boulaq (near Cairo) in 1883 (via Wellcome Collection)

Finally, it was time to start mapping, and herein lay another challenge. ARCGIS has an expansive built in library of open source data, which included, as I had hoped, administrative maps of Egypt. I very quickly realized, however, that the administrative borders of the early 21c did not correlate directly to those of the early 20c. At least one governorate has since been split into three and there were a lot of unfamiliar names on the maps. I discovered that the UT Libraries has a copy of the 1917 Egyptian census, which has a big fold out map of the country. I scanned it, brought it home and compared it to the current maps … and realized that it was probably going to be easier to draw the 1917 map in ARCGIS rather than try to adapt the contemporary maps.

The process took nearly two weeks, employing long forgotten Photoshop skills (yay for bezel curves!), tracing a century old map and rendering it onto a satellite image of contemporary Egypt. The resultant map is, as they say, “good enough.” It’s probably got a distortion of around 2 miles, but it’ll never appear in print at that level of detail. Maybe when my monograph becomes a best-seller, I’ll hire someone to re-draw it.

I learned that ARCGIS has some quirks. It has a tendency to freeze up every 60-90 seconds. I quickly learned to save my work every time I did anything, a lesson that came in handy when, for some reason, the entire Giza governorate vanished inexplicably … three times … after I drew it. (The following morning, I discovered that the governorate hadn’t vanished, it was just invisible. I still don’t actually know why).

Finally, the big day came. After the blood, sweat, tears, swearing, and yelling at the cat, the map was finished. I overlay my disease data, and sat back to look at the results.

Children playing in a poor neighborhood of Alexandria under quarantine during an outbreak of typhus, sometime around WWI (via Wellcome Collection)

Have the microbes told me a story? They have. As I set forth on the next phase of my project, I have clusters of locations and specific dates to look for. But the maps have also given me more questions—Is there a correlation between a two-year outbreak of cattle plague and the rampant inflation in the cost of food during the war? Does the death of 139,000 Egyptians due to influenza at war’s end have anything to do with the eruption of a populist uprising just six weeks later? And why is this most deadly epidemic absent from the press and the pages of the official gazetteer?

I also realized the importance of presenting my data in this visual form. No one is going to go through all 800 records on my spreadsheet, but the map provides a clear snapshot of my subject and the questions it raises, and it makes a visual case for the argument I’m laying out in my dissertation. In this form, it will make my modest contribution to this field of study more convincing and accessible.

The New Archive series highlights various uses of digital tools in humanities research. More from the series:

Charlie S. Binkow explores Honest Abe’s Archive
Joseph Parrott highlights the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing
Maria José Afanador-Llach discusses her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

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