Labour, Rights, Politics: research, comments, links

Donald Quataert: Ottoman scholar.

Two years back I launched this blog as (NSW) North Coast Labour History. That's now a link to this page. An early post noted a new labour history website for the Ottoman and modern Middle East, founded and convened by John Chalcraft of the LSE and Donald Quataert at Binghampton. This imaginative initiative serviced Turkish/ Ottoman labour history, and aimed to reach historians and the labour movement beyond Ottoman/ Middle East regions .

Don Quataert died in February this year. He was 69. He was a scholar and a teacher with a tremendous output of important books and publications on labour, work and culture in the Middle East. These include Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500-1950 (2002 ) ; Miners And the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822-1920' (2006);The Ottoman Empire 1700-1922 (2005). Their research base included documents not widely accessed by post-19th century labour scholars, including in Turkey, given the barrier to Ottoman documents created by Kemal Attaturk's shifting of an entire nation from reading and writing in Roman rather than Ottoman/ Arabic characters. Robert Fisk has observed that this shift created a barrier to accessing circa 1915 documents on the Armenian genocide.

Quataert's work is highly regarded in Turkey. Nonetheless, and despite a professional need to retain full access to local resources and support, he didn't shrink from speaking out on what he defined as until recently 'the elephant in the room' of Ottomanist studies, the Armenian genocide of 1915. In a 2006 review of Donald Bloxham’s The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians he urged scholars  to resist polemics on the deportations, ‘to engage’ with issues raised in Bloxham’s book relating to the forced march and mass murder and to ‘encourage the dialogue’  between the parties to this horrific past. While the review indicts the Great Powers for complicity, agreeing with Bloxham that if they ‘as a group, had acted differently, the horrors of 1915 might have been averted’ (as must also be said of the WW1 horrors of 1914-18), it also unequivocally indicts Ottoman officials, as distinct from Turkish nationalists, of the massacres/ genocide while associating the emergent Turkish republican state with a strategic cover-up.  The review was published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. In a February obituary Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News  recalled the Turkish ambassador to the US warning that the published views threatened Turkey’s funding for the (US based, independent ) Institute of Turkish Studies, which Quataert chaired: he resigned from the board rather than retract.

I never met Don Quataert but came across his work and the labour history website when researching for my first visit to Turkey - to Istanbul - in 2008. In Istanbul I met a sophisticated, exciting, hospitable city bridging Asian and Europe - literally, with the Bosphorus - which, as it has done for visitors over millenia, shifted my perspectives on the world. Istanbul also revealed a labour rich culture - a huge construction and manufacturing base, large shipyards, a working port, and a trade union movement in constant tension with the nation's push to become a voice and a stakeholder in Europe. So, back home in Australia I tried unsuccessfully to find labour history comrades also working on Turkish/ Middle East labour movement or with links to there. This apparent absence of like studies in Australia's labour history networks despite Australia's having a critical Turkish immigrant population reinforced my understanding of the significance of the Quataert/ Chalcraft initiative and admiration for Quataert's wider work. With this posting I want to register my thanks: vale Don Quataert.

 

 

 

 

NSW went to the polls and made a trainwreck.

Sat 26 March saw N.S.W. State election and state-wide trashing of the Labor Party. Defeat expected, & to be thorough, but not this landslide. Greens 1 seat - Balmain! after a week of counting; Labor 20; Coalition 69 Greens 1 Independents 3 total seats 93. The map of N.S.W. is entirely blue save patches of red in Sydney and a tiny splotch of green. In the Legislative Council the balance of power is with the Christian Democrats, and the Shooters and Fishers (shooters having teamed with fishers to, er, soften their image). The National Party holds from Hawkesbury to the Hunter, and most to north and south of that. Which means parochial electorate representation, and that might or might not be, on occasion, positive. Even Pauline Hanson seemed possible for an upper house/ Legislative Council seat, though she now looks like losing to the Greens. Overall: despite the small-l liberal bias of new Premier Barry O'Farrell, this is a dreadful outcome for the homeless, the environment, for social justice, for public utilities. (O'Farrell talks transport and rail, but emphasises Sydney. This a a big state, with regional voters screaming for trains. He'll need to listen).

Yet Sussex St, having lumbered this result on Labor, showed last week that it has learned nothing from being trashed. Kristina Kenneally offered in her election night concession speech that 'we had walked away from the electorate'. Despite the core truth of the admission the NSW Labor met on Thursday and unanimously elected John Robertson as new leader, unopposed, all clearly having been instructed to not oppose. (That must be true - Paul J Keating and Morris Iemma said so). It's clear that the electorate, or much of it, saw the rolling of Rudd and installation of Gillard at Federal level as down to N.S.W. powerbrokers in Sussex Street, and resented this. It's also clear that the electorate realised that it was because of the Labor powerbrokers that there had been 3 premiers in the State in as many years. What does  this say about electors? In my view it shows we/they understand systems far better than we/they used to. People are learning about this vexed complex valuable thing called preferences. They voted against a party machine, just as they had voted down a different party machine 8 year ago that threw out a reasonable leader because he was depressed, and replaced him with a swimming dude. I don't think the outcome necessarily shows every elector intended a landslide. People vote with both the local and state-wide perspective when they have their 4 yearly Saturday outing to the local school. Sadly, in this process good MPs - Steve Whan was one - got caught up on the landslide.

Point of interest: it is very hard to get a straight answer on election results through a Google search. Or to find a map of electorates. Now that is very odd. And a Point of correction: the N.S.W. election outcome was dramatic, a landslide, a fascinating trainwreck. It was neither a bloodbath, a massacre, nor a slaughter. It was certainly not a tragedy. To use these words is a travesty, given the real bloodbaths and massacres happening right now in other parts of the planet.