Cigarettes, the Russo-Japanese War, and Anti-Colonialism in the Ottoman Empire

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

In the early twenty-first century in Istanbul, academics use maps as excuses for blogs with pun-intended consequences.  In the early twentieth century in Trabzon meanwhile, people saw maps as a way to sell cigarettes, also with potentially unintended consequences.    

In the spring of 1904, the Seras brothers of the Black-Sea city sent a request to the Ottoman authorities for permission to adorn cigarette paper covers with maps of Japan and Russia, probably attempting to capitalize on the interest in these places stoked by the ongoing Russo-Japanese War.  The Ottoman authorities - ranging from the governor of Trabzon to the Director of Domestic Publications to the Education Minister - took a few more than two documents to say two rather simple words:  no and inappropriate.  They declined to explain the reasoning on this prohibition.

Nevertheless, the document reveals two interesting dynamics about both print culture and cultural politics at this time.  First, printing meant much more than newspapers, books, and words.  It also included street signs, ads, and images.  Second, the request opens a window onto interest in a conflict that provided an arena for civilization as spectator sport.  Future anti-colonial leaders like Nehru and Sun Yat-Sen cheered on the Japanese victories, and lively press discussions from Anatolia to India and Egypt to Iran heralded nothing short of the birth of a pan-Asian anti-colonial consciousness, founded on the conflict's "disproof of the Western claim to permanent racial and cultural superiority," as Cemil Aydın argues in Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia. (73)

The British writer and government official Gertrude Bell made a similar point in decidedly less academic terms a century before Aydın in her 1907 travel narrative The Desert and the Sown.  "The topic that interested them most at Saleh," she wrote regarding her journey through  what is now southern Syria in 1905, "was the Japanese War - indeed it was in that direction that conversation invariably turned."  While it made sense to her that the Ottoman authorities might "rejoice" in the Russian loss, she struggled "to account for the pleasure of the Arab, Druze...and Kurd, between whom and the Turk there is no love lost."  She concluded, clearly speaking to a European readership, "However eagerly you may protest that the Russians cannot be considered as a type of European civilisation, however profoundly you may be convinced that the Japanese show as few common characteristics with Turk or Druze as they show with South Sea Islander or Esquimaux, East calls to East, and the voice wakes echoes from the China Seas to the Mediterranean." (103-104)

Of course, Bell's description of an unchanging Eastern-ness at the root of empire-wide support for Japan elides entirely the colonial conditions that made these forms of solidarity thinkable in the first place.  But nevertheless Bell does capture the trans-continental breadth of reactions to the conflict.  And as the Seras brothers' request for permission to print demonstrates, the wave of interest in the conflict extended to the eastern end of the Black Sea, too, even if the Trabzon-based printers weren't able to harness it to sell cigarettes.




Source: BOA, DH-MKT 848/20 (18 Safer 1322 [4 Mayıs 1904])

      

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