An Oily Entente: France, Britain, and the Mosul Question, 1916-1925

Conlin, Jonathan

doi:10.1080/09592296.2020.1760033

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Nevertheless, the Treaty of Lausanne left the fate of the oil-rich region of Mosul (included in the National Pact) undecided. In 1924, the League of Nations assembled to determine the fate of Mosul, deciding that it would remain part of Iraq, despite Turkish claims over it (Conlin 2020). 19.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speculative Undergrounds

Oguz

2023

Cult. Anthropol.

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The fraught tectonic history of Anatolia has given oil in Turkey an absent presence. In this article, I examine how oil’s absent presence produces a series of speculations in Turkish public life regarding oil’s alleged abundance and its obstructed production. In particular, I trace widespread speculations that claim that the Treaty of Lausanne, which founded Turkey in 1923, will expire on its centennial anniversary in July 2023. I argue that speculations about the expiration of Lausanne harken back to both anxieties around territorial partition and neo-imperial desires of expansion in contemporary Turkey. Such speculations are further utilized by the AKP government to reinterpret Turkey’s history and to legitimize expansionist and irredentist politics in the present. In this context the ground—what’s under it and who exerts political claims over it—becomes a productive zone in which multiple ethno-nationalist and imperialist notions of territorial belonging, loss, and desire are played out. I conclude that by recalibrating anthropological analyses around the generative powers of the geological, we can better understand how the indeterminacy of the underground entwines with the political legacies of post-imperial collapse and nation-state formation that emerged in the aftermath of World War I.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%