Eugene Rogan is a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of numerous books, including The Arabs: A History (Basic Books and Penguin, 2009, 2nd ed. 2012), The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 (Basic Books and Penguin, 2015), and most recently, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Penguin, 2024). Diwan interviewed Rogan on his latest book in mid-September.
Michael Young: There is a tendency when talking or writing about the sectarian conflicts in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 to look at events in Damascus as a continuation of the sectarian killings in Mount Lebanon and Wadi al-Taym. For example, this is what Leila Tarazi Fawaz did in her history of the conflict. You, however, have chosen to focus on Damascus. What made you do so, and was something lost by adopting this approach?
Eugene Rogan: I think it is important to distinguish between the very different contexts of the violence in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. The roots of violence in Mount Lebanon lay in the disintegration of the feudal system of the Shihabi Emirate following the Egyptian occupation in the 1830s and provoked strife between the largely Maronite Christian majority and the Druze minority. In Damascus, the tensions were much more the product of the growth of trade with Europe and the Ottoman reforms that empowered the Christian minority at the expense of the Muslim majority. What the events in Mount Lebanon and Damascus had in common was the perception that the newly-assertive Christians had come to pose an existential threat to their Druze or Sunni neighbors. The events in Mount Lebanon influenced what happened in Damascus by example: where Christians were deemed to pose an existential threat, extermination was a reasonable solution. By all local accounts, Damascene Muslims followed the violence in Mount Lebanon and Wadi al-Taym with enthusiasm. As I note in my book, the violence in Mount Lebanon was a key trigger of the Damascus Events. But it seems to me reasonable to examine the two cases independently. They had very different origins, involved different protagonists, followed very different courses, and had very different historical consequences. Where most historians trace the origins of Lebanon’s confessional system of government back to 1860, the Damascus Events left no sectarian legacy in Syria.
MY: Your focus is on Mikhail Mishaqa, the U.S. vice-consul in Damascus in 1860. Why did you choose him as the prism through which to tell your story, all the more so as you note that later in life he adopted a position on the 1860 events quite different than when writing diplomatic reports in real time during the killings? Did you have any questions about his reliability in light of this rather dramatic shift in direction?
ER: Mishaqa was my inspiration to write the book. As a doctoral student back in 1989, I discovered the notebooks in which he recorded his reports as U.S. vice-consul in Damascus, spanning the years 1859 to 1870. Mishaqa was America’s first consular official in Damascus and he kept his records in Arabic (he never learned English) in small notebooks. The archivists could not read them to identify them as the first three volumes of the consular reports from Damascus and had left them on a shelf along with the other records from Damascus, which is where I found them.
This remains my most exciting archival discovery ever. I realized I was the first modern scholar to access these records, which began one year before the violence and covered the first decade of reconstruction after the Events. They were, without doubt, the most important new source on one of the most controversial moments in 19th century Arab history. I photocopied each and every page, and spent the last three decades gathering further source material to try and come to grips with what Damascus experienced in the lead-up to the Events and in the long road to reconstruction.
In that narrative, Mishaqa proved a remarkable source. Unlike the many chronicles of 1860, which were written with hindsight years after the Events, Mishaqa’s reports were contemporary to events and captured the uncertainty of the future. They are the best source precisely because Mishaqa had no knowledge of what the future held. By 1873, when he wrote his own history of the events, it was natural for his interpretation to have changed. I think the way his narrative shifted from despairing of Ottoman rule to advocating total loyalty to the Ottoman state provides insight into the impact of the government’s efforts to rebuild the city and reconcile its divided communities. By 1873, Mishaqa’s loyalism reflects not total confidence in the state so much as recognition that there was no alternative to the Ottomans, and that Damascenes were reliant on the Ottomans to restore their damaged city.
MY: There is a striking figure in your account, namely Fouad Pasha, the Ottoman official who came to Damascus to deal with the aftermath of the massacre of Christians. What challenges was he facing when he arrived in the city, and later in Mount Lebanon? How would you characterize his way of dealing with them?
ER: Fouad Pasha was already one of the most influential statesmen in the Ottoman Empire in 1860. One of the architects of the Tanzimat reforms, Fouad was then foreign minister and enjoyed cordial relations with Europe’s leading statesmen. Even with those assets, he faced tremendous challenges during the 1860 crises. The European powers—Britain, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria—regularly intervened in Ottoman affairs on behalf of Christian and Jewish minority communities. Massacres on the scale of 1860 risked provoking not just foreign intervention but an imperial land grab that could end Ottoman rule in the Syrian provinces. Napoleon III of France dispatched a major campaign force to Syria, and the European powers convened an international commission to “assist” the Ottomans in restoring order. Both European measures posed dangerous threats to Ottoman sovereignty. Fouad had to demonstrate that he could restore law and order, punish those responsible for the massacres, and provide immediate relief for survivors and the funding to compensate their losses and permit them to rebuild their homes and workplaces.
Incredibly, he managed to navigate these treacherous waters and set Damascus on a course of reconstruction within eighteen months of the events. He never allowed an ideal solution to get in the way of a more practicable good solution and made such compromises as necessary to preserve the grudging cooperation of Damascene Muslims and the skeptical collaboration of the European commissioners. For his success with this remarkable balancing act, Fouad was rewarded with a promotion by being named grand vizier, or prime minister, at the end of his tour in Damascus.
MY: Tell us something about the competition between Beirut and Damascus in the wake of the 1860 events. In many respects, the fate of the Christians in both cities was intimately tied to the cities’ emergence as centers in their own right. Can you explain how?
ER: Beirut was the rising boom town of the mid-19th century, expanding with the growth of European trade and steam shipping across the Mediterranean. Damascus was the grand old provincial capital that had served for centuries as a center of administration, learning, and overland trade with Asia and Africa. The 1860 massacres impacted the two cities very differently. Beirut did not witness sectarian violence, but was flooded with tens of thousands of refugees from the devastated villages of Mount Lebanon. Damascus, on the other hand, suffered massive devastation, with thousands of Christians massacred and whole sections of the city center laid waste. The events and the Ottoman government’s reprisals placed the economy of Damascus into a death spiral, as Muslim and Jewish townsmen were taxed to pay for the reconstruction of Christian quarters. It would take a massive injection of funding to reverse Damascus’s economic decline, and the Ottoman provincial reform law of 1864 provided a means to increase cash flow.
The provincial reform law, associated with Fouad Pasha now in his role as grand vizier, was applied to Syria in 1865. It combined the three provinces of Damascus, Sidon (ruled from Beirut), and Jerusalem into a super-province called Syria. Beirut’s leading Christian and Muslim merchants were quick to nominate their city to serve as capital of the new province of Syria. The Damascenes mobilized to check the parvenu Beirutis and to assert their city’s claim as the “natural” administrative center of Syria. The stakes were high, as the new province would command a budget that was over five times greater than the revenues of the former province of Damascus. The Ottoman authorities ultimately decided that Damascus would be the capital of the new province. This was the lifeline for Damascene reconstruction. Between 1865 and Beirut’s secession from Syria to be capital of a new province of Beirut in 1888, Damascus witnessed a building boom and expansion of commercial, administrative, cultural, and educational facilities that lifted the city out of its economic decline and completed the reconstruction of Damascus as a vital and prosperous city.
MY: While 1860 was characterized by the massacre of Christians in Damascus (as well as in Mount Lebanon and Wadi al-Taym), you spend a considerable amount of time examining the beneficial consequences that followed in terms of the Ottoman response, both with regards to Damascus and broader relationships within the empire between the Ottoman authorities and their subjects. Can you summarize your thinking on this, above all your belief that after 1860 a new era of Ottoman modernity began?
ER: The 1860 Events were a consequence of Ottoman reforms that destabilized society, such as the imposition of legal equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, which was introduced to stabilize Ottoman relations with European powers without consultation or consent from Ottoman society. But later reforms played a major role in the reconstruction and reconciliation that followed the events. Before 1860, the Ottomans ruled through communal organizations such as villages, town quarters, and religious councils. The Millet system, which gave autonomy to the religious communities in managing communal affairs, allowed a high degree of Christian and Jewish self-government, but left non-Muslim minorities as distinctly second-class citizens.
The first step toward citizenship was the controversial 1856 reform conferring legal equality that, I argue, played a major role in provoking the 1860 massacres. But Ottoman measures following the massacres neutralized further resistance to equality, and later reforms such as the 1864 provincial reform law replaced the old system of communal governance with elected councils in which all Ottoman men could not only vote but run for office as well, whether in municipal councils, provincial councils, the court system and, after the 1876 Constitution, parliament.
This expansion of citizens’ rights and participation in administration was combined with additional responsibilities, such as individual taxation and military service. But the end result was a move away from a despotic to a participatory order more in line with the norms of modern statecraft.
