The SenseMaker

Professor Eugene Rogan is a Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and the Director of the Middle East Centre; Fellow of St Antony’s College. He is the author of The Arabs: A History, which has been translated into ten languages and was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book is The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920 (2015). Professor Rogan has extensive experience of working with the media, both nationally and internationally, and including both print and broadcast.

Amogh Dev Rai: Eugene Rogan, welcome to The SenseMaker.

Eugene Rogan: Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be with you.

Amogh Dev Rai: You have written remarkable books. They have been translated into 18 languages worldwide, and they also have a fan following of their own, which is not just restricted to academicians but also people far and wide. You’ve written a new cracker of a book, if I may say so, which tells an interesting story and history. But before we begin, how would you like to describe yourself?

Because it is a story that resonates deeply, I’d like to ask: as an American in Oxford, do you see yourself as something like an Englishman in New York? How would you like to describe yourself?

Eugene Rogan: Thank you. I think you’ve done a beautiful job framing it. What I would say is that my position complicates my life as a historian of the Middle East. I carry two suitcases worth of baggage. On the one hand, I work in a British university, which comes with the British imperial legacy over the region. On the other, I do so with an American accent, which carries all the Cold War baggage that implies.

The challenge I’ve faced all along is how to leverage my years of living in the region and my knowledge of Arabic and Turkish to approach the history of the Arab world using local sources and a localised perspective—despite not being a local myself. This challenge was set out in many ways by the late great Edward Said in his work Orientalism, where he highlighted the imperial and neo-imperial biases that shape how we discuss the histories of others.

I’m deeply conscious of the fact that as I write Arab history, I do so as an outsider. Yet, I believe I bring value to this perspective. Certainly, my readers in the Arab world have engaged positively with how I write their history. I see my role as building a bridge between a region I deeply love—I’ve spent much of my life there—and my own cultural contexts in Europe and America. That is how I situate myself as a historian of the Arab world.

That is a beautiful introduction to the discussion we’re about to have. In your book, the role of people from outside the region is indeed very prominent. But before we delve into specific events, we need a sense of the old Ottoman world. You’ve done a fabulous job of describing it.

Amogh Dev Rai: There is a cast of characters. The French are involved. The English are involved. The Americans are involved. But above all, the city itself takes centre stage. I’ve listened to two or three interviews you’ve given about the book, and the questions have been very interesting and on point. One theme that stands out is your description of the city and its segregation. As a historian of this region, could you tell us more about old Damascus, which plays such a pivotal role in everything that follows? Your narrative takes us back to 1860. I know it’s a challenging task, but could you give us a glimpse?

Eugene Rogan: It’s actually a captivating task, and I think it was one of the real pleasures of writing this book. One of the things I most looked forward to was being able to do a deep dive into the history of such a rich and fascinating city as Damascus. And you talk about old Damascus—Damascus was old even at the time that the Hebrew Bible was being written.

Yeah. This is the city where the Roman soul was blinded by the light and converted to Christianity in the first century. It was the city that the Prophet Muhammad did not wish to enter because he believed it was only right for a human to enter Paradise once he was in the afterlife, and not visit it in his lifetime by going into Damascus.

So by the time you reach 1868, there’s the sheer antiquity of the city of Damascus. The fabric of the city is shaped by ruins going right back to Roman and Byzantine times, and all that history is omnipresent. Mosques, while writing the book, actually treat Damascus almost as one of the characters in the city. And I try to capture the civic pride.

They were so enamoured of their city. The greatest punishment you could deal a Damascene, found guilty of the worst crimes, was exile—telling them they could never return to their home city again. You know, they’d rather you cut out their tongue or blind their eyes than deprive them of the pleasure of being in their beautiful, and, as they called it in Arabic, mystical city.

They called it the fragrant city of Damascus. And I think it’s the contrast of the desert and the greenery that makes Damascus stand out for 19th-century observers. It’s a city that is fed by rivers that pour into a desert landscape. And so you had this wonderful contrast between the sand that surrounds it and the greenness of the city. This greenness permeates every house and every neighbourhood through fountains and watercourses.

At night, you’re serenaded by the croaking of frogs. And in the daytime, you sit in the shade of fruit trees in beautiful courtyard houses that are 400 or 500 years old. So there was a kind of refined lifestyle of good food, fresh water, and promenades along the riverside of the Barada, with cafes where men and women could mix and mingle. This characterised the beautiful city.

And you talk about its kind of segregation. It is true that you had Jews and Christians living alongside Muslims. There were quarters like Bab Touma, which were seen as Christian quarters because the mosques gave way to churches, and there were monasteries and convents. But all these quarters were inhabited by people of all faiths, and there was a real mixing and mingling.

At the same time, a high level of communal self-governance characterised the old Ottoman world. This was known as the millet system, in which Christians more or less governed themselves and collected taxes on behalf of the state under Christian personal status law. The same applied to the Jewish community. So there was a high degree of cohabitation and interaction. But in this city, the Muslims—Sunni Muslims—were certainly the elite, the most privileged citizens. Christians and Jews were respected and protected but were distinctly second-class citizens.

And all of that begins to change as the pressure of outsiders starts to invert the social hierarchy. And with that inversion came tensions that grew increasingly murderous.

Amogh Dev Rai: Right. That is an element that keeps coming up and building. We are going to get to that. I know that I’m projecting by getting into the bit about the book, but I think a lot of those are topical announcements that have been made before. When we seriously get into the book, one thing that stands out when making a chronological assessment of all you write about is the Ottoman Empire.

Especially in the time you are writing about, the Ottoman Empire is a big three at the edges. What was really going on? I mean, you were very graphic in detailing how the government in Egypt was not really listening or heeding the control from the Sublime Porte, and it had a domino effect. But what was going on in the bureaucracy at this point in time?

From 1856 onwards, especially with the 1856 reform that was happening—why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?

Eugene Rogan: I find that many in the West have a lazy habit of talking about the Ottoman Empire during this period as being in decline. So there’s the “decline and fall” model of discussing Ottoman history. And with that, you overlook the fact that the Ottoman Empire that spanned three continents and was a very powerful state.

But it was competing in a neighbourhood in which other countries had a technological and military advantage. The Russians were the closest and most dangerous neighbour, and they had been defeating the Ottomans militarily for over a century. Britain and France were at the forefront of countries whose empires were growing, and they looked towards the Ottoman Empire as geostrategic territory, which put the Ottomans at a disadvantage.

In the 19th century, the Ottomans were trying to find a formula to defend their territories against both external and internal challenges, while also making the most of their revenue base to pay for the new technologies that gave European powers a decisive advantage in organisation and the conduct of war.

The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in Europe had introduced new technologies and ideas that made Europe unusually powerful in the 19th century. This put the Ottoman Empire at a disadvantage. In its own terms, however, the empire was still quite strong and viable, but it faced real challenges. The Ottoman solution in the 19th century was to initiate a series of reforms. On the one hand, they aimed to make their administration fit for purpose—more efficient at raising taxes, applying laws, and controlling their territories.

On the other hand, they sought to keep the ambitions of Russia or France at arm’s length and preserve their territorial integrity. One-way European powers found to intervene in Ottoman affairs was by claiming to protect non-Muslim minority communities. For example, Russia claimed to be the protector of all Orthodox Christian churches, as the successor to the Byzantine Empire. France claimed to be the protector of Catholic churches, including Roman Catholicism and local Catholic churches that accepted the Pope’s authority, such as the Armenian Catholics, Greek Catholics, and the Maronite Church.

The British, for their part, were committed to preserving Ottoman territorial integrity for their imperial interests. They saw the Ottoman Empire as a buffer state to keep Russia out of the Mediterranean and to prevent France from encroaching into South Asia. For Britain, the Ottomans were strategically useful. The British engaged in protection by looking after small communities like the tiny Protestant and Jewish populations, and in Mount Lebanon and Syria, the Druze community. These were not large minority communities like the Orthodox and Catholic populations, so Britain’s involvement was less pronounced.

This politics of intervention and protection of minority communities was very dangerous for the Ottoman Empire, as it gave European powers a regular pretext for intervention. The danger of this became apparent in disputes between Orthodox and Catholics over holy sites in Palestine. Such conflicts, including disputes in Ham and Nazareth, drew the Ottomans into larger conflicts. When the Russians decisively won in 1854, it led to French and British intervention, culminating in what came to be known as the Crimean War.

At that point, the Ottomans recognised that they had to find a formula to pre-empt European intervention on behalf of minority communities, or they would face an endless cycle of poverty and wars. So they passed a reform measure that, for the very first time, gave legal equality to all Ottoman citizens, regardless of their religion. This sounds to us today, in the 20th century, like a totally reasonable proposition.

But for an Ottoman Empire, where the Sultan was also the Caliph of Islam, the idea that Muslims, Christians, and Jews would all be on an equal footing before the law wasn’t just an affront to their social status—it was the Sultan contradicting the very word of the Quran, the perfect and unedited word of God.

This made many of the pious Sunni Muslims in the Ottoman Empire resist this change. They saw it not just as a threat to their interests but as subverting the God-given natural order. As a result, the period after 1856 became one of heightened volatility, particularly in the more conservative cities of the Ottoman Empire. For reasons I discuss in the book, Damascus in the mid-19th century was among the most conservative.

These reforms were therefore very destabilising to the social and political order of Damascus after 1856.

Amogh Dev Rai: Absolutely. Now we get into the main character in the book. The book is centred around many very interesting people, but I think you would agree with me that Mikhail Mishka is the gentleman who stands out. He publishes the book and is central to the terrible tragedy that happens in 1860. He is the main, sympathetic character and the focus throughout this particular book.

But before we get into the event, tell us a little bit about this remarkable man. His journey, in a very important way, reflects the assimilation you were just referring to. He is the son of an immigrant. He comes to this area, and although technically a Christian—moving from one form of Christianity to another—he should have been treated as a second-class citizen.

Yet, he rises and becomes on par with the most important and notable people in the city of Damascus. Give us an author’s view of this remarkable man, who was called the most intelligent man in the massacres, if not the entirety of the Middle East.

Eugene Rogan: Don’t be shocked—he is an incredible eyewitness to history. Forgive me; there’s a siren in the background as a fire truck goes by. As you rightly point out, he was seen by his peers as the most intelligent man in all of Syria. Born in Mount Lebanon in 1800, he travelled between Egypt and Syria, held many different professions, and was by all accounts a brilliant man.

An autodidact, he taught himself several professions and wrote many books. He emerges from the society of 19th-century Syria as a three-dimensional character. We even have a photographic portrait of him, at a time when perhaps one in 10,000 people had their picture taken. Mishka is a wonderful eyewitness, and he first came to my attention as a historian in his retirement.

The United States was a curiosity but certainly not a power to be taken seriously. The very fact that the United States saw fit to hire a local Syrian to represent them in a provincial capital like Damascus suggested to the Ottomans that this was not a very serious country. For the governor of Damascus, it was clear from the resistance he showed to accepting the accreditation of a native Syrian Christian as vice consul.

The idea that a Christian could head a diplomatic mission in his city underscored his resistance to the notion that Christians could rise to equal footing with Muslims. He was deeply resistant to this change in the social order, in which Sunnis saw themselves—quite rightly, under the Ottoman system—as the protected community of the Ottoman Sultan. To him, Christians were still second-class citizens.

He simply didn’t want to recognise that a Syrian Christian could hold ambassadorial or high diplomatic standing. He refused to return Mishka’s visits, accept his credentials, or allow him to perform his duties. This meant that, immediately after taking up his post in 1859, Mishka began to face serious obstacles in handling some of the important diplomatic issues confronting the young United States of America.

One issue involved a consignment of wool being blocked by the British, as part of a broader competition over primary resources like wool for industrial use. Another issue arose from a confrontation between Protestant missionaries in the neighbouring town of Zahlé, on the eastern side of Mount Lebanon, where the culprits had fled into the province of Syria.

The Americans were eager for these individuals to be arrested and brought to justice for the damage done to American missionary interests. Mishka, however, simply couldn’t get the governor to meet with him or take these issues seriously, and he was failing in his job. He filed increasingly desperate reports back to Beirut, which made their way to Constantinople (Istanbul). In response, the American ambassador abruptly decided to board a ship, sail to Beirut, and, with very little warning, present himself in Damascus to resolve the tensions.

The visit of an ambassador from Constantinople was sufficient to make an impression on the recalcitrant governor of Damascus, Ahmed Pasha. He grudgingly accepted Mishka’s role in the city. In this way, the issue was resolved in a grudging manner, but tensions persisted. I think this is a good place to begin understanding the breakdown of social order in Damascus, particularly in the dynamic between the Muslim majority and the Christian minority at that time.

Amogh Dev Rai: Absolutely. After that, the problems were resolved to a certain extent, but not fully. Protocol dictated that the governor, the judge, and the treasurer were required to visit the vice consul or any high-ranking diplomat after the diplomat had called on them. This, however, didn’t happen with Mikhail Mishka.

He was told by the judge, “I really want to call on you, but perhaps some other time.” While reading your book, a question that kept coming up for me was about the acknowledgments you give to the state archives of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike the equivalent Mughal Empire in India, which was well-documented but not clerical in its approach, the Ottoman Empire seemed to have a robust and well-devised system for collecting and centralising inputs and information from different parts of the empire.

This complex bureaucracy is evident in the documents. From 1856 to the entry of Ahmed Pasha in Damascus after the events of 1860, one gets the sense of a social contract between the people of Damascus and their rulers. This also extended to the relationship between important bureaucrats like Ahmed Pasha—being a governor of such a significant city—and his superiors in the hierarchy.

So how was it that the Ottomans just did not see this break happening?

Eugene Rogan: Well, I think the tensions between the governor of Damascus, Ahmed Pasha, and his higher-ups in Istanbul or Constantinople reflect elite resistance to reforms. We mentioned the 1856 reforms, which were not just challenging the social hierarchy but also appeared to contradict elements of the Quran that clearly distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims.

This created resistance from many conservative elites, not just within the religious establishment but also among the elites in cities. For instance, the Governing Council of Damascus included many conservative Muslim functionaries who strongly opposed these changes. Even at the highest levels of government, there were officials who believed the reforms were wrongly inspired and resisted their implementation. I think this is where Ahmed Pasha’s resistance becomes significant.

It’s extraordinary because, as you noted, there’s a detailed bureaucratic trail left by these characters in the Ottoman archives, which are incredibly rich and remain one of my most important sources. Yet, in going through the reports, I found only one from Ahmed Pasha dating to the actual period of the massacres.

When you read how he described the breakdown in order, it seems as though the governor himself was detached from reality. It was almost as if, pardon my frivolity, the man was on drugs—he simply didn’t appear to grasp the scale or nature of the violence unfolding on his watch.

Many, including Mishka, viewed the violence as something Ahmed Pasha actively aided and provoked rather than prevented. His role remains ambiguous, and there’s nothing in his writings to suggest he was genuinely trying to uphold order in his city or province. It seemed as if he was almost willing to allow chaos to demonstrate that the reforms were responsible for the unrest and that the situation was beyond his control.

But here, I’m left interpreting between the lines. He never explicitly said that. What we do know is that, at the end of these events, he was arrested by the authorities, put on trial, and ultimately executed for his failings as governor, particularly for not preventing the violence in Damascus.

Amogh Dev Rai: The violence of 1860 was deeply tied to the nature of the city itself. The reason I began this conversation with the city is that, while line of religious demarcation emerging. There were many religious groups, even within the Muslim community, that were active at the time.

I’d like you to shed some light on the role of specific learned Muslim scholars in resisting or supporting the 1856 reforms and how their actions contributed to the tense situation in 1859. It feels like a precursor to events similar to what John Reed described in Ten Days That Shook the World. In this case, we’re talking about eight days that shook the Ottoman Empire.

If I were to read a newspaper today, it feels like I could just change the date, and many of the same dynamics still persist. So, while some things have changed, much remains the same. What role did the religious authorities play in this, and how do we hold them accountable?

Eugene Rogan: It’s a very difficult question to answer, because the most critical sources about the role of the Muslim religious elites in Damascus during these events come either from European consuls or highly biased accounts. The European consuls, in the aftermath of the events, emerge as very bloody-minded individuals. They clearly wanted to see a lot of capital punishment, believing that the violence done against Christians required equal violence done against Muslims to even the score.

I reproduce some of the absolutely ridiculous plans put forward by British and French consular officials, recommended to the Ottomans as their way of solving the crisis in Damascus. These plans were hardly balanced or wise. One example is the British minister recommending vacating all Muslims from the Muslim quarters of Jerusalem and handing their houses over to the surviving Christians of Damascus.

This, they argued, would punish Islam and compensate Christians for their suffering while restoring Jerusalem to Christendom—a situation that hadn’t existed since the Crusades. Frankly, only a European potentate in the 19th century could have thought this was a good solution. Certainly, no one in the rest of the world would have believed that reverting to the medieval violence of the Crusades was a reasonable outcome.

The French, for their part, proposed taking hostages and executing them if they didn’t yield all their wealth to compensate Christians for the violence they had endured. The Europeans were themselves very bloody-minded and took particular offense at what they perceived to be the role of key members of the religious establishment in Damascus.

They accused these figures of aiding, abetting, and encouraging violence during the 1860 massacres. However, the truth is that the Ottoman authorities convened a tribunal and pressured Damascene notables as much as they could to provide evidence against the leading religious scholars of the city. Despite this, they couldn’t find anyone willing to testify that the imams or the mufti were directly responsible, as the Europeans claimed.

So, I have a hard time fully accepting the position of the European consuls in accusing these religious figures of active responsibility. However, there is circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Ottoman authorities themselves suspected their involvement. Christian eyewitnesses also accused some leading religious figures, including the mufti, of responsibility.

At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that many Muslims intervened to protect their Christian neighbours. The most notable example is Emir Abd al-Qadir, who came to Damascus as a refugee from the French conquest of Algeria, where he had led the resistance. He emerged as one of the notables of Damascus and a leading Islamic scholar.

Appalled by the violence, he rallied over 1,200 Algerian veterans, who were still with him in Damascus, in exile, on his payroll, and armed by him and the French authorities. This force effectively intervened to protect Christians, moving them to safe houses and ultimately to the safety of the citadel. Approximately 85% of Christians in Damascus survived these events due to the intervention of Muslim notables like Abd al-Qadir.

So, it’s a mixed picture. I can’t simply say it was Islam versus Christianity. There were certainly Muslims in the mob responsible for the killings, and undoubtedly some Muslim leaders encouraged the violence. However, many Muslim figures also played critical roles in saving lives, which complicates any neat or tidy division of the city. Muslims were both part of the tensions that gave rise to the massacre and instrumental in mitigating the destruction.

They were part of the solution that rescued so many Christians from massacre.

Amogh Dev Rai: Absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. The reason I wanted to delve into this in detail is because the tension hangs heavy in the book as we approach the events of 1860. But when the violence erupts, it happens suddenly—like most tragic events in history, the wars and conflicts that began then seemed to start out of nowhere.

For those of us who have read the book—and for those who are listening and may grab a copy—why don’t you tell us a little about how the events of 1860 began? What was it that the instigators wanted?

Because it doesn’t seem clear at any point that they had a concrete set of demands, apart from wanting to get rid of every Christian—or more broadly, every non-Muslim person—but specifically targeting Christians.

You know, I’m particularly interested in the comparative perspective here—how this compares to mixed communities in other regions, for instance, in South Asia, which has also seen times of great tension and violence between communities. I think there’s an interesting comparison to be made when circumstances lead one community to perceive another as an existential threat.

As you’ll recall from the book, I refer to such moments where a community is defined as an existential threat as giving rise to what I call a “genocidal moment.” This isn’t to say that genocide hangs over these communities continuously throughout history, but rather that a specific intersection of circumstances creates a perception that the target community—in this case, the Damascene threat to the Muslim majority.

Eugene Rogan: In these moments, the call isn’t just for the extermination of the Christians but for the complete erasure of their presence in the city. It wasn’t enough to kill Christians; they sought to destroy their churches, monasteries, houses, workshops, and shops in the markets. Even after the killing ended, they continued burning the houses of the Christian quarters for days, as if to ensure that Christians could never return to Damascus.

It was a specific moment of madness that stands as an exception in Damascus’s history. Such an event had never happened before and would never happen again.

Your question is about what led to this perception that the Christian minority posed such a threat to the Muslim majority. In the early chapters of the book, I point to several factors. First, changing patterns of trade actively disadvantaged the livelihoods of the Muslim majority, while the primary beneficiaries were Christian households. These Christians increasingly became agents of European trading companies, growing richer and more prosperous, seemingly at the expense of their Muslim neighbours.

Second, the arrival of European and American consuls in Damascus in the 1840s introduced a new diplomatic presence that extended privileges and legal rights not only to the diplomats but also to the local Christians they employed as clerks and guards. These individuals came under the same extraterritorial privileges as Europeans, effectively gaining an elevated legal and social status.

These privileges extended to their families and relatives, creating a new group of minorities who began exercising European-like rights. This shift in power dynamics made these groups more assertive, demanding, and, in some cases, arrogant, which created significant tensions with the Muslim majority.

Finally, I think there’s a third factor that also played a role, albeit for very different reasons…

You have tensions emerging between the Maronite Christians and the Druze community. The Druze, being a distinct religion that originated from Shiite Islam in the 12th century and evolved through the 16th and 17th centuries, had by then become a clearly defined religious community of its own. These two communities, the Maronite Christians and the Druze, had established a kind of social and political order that had allowed them to live in close harmony.

At every level of the hierarchy, there was a balance between the two. At the very top, among the princes of Mount Lebanon, there were both Druze and Maronite families. At the feudal level of sheikhs, there was an equal division between Druze and Maronite families. Even among the 85% of the population, comprising farmers and artisans, there was a similar balance. Religion served as a dividing principle, but it was more about the social hierarchy than sectarian conflict.

This balance was disrupted in the 19th century by a series of changes. The Egyptian occupation, led by an ambitious Egyptian governor, played a significant role in pitting Maronites against Druze, fostering sectarian tensions in communities that had never previously experienced such divisions. For various reasons, the Druze began to perceive the Maronites as an existential threat.

The Druze came to believe that the Maronites were attempting to push them out of their ancestral homeland in Mount Lebanon entirely. Being a smaller community than the Christians of Mount Lebanon, the Druze decided that in order to protect their land and livelihoods from what they saw as a Christian threat, they would have to resort to violence. They resolved to shock and surprise their enemies, refusing to lose even a single engagement, and pursued the extermination of their Christian adversaries—particularly the men of fighting age—to preserve their position in Lebanon.

In the summer of 1860, just 50 km from Damascus, the Druze attacked the Christians of Mount Lebanon, perceiving them as an existential threat and pursuing extermination as their solution. This conflict excited the angry and resentful Muslims of Damascus, who observed the violence in Lebanon. When the town of Zahle, a Christian stronghold, fell to the Druze in June 1860, shopkeepers in Damascus hung lanterns in celebration through the streets. The authorities even had to order them to take the lanterns down due to the inappropriate excitement.

If not for the violence in Lebanon, which set the example of extermination as a solution to the “Christian problem,” it is possible that the massacre in Damascus might never have occurred. However, the convergence of these events created an acceptance of violence and massacres.

Tensions reached a boiling point when a group of youths drew Christian crosses on the streets of Damascus, forcing Christians to defile their religious symbol by walking over them. The governor’s response—arresting the youths and parading them through the streets in manacles while making them sweep away the chalk crosses—outraged the already volatile Muslim public. This provoked a massacre, and the violence began.

Amogh Dev Rai: And so, the moment of madness unfolded. One of the principal consolations of this tragic event, as you describe it, is that figures from earlier in the book—be it Mishka or Emir Abd al-Qadir—played crucial roles in helping others. For instance, the European consulates and diplomatic agents were largely protected.

Mishka himself was taken to a safe place but later sought refuge with another noble Muslim friend who kept him hidden for a month, during which he reunited with his wife and family. The process of reconciliation began around this time.

But this brings me back to what you just mentioned about the economic changes. I’d like to understand this better—how these shifts contributed to the tensions and eventual outbreak of violence.

Hajj travels used to be very important movers and shakers in the market of Damascus. It was a significant source of wealth and prestige for Damascus and its traders. Records from a few years before 1860 indicate that the numbers were declining.

So what I wanted to understand is whether, at some point, this could be seen as a kind of Luddite revolution. I know I’m standing on one leg with this argument, but could it be that there was this perception that if you could just remove certain groups or people from the equation, Damascus could reclaim its central role in the market?

You’ve mentioned the role of steamships and illustrated the number of them operating at the ports under different flags. This economic argument resonates, and while I agree with you that the violence was an overreaction, I still don’t quite see how it would have changed anything. What was the thinking behind it? I understand you might not have a definitive answer, but I’d like you to reflect on this because it’s an argument that comes up in many contexts, even in modern conflicts.

Eugene Rogan: That’s such an interesting question. Let me take you back to early 19th-century Damascus. What made Damascus a conservative city, as opposed to its neighbours like Beirut, was that it wasn’t open to the Mediterranean world. It lacked the cosmopolitanism we associate with Ottoman port cities—places where you had Armenians, Greeks, Maltese, Italians, and people from across the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds mixing languages and cultures.

Instead, Damascus was a “port city of the desert.” The vehicles that brought trade to Damascus were not ships but camels. There are these wonderful descriptions of caravans coming from Baghdad and the Hejaz, from Mecca and Medina—two, three, or even five thousand camels long. When these caravans arrived, it was a huge event in Damascus.

Camels, however, were not efficient for transporting low-value commodities. You wouldn’t ship wheat by camel over 2,000 miles. Instead, only high-value goods like silks, precious metals, spices, and coffee—items with enough markup to justify the cost of camel transport—were carried. This made the markets of Damascus unique, a veritable treasure trove of luxury goods.

Additionally, local production of fabrics was a significant part of Damascus’s economy. Fine fabrics—cottons, blends of cotton and silk, silk and wool, and pure woollens—were intricately woven and highly sought after. Many in the Ottoman Empire and the broader Asian world preferred Damascene weavings over industrial products from Europe.

This created a kind of protected market focused on overland trade routes coming primarily from Anatolia, Baghdad, Persia, and Egypt. However, with the advent of steamship traffic, everything changed. Steamships introduced a high volume of regular and predictable shipments from European markets to the eastern Mediterranean.

These ships began unloading large quantities of cheap, industrially manufactured products—woollens and cottons—that significantly undercut local production.

The sheer volume of goods being produced began to displace what traditional weaving could accomplish. Lancashire mills were able to churn out bolts of cloth with a level of efficiency that the local weavers could hardly match. As a result, trade began to shift due to changes in industrial technology and transport.

Many in Damascus believed that if they could stop the flow of goods coming from the Mediterranean through Beirut to Damascus—products that they associated with Christians and that undermined the wealth of Muslims—they could restore the kind of desert-oriented caravan trade of the past. They thought this would return the market to its natural trade relations, its natural economy, and its natural order.

It was madness. You couldn’t turn the clock back. But I think that nostalgia drove this mindset. Nostalgia is powerful, and it can lead to economic self-harm. I’m sitting in post-Brexit Britain, where many who voted to leave the European Union imagined they could return to a Britain of the 1930s and 1940s.

So, these movements were driven by irrational nostalgia. It’s not such a remote phenomenon, even for us in the 21st century.

Amogh Dev Rai: Absolutely, it’s not. There are so many movements in Middle Eastern history that I think can be traced back to this specific event.

After the massacre, you explore the concept of genocide in the book. The term hadn’t been invented yet, but you call it a “genocidal moment,” which I think encapsulates the weight of what occurred beautifully. We also see the governor stripped of his rank, forced to leave, and later tried and executed, as you mentioned earlier.

Following this, we have an interesting figure enter the scene—one of the most important enforcers of the 1856 reform, Fuad Pasha. He is sent to Damascus and famously refuses to wear his uniform because he finds the tragedy that occurred to be both anti-Ottoman and, to a certain extent, anti-Islam. Tell us about this moment of reconciliation and what lessons we might take from it today.

I’m going to do something inexcusable—asking you, as a historian, to reflect on the present moment. But is there hope for reconciliation of the kind we saw post-1860 today? Do we have the necessary elements, like the fuelled passions and the cast of characters present in Damascus at that time, to facilitate such a process?

Eugene Rogan: At the time of writing the book, the Gaza war had not happened, and I wasn’t thinking specifically about Israel-Palestine or the tensions brewing there since 1948 in the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism. However, I do think there are lessons—not just for Israel-Palestine but for any regional conflict.

Genocidal movements are not confined to the Middle East. In just the past 25 years, we’ve seen examples in Myanmar with the Rohingya, in Darfur, and during the breakup of Yugoslavia. These are all instances of extermination movements that could be characterised as genocidal. The example of Damascus provides hope that there is a pathway back from the brink of madness—not just towards reconstruction but also reconciliation.

But reconciliation requires certain elements. First, there must be a return to a new sense of law and order. The violence and lawlessness of the massacre itself must be addressed as a first-order priority. Establishing law and order and holding people accountable for their actions is essential.

Second, there must be a sense of justice for those who have suffered deeply traumatic events. Without these steps, reconciliation becomes almost impossible.

It is essential to ensure that those responsible for wrongdoing are held accountable. However, the process of justice must not be dragged out in a quixotic attempt to achieve total justice. The aim should be to deliver enough justice to deter wrongdoers from repeating their actions and to reassure victims that their suffering has been acknowledged.

Alongside justice, there must be a concerted effort to provide people with basic necessities—a dignified roof over their heads and the means to resume their economic activities. This allows them to return to a normal life, caring for their families and meeting their needs. These are fundamental requirements for restoring stability.

People need a stake in society—something that gives them a reason to preserve the order being re-established. Achieving this requires compromise. Total justice is unattainable; you cannot fully compensate for losses or bring back the dead. However, the process must offer the survivors, and especially their children, the prospect of a better future.

This focus on creating hope for the next generation is crucial for encouraging people to turn the page on past injustices and look forward. Reconciliation is not a quick fix; in Damascus, it took over 20 years to achieve. The events of 1860 were a deeply divisive trauma, but under the Ottoman Empire, the city rebuilt and reconciled so successfully that there would never again be sectarian violence in Damascus.

This offers hope. It demonstrates that with wise and effective guidance, any society can achieve positive reconciliation, even after profound divisions.

Amogh Dev Rai: Thank you. That gives us a lot of hope. It also brings me to my last question. One of the key takeaways from the book is the reconstruction of Damascus after the riots, fire, and violence. You mention that the first three things built were the armoury, the police station, and the courthouse.

These institutions became the centre of the rebuilding process. Following this, there was significant reconstruction, with funds flowing in, which not only reduced sectarian tensions to pre-19th-century levels but also led to a careful regulation of the foreign consular system.

I noticed that after 1860, not every Christian could automatically become a foreign consular officer. This number was regulated because, if unchecked, it could lead to Christians seeking to extend consular protections to everyone they knew. Do you think that by 1914, the Ottoman Empire had developed a strong administrative hold over regulating its internal affairs?

Can the events of 1860 be seen as a triumph of Ottoman bureaucracy, contrary to the narrative that the Empire was in a long period of decay? I’m not saying there weren’t issues, but it seems the Ottomans demonstrated remarkable capacity to fix such a situation. Fuad Pasha, for instance, used capital punishment sparingly as a modifier, not as extensively as the Europeans would have preferred.

Was this also a broader apology for the Empire itself, showing that it was more adept at managing internal squabbles than it is often credited for?

Eugene Rogan: I think that’s a fair point. In many ways, the Ottoman reforms were a success in transforming an empire with significant structural challenges into a state that was still viable. More than a failure of governance, what truly undermined the Ottoman Empire was the rise of nationalism among minority communities, particularly in the Balkans.

The tensions with the Armenians, for instance, stemmed from the perception that Armenians were becoming increasingly nationalised, forming nationalist parties, and seeking to carve out territory from Ottoman Anatolia to create an independent Armenian state—often with Russian support.

It’s important to clarify that this is not a justification for the genocide that followed, but rather an attempt to understand how even the Armenian community came to be perceived as a threat to the empire’s integrity. Nationalism was the defining challenge, and the Ottomans were deeply concerned about preventing its emergence in the Arab provinces.

They recognised that by implementing reforms and investing in provinces like Damascus, as they did successfully, they could create a viable and enduring Ottoman state. This state would have been centred around the Muslim majority of Arabs, Kurds, and Turks, encompassing Asia Minor and the Arab provinces.

I believe such a state could have been viable had the Ottomans remained neutral in the First World War. The collapse of the empire wasn’t an inevitability. It’s an intriguing counterfactual to imagine how the 20th-century Middle East might have unfolded if the Ottomans had avoided the war and emerged intact as a Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab state, bolstered by oil revenues and other resources. The Middle East might have looked very different.

However, fears of further fragmentation through nationalist forces and concerns about European powers carving up their empire drove the Ottomans to take sides in the First World War. That decision proved fatal. Despite this, the experience of reform and its implementation suggests that the Ottomans could have adapted to survive into the 20th century. They would, of course, have faced challenges in statecraft, just as they did in the 19th century, but survival was possible.

Amogh Dev Rai: Thank you. That’s definitely something to reflect on, and it carries a message of hope throughout. I’m so grateful that you took the time out of your busy schedule for this conversation. I’m going to ask you to do something that authors typically dislike, but I think it’s important.

How would you paraphrase the book for an interested reader?

Eugene Rogan: First, let me thank you for the great honour of inviting me onto your programme and giving me the opportunity to address your listeners. It’s been wonderful to be with you.

I see the book as, on one level, a study of a fascinating city experiencing tremendous pressures of change as it engages with the modern age of the 19th century. On another level, it’s a history of what divides societies to the point of rupture and explores the pathway back through such ruptures.

It’s also a study of genocidal movements, which have been a recurring part of human history across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Finally, I think it’s simply a compelling story, enriched by strong narrative voices.

What makes this book stand out among my other works is the wealth of narrative records left behind—not just by Mishka and Fuad Pasha, but also by Muslim and Christian notables of Damascus, and survivors of the violence. These sources allow us to weave a narrative with a strong cast of characters, creating a time machine of sorts that brings this fascinating moment in history vividly to life.

Amogh Dev Rai: Thank you. As a reader who loved the book, I couldn’t have put it better myself—but then, you’re the author. Thank you so much for doing this. If you ever come to India and travel to Jaipur via Delhi, please let us know. I’d love to have a one-on-one conversation.

Eugene Rogan: Thank you very much for having me.