The Well-Defended Domains: Eurocentric International Law and the Making of the Ottoman Office of Legal Counsel

While historians have acknowledged the centrality of international law in late Ottoman diplomatic discourse, they have overlooked an important late Ottoman institution that was crucial in making international law a centerpiece of its foreign policy. This article examines the Ottoman Foreign Ministry’s Office of Legal Counsel (hukuk müşavirliği istişare odasi) and the international lawyers who worked there from the Hamidian era through the early 1920s—a period in which the role of international law in state practice transformed dramatically. It argues that Ottoman lawyers viewed international law positively as a tool of the weak for much of the period under study. But in the years leading up to the First World War, Ottoman enthusiasm for international law collapsed against the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya and the Balkan Wars. International lawyers increasingly viewed militarization rather than legalism as the best means to secure the state’s future. In the aftermath of the First World War, these erstwhile protectors of empire found themselves in a range of positions vis-à-vis the new Turkish state—from national indifference, resistance or exile, to architects of the national order.