The Dry Man of Europe—Ottoman Prohibition against British Domination

Abstract

Chapter 8 examines temperance and prohibition history within the Ottoman Empire and secular Turkey. Drinking and viticulture were widespread throughout the empire, though the trade was often in the hands of non-Muslims. The Ottoman liquor traffic even became integral to the European-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was among the drunkest leaders in world history, yet Atatürk and the secular Turkish government in Ankara embraced prohibitionism as a means of denying badly needed alcohol revenues to the Christians occupying their lands—most notably the British controlling Istanbul and the Greeks around Smyrna. Turkish prohibition expanded across Anatolia, as Atatürk liberated Turkey’s occupied territories. Only in 1924, with the end of foreign occupation, was the Kemalist prohibition rescinded, and replaced with a national alcohol monopoly, in which the financial benefits of the liquor trade would accrue to the Turkish state, not to foreigners.