To Bring About a "Moral of Renewal": The Deportation of Sex Workers in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War

Abstract

I n J a n u a r y 1915 E u r o p E a n c o n s u l s in Istanbul gave the city’s police commissioner, Osman Bedri Bey, a list of names of known procurers. The accused traffickers included Russian, Argentinian, Romanian, American, Austrian, French, British, and Greek citizens. All but one of them were deported; 151 were banished from the country, 11 were sent to Sivas, and 5 were sent to Kayseri, cities in the interior of Anatolia that were far removed from the capital. Bedri quickly rose through the ranks of Ottoman civil officialdom as he was a close friend of Talaat, the powerful interior minister who became grand vizier in 1917. Bedri was appointed as a prosecutor in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul in April 1912 and became police commissioner of Istanbul in 1914. As police commissioner, he was “equipped with the near dictatorial powers he was given over Constantinople’s public life” by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the secret society that plotted the 1908 Ottoman constitutional revolution and deposed Sultan Abdülhamid II a year later. Bedri was therefore free to use his power as police commissioner to carry out deportations of madams, pimps, and