A First Button Done Up Wrongly: Revisiting Philip H. Stoddard’s “Ottoman Special Organization”

ABSTRACT The Ottoman Special Organization made its way into the literature of historical studies during the 1960s in the United States through the work of Philip H. Stoddard. Stoddard’s doctoral dissertation resonated so powerfully within academic circles that his approach to the organization, albeit flawed, was adopted extensively and thus echoed by later researchers. This also holds true for Turkish academia, where the nature, origin and historical course of the Special Organization in particular, and unconventional warfare and intelligence in general, was and remains largely misunderstood due to Stoddard’s fallacious analysis of the organization coupled with the uncritical character of conventional history-writing in Turkey. Through a critique of the paradigms and referential points Stoddard based his study on, as well as the conceptual and terminological aspects of his work, this study offers a more sound approach to both the organization and the units that fulfilled intelligence duties at the institutional level.