In January 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson in a speech to Congress outlined Fourteen Points to undergird the postwar peace and international politics. Vis-à-vis European empires’ interests and against Soviet anti-colonialism, he asserted a panorama of (actually self-interested) US ideals. Thus, point 5 called for “A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable government whose title is to be determined;” and point 14 insisted that “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike.”

Around the world, many anti-colonialists rejoiced. They insisted these points apply to their case, and hoped Wilson would agree. Neither of these two things came to pass, as Erez Manela has shown in The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007). In Paris during the 1919 Peace Conference, Wilson rebuffed the advances of many, including the Egyptian delegation, which wrote and self-published, in Paris in 1919, the booklet containing the two letters below. While conceding British supervision of Egypt’s debt and of the Suez Canal, leading Egyptian nationalists had just after the end of World War I demanded independence and the right to address the upcoming Paris Peace conference. Britain rejected these demands and offers. An uprising ensued, which Britain tried to suppress, in March 1919 exiling leading nationalists, including Sa’d Zaghlul (1959-1927), to Malta. As this only worsened the uprising, the Britain’s new High Commissioner in Cairo, Edmund Allenby (1861-1936) released the nationalists—who made haste to Paris.

In January 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson in a speech to Congress outlined Fourteen Points to undergird the postwar peace and international politics. Vis-à-vis European empires’ interests and against Soviet anti-colonialism, he asserted a panorama of (actually self-interested) US ideals. Thus, point 5 called for “A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable government whose title is to be determined;” and point 14 insisted that “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike.”

Around the world, many anti-colonialists rejoiced. They insisted these points apply to their case, and hoped Wilson would agree. Neither of these two things came to pass, as Erez Manela has shown in The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007). In Paris during the 1919 Peace Conference, Wilson rebuffed the advances of many, including the Egyptian delegation, which wrote and self-published, in Paris in 1919, the booklet containing the two letters below. While conceding British supervision of Egypt’s debt and of the Suez Canal, leading Egyptian nationalists had just after the end of World War I demanded independence and the right to address the upcoming Paris Peace conference. Britain rejected these demands and offers. An uprising ensued, which Britain tried to suppress, in March 1919 exiling leading nationalists, including Sa’d Zaghlul (1959-1927), to Malta. As this only worsened the uprising, the Britain’s new High Commissioner in Cairo, Edmund Allenby (1861-1936) released the nationalists—who made haste to Paris.

From the 1880s to 1914, about half a million Ottoman citizens from Bilad al-Sham (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) emigrated, principally for economic reasons. A majority were Christians. Most hailed from what after World War I became Lebanon and Syria; some were from Palestine. While some travelled to Africa—a story analyzed in Andrew Arsan’s Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (2014)—a large majority headed to the Americas, where they worked mostly in lower-class professions, soon launched newspapers, and founded numerous local but interlinked migrant societies. Although only few returned permanently, equally few renounced their Ottoman citizenship. Moreover, a good number of emigrants stayed in touch with their place of origin: socially, e.g. through letter exchanges, marriages, and the occasional visit; economically and financially, e.g. through remittances; and politically.

As Stacy Fahrenthold has shown in Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925, political involvement grew after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire. For one thing, Ottoman freedom of expression improved for a few years; for another, the Young Turk regime hoped to politically recruit migrants for the Ottoman cause, though had little success. Migrants’ own political involvement increased in World War I. A clear majority turned against the Ottoman Empire. This was reflected also in numerous South- and North-American-Syrian journals.

One was the New York-based al-Fatat, whose founder in 1916, Shukri al-Bakhkhash, wrote the below text; he was born in 1889 in Zahle, present-day Lebanon, and arrived in the United States in the early 1910s. Moreover, thousands sought to, and did, join the war as volunteers on the Allied side, organized by Syrian American recruiters across the Western hemisphere. From 1914-17, migrants enlisted in the French and British armed forces and from 1917 also in the US military, fighting in Europe and the Middle East. (Al-Bakhkhash himself enlisted in the US army in 1918.) This was a political act that they and their communities hoped would further Syria’s liberation from Ottoman rule and give Syrians a voice in the postwar world, though they did not quite agree how post-Ottoman Syria would or should look like and whether a (and if yes, which) foreign country—principally, France or the United States—should play a role in it.