TRACING THE CIRCASSIAN MYTH: RACE, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND MARTIAL CULTURE IN FRENCH MANDATE SYRIA

Abstract

This thesis examines the position of North Caucasians in French Mandate Syria (1920–1946), tracing how this refugee minority came to occupy a distinctive role in the French colonial military as both an idealized auxiliary force and a racially liminal community. Drawing on French colonial military and institutional documents, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European ethnographic and scientific literature, Mandate-era print and visual culture, and oral history from the Syrian-Circassian community, the thesis argues that North Caucasians were constructed through what it terms the "Circassian myth," a racialized imperial mythology of inherent martial and social virtues that rendered them model colonial soldiers while complicating their place in Syrian society.

The argument proceeds along three intersecting lines. First, it traces the intellectual genealogy of European and French racial knowledge about North Caucasians from the eighteenth century onward, examining how anthropological and ethnographic literature produced the category of the "Caucasian" as a site of both racial idealization and ambiguity. Second, it examines how French colonial officers transferred racialized military categories produced in French North Africa, the so-called “Berber myth”, to the Levant. Third, it considers how this mythology was made material through visual culture, military iconography, and the regulated dress of Circassian auxiliary units, and how it was performed and internalized by North Caucasians themselves during the Mandate period.

The thesis contributes to ongoing conversations in Middle East historiography about the analytical utility of race in the study of French Mandate governance, suggesting that racialized knowledge operated alongside sectarian categories rather than beneath them. It also addresses the problem of voice in the colonial archive, treating oral history and family memory as crucial historical materials. More broadly, the project speaks to questions of race, minority military service, and colonial knowledge production across imperial spaces.