Gimmicks of War

This essay examines three pivotal instances where late Ottoman maps served as “gimmicks of war.” Forgotten and reactivated, these visual artifacts gained renewed political significance years after their production on battlefields. The analysis focuses on three maps: an 1878 map of Eastern Anatolia delineating six Armenian provinces, a wall map of Palestine featured at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, and a map of Lebanon that facilitated the proclamation of the state of Greater Lebanon in 1920. Each instance reveals a shared tactic: staging the authority of old maps to underpin territorial claims in the present. Though tied to specific historical moments, these maps weren't just traces of a bygone moment; they embodied an ongoing relationship with an aesthetic form, functioning as gimmicks that transcended their original contexts while retaining the empirical authority they had conveyed. The actors at play did not passively deploy these maps as fixed, inert objects. Instead, they breathed new political life into relational and increasingly commodified artifacts with a unique affective intensity, mobilizing them to inscribe new facts on the ground. As gimmicks, these artifacts constituted a temporally sensitive form that surfaced at decisive moments, staged on negotiation tables and the walls of political assemblies.