Person

Djavid, Mehmed, Bey, 1875-1926

1875-1926

Mehmet Cavit Bey, Mehmed Cavid Bey or Mehmed Djavid Bey was born in 1875 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

He was an Ottoman economist, statesman, and newspaper editor. After graduating from the Imperial Civil Servants School (Mülkiye) in Istanbul in 1896, he worked for the Agriculture Bank and Education Ministry. He returned to Salonica in 1902 to teach economics at the Fevziye School, where he co-founded the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), called the Young Turks by the foreign press. After the 1908 Revolution, he was elected to the Ottoman parliament, where he served as Minister of Finance in five cabinets (1908-1918). In 1914, he briefly resigned to protest the secret Ottoman-German alliance, although he remained a financial adviser, reassuming the ministerial post in 1917. After the war, he went into hiding in Istanbul and fled to Switzerland, where he lived for several years. In 1921, he married Emine Nurbanu Hidayet Hanım (1891-1946), an Ottoman princess. Cavit Bey played an important role in the CUP and represented the Ottoman Empire in postwar financial negotiations in London and Berlin. After Turkey's independence in 1923, he was charged with alleged involvement in the assassination attempt against Mustafa Kemal, the first President of the Republic of Turkey. Cavit Bey was executed on August 26, 1926, in Ankara, Turkey. He was a contributor and editor of the influential social sciences journal Ulum-i İktisadiye ve İçtimâiye Mecmuası (1908–1911). He also published several textbooks on economics and statistics, and his voluminous memoirs were published as a series in the daily Tanin (1943-1946).