The fall of the Ottomans The Great War in the Middle East

Rogan (St. Anthony's, Oxford) draws on previously untranslated Arab and Turkish sources to give Western readers indispensable new perspectives on the Great War in the Middle East and its lasting effects on the region. Excellent chapters on Gallipoli and Kut underline well-known accounts of British blundering, and the Ottoman leadership emerges from this rich narrative as equally flawed. At the operational level, Young Turk commanders with the soundest of revolutionary credentials often proved incompetent in the field. Their men suffered accordingly, and their superiors distorted the big picture with wishful thinking. Courting a German alliance yet hoping to remain neutral, the Ottoman leadership proceeded to over-commit its newly modernized military and overestimate its chances for inciting jihad against the British and French--jihad by Arabs who did not all consider the Ottoman sultan to be their caliph. That an increasingly secularized state put so much stock in jihad against selected infidels further underlines its desperation, as does Rogan's even-handed treatment of the Armenian Genocide. Mining both Armenian and Turkish sources, he thoroughly sets the context without excusing. Required reading for students of WW I and the modern Middle East. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --John L.S. Daley, Pittsburg State University

IN NOVEMBER 1914, the world's only great Muslim empire was drawn into a life-or-death struggle against three historically Christian powers - Britain, France and Russia. All parties made frantic calculations about the likely intertwining of religion and strategy. The playing out, and surprise overturning, of these calculations informs every page of Eugene Rogan's intricately worked but very readable account of the Ottoman theocracy's demise. As Rogan explains in "The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East," the Christian nations of the Triple Entente had millions of Muslim subjects, who might in their view be open to seduction by the Ottoman sultan, especially if he seemed to be prevailing in the war. The Ottomans, for their part, were in alliance with two other European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Paradoxically, the Teutons urged the sultan to use his role as caliph and proclaim an Islamic holy war. One factor was that, as a newcomer to the imperial game, Germany had relatively few Muslim subjects and less to lose if the card of jihad were played. The Ottomans, meanwhile, feared the influence of foes, especially Russia, over their own Christian subjects - including the Greeks and Armenians, who formed a substantial and economically important minority in both the empire's capital and the Anatolian heartland. In the end, nothing went as expected, because global conflict overturns all predictions. But the very existence of those religion-based calculations had consequences, many of them tragic. Rogan's narrative shifts from the Aegean to the Caucasus to Arabia as he traces those consequences, and shows how they led, ultimately, to the Ottoman Empire's defeat and collapse. Defeat and collapse are not the same thing, and Rogan, a history lecturer at Oxford University and the author of "The Arabs," carefully distinguishes them. The defeat that the empire suffered in 1918 was not total, and left some of the sultan's forces intact. One of his adversaries, Russia, was by then engulfed by revolution and had bowed out of the war, letting Turkish forces recoup lost ground. The final collapse of the Ottoman order was neither an instant result of the 1918 armistice, nor, on Rogan's reading, an inevitable one. But for a power whose strong point was military excellence rather than commercial or technological prowess, the defeat was painful enough. In the Ottomans' confrontation with Britain, there were several early surprises. Instead of the sultan winning over London's Muslim subjects, it was the British who profited by breaking the Turks' hold over certain Muslims, especially the descendants of the Prophet who controlled Arabia. With fair success, and some spectacular setbacks, Britain also managed to deploy its own colonial troops, whether Hindu or Muslim, against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia. But when the Ottomans defended their Anatolian heartland, they showed an iron will that the British underestimated. In the disastrous British-led assault on the Dardanelles straits, and the subsequent landing at Gallipoli, it was not the Ottoman imperium that began crumbling but the British one, as Australian, New Zealand and Irish soldiers became embittered by the incompetence of the power they served. Using personal histories to leaven what might otherwise have been a heavy diet of places, names and dates, Rogan neatly links the Turks' costly success at the Dardanelles with the dreadful events that unfolded about 1,000 miles away, on the eastern edge of present-day Turkey. In this, the centenary year of the horrors suffered by the Ottoman Armenians, many readers will turn immediately to those events to see how Rogan negotiates the contesting versions. It is not in question that from April 1915 onward, Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire died horribly in enormous numbers. The American administration, which for diplomatic reasons still balks at using the word genocide, accepts that as many as 1.5 million perished. It is on record that in May 1915, a law was passed calling for the "relocation" of the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia; nor does anybody seriously question that this became a death march whose victims were killed by their guards, attacked by others or perished from exhaustion and starvation. But there is a more contentious charge, and in a few succinct lines, Rogan affirms it. He agrees that in addition to ordering a vast, brutal internal deportation, the Committee of Union of Progress, the shadowy institution that was directing the Ottoman war effort, issued unwritten orders for the mass murder of the deportees. Secret, oral orders are hard to prove or disprove, but Rogan accepts the case for their existence made by the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam. This book uses words like "annihilation" and "massacre" more often than "genocide" but does not avoid the g-word. As he explains in a footnote, Rogan employs the term genocide in support of the "courageous efforts" of Turkish historians and writers to "force an honest reckoning with Turkey's past." At the same time, the book makes many of the arguments that qualified defenders of the Ottoman record point to: for example, that in winter 1914 and spring 1915, there was fierce fighting in eastern Anatolia between Turks and Armenians; sometimes the Armenians fought alone, and sometimes with Russian help. In Istanbul, at the same time, Turkish officialdom's fear of an "enemy within" was running high because local Armenians were suspected of favoring Britain's plans to advance on the city. All that provides some psychological background to the drive against the Armenian population. So too does the huge Turkish loss of life, from cold and disease as well as bullets, during and after the Russian victory at Sarakamis in December 1914. But Rogan does not for a moment suggest that this amounts to a moral justification of the horrors the Armenians endured. To stress, as some Turkish versions of the story do, that this was a period involving tragic suffering on all sides is valid as far as it goes, but it is not an adequate statement. It is to Rogan's credit that he acknowledges this. Still, a moral assessment of the treatment of the Armenians is not the main purpose of this book, which promises a more Ottoman-centric vision of a conflict that is often described through the eyes of British generals and strategists. That promise is only partly fulfilled. In what is a manageably sized book, Rogan feels he must spend several pages on the motives of the Ottomans' adversaries, especially Britain; that limits the space he can devote to bringing the Ottoman side of the story to life. Some gripping sections describe the British-led advance on Jerusalem in late 1917, leading to the holy city's capture in time for Christmas. This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it well, making clear both the stiffness of the Turkish defense and the ingenuity of Britain's tactics. The book explains how, with the experience of an imperial power at its height, the British used dynastic rivalries to rally the Muslims of Arabia and the Levant against their Turkish overlords. In doing so they established the principle that in the 20th century, ethnicity and nationalism (in this case, Arab nationalism) would often trump religious bonds, even in lands where faith was zealous. Only in the early 21st century is that trend being reversed, as competing versions of Islamism vow to tear down the borders that were drawn a century ago. BRUCE CLARK, who writes about religion, history and society for The Economist, is the author of "Twice a Stranger," a study of the Turkish-Greek population exchange.

The Ottoman empire, dating back to 1299, quickly dissolved after the end of World War I, and there have been few works about its role in the Great War. The empire's most famous battle and victory, Gallipoli, is often told from the side of the British. Rogan (History, Oxford Univ.) aims to correct this. Beginning with the revolution of the "Young Turks" in 1908, his account chronicles the story of the Ottoman empire in World War I and its eventual collapse. The author contends that the entrance of the empire is what truly made World War I a "world" war. And the empire's sacrifices were great: 3,800 British died at Gallipoli while 14,000 Ottoman soldiers were killed. Rogan's work is even more pivotal because researching the Ottoman Army was not an easy task. Access to Turkish military archives is limited, and World War I is rarely memorialized in the Middle East. This well-researched and well-written book is not strictly military history, however, but an overview of the last years of the empire and its experiences in the Great War. VERDICT A much-needed addition to World War I scholarship that is recommended for anyone interested in that conflict and the history of the Middle East or Turkey.-Jason Martin, Stetson Univ. Lib., DeLand, FL (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.