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The Fall of the Ottomans review - an absorbing history of the impact
of the first world war on the Middle East
Eugene Rogan's study of the great war from the Ottoman perspective
reveals the root cause of many of today's conflicts
Turkish soldiers on eastern front during the first world war. Rogan
brings extensive knowledge and research to a familar story.
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Anthony Sattin
Sunday 1 March 2015 13.00 GMT
The last thing the people of the Ottoman empire needed in autumn 1914
was another war. In the six years leading up to that calamitous year
they had seen a sultan deposed and their immense and immensely
inefficient army battered. In several bruising wars, they had ceded
Libya to Italy and all their European territories - including what is
now Bulgaria, large chunks of Greece, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania - to
independence. Now their Young Turk leaders were siding with Germany,
because the Kaiser looked most likely to help them regain some of that
lost territory, or at least avoid the dismantlement of the empire. The
consequences of that decision - the great war that shaped the Middle
East, the conflict that made the war global - form the grand tale that
Eugene Rogan tells in his latest book.
Readers of his previous work, The Arabs, will know how comfortably he
handles multiple themes, ambitious narratives and a crowd of
characters. Writing about the collapse of an empire that, in 1914,
still included all of what is now Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt demands those skills, and more. Finding
something new to say about a conflict that one of its most famous
participants described as "a sideshow of a sideshow" would seem to be
a challenge, especially with other books recently published on the
subject. Some of these have looked at individual theatres, most
obviously the Arab revolt, while others (such as Kristian Coates
Ulrichsen's The First World War in the Middle East) cover the entire
war.
So what does Rogan bring to the subject? For one thing, he has
extensive background knowledge, as one would expect from the director
of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University. To this he has added
extensive research. Most histories of the Middle East in this period
have been written from a western point of view, because British,
French and German archives have been open longer and are, for the most
part, more accessible. Rogan has drawn on little-used Ottoman and Arab
material.
He has also brought a clarity of vision and of description to the war,
whether sketching out the intentions of military commanders and the
effects of their plans on the ground, or when choosing a chapter
title. "Annihilation of the Armenians", for instance, will win him no
friends among those Turks still in denial about the genocide, for it
describes with depressing clarity the plan of Talaat Pasha, the
Turkish leader, and his advisers Dr Mehmed Nazim and Dr Behaeddin
Shakir: that there should be nothing less than "the annihilation of
the vast majority of Ottoman Armenians" in order to ensure there would
not be enough of them left to fight for an independent homeland.
Turkish authors, including the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, have
recently faced jail on treason charges for alluding to the genocide.
As Rogan tells it, participants in the Middle East had different
reasons for entering the conflict: the British fought to secure the
Suez canal and the Gulf oilfields; the Turks feared Russian
encroachment and hoped to regain territory lost before the great war;
the Germans sought to destabilise the British empire, the Russians
coveted Istanbul and Anatolia...
Rogan examines these larger geopolitical motives while also giving a
human face to the military engagements that they created, using a wide
range of voices - from a low-ranking Ottoman medic, to an Australian
poet, an Arab from Jerusalem and an emir from the Hejaz. The story
needs these voices to make poignant the consistent bungling by
commanders, and equally consistent bravery of soldiers (and the
hardship) on all sides - as, for instance, when the poorly equipped
Turkish Third Army fought the Russians in the Caucasus, in the snow,
with neither heavy coats nor boots; or when British planners
underestimated the strength of Ottoman defences along the Dardanelles
and Gallipoli, with enormous loss of life.
Some of this is already familiar: the account of the Arab revolt adds
little to what has been told before. But even the familiar has
resonance, such as General Maude's insistence to the battered people
of Baghdad that his soldiers were "liberators". Or foreign secretary
Arthur Balfour's declaration that the British government would favour
the creation of a Jewish homeland so long as it did not infringe on
"the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in
Palestine". Or the cynical German manipulation of an Ottoman call for
jihad against Britain, in an attempt to rouse Indians against the
crown.
That resonance adds relevance to this thorough and absorbing book,
because it reminds us that the postwar Middle East settlements were as
flawed as the conditions imposed on Germany, and that in turn explains
why the land they fought over then is still being contested today.
Anthony Sattin's Young Lawrence is published by John Murray. The Fall
of the Ottomans is published by Allen Lane (£25). Click here to buy it
for £20
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/fall-of-the-ottomans-eugene-rogan-review
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
of the first world war on the Middle East
Eugene Rogan's study of the great war from the Ottoman perspective
reveals the root cause of many of today's conflicts
Turkish soldiers on eastern front during the first world war. Rogan
brings extensive knowledge and research to a familar story.
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Anthony Sattin
Sunday 1 March 2015 13.00 GMT
The last thing the people of the Ottoman empire needed in autumn 1914
was another war. In the six years leading up to that calamitous year
they had seen a sultan deposed and their immense and immensely
inefficient army battered. In several bruising wars, they had ceded
Libya to Italy and all their European territories - including what is
now Bulgaria, large chunks of Greece, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania - to
independence. Now their Young Turk leaders were siding with Germany,
because the Kaiser looked most likely to help them regain some of that
lost territory, or at least avoid the dismantlement of the empire. The
consequences of that decision - the great war that shaped the Middle
East, the conflict that made the war global - form the grand tale that
Eugene Rogan tells in his latest book.
Readers of his previous work, The Arabs, will know how comfortably he
handles multiple themes, ambitious narratives and a crowd of
characters. Writing about the collapse of an empire that, in 1914,
still included all of what is now Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt demands those skills, and more. Finding
something new to say about a conflict that one of its most famous
participants described as "a sideshow of a sideshow" would seem to be
a challenge, especially with other books recently published on the
subject. Some of these have looked at individual theatres, most
obviously the Arab revolt, while others (such as Kristian Coates
Ulrichsen's The First World War in the Middle East) cover the entire
war.
So what does Rogan bring to the subject? For one thing, he has
extensive background knowledge, as one would expect from the director
of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University. To this he has added
extensive research. Most histories of the Middle East in this period
have been written from a western point of view, because British,
French and German archives have been open longer and are, for the most
part, more accessible. Rogan has drawn on little-used Ottoman and Arab
material.
He has also brought a clarity of vision and of description to the war,
whether sketching out the intentions of military commanders and the
effects of their plans on the ground, or when choosing a chapter
title. "Annihilation of the Armenians", for instance, will win him no
friends among those Turks still in denial about the genocide, for it
describes with depressing clarity the plan of Talaat Pasha, the
Turkish leader, and his advisers Dr Mehmed Nazim and Dr Behaeddin
Shakir: that there should be nothing less than "the annihilation of
the vast majority of Ottoman Armenians" in order to ensure there would
not be enough of them left to fight for an independent homeland.
Turkish authors, including the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, have
recently faced jail on treason charges for alluding to the genocide.
As Rogan tells it, participants in the Middle East had different
reasons for entering the conflict: the British fought to secure the
Suez canal and the Gulf oilfields; the Turks feared Russian
encroachment and hoped to regain territory lost before the great war;
the Germans sought to destabilise the British empire, the Russians
coveted Istanbul and Anatolia...
Rogan examines these larger geopolitical motives while also giving a
human face to the military engagements that they created, using a wide
range of voices - from a low-ranking Ottoman medic, to an Australian
poet, an Arab from Jerusalem and an emir from the Hejaz. The story
needs these voices to make poignant the consistent bungling by
commanders, and equally consistent bravery of soldiers (and the
hardship) on all sides - as, for instance, when the poorly equipped
Turkish Third Army fought the Russians in the Caucasus, in the snow,
with neither heavy coats nor boots; or when British planners
underestimated the strength of Ottoman defences along the Dardanelles
and Gallipoli, with enormous loss of life.
Some of this is already familiar: the account of the Arab revolt adds
little to what has been told before. But even the familiar has
resonance, such as General Maude's insistence to the battered people
of Baghdad that his soldiers were "liberators". Or foreign secretary
Arthur Balfour's declaration that the British government would favour
the creation of a Jewish homeland so long as it did not infringe on
"the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in
Palestine". Or the cynical German manipulation of an Ottoman call for
jihad against Britain, in an attempt to rouse Indians against the
crown.
That resonance adds relevance to this thorough and absorbing book,
because it reminds us that the postwar Middle East settlements were as
flawed as the conditions imposed on Germany, and that in turn explains
why the land they fought over then is still being contested today.
Anthony Sattin's Young Lawrence is published by John Murray. The Fall
of the Ottomans is published by Allen Lane (£25). Click here to buy it
for £20
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/fall-of-the-ottomans-eugene-rogan-review
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress