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
By Anthony Sattin
The Guardian - Sunday 1 March 2015
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.
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