The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East by Eugene Rogan (review)

World War I was one of history’s greatest conflicts. It has accordingly generated a vast literature, one that continues to expand with the publication of scores of new studies during this, the centenary of the war. The war was as devastating and consequential for the Middle East as anywhere else, yet the number of studies in the English language on the Great War in the Middle East still remains pitifully small. Moreover, of those works the great majority focuses on the role and operations of the British and pay only glancing attention to the Ottoman role.

In 2005, the Oxford historian of the Middle East Eugene Rogan visited the battlefield of Gallipoli. He was there not to conduct research but instead to pay respect alongside his family members to a great uncle who had fallen in combat there 90 years earlier. The visit caused Rogan to reflect on the near-total nescience of the Turkish and Arab experiences in the war. The Fall of the Ottomans represents Rogan’s attempt to remedy this ignorance.

The Fall of the Ottomans provides an engaging, at times even gripping, narrative. Weighing in at 406 pages of text and six maps, the book provides a comprehensive but concise overview of the Middle East in World War I. This is no simple achievement. The war in the Middle East was complex. It found the Ottomans, assisted by their German allies, battling the armies (and navies) of the Russian, British, and French empires on multiple fronts in the Caucasus, the Dardanelles, Iran, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Yemen, ‘Asir, and Palestine. And unlike in Western Europe where armies stood bogged down along essentially the same trench lines for years, in the Middle East the campaigns were fluid and unpredictable.

Throughout the book, Rogan interweaves the story of high politics and grand strategy with vignettes of individual soldiers, civilians, refugees, clergy, and missionaries. He maintains a focus on the political and military course of the war, but does not neglect to provide social, economic, and human context. He is especially good in his descriptions of British operations at Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and in greater Syria, and in his narration of the Arab Revolt. Rogan also skillfully uses British debates over military and diplomatic strategy to reveal not just the motives and thinking behind British actions, but also how Ottoman actions profoundly affected the overall course of the war. Dismissed as inconsequential by most European observers and initially diffident about entering the war, the Ottoman Empire defied expectations by refusing to crumple under the assorted blows of the Triple Entente. Instead it persevered, forcing the Entente to divert scarce manpower and resources to the Middle East and prolonging the war by at least a year with devastating consequences that stretched well beyond the Middle East.

Rogan’s synthesis within a single volume of an overview of the Ottoman experience in the Great War constitutes a major contribution. The book currently has no rival. But the specialist will not find within Fall of the Ottomans any revelations about the Ottoman war effort. Rogan, who in the past has produced research that painstakingly exploited Ottoman archival sources, opted in this book to rely largely on secondary sources and to forego Ottoman sources entirely. Only occasionally does he draw on British and (curiously) American archives, and then mainly to provide descriptive detail rather than new information or analytical insights. Archival research when performed properly and not as an exercise in window dressing, is arduous and time consuming. This is especially true in a field such as Ottoman history where knowledge even of fundamental institutions and events is often incomplete. Rogan’s decision not to delve into the Ottoman archives in favor of writing a book that is timely and accessible to broader audiences is a defensible one, although greater attention to the burgeoning Turkish-language scholarship on the war would have allowed the author to provide more...