When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire by Yiğit Akın (review)

World War I is surely one of the most overwritten fields of history, and yet it continues to generate innovative work. Yiğit Akın's When the War Came Home addresses two persistent lacunae in the extensive historiography of the war. Europeanists—with notable exceptions, such as John H. Morrow, Susan Grayzel, and John Horne—continue to write the history as a Western European war with less attention than they should pay to Austria-Hungary and Russia, never mind what happened in Southwest Asia and colonial territories. How can we catch Europeanists' attention and encourage them to incorporate the events that made this and World War II as close to global wars as we have seen? How can this war be understood without looking beyond white Europeans to incorporate the experience of Harlem's Rattlers, Senegalese, and Indian colonial soldiers, for example; or Ottoman soldiers on the European and Southwest Asian fronts; and civilians wherever combat, occupation, or merely the devastating forces of mobilization of resources left them to starve and struggle to survive? As well, new generations of Ottomanists and Arabists have been working to break the discontinuity narrative of empire to nation-state with great success, which only proves that there is more work to be done in this vein for us to understand recent history of the Middle East and North Africa.

Akın's highly readable book bids fair to advance both of those objectives. It is concise, thorough, and combines military, social, economic, ethnic, and gender history with other fields in a minor key to create a compelling narrative based on primary sources, ranging from dry archival documents to poetry, novels, and folklore. This reviewer can attest that, in addition to its pure scholarly merit, it is an excellent pedagogical tool in three types of courses: World War I and the world, modern Middle East and North Africa, and undergraduate methods courses in history and historiography as the non-Western entrant in how to research, analyze, and write like a historian.

The book opens with writer Yaşar Kemal's surprise at the number of songs about WWI he heard in the collection journeys he took to villages in the late 1930s, and such ballads and poetry of the common man and woman resonate throughout the book to great narrative effect. The introduction then provides a highly organized and crystal-clear statement of objectives and argument suitable for audiences from colleagues to undergraduates, and even for a popular reader who favors accuracy over sentimental history. Akın aims to "offer a broad view of how the Great War affected Ottoman society, tracing the new socioeconomic and cultural realities that the war created in the form of mass conscription, a state-controlled economy, widespread shortages, population movements, ethnic cleansing, and death" (p. 3). He describes the effects of the preceding Balkan Wars on the Ottoman military, politics, and society and what they revealed about failures of training, morale, and infrastructure. He effectively problematizes how "total war" is relevant to the Ottoman experience; and he takes us through lists of what constituted the engagement in the war of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), how this led to loss of the reality and idea of the last great land-based empire in the region, and how this compared to European powers in the war.

Subsequent chapters take us deeper into the political and military history of the Balkan Wars and their aftermath before taking on the home front. Akın begins with conscription's effects on combatants and the civilians left behind, continues with failures of infrastructure, and moves the narrative efficiently through famine and epidemic resulting from mobilization of resources and natural disaster, women's activities, and deportees and refugees. Such wide-ranging sources as biographies, popular literature, several periodicals, and documents from the...