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  • When the War Came Home: the Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire by Yiğit Akın
  • Stacy D. Fahrenthold
Yiğit Akın. When the War Came Home: the Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. 288 pp. Paper, $28. ISBN: 978-1503604902.

Among historians, the centennial of the First World War has brought forth a needed reassessment of this conflict's global dimensions, focusing on the identification of new archives, translation of memoirs, and a serious exploration of war's social dimensions. Several important studies of the war in the Ottoman Empire have emerged in recent years; collectively, they illustrate the empire's geopolitical centrality while arguing the need to consider the war's long-term sociocultural traumas. In When the War Came Home, Yiğit Akın brings us an exquisite exploration of civilian life on the Ottoman home front. He reveals an Ottoman state that invested enormous resources into creating (and enforcing) a new moral order through celebration of patriotic heroes, sacrificing wives and mothers, and the forceful repression of dissent. At the same time, the experiences of civilians, conscripts, and displaced persons reveal resistance to this new order at the level of local endurance and survival. Drawing directly on stories from the civilian home front, the book illustrates how the Unionists' most destructive policies irrevocably altered the lives of civilians living far away from any battlefield.

When the War Came Home provides a new look at the relationship between the Ottoman home front and the state's war-making capacity. Its early chapters argue that the Unionist government sought to totalize state control over civilian spaces, building on the twin issues of mobilization and provisioning that predominate in Ottomanist historiography. From there, the author pursues significant ways that Ottoman subjects limited, subverted, and resisted state power at the local level. As a result, this work is as focused on resistance to total war as it is on state ideologies, giving it an excellent social historical quality in addition to needed exploration of the war as mass trauma. Akın works in Turkish archives as well as published serials and unpublished manuscripts to foreground the experience of civilians.

When the War Came Home comprises an introduction, six thematic chapters, and a brief conclusion. The book's introduction orients readers in the war's major timeline and prompts us to reflect on the "totality of warfare" not as a sudden event, but as a mounting force that informed the state's mobilization policies through the entire Second Constitutional Period (pp. 4–5). Akın lays out four interrelated proxies for assessing total war on the Ottoman home front: the empire's infrastructural deficiencies, its lack of access to global resources, the disastrous conflicts it endured before 1914, and the CUP's "perception of the war as an opportunity to redesign the empire demographically" (p. 5). His goal is to demonstrate how each factor influenced the others, resulting [End Page 264] not only in the empire's military defeat but utter economic devastation, social disintegration, and ethnic cleansing.

Chapter 1, "From the Balkan Wars to the Great War," situates the Unionist entry into the First World War as coming on the heels of previous conflicts that has already stretched the empire's military reserves and human capital to the brink. In addition to the cession of most of the empire's European territories, the Balkan Wars in particular shaped the state's emerging impulse toward mobilization and the home front's militarization: Istanbul's approaches to conscription, requisitioning, and repression of dissent after 1914 were mostly intensifications of policies initiated during the Balkan Wars, even if notable Arab and Armenian reform movements persisted for a time. Chapter 2, "From the Fields to the Ranks," examines mobilization, dealing with the unprecedented conscription order which drew hundreds of thousands into military service as well as the Unionists' bending of the economy towards provisioning. The author explores the state's attempt to control the civilian mindset, which he calls the "mobilization of the imagination" (p. 53). Despite the clear continuities which existed between this mobilization and previous ones, the...

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