McMeekin has argued elsewhere that World War One could rightly be thought of as the War of the Ottoman Succession, a war that lasted from 1909 to 1923. You could even argue, as McMeekin does in his concluding chapter on the pros and cons of Ottoman administration and what happened when it ended, that that war is still going on in the Middle East.

Of all the nations that inherited the remains of the Ottoman Empire, it was Turkey, in the heartland of the empire, that has had the most stable borders since 1923.

Edward Gibbon famously noted that we shouldn’t wonder that the Roman Empire it fell but that it lasted as long as it did. The same could be said of the Ottoman Empire. Some have put the date the irresistible rot set in as far back as 1529 when the empire failed to take Vienna. The famous remark about the empire being a “sick man” was uttered by Tsar Alexander Nicholas I to a British ambassador in 1853.

But the sick man’s greatest defense was, paradoxically, the number of his enemies. They wanted Ottoman lands and to deny them to other great powers. The two most important of those powers were Russia and England.

McMeekin’s 593-page history (with additional notes, bibliography, photos, and several very useful maps) shows how that theme played out again and again from the Turco-Russian War of 1877-1878 to Italy’s invasion of Tripoli in 1911 (a forgotten war that saw the first use of many military technologies) to Soviet Russia arming the Ottoman Empire against a Greek invasion in 1921, an invasion supported by Britain.
This history covers both combat on the battlefield (one source is, surprisingly, a Venezuelan mercenary with the Ottomans) and political intrigues. McMeekin covers the grand sweep of things with the occasional illuminating detail about personalities and small incidents. He also covers relevant events outside the empire like the intrigues of the British cabinet and Russian revolutionaries. And, of course, the turmoil of Ottoman politics – the coups, countercoups, and counter-counter coups between 1908 and 1909 – are covered.

McMeekin mentions several seldom-discussed events.

How the events of November and December 1912, specifically Serbia absorbing Albania, almost lead to the Great War nearly two years earlier.

On the question of the Armenian Genocide, goes into some of the controversies of whether it was genocide and also the motives and procedures of the war crime trails the Ottoman government held. McMeekin opts for a number between 650,000 and 700,000 for Armenian deportees dying. The number of a million Armenian dead seems unrealistic.

McMeekin goes into details as to why the Armenian National Committee’s proposal for British forces and the Armenian Legion to land in Alexandretta in July 1915 was rejected even though it was a sound strategy and would have used half the troops sent to reinforce failure at Gallipoli the next month.

Before the end of World War One, allies Germany and the Ottomans were shooting at each other because of increasing resentment of the German infidels by the Muslim population and because of the desire of both to procure the oil fields around Baku.

McMeekin particularly takes apart the myth of Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence’s major skill was self-promotion and bureaucratic in-fighting. His missions rarely achieved their objective. He lied spectacularly about Arab contributions in fighting the Ottomans, especially in the claims he made about Feisal and his Arabs taking Damascus. They, in fact, showed up two days after the British had already taken the city. But the British government was happy to go along with the story to cut France out of lands in Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula granted to them in the famous Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916.

A major theme of McMeekin’s is, in fact, refuting the idea that the treaty created the modern Middle East. The agreements in Sykes-Picot didn’t even survive World War One. It was the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 that established the political contours of the modern Middle East.

The British cut the French out of negotiating an armistice with the Ottomans. The skillful British negotiators completely dominated the amateurish Ottoman delegates. The armistice of Mudros was signed on October 30, 1918. It amounted to a dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire which was to become a mere “rump state” in Anatolia.

But Mustafa Kemal was already taking steps to resist and had military supplies moved before he was recalled to Istanbul in November 1918.

In the negotiations at Versailles, there was support among victors and vanquished for American mandates over an Armenian homeland as well as Syria and Palestine. Wide support, that is, except among the American public and congress which, thankfully, wanted nothing to do with it.

In June 1919, the National Pact was formed by Kemal and others. It called for an army to resist the occupation by French and Greek forces, to stop demobilization of the Ottoman Army, and proclaimed that parts of the Empire with Turkish majorities were “indivisible”. The Arabs, though, could go their own way.

The Sevres Treaty coming out of Versailles in May 1920 enraged the Ottomans. Back were the “Capitulations” to foreign governments which they had finally gotten rid of during the war. They granted foreign powers control over Ottoman tax collecting and expenditures. Kemal responded by forming a new Grand National Assembly with Extraordinary Powers. On April 13, 1920, now celebrated in Turkey as National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, the capital was moved to Ankara. On March 16, 1921, Soviet Russia and “Kemalist Turkey” signed a treaty which agreed land that Turkey had taken back from the Russian Empire would remain Turkish.

The Turks lost every battle against the invading Greeks – until the last one, the historic Battle of Sakarya which occurred between August 23, 1921 and September 12, 1921. McMeekin calls it the “last real battle of the First World War”
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The thoroughly demoralized Greeks – now also dogged by European hostility regarding the many atrocities they had committed – retreated to the coast. There the great disaster of the burning of Smyrna occurred on September 15, 1922.

On November 1, 1922, the Ottoman Empire was done. The sultanate was abolished. (The caliphate would last until March 1924.)

The latter days of the Ottoman Empire are a remarkable story of constant impending disaster, diplomatic intrigue, sudden reversals of fortune, atrocities and bloodshed, and, ultimately, the story of Turkish resilience which carved, from seeming defeat, its own homeland.

Definitely recommended for all those with an interest in World War One or the Ottomans. ( )

Vel skrifuð og rannsökuð saga um lok veldis Ottomana í Fyrri heimsstyrjöld. McMeekin rekur aðdragandann að stríðinu m.t.t. innri ólgu í ríkinu og hvernig Bretar, Frakkar og Rússar hröktu Ottomana til stuðnings við Þjóðverja því ríkin ásældust lönd og áhrif við Svartahaf og botn Miðjarðarhafsins. McMeekin rústar líka mörgum flökkusögum sem hafa farið á kreik svo sem um áhrif Arabíu Lawrence, bresks hermanns sem talinn var hafa sameinað arabíska þjóðflokka gegn Ottomönum. Fínasta saga og ágæt aflestrar. ( )

short introduction to the fall of ottomans and raise of Turkey ( )

Written in an easy to digest and fun matter, I found this history book one of those that is hard to put down and full of information that you would often never hear about (Fringe History). Great book for the topic of the Ottoman empire in its late stages. ( )

Czar Nicolas I of Russia is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Sick Man of Europe" to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 20th century, there could be little doubt that the disparaging sobriquet applied in spades. The Ottoman Empire was soundly defeated in two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 by the comparatively pipsqueak countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia. One result of the wars was that the Empire lost all of its European territories to the west of the River Maritsa, which now forms the western boundary of modern Turkey. Then, when World War I broke out, the Ottomans made the disastrous decision to side with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente, ending up on the losing side of that cataclysm.

A popular theory is that the carving up of the Ottoman lands after the war, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, is the source of many of the problems of the current Middle East. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin concedes that it is not wrong to look to the aftermath of the war for the roots of many of today’s Middle Eastern problems, but the “real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” For example, the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement was sponsored primarily by Russia, whose foreign secretary, Alexander Samsonov, was the principal architect of the agreement. McMeekin’s retelling of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and its recrudescence as modern Turkey is a fascinating and complicated narrative.

Among the interesting facts McMeekin points out is that according to an 1893 census only 72% of the Ottoman citizens were Muslim, and that in the middle of the 19th century the majority of the population of Constantinople may have been Christian. The Balkan Wars started a trend, exacerbated by World War I, toward ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of Christians leaving the Empire and similar numbers of Muslims moving from territory lost by the Empire to areas it still controlled.

We in the West tend to think of World War I as a static slugfest conducted in the trenches of northern France. But the war in the East, particularly as it applied to the Ottoman Empire, was a much more mobile affair. In fact, the Ottomans ended up fighting the war on six different fronts, as the Entente Powers invaded them from many different angles.

At the outbreak of WWI, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany out of fear of Russia, which had coveted control over the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas for centuries. In 1914 the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia and met with initial success. However, Russia feared its early success was quite precarious, and so it inveigled its ally, Britain, to launch a diversionary assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. The “diversion” became one of the most deadly killing grounds of the war, as the British poured hundreds of thousands of men into the battle in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. The author credits Russian prodding more than Winston Churchill’s stubbornness for the extent of the British commitment. The Ottomans, led by Mustapha Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey”), prevailed in this hecatomb, showing that there was still plenty of fight left in the “Sick Man.”

The Ottomans also soundly defeated the British in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in late 1915, but they were less successful against the Russians, who invaded across the Caucasus and held much of eastern Anatolia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 caused them to withdraw voluntarily. The British ultimately prevailed against the Ottomans in 1918 by invading from Egypt through Palestine, with a little help from the Arabs of Arabia.

The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war in Europe in 1919, did not end the war for the Ottomans. The victorious Allies were ready to carve up much of the Empire for themselves. The Ottoman armies were to disband; England was to keep Egypt and to get Palestine and Mesopotamia; France was to get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of modern Turkey; and Greece was to get a large swath of western Turkey. All might have gone according to that plan, but Mustapha Kemal (Attaturk) was still in charge of a small but effective fighting force in central Anatolia. Attaturk husbanded his forces and fought only when he had an advantage. In a war that lasted until 1923, he was able to expel the Greeks from Anatolia and to establish the boundaries of modern Turkey.

McMeekin deftly handles this complexity with a lucid pen. His descriptions of the various military campaigns are riveting. This is not to say that he shortchanges the political machinations taking place. He gives more than adequate coverage to the “Young Turks,” a triumvirate that ruled the Empire from 1909 until they eventually brought it to its ruin in 1919. He also covers the Armenian massacres as objectively as possible, given the enormity of the events described.

Evaluation: This is a very satisfying book and an excellent addition to the enormous corpus of World War I literature. The book includes good maps and photos.

(JAB) ( )