The Ottoman Empire collapse at the end of the First World War is often treated as a foregone conclusion. It was only a matter of time the story goes, before the so-called ‘sick man’ of Europe succumbed to its ailments– incompetent management, nationalism, ethnic and religious conflict.
Mustafa Aksakal overturns this conventional narrative in this book. Aksakal is an associate professor of History at Georgetown University where he teaches courses in Ottoman and modern Turkish history He holds fellowships from Princeton and the American Council of Learned Societies.
He describes how European Imperial ambitions and Ottoman commitment to saving its empire at any cost– including the destruction of the Armenian community with deaths of more than a million Ottoman troops and other civilians– led to the empire’s violent partition and created politically unstable Middle East.
THE WAR THAT MADE THE MIDDLE EAST shows that until 1914, the Ottoman Empire was a viable multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, and the relations between Arabs, Jews, Muslims and Christians of the empire were relatively stable. When the war broke out the Ottoman government sought an alliance with the Entente but was rejected because of British and French had designs on the Eastern Mediterranean.
After the Ottomans entered the fight on the side of Germany and were defeated, Britain and France seized Ottoman lands and a new national elites in former Ottoman territories claimed their own states. The region was renamed “The Middle East”, erasing a robust and modernising 600-year-old empire. Mustafa Aksakal wanted to capture many of the complexities of the Ottoman First World War and the empire’s dissolution in 1922. He stresses that the national identities that we associated with the Middle East today came into being only in the war’s aftermath. With the loss of financial control came the incremental erosion of the empire’s political independence and Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire became British or French ruled colonies under the designation of “mandates”. It also marked the birth of statelessness of the Palestinian and Kurdish people.
The state within the Ottoman political competition for resources and a deadly confrontation with groups and populations whose loyalties is questioned–Armenians, Assyrian, Greek Orthodox Christians, Muslim Arabs and Kurds. In a sense, the Ottoman Empire was at war against the world and against itself. Historians are usually loathe to ask “What If?” but in the book, the author gets close. The Ottoman state took the war to its own communities before taking it to the Great Powers. It was this dynamic including the Unionist decision- making that helped implode the Empire. One has to remember that the Ottoman Empire was an empire: self determination wasn’t part of their vocabulary. Its the economic upheaval that Aksakal explores.
When war broke out, the government in Istanbul, its military already weakened by losses in the Balkan Wars, issued conscription orders that removed hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers from the fields, requisitioning the animals, as well, reducing the acreage under cultivation. Couple this with a region-wide plague of locusts and a blockade of shipping across the Mediterranean, this meant starvation across the empire. But rather than reduce military operations which would include the Armenian genocide on the assumption that the Armenians would be rebellious or disloyal. In the end the Ottoman Empire collapsed with Kemal Atarurk’s Republican Peoples Party claiming sovereignty over the Turkish remnant alone and the new states forming across the Middle East. The “what if” continues engaging in the counter-factual for a moment, if there had been no series of wars from 1911 to 1922, or no World War in 1914, it is possible that the empire might have overcome its not insignificant internal problems and survivedp further into the 20th century
The parliament that opened in late 1908 might have over the long term proved to be an engine for reform, also perhaps providing institutional framework for overcoming ethnic and religious differences. Perhaps the empire wasn’t doomed in 1914. More of an upheaval was the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people as an exchange of Muslim population residing in Greece with Christian population residing in Anatolia. This was done in the name of creating homogeneous nation-states in Greece and Turkey, respectfully.
