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Eugene Rogan , The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York : Basic Books , 2015). Pp. 512. $32.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780465023073
State Building and Collapse
Largely a work of synthesis, Eugene Rogan's The Fall of the Ottomans offers an accessible and comprehensive account of the complex history of World War I in the Middle East. Given the range of topics one must cover in such a history, this is a major accomplishment, even if the book does not reveal significant new knowledge for specialists on the Ottoman experience of the war. In more than 400 pages of text divided into thirteen chapters, Rogan covers the period from the Young Turk revolution in 1908 to the postwar settlements and developments in the early 1920s.
His engaging narrative emphasizes the political and military aspects without ignoring the social and human face of the war. Rather than being a "side show," as some Europeans claimed it to be, the war waged in the Ottoman territories was much more. The Allied prediction of a speedy victory over the Ottomans did not materialize. Instead, long campaigns in Sinai, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria diverted many hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from the "primary theaters" of the western and eastern fronts, and lengthened the war (pp. 403-4). Rogan writes that it was really the Ottoman entry into the war that turned Europe's conflict into a world war; often the Middle Eastern battlefields were the most international of the whole war. French and British imperial, dominion, and colonial soldiers from around the world came to clash with the many ethnic groups represented in the Ottoman armies (p. xvii). In this context, in a chapter called "A Global Call to Arms," Rogan examines both the Allied recruitment of dominion and colonial troops and the German efforts to turn North African Muslim soldiers they had captured against their former comrades in arms. Placed in Halbmondlager (Crescent Moon Camp), a special camp outside of Berlin, they were given many...