The Ottoman Empire, ruler of most of the Middle East since the Ottoman defeat of the Egyptian Mameluke regime in 1517 CE, disappeared at the end of the First World War, the Empire's former Arab provinces coming under European colonial rule and its last sultan, now a private Turkish gentleman, being quietly hustled out of the former imperial palace in Istanbul. Its allies, the Central Powers of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, suffered similar indignities. Austro-Hungary, already a great power only in name, disappeared altogether from the map, and the German Empire became a much-chastened parliamentary republic. The way all this happened makes for a marvelous story and one that has often been retold. During last year's centenary of the outbreak of the First World War publishers across the continent fell over themselves to produce new histories of the War for a public still fascinated by how this catastrophic conflagration came about and how it shaped later history. But little attention was paid to the non-European theatres of operations. The Oxford historian Eugene Rogan has now stepped in to fill this gap with his The Fall of the Ottomans, a comprehensive account, aimed at the general reader, of the First World War in the Middle East. “It is time to restore the Ottoman front to its rightful place in the history of both the Great War and the modern Middle East,” Rogan writes in his introduction. “For, more than any other event, the Ottoman entry into the War turned Europe's conflict into a world war,” also transforming the Middle East region. Like in Europe where the Central Powers found themselves fighting on multiple fronts against different adversaries, the Ottoman Empire also fought in different regions. In eastern Anatolia the adversary was Russia, traditionally its greatest threat and having the most to gain from its dissolution. In the Levant the main adversary was Britain, which led a campaign to detach the Empire's remaining Arab provinces. Britain was also the Ottoman Empire's most important adversary in the Gulf as it was when it attacked the Empire's Black Sea heartlands at Gallipoli in 1915. Some of this history is well-known, some much less so, and Rogan's book has the great value of bringing it all together. In the Empire's western Arab provinces the British used their position in Egypt to attack the Ottomans in the Levant having beaten off an earlier Ottoman attack on the Suez Canal. Support was given to Arab nationalist forces operating at first in the Arabian Peninsula, and British agents, among them T.E. Lawrence, the “Lawrence of Arabia” of the famous film, travelled the region with money and material in the hope of rallying Arab leaders. Rogan includes some vivid pages on the impact of these events on life in Egypt. The country was crucial to the British war effort in the Middle East, and troops poured into Cairo. The Egyptian khedive, nominally still owing his position to the Ottoman sultan, was removed and the country declared an independent state under British protection. Australian and New Zealand troops were billeted at the Mena House Hotel on the Pyramids Road and in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. British officers filled hotels around Ezbekiyya, and drunken soldiers rioted in central Cairo. In the Gulf, Britain moved even before the Ottoman declaration of war to secure its interests in Mesopotamia. Agreements had been made in previous years with local ruling families to create a chain of British protected mini-states along the Gulf's western coast, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had set up operations in Abadan. “Between oil, trade, and a century-old position of supremacy in the Persian Gulf, it was natural that Britain would choose Mesopotamia as its prize in any post-war partition of the Ottoman Empire,” Rogan comments. “Even before opening negotiations with Russia and France, the British had already sent an expeditionary force to secure its claim to Basra,” the Ottoman province at the head of the Gulf and the gateway to Mesopotamia. The British campaign in Mesopotamia was improvised, perhaps a feature of the larger conflict in the region. Having driven the Ottoman forces out of Basra, “the British had effectively achieved their objectives in Mesopotamia,” Rogan writes. While the local resident, Sir Percy Cox, argued for taking control of the rest of the region, he was at first overruled by London. There seems to have been no plan, at this stage, for the creation of a new British empire in the Arab world on the ruins of the former Ottoman Empire. This only took shape later under the pressure of events as Britain, France, and at first Russia began to negotiate on the post-war shape of the region. The negotiations began in 1915, ending in the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the previously Ottoman territories, Britain taking what are now Iraq, Jordan and Palestine, and France taking Lebanon and Syria. The pressure behind them came from what was felt to be the certainty of Ottoman defeat and thus the need to jockey for position in the post-war order, even though the outcome of the larger conflict would be decided in the fight against the Central Powers in Europe. Another agreement entered into during these years and with as many consequences was the Balfour Declaration in 1917, named after the British foreign secretary at the time, which committed the British to “the establishment in Palestine,” until then part of the Ottoman Empire, “of a national home for the Jewish people.” Rogan calls this “the latest in a string of wartime partition plans… [including] the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence of 1915 and 1916 [between Britain and Arab nationalist leader Sharif Husayn], and the Sykes-Picot Agreement.” The only difference was that whereas earlier plans had been kept secret in order to avoid awakening suspicions about British and French objectives, this one was published to court Zionist support for Britain. Rogan includes much useful material in his book on the Russian campaigns in eastern Anatolia and domestic developments within the Ottoman Empire itself, among them the Armenian Genocide in 1915 in which an estimated one million Armenians died and the reprisals that took place in the Levant against Arab nationalist leaders. He makes efforts throughout to see things from the Ottoman point of view, this being a book about the Ottoman experience of the First World War and not primarily the military campaigns of the Europeans. The text is peppered with quotations from Arab and Turkish memoirs of the period, many of them from sources that are still untranslated. However, one wonders how far Rogan has succeeded in writing a history of the fall of the Ottomans that looks at the First World War from a regional, or non-European, perspective. European writing on the War is notoriously extensive, and Rogan has rightly used it to produce his Middle Eastern history, along with the archives of the British, former British Empire, and US government forces. But he has not used non-European writing to anything like the same degree, meaning that he is often reduced to retelling the story of Middle Eastern military operations in the First World War from western European and overwhelmingly British sources. In the preface to his book, Rogan says that “it is actually quite difficult to approach the Ottoman front from the Turkish side of the trenches” since “only a fraction of published primary sources are available in translation” and Ottoman archival materials, kept at the Military and Strategic Studies Archive in Ankara, are largely closed to western researchers. Whereas it is not so difficult for a British historian to reconstruct the thinking behind British military campaigns in the First World War, the relevant archives having long been open to researchers and many of the protagonists having even published (self-serving) memoirs, this is not the case when seeking to reconstruct the thinking behind Ottoman campaigns. These have to be described from without, there being little material available to help the historian understand how the situation appeared through Ottoman eyes. Some readers may stumble in reading Rogan's account as a result. It would be fascinating to understand the thinking behind the Ottoman moves towards war in more detail, for example, these being the Empire's suicide note. In August 1914, the Ottoman government was negotiating a possible alliance with Russia, then at war with the Central Powers, at a time when it was also bound by an alliance with the Germans. Earlier, it had tried to make an alliance with France and Britain. Rogan says that the Ottoman authorities were desperate to stay out of the European war, even as the Germans were pressuring them to declare unequivocally for one side or the other. It was only in late October when Germany finally came through with substantial financial aid that the Ottoman government made the fateful decision to enter the War on the side of the Central Powers. Why was Germany so keen on having the Ottoman Empire as an ally? The proposal had apparently first been made as part of a panicked scramble in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of the European war at the beginning of August, but Rogan reports that both the German ambassador in Istanbul and the head of the German military mission believed the Empire would be “worthless as an ally… [and] a burden to her associates without being able to offer them the slightest advantage.” He says the decision was only made to draw the Ottomans in by the German emperor himself at the end of July, jealous of the prospect of the Middle East with its Arab provinces going over to the other side. What would have happened had the Ottomans resisted German pressures, succeeded in making an alliance with Russia, or even successfully stayed out of the War or entered it later on the other side? It would be fascinating to know more about how the situation appeared to the Ottoman government as its leaders prepared to throw the dice for the last time. We, unlike them, know what happened. What we don't know is why they thought the Ottoman Empire could possibly afford to fight a major war on multiple fronts against three European great powers with only the Central Powers as allies. Though the “Ottoman entry into the War turned Europe's conflict into a world war,” as Rogan writes, one can't help feeling that the Ottomans would have been much better off staying out.
