I was drawn into this book after reading the delightful prologue online, which describes the accession of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Based on that, I hoped for and expected a cultural, social, and political history of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 1 promises that the book will dispel myths about the partition of the Middle East, like the importance of Sykes-Picot (or as it should be considered, Sykes-Picot-Sazonov). Anyway I was very excited about this book when I first opened it.

However, it turned out to be mostly a military history of the last few decades of the Ottoman Empire, with a bit of political history thrown in. Now to be fair the Ottoman Empire was almost continuously at war from 1912 until 1922, so any discussion of this period will include military history. This was itself a fact I found quite shocking—we in the West are used to hearing about the enormous social upheavals of WWI in Western Europe, but imagine that the war lasted twice as long in the Ottoman Empire. That helps us imagine the scale of change and destabilization in the empire in this period. Note also that the Ottoman Empire lost about 20% of its population during this period, compared to France which lost about 3.5%

Unfortunately these social upheavals are mostly left to the realm of imagination in this book. The military history was far more detailed than I would've preferred, and it came at the expense of all the other stuff I really wanted to hear about. I got no clear sense of the social and cultural context for the collapse. But I did get a ton of information about the military personalities involved, like Enver Pasha, Mustafa Kemal, Winston Churchill, amongst others. It was entertaining, but I'm just not that interested in military history, and that's not why I picked up the book. There was also very little about the actual partition of the Middle East, or the mandate system. In fact the Arab world was essentially ignored except to describe the occasional military operation there. There's clearly a heavy reliance on British and German military archives to help tell this story; one gets the sense that this story is very much being told from that point of view.

In the end, it's a fairly well-researched and well-written book by a military historian, though not an Ottoman historian or historian of the Middle East. Would recommend it if you know that going in.

avrei dato 4 se non 5 stelline per la completezza e l'attualità, ma nel mio personalissimo giudizio ne perde un paio a causa della parte preponderante lasciata agli aspetti squisitamente di storia militare.

I really enjoyed this historical account of the end of the Ottoman Empire. It paints a clear picture of a very complicated time period and explains well the far reaching implications of the Ottoman Endgame.

The book gives a good overall history of the Balkan Wars and WW1 and the transition thereafter to Kemal's government of the modern Turkish borders we know. How Sean describes movements and campaigns in these wars is not too heavy or long-winded, and he does a good job of keeping things engaging while moving time forward.

I do wish we heard a little more about reforms made by Kemal's government. It's a little glossed over the transition from a sultanate to a parliamentary republic, it kind of just happens, and I think hearing about how the government did things more broadly post treaty of Lausanne would've been interesting, even if it was just a brief summary. It would give the reader a little more context and could give an idea of where the Turkish government was heading post 1923.

If you're looking for a book to give some detailed context to events in the Middle East in general in our modern world, especially Israel-Palestine, this is not the book. The book tends to focus more on the geopolitical goings-on during the time period from a Turkish and European great-power perspective as it relates to the Ottoman Empire and its survival in WW1 and post-WW1. The Balfour declaration, Sykes-Picot, and McMahon correspondence are mentioned but are basically just footnotes with little context given to the problems they caused, besides a slight summary in the epilogue (for Sykes). I don't think this is necessarily a huge problem since the book is Ottoman/Turkey-based but just a heads up.

What's a girl like you doing in a place like this ? At first, the fall of the Ottomans seemed an odd subject for the man who gave us [b:The Russian Origins of the First World War|11819948|The Russian Origins of the First World War|Sean McMeekin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328044838s/11819948.jpg|16774331] but hereditary enemies entwine their histories and the series of Russo-Turkish wars spanning four centuries tied the fates of the Balkan and the Caucasus to those of the two powers.

The rise of the Young Turks, so often glossed over as a sudden burst of modernism, is set within a context of reforms under the Ottoman sultans, as slow and partial as they may have been. The Great War, in turn, is set firmly within the context of the Tripolitanian and Balkan wars. The overall effect is an adjustment of the 'Sick Man of Europe' view: he made several miraculous recoveries in a decade of warfare.

The 14-18 story as told here has its strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, the Caucasian front gets an amount of attention in proportion to the importance Enver Pasha attached to it, not seldom to the detriment of other theaters. Lawrence of Arabia gets taken down from his mythological pedestal to a level even with the second-rate impact of the Arab revolt on the Ottoman war. On the other hand, there is (still) too much Gallipoli here and events in Mesopotamia unfold a bit too rapid after the infamous siege of Kut.

The post-war chaos takes up 100 pages or a good 20% of the book. It is not enough to do the shifting frontiers justice and the diplomatic games surrounding the treaties of Sèvres and Lausanne aren't spelled out coherently, but it is not 'stumbling through', either. The occupation of Constantinopel by British, French and Italian forces was news to me. The Allied intervention carries (for good reasons) similarities with their undrwhelmed support of the Whites in the Russian civil wars. The main event in McMeekin's version is the Greek invasion and its mutual atrocities, accumulating in the fire of Smyrna after the lines in front of Ankara almost broke.

1911-1923 is a lot of Turkey to fit within 500 pages, but McMeekin is a consummate storyteller.
The following breathless excerpt (p.245) looks back upon 1915:

"And so the British, instead of landing several divisions in scarcely defended Alexandretta to cleave the Ottoman Empire in two, [to] aid their Russian allies [who were] fighting the Ottoman Third Army at Manzikert and [to] save thousands of Armenian refugees, chose to reinforce failure by landing yet another 25.000 troops on Gallipoli, to face the deadly fire of forces entrenched on high ground. After beginning so well at Basra and Suez, 1915 had thoroughly turned sour for Britain in the Ottoman theatre. It was about to get worse."

McMeekin's use of Ottoman and Russian archival materials has greatly enriched historical understanding of the last quarter of the 19th century and its lead-up to WWI. In this installment, he focuses on Turkey, from the 1908 Young Turks to the devastating forced movements of peoples in the aftermath of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the Treaty of Sevres. It's interesting to see the Arab Revolt and Lawrence put into less legendary perspective, and he looks at the Armenian Genocide head on, although in the context of the war and other Turkish-driven decisions. This ably sets the stage for the rash of new country creation in the Middle East, and the place Turkey see for itself as the inheritor of Ottoman authority in the region.