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A review by atarabishy
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908 - 1923 by Sean McMeekin
3.0
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.
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.