Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs ISSN: 1360-2004 (Print) 1469-9591 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjmm20 The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 Yücel Güçlü To cite this article: Yücel Güçlü (2015) The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 35:4, 580-588, DOI: 10.1080/13602004.2015.1112119 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2015.1112119 Published online: 16 Dec 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 8 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjmm20 Download by: [Republic of Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs], [Yücel Güçlü] Date: 21 December 2015, At: 00:39 Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 2015 Vol. 35, No. 4, 580–588 Review Essay The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 EUGENE ROGAN, 2015 London: Allen Lane xxvi+485 pp., US$22.64 (pb), 6 maps, 35 illustrations, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-1- 846-14438-7 Some 97 years later, the First World War (or the Great War, as it was known in contemporary parlance) continues to haunt the British imagination. Memories of it are, in effect, still living and breathing. The War is not a closed chapter but a living past. The history of the First World War is emotionally charged, full of political and moral meaning, and more than ever reproduced in popular stories and iconic images. Any persons interested in this war can be forgiven if they are bewildered by the conflict’s huge bibliography, which has increased enormously since the 1960s, when the fiftieth anniversaries resurrected popular and academic attention. Keeping up with the literature is a hard task indeed, particularly when the spectrum of available material is so broad. Enter “First World War” on the London Library’s computer search function and 890 titles come up. The Imperial War Museum has thousands of Great War diaries, letters, interviews, and memoirs, as well as its library. There are also Great War archives at Leeds University, Birmingham University, and King’s College, London. The recent rush of British publications on the Great War shows no sign of abating. It has been fueled by the declassification programs of several Western countries and access to the records of Eastern European intelligence agencies after the political upheavals of 1989–1991. A century after the First World War, scholarly interest in its history appears to be as vigorous as ever. This centenary, if anything, is marked by increased attention and publication of a spate of new books. Despite this fact, both professional military historians and general readers are still poorly informed on the war as waged in the Ottoman Levant. Eugene Rogan, lecturer in the History of the Modern Middle East at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Antony’s College, attempted to fill this void by his book, The Fall of the Ottomans. He is the author of The Arabs: A History and Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921. The major theme developed throughout The Fall of the Ottomans is that mentioned in the blurb of the dust jacket: Downloaded by [Republic of Turkey Ministry Foreign Affairs], [Yücel Güçlü] at 00:39 21 December 2015 Despite fighting back with great skill and determination against the Allied onslaught, and humiliating the British both at Gallipoli and in Kut al-Amara, the Ottomans were ultimately defeated, clearing the way for the making of a new Middle East that has endured to the present—with consequences that still dominate our lives. Review Essay 581 Organized both chronologically and thematically, the narrative covers most relevant features of Ottoman history from 1908 to 1918. The titles of the 13 closely integrated chapters of the book indicate the breadth of its content: “A Revolution and Three Wars, 1908–1913”, “The Peace Before the Great War”, “A Global Call to Arms”, “Opening Salvos: Basra, Aden, Egypt, and the Eastern Mediterranean”, “Launching Jihad: Ottoman Campaigns in the Caucasus and the Sinai”, “The Assault of the Darda- nelles”, “The Annihilation of the Armenians”, “The Ottoman Triumph at Gallipoli”, “The Invasion of Mesopotamia”, “The Siege of Kut”, “The Arab Revolt”, “Losing Ground: The Fall of Baghdad, the Sinai, and Jerusalem”, “From Armistice to Armis- tice”. Relying mainly on memoirs, diaries, letters, and an array of secondary literature, Rogan has written with clarity a nuanced, informative history on the participation of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War and its immediate aftermath. He chronicles many details at length, not available in American military historian Edward Erickson’s following three books: Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War, Ottoman Army Effectiveness in World War I: A Comparative Study and Gallipoli: The Ottoman Campaign, though Erickson’s works are better analytically. As an Oxford historian, Rogan considers in length the decisions and activities by the main British politicians, government officials, and military commanders during the First World War. He provides extensive coverage of Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George (both prime ministers); Sir Edward Grey (foreign secretary); Field Marshall Horatio Herbert Kitchener (secretary of state for war); Sir Winston Spencer Churchill (first lord of the Admiralty, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and secretary of state for the colonies); Sir Percy Cox (British Resident in the Gulf); Sir Mark Sykes (Lord Kitchener’s Middle East advisor and co-author of the Sykes-Picot Agreement); General Sir Edmund Allenby (commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force); General Sir William Robertson (chief of the Imperial General Staff); Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Murray (military commander in Egypt); Major General Charles Townshend (commander in Kut al-Amara); Major General Sir Stanley Maude (com- mander to the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force); Admiral Sir Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe (commander of the British Mediterranean squadron) and Admiral Sackville Carden (naval commander in the eastern Mediterranean). Rogan is at his best when quoting the letters of British and Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) soldiers fighting Turks at the Dardanelles in 1915. The account suffers from a number of important deficiences, however. Rogan, who, while studying relevant documents in Australian, New Zealand and the United States archives concerning the Dardanelles, Egyptian, and Caucasian fronts, entirely ignores the voluminous documents found in the Prime Minister’s Office Ottoman Archive (BOA) in Istanbul̇ and the Turkish General Staff Directorate of Military History and Strategic Studies Archive (ATASE) in Ankara. The author contents himself with accept- ing what Western politicians and military commanders assumed Ottoman attitudes, pos- itions, and policies to have been. Only by using archival material from Turkey can one Downloaded by [Republic of Turkey Ministry Foreign Affairs], [Yücel Güçlü] at 00:39 21 December 2015 hope to counteract this inevitable bias. Anyone interested in the Ottoman Empire’s invol- vement in the First World War should refer to the BOA and to the ATASE. Authentic sources are essential to a full understanding of Ottoman and Turkish history, and the role of the Ottomans and Turks in world affairs. The history of the Ottoman Empire should not be written without Ottoman sources. It is difficult to imagine how a study that deals with the effects of governmental decisions on the society can avoid reference to records or publications of the government in question. When asked, during an 582 Review Essay interview with Nancy Gallagher conducted in 1988, for his advice to students considering a specialization in Middle East history, Professor Albert Hourani recommended: At least some of them should learn Ottoman Turkish well and learn also how to use Ottoman documents, since the exploitation of Ottoman archives, located in Istanbul and in smaller cities and towns, is perhaps the most important task of the next generation.1 It should be recalled that Paul Wittek and Bernard Lewis of the University of London, Franz Babinger of the University of Munich, Jean Deny of the University of Paris, and Walter Livingston Wright and his successor at Princeton, Lewis Thomas, had earlier led the way in insisting that students learn Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish, and provided the means for this to be accomplished.2 Both the BOA and the ATASE are open to all scholars. There are at least 150 million documents and 366,000 registers of inestimable value that span every period and region of the Ottoman Empire in the stacks and vaults of the BOA. They fill more than 75 kilo- meters of shelves. The BOA is thronged with researchers. Usually several hundred scho- lars, young and old, Turkish and foreign (including scholars from Armenia and Greece) are studying there at all times. On 2 June 2013 the BOA moved to its new facilities in the Kag˘ıthane area of Istanbul,̇ providing visitors a much larger public research room with more researcher stations that accommodate laptops, scanners, and other equipment. No additional fees beyond those for copying are required, even for publication rights, because all government documents are considered legally in the public domain and hence freely accessible by all with copyright restrictions. There are no charges for readers’ passes in archives in Turkey. The experiences of all scholars may serve as instruc- tive examples of benefits that researchers receive when gaining access to the BOA. It is clear that research opportunities in the BOA are as good and varied as those in most archives around the world. The ATASE records attract a great many researchers because its vast assortment of files reveals information never before available about one of the greatest defining moments in modern history, the First World War.