Eugene Rogan's "The Fall of the Ottomans: A Comprehensive Look at the Great War in the Middle East"

S. Munir: This book was recommended to me by a friend who said it really helped him understand the historical background to a lot of today’s politics. He also said the writing was such that one just wanted to keep turning the pages to read on.
Having read this book, I agree with him on both points. I love reading and watching history related material. This is an exceptional book and I learnt so much on a topic I thought I already knew quite a lot about. This book has really changed a lot of my previous (incorrect) understandings of what caused World War 1 and the significance of the Eastern Front of the Great War.
I also learnt more about the Armenian genocide than I had ever known.
The book contains moving anecdotes of sparks of humane behaviour between soldiers fighting each other in trench warfare that is surprising to read and not the kind of stuff normally covered in standard histories.
The tempo of the book and stle of writing is like if a really exciting thriller. I kept wanting to just keep reading on and on.
Importantly, the book covers both perspectives of Allied Poerws and Central Powers. Unbiased account.
This book is clearly an example of history telling at...

United Kingdom on Aug 05, 2022

Debjit Sengupta: The Ottoman Empire was a multinational and pluralist empire spanning 6 centuries. Even at the onset of the First World War, the empire controlled around 2.4 million square km of area that includes modern day Turkey and most of the Middle East. The Islamic caliphate ruled empire was dominated by the Turks and also includes Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians and other ethnic minorities. During it’s prime , it surpassed even European power both in terms of military strength and wealth. Why and when the empire of such magnitude started to wane? What were the stimuli that caused its downfall? What were the flash-points? The lookout for these answers pulled me towards this book.

The 17-18th century is an era which coincided with technology and enlightenment advancement. The benefit was reaped by European power and they left Ottoman Empire far behind. In the last few centuries, Ottoman Empire had lost significant territories to others. They lost almost every war with their Eastern neighbour Russia and with its territories too. In the year 1911, they fail to prevent Italy from annexing Libya. In 1912, the Balkan League comprising of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria waged a...

India on Apr 17, 2017

A. Menon: The fall of the Ottomans - The great war in the Middle East presents an engaging history of the final years of the Ottoman Empire which was dismantled at the end of the first world war. The book gives a comprehensive overview of the political environment both prior to and during the war. It provides details on the major battles fought as well as an overview on the tragedy of the Armenian genocide that occurred. It is highly readable and the author has the readers attention throughout the entire book. The dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the forming of the modern Middle East is of fundamental historic importance and much of what decided that is contained in this book.

The Fall of the Ottomans begins while the empire is in terminal decline The weak Ottoman state had been in decline for a long time but the author begins with the domestically politically challenging period of 1908-13 while the Sultan had reclaimed authority due to a weak parliamentary government. The author introduces the political movement of the Young Turks who were focused on bringing back the parliamentary process to Turkey and create a stronger national voice for the people. The author details how the...

United States on Dec 26, 2015

Athan: There’s a ton of information and loads of opinion in this beautifully written book, but not terribly much cohesion when it comes to the telling of the story itself. Rather, what we have here is a collation of twelve very separate chapters about the six theaters of war that transformed the Great War into WWI: the Caucasian front, the European front (chiefly the Dardenelles), the North African front, the Arab Peninsula, Mesopotamia and what we call today the Middle East. You also get a chapter about the Armenian Genocide.

On the plus side, each chapter stands on its own and can be read separately. On the minus side, stuff gets repeated unnecessarily and you’re often left asking yourself questions along the lines of “this al Askari fellow who’s leading the Arabs against the Ottomans, is he the same guy who was fighting the British earlier in the book in North Africa?” A bit more of an effort could have gone into turning this book into a narrative.

No idea what some of the reviewers are talking about here, the angle is 110% British. It’s not a whitewash, it’s not an attempt to make the British look good, but it’s told by a Brit to other Brits and you’re...

United Kingdom on Sep 14, 2015

Anne Mills: This compelling history of the Ottoman Empire's involvement in World War One -- and of the peace that led to the Empire's collapse -- is important not just as history, but as a backdrop to current events. As history, it is a major achievement, opening a perspective on the war with which I at least was almost totally unfamiliar (barring references to the Treaty of Sevres and to Lawrence of Arabia).

Why has so little been written about the Ottoman involvement in World War One? Western European and American historians have focussed on the diplomatic lead-up to the war and on the war on the Western front, not surprisingly given the tendency to focus on one's own (or one's country's), point of view. Beyond that, there are vast troves of material on the War in English, French, and German, and a wide audience for World War One books in countries where those languages are spoken. Much less has been written from an Ottoman perspective. Much of the source material is in Turkish or Arabic, not part of most Western historians' toolkits. And from a current-day Turkish perspective, the First World War was a prologue to Turkey's definitive war -- the War of Independence from 1919 to 1923,...

United States on Jun 13, 2015

docread: Having enjoyed the classic account of David Fromkin " The peace to end all peace" which covered the events leading to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire I was a little disappointed by Rogan's book. It certainly gives a good account of the various military engagements and the " Armenian genocide" is well covered with the benefit of new documents coming to light.He is also good at engaging the voices of common diarists from both sides to enrich our historical perspective.But I felt he rushed a bit through the end namely the Syrian campaign and most importantly the aftermath of the war with the rise of the Kemalists trying to salvage the core of the empire, the abolition of the Caliphate , the military victories against the Greek invaders to consolidate the Turkish ethnic homogeneity with new frontiers and the sweeping republican constitutional reforms sounding the death knell of the Ottoman Empire.These were barely mentioned yet they shed more light on the demise of the Empire than the military defeats of WW1.

The author often skimmed over what drove the political decisions which were crucial to the unfolding of the future events in particular the contradictions and...

United Kingdom on May 16, 2015

Leopold: This is an utterly absorbing account of the defeat and eventual ruin of the old Ottoman Empire during and after the First World War. It is a factual history of the slow collapse of Ottoman power in the Middle East, encompassing the horrific genocide of the Armenians by an increasingly paranoid Ottoman Government and its evntual defeat and collapse at the hands of the British-led forces which included large numbers of Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops. After the early bloody disaster of Gallipoli and the defeats in Mesopotamia the British realised that to have any prospect of victory over the tough Turks, often commanded by experienced German officers, they would need to persuade the Hashemite Arabs to rise against the Turks.

Eugene Rogan sets out in shamefully clear detail the promises made by Britain to ensure the co-operation of the Arab leaders; they were effectively promised an independent Arab kingdom, a Syria stretching from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan, to include today's Syria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The `Hashemites kept their side of the bargain, spilling their blood in the Allied cause, only to be traduced by the duplicity of the British...

United Kingdom on Mar 18, 2015