This is narrative history at its very best: disciplined, well-paced, judicious and spiked with detail, character and incident. A chronological tale of the First World War might be wearyingly familiar, but by telling it from the perspective of the Ottoman Empire, Eugene Rogan grabs the reader’s attention—as if we are hearing the Iliad from the Trojan battlements. It is a complicated story, for the Ottoman Empire fought a war on four major fronts: against the Russians in eastern Anatolia, against the British-Indian army in Iraq, the British-Egyptian army in Palestine and the Allied landings at the Dardanelles, not to mention the Arab revolt, Yemen and Thrace.
It also tackles some pretty contentious issues head on (oil-fuelled imperialism, Islamic jihad, the founding of Israel, genocide, Kurdistan and British perfidy) but is magnificently free of partisan bias. Even if you have no desire to understand the foreign politics of modern Turkey, the sensibilities of the Shias of southern Iraq or why Kuwait was a role model, you should read this to understand how the killing beaches of Gallipoli link up with TE Lawrence, Lake Van and John Buchan’s Greenmantle.
You will also hear many a strange tale on the way: of French-Algerian conscripts being charmed in German prison camps to join the Turkish army, of heroic Ottoman volunteers being landed by submarine to fight alongside the desert tribes of Libya, of river boats storming up the Tigris and the fate of nations being decided by five rusty tubs holding their anchorage by night. And in the dark background is the tragic fate of the innocents: the half a million Syrians who died in the famine of 1916 and the 1.5m Armenians who were murdered as an act of state.
