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The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923
Audiobook19 hours

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923

Written by Sean McMeekin

Narrated by Richard Poe

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

An astonishing retelling of twentieth-century history from the Ottoman perspective, delivering profound new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East Between 1911 and 1922, a series of wars would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, in which the central conflict, of course, is World War I-a story we think we know well. As Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history of what he calls the "wars of the Ottoman succession," we know far less than we think. The Ottoman Endgame brings to light the entire strategic narrative that led to an unstable new order in postwar Middle East-much of which is still felt today. The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East draws from McMeekin's years of groundbreaking research in newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives. With great storytelling flair, McMeekin makes new the epic stories we know from the Ottoman front, from Gallipoli to the exploits of Lawrence in Arabia, and introduces a vast range of new stories to Western readers. His accounts of the lead-up to World War I and the Ottoman Empire's central role in the war itself offers an entirely new and deeper vision of the conflict. Harnessing not only Ottoman and Russian but also British, German, French, American, and Austro-Hungarian sources, the result is a truly pioneering work of scholarship that gives full justice to a multitiered war involving many belligerents. McMeekin also brilliantly reconceives our inherited Anglo-French understanding of the war's outcome and the collapse of the empire that followed. The book chronicles the emergence of modern Turkey and the carve-up of the rest of the Ottoman Empire as it has never been told before, offering a new perspective on such issues as the ethno-religious bloodletting and forced population transfers which attended the breakup of empire, the Balfour Declaration, the toppling of the caliphate, and the partition of Iraq and Syria-bringing the contemporary consequences into clear focus. Every so often, a work of history completely reshapes our understanding of a subject of enormous historical and contemporary importance. The Ottoman Endgame is such a book, an instantly definitive and thrilling example of narrative history as high art.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 13, 2015
ISBN9781490699318
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923
Author

Sean McMeekin

Sean McMeekin is Professor of History at Bard College, New York. For some years he taught at Bilkent University, Istanbul. His books include the highly successful The Berlin-Baghdad Express (Penguin), The Russian Origins of the First World War and July 1914.

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Rating: 4.517857142857143 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of McMeekin’s best monographs, an absolute must read/listen if you’d like to get into his other historical work centered around light revisionist diplomatic and military history of the early 20th Century. Here McMeekin is in ways more conventional than his later works, if only because he is the convention in interpreting the large trends created by the Ottoman military and political position in the Caucasus and Persian Azerbaijan in English. You will not find many other audiobooks that talk about these areas in this time period with a Ottoman/Russian perspective. High recommend.

    2 people found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An excellent all-round gloves-off account with several new takes using recent materials. For example: the Russians were involved in drawing up the Sykes-Picot map and document; Alexandretta (Iskenderun) offered a superior attack point instead of the Dardanelles; and Armenian and Greek atrocities fuelled Muslim revenge and genocide.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    McMeekin has argued elsewhere that World War One could rightly be thought of as the War of the Ottoman Succession, a war that lasted from 1909 to 1923. You could even argue, as McMeekin does in his concluding chapter on the pros and cons of Ottoman administration and what happened when it ended, that that war is still going on in the Middle East.Of all the nations that inherited the remains of the Ottoman Empire, it was Turkey, in the heartland of the empire, that has had the most stable borders since 1923.Edward Gibbon famously noted that we shouldn’t wonder that the Roman Empire it fell but that it lasted as long as it did. The same could be said of the Ottoman Empire. Some have put the date the irresistible rot set in as far back as 1529 when the empire failed to take Vienna. The famous remark about the empire being a “sick man” was uttered by Tsar Alexander Nicholas I to a British ambassador in 1853.But the sick man’s greatest defense was, paradoxically, the number of his enemies. They wanted Ottoman lands and to deny them to other great powers. The two most important of those powers were Russia and England.McMeekin’s 593-page history (with additional notes, bibliography, photos, and several very useful maps) shows how that theme played out again and again from the Turco-Russian War of 1877-1878 to Italy’s invasion of Tripoli in 1911 (a forgotten war that saw the first use of many military technologies) to Soviet Russia arming the Ottoman Empire against a Greek invasion in 1921, an invasion supported by Britain.This history covers both combat on the battlefield (one source is, surprisingly, a Venezuelan mercenary with the Ottomans) and political intrigues. McMeekin covers the grand sweep of things with the occasional illuminating detail about personalities and small incidents. He also covers relevant events outside the empire like the intrigues of the British cabinet and Russian revolutionaries. And, of course, the turmoil of Ottoman politics – the coups, countercoups, and counter-counter coups between 1908 and 1909 – are covered. McMeekin mentions several seldom-discussed events.How the events of November and December 1912, specifically Serbia absorbing Albania, almost lead to the Great War nearly two years earlier.On the question of the Armenian Genocide, goes into some of the controversies of whether it was genocide and also the motives and procedures of the war crime trails the Ottoman government held. McMeekin opts for a number between 650,000 and 700,000 for Armenian deportees dying. The number of a million Armenian dead seems unrealistic.McMeekin goes into details as to why the Armenian National Committee’s proposal for British forces and the Armenian Legion to land in Alexandretta in July 1915 was rejected even though it was a sound strategy and would have used half the troops sent to reinforce failure at Gallipoli the next month. Before the end of World War One, allies Germany and the Ottomans were shooting at each other because of increasing resentment of the German infidels by the Muslim population and because of the desire of both to procure the oil fields around Baku.McMeekin particularly takes apart the myth of Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence’s major skill was self-promotion and bureaucratic in-fighting. His missions rarely achieved their objective. He lied spectacularly about Arab contributions in fighting the Ottomans, especially in the claims he made about Feisal and his Arabs taking Damascus. They, in fact, showed up two days after the British had already taken the city. But the British government was happy to go along with the story to cut France out of lands in Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula granted to them in the famous Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916.A major theme of McMeekin’s is, in fact, refuting the idea that the treaty created the modern Middle East. The agreements in Sykes-Picot didn’t even survive World War One. It was the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 that established the political contours of the modern Middle East.The British cut the French out of negotiating an armistice with the Ottomans. The skillful British negotiators completely dominated the amateurish Ottoman delegates. The armistice of Mudros was signed on October 30, 1918. It amounted to a dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire which was to become a mere “rump state” in Anatolia.But Mustafa Kemal was already taking steps to resist and had military supplies moved before he was recalled to Istanbul in November 1918. In the negotiations at Versailles, there was support among victors and vanquished for American mandates over an Armenian homeland as well as Syria and Palestine. Wide support, that is, except among the American public and congress which, thankfully, wanted nothing to do with it.In June 1919, the National Pact was formed by Kemal and others. It called for an army to resist the occupation by French and Greek forces, to stop demobilization of the Ottoman Army, and proclaimed that parts of the Empire with Turkish majorities were “indivisible”. The Arabs, though, could go their own way.The Sevres Treaty coming out of Versailles in May 1920 enraged the Ottomans. Back were the “Capitulations” to foreign governments which they had finally gotten rid of during the war. They granted foreign powers control over Ottoman tax collecting and expenditures. Kemal responded by forming a new Grand National Assembly with Extraordinary Powers. On April 13, 1920, now celebrated in Turkey as National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, the capital was moved to Ankara. On March 16, 1921, Soviet Russia and “Kemalist Turkey” signed a treaty which agreed land that Turkey had taken back from the Russian Empire would remain Turkish. The Turks lost every battle against the invading Greeks – until the last one, the historic Battle of Sakarya which occurred between August 23, 1921 and September 12, 1921. McMeekin calls it the “last real battle of the First World War”. The thoroughly demoralized Greeks – now also dogged by European hostility regarding the many atrocities they had committed – retreated to the coast. There the great disaster of the burning of Smyrna occurred on September 15, 1922. On November 1, 1922, the Ottoman Empire was done. The sultanate was abolished. (The caliphate would last until March 1924.)The latter days of the Ottoman Empire are a remarkable story of constant impending disaster, diplomatic intrigue, sudden reversals of fortune, atrocities and bloodshed, and, ultimately, the story of Turkish resilience which carved, from seeming defeat, its own homeland.Definitely recommended for all those with an interest in World War One or the Ottomans.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Written in an easy to digest and fun matter, I found this history book one of those that is hard to put down and full of information that you would often never hear about (Fringe History). Great book for the topic of the Ottoman empire in its late stages.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Czar Nicolas I of Russia is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Sick Man of Europe" to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 20th century, there could be little doubt that the disparaging sobriquet applied in spades. The Ottoman Empire was soundly defeated in two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 by the comparatively pipsqueak countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia. One result of the wars was that the Empire lost all of its European territories to the west of the River Maritsa, which now forms the western boundary of modern Turkey. Then, when World War I broke out, the Ottomans made the disastrous decision to side with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente, ending up on the losing side of that cataclysm. A popular theory is that the carving up of the Ottoman lands after the war, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, is the source of many of the problems of the current Middle East. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin concedes that it is not wrong to look to the aftermath of the war for the roots of many of today’s Middle Eastern problems, but the “real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” For example, the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement was sponsored primarily by Russia, whose foreign secretary, Alexander Samsonov, was the principal architect of the agreement. McMeekin’s retelling of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and its recrudescence as modern Turkey is a fascinating and complicated narrative. Among the interesting facts McMeekin points out is that according to an 1893 census only 72% of the Ottoman citizens were Muslim, and that in the middle of the 19th century the majority of the population of Constantinople may have been Christian. The Balkan Wars started a trend, exacerbated by World War I, toward ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of Christians leaving the Empire and similar numbers of Muslims moving from territory lost by the Empire to areas it still controlled. We in the West tend to think of World War I as a static slugfest conducted in the trenches of northern France. But the war in the East, particularly as it applied to the Ottoman Empire, was a much more mobile affair. In fact, the Ottomans ended up fighting the war on six different fronts, as the Entente Powers invaded them from many different angles.At the outbreak of WWI, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany out of fear of Russia, which had coveted control over the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas for centuries. In 1914 the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia and met with initial success. However, Russia feared its early success was quite precarious, and so it inveigled its ally, Britain, to launch a diversionary assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. The “diversion” became one of the most deadly killing grounds of the war, as the British poured hundreds of thousands of men into the battle in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. The author credits Russian prodding more than Winston Churchill’s stubbornness for the extent of the British commitment. The Ottomans, led by Mustapha Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey”), prevailed in this hecatomb, showing that there was still plenty of fight left in the “Sick Man.” The Ottomans also soundly defeated the British in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in late 1915, but they were less successful against the Russians, who invaded across the Caucasus and held much of eastern Anatolia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 caused them to withdraw voluntarily. The British ultimately prevailed against the Ottomans in 1918 by invading from Egypt through Palestine, with a little help from the Arabs of Arabia. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war in Europe in 1919, did not end the war for the Ottomans. The victorious Allies were ready to carve up much of the Empire for themselves. The Ottoman armies were to disband; England was to keep Egypt and to get Palestine and Mesopotamia; France was to get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of modern Turkey; and Greece was to get a large swath of western Turkey. All might have gone according to that plan, but Mustapha Kemal (Attaturk) was still in charge of a small but effective fighting force in central Anatolia. Attaturk husbanded his forces and fought only when he had an advantage. In a war that lasted until 1923, he was able to expel the Greeks from Anatolia and to establish the boundaries of modern Turkey. McMeekin deftly handles this complexity with a lucid pen. His descriptions of the various military campaigns are riveting. This is not to say that he shortchanges the political machinations taking place. He gives more than adequate coverage to the “Young Turks,” a triumvirate that ruled the Empire from 1909 until they eventually brought it to its ruin in 1919. He also covers the Armenian massacres as objectively as possible, given the enormity of the events described. Evaluation: This is a very satisfying book and an excellent addition to the enormous corpus of World War I literature. The book includes good maps and photos.(JAB)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Quite a good history, and well balanced. The author likes the old Ottoman Empire and thinks that Abdul Hamid, the sultan deposed by the young Turks, was smart. The book goes into all of the Balkan wars that predated the great war, and he is quite good on the army and their faults. It is fairly well written and very detailed. With regard to the slaying of the Armenians, he thinks that the Ottomans were provoked, but says that everybody in the country knew about this event and he also mentions that the army had over 1000 courts martial for soldiers who either stood by or actively helped. Still, he keeps the word genocide in quotes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Europe just before World War I was still in the absurd Middle Ages mode of ultimatums, land grab and mass migration of refugees. Mostly kingdoms, countries were forever dragging out old claims or inventing new insults that would result in takeovers, either peaceably or through conquest. Hundreds of thousands of people had to flee or were deported every year from one misery to another, based on their race, religion, ethnicity, ancestry and nationality. The ever shrinking Ottoman Empire was everyone’s favorite target, and WWI was the perfect excuse for Britain, Russia, France, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and even Australia and New Zealand to tuck in.The Ottoman Empire was embattled from every compass direction, but it was made far worse by internal issues. From this book, it seems there were four:-Incompetent leadership of both the sultan and the government-Disorganized strategy, tactics and execution in WWI -Armenian rebellion leveraging Russian support-Losing the Caliphate of Islam to Mecca.The book is almost entirely a blow by blow description of eastern battles, and largely from a British standpoint. There is constant reference to TE Lawrence and Lord Kitchener, to Lloyd George and Churchill (making gigantic strategic blunders from thousands of miles away). They seem to be the main characters. There is a great deal on the Russian Revolution that obviously affected the outcome for Turkey. But until the final hundred pages, it is rarely a Turkish perspective. After the armistice, the Russians stopped battling the Turks and supplied and supported them. The British were still making a murderous mess of everything, and the French were still looking for spoils of a war they hadn’t really participated in. Incredibly, Lloyd George actually called for a new war to dismember and destroy Turkey once and for all. No one raised their hand in agreement. George and his whole Liberal party became a final victim of the madness.When Westerners look at WWI, they think of France and Belgium, the interminable trench war, the stalemate, the slaughter in Western Europe. Ottoman Endgame demonstrates the same pointless battles in the farthest eastern reaches. And worse, the allies then proceeded to botch the peace, allowing the Greeks to run amok, dividing up what was to become Turkey according to everyone’s territorial demands, and crippling it the same way they crippled Germany going forward. Word War I didn’t end in the East until 1922 when Kemal gained respected independence for Turkey. The book concludes with the thought that the fallout of Ottoman succession continues outside Turkey to this day, with constant ethnic cleansing, religious wars and battles for religious exclusivity all around it (not to mention the unnatural borders the allies imposed for new countries). Cosmopolitanism is all but forbidden; purity is the standard. Should there be any doubt why Turkey is stubbornly its own inward-looking entity, this is why.David Wineberg