Book | The Ottoman Endgame

Mavi Boncuk |

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923. By Sean McMeekin.[1]

Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Penguin Press (October 13, 2015) Language: English ISBN-10: 1594205329 
ISBN-13: 978-1594205323 

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.

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923. By Sean McMeekin. Penguin Press; 576 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30.

The Guardian Review

FEW international relationships are as volatile and important as that between the Russians and the Turks. Although they were a formidable combination when they occasionally teamed up (against the French in 1798-99, for example), the tsars and the sultans were more often at loggerheads. In fact they clashed in 12 wars between the 16th and the early 20th century. Not much has changed since. In the early 21st century Turks and Russians have veered between warm commercial relations and war by proxy over Syria.

The last big Russo-Turkish war, which formed one of the fronts in the first world war, is a source of continuing fascination to Sean McMeekin, a history professor at Bard College north of New York who previously taught at two universities in Turkey. In “The Ottoman Endgame”, a sweeping account of the last 15 years of the Ottoman empire, the most original and passionately written parts concern the fight between Russians and Turks in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus.

Two things distinguish Mr McMeekin from many other writers in English about this period. First, he has a deep empathy with Turkish concerns, and he hews closer to the official Turkish line than to the revisionist, self-critical approach taken by some courageous Turkish liberals. Second, he has some unusual insights into imperial Russian thinking, based on study of the tsarist archives.

Mr McMeekin finds it easy to imagine the world as it appeared to the young masters of the Ottoman realm, as they and their Teutonic allies faced the combined forces of Russia, Britain and France; and he brings alive the memory of tsarist commanders like Nikolai Yudenich and the titanic battles they fought in wild places like Van and Erzurum, with ghastly consequences for civilians on the wrong side.

The author has a well-founded sense that traditional theocratic powers which look ramshackle or even moribund to Western eyes can still act with ruthless effectiveness when the strategic stakes are really high; and he applies that point in equal measure to the late Ottoman empire and to the late tsarist one.

Using this lens, he brings some useful correctives into focus. It has become a commonplace to say that the Middle Eastern boundaries now being challenged by Islamic State are the ones laid down by an Anglo-French deal, struck in 1916 and known as the Sykes-Picot agreement. Actually, Mr McMeekin insists, it was an Anglo-Franco-Russian deal; and he argues, controversially, that the Russians were senior partners in the bargain.

Many students of the period will see in Mr McMeekin’s approach a barely hidden agenda. He stresses the fighting spirit of all the forces battling for the tsar, a coalition which at certain times and places included local Armenians. Whether with disgust or approval, that emphasis will certainly be interpreted as a way of vindicating or explaining away the mass deportation of Armenians, decreed in 1915, which was really a death march.

In fact, Mr McMeekin does not play down the fact that many hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished “…whether through starvation, thirst, disease, simple exhaustion, or at the hands of execution squads.” As he delicately puts it, the choice of a parched strip of Syrian desert as the uprooted Armenians’ destination suggests that “the survival of the deportees was not…[the] first priority” of Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman official whom Armenians regard as the main perpetrator of genocide.

To many, such cautious turns of phrase will amount to praising, or at least excusing, by faint damnation. But if Mr McMeekin’s purpose was merely to exonerate all Ottoman behaviour and play down Armenian suffering, he would not have included the observation of a Venezuelan soldier of fortune who saw on a mountainside “thousands of half-nude and bleeding Armenian corpses, piled in heaps orinterlaced in death’s final embrace.” 

[1] Professor of Historical and Political Studies
Phone: 845-758-6822 x7448 | E :smcmeeki(at)bard(dot)edu

Sean McMeekin is a professor of history at Bard College. His The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918, won the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize. He previously taught at Koç University, Istanbul; Bilkent University, Ankara; and Yale University.

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Global and International Studies, Russian and Eurasian Studies

Biography:
A.B., Stanford University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; also studied at University of Paris 7, Moscow State University, Humboldt University, and Mezhdunarodny Universitet, Moscow. Previously taught at Koç University, Istanbul; Bilkent University, Ankara; and Yale University. He is the author of The Russian Revolution (forthcoming, 2017); The War of the Ottoman Succession (forthcoming, 2015); July 1914: Countdown to War, which was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review; The Russian Origins of the First World War, which won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize and was nominated for the Lionel Gelber Prize; The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918, winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize; History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks; The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West; and numerous articles and book chapters. Notable recent reviews have appeared in The American Historical Review, History Today, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review; Slavonic and East European Review; and Journal of Cold War Studies. Additional awards and fellowships include Henry Chauncey Jr. ’57 Fellowship at Yale; postdoctoral fellowship at the Remarque Institute, New York University; German Chancellor’s Fellowship, Humboldt Foundation; FLAS award for Russian language study in Moscow; and various fellowships and prizes from Stanford and UC Berkeley. At Bard since 2014.