In November 1914, the world's only great Muslim empire was drawn into a life-or-death struggle against three historically Christian powers—Britain, France and Russia. All parties made frantic calculations about the likely intertwining of religion and strategy. The playing out, and surprise overturning, of these calculations informs every page of Eugene Rogan's intricately worked but very readable account of the Ottoman theocracy's demise.

01/19/2015
Rogan (The Arabs: A History), a scholar of modern Middle Eastern history at Oxford, conducted extensive research in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic primary sources to remedy the lack of English-language WWI history from the Ottoman perspective. The result is a sweeping and nuanced work that shows how, in the years preceding the war, “the Ottoman Empire had endured a revolution, three major wars against foreign powers, and a number of internal disorders.” Ottoman forces were thus at a marked disadvantage when war broke out, which was compounded by hubris and poor planning: “The rush to take on two Great Powers with inadequate preparation condemned both campaigns to catastrophic failure.” Istanbul proved resilient, though, and it was only the Arab Revolt that precipitated the end of the Empire. Of the most contentious issue in latter-day Turkish history, Rogan says Ottoman documents “make a mockery of any attempt to deny the Young Turk government’s role in ordering and organizing the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenian community.” Though sections of the book are heavy on military strategy and tactics, Rogan’s multifaceted analysis touches on everything from the use of Islamist discourse in political movements to the treatment of minorities in the modern Middle East. Photos. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management (Mar.)

"A remarkably readable, judicious and well-researched account of the Ottoman war in Anatolia and the Arab provinces."—Mark Mazower, Financial Times

"[An] intricately worked but very readable account of the Ottoman theocracy's demise.... This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it well."—New York Times

"The book is not only exact and readable but also has the elements of a thriller and thus is all the more remarkable in view of its thoroughness in covering a linguistically and historically difficult subject."—Wall Street Journal

"To have written a page-turner as well as an accurate and comprehensive history of the Ottoman struggle for survival is a remarkable achievement."—Wall Street Journal

"This engrossing history unfolds in the Middle Eastern theatre of the First World War, capturing the complex array of battles, brutalities, and alliances that brought down the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire.... Rogan argues that the empire's ultimate demise was the result not of losing the war but of a clumsily negotiated peace. His balanced narrative unearths many seeds of current conflicts."—New Yorker

"[Rogan's] account is geopolitical and military writing at its best - taut, anecdotal and extraordinarily researched. A tangled story, to be sure, one that both commands and rewards the reader's attention."—Washington Times

"The Fall of the Ottomans is a remarkably lucid and accessible work of history, involving a large cast of contradictory and complex characters.... Telling quotations from diplomats, field commanders, and ordinary soldiers of all the combatants lend the narrative a powerful sense of immediacy."—The Daily Beast

"[An] assured account.... The book stands alongside the best histories."—Economist

"Rogan has written an impressively sound and fair-minded account of the fall of the Ottoman Empire."—Max Hastings, Sunday Times (UK)

"A comprehensive, lucid and revealing history.... This book will surely become the definitive history of the war."—The Times (UK)

"[A] masterly history of the Ottoman empire in its final years.... Eugene Rogan has written a meticulously researched, panoramic and engrossing history. The book is essential reading for understanding the evolution of the modern Middle East and the root causes of nearly all the conflicts that now plague the area. The Fall of the Ottomans is an altogether splendid work of historical writing."—Ali A. Allawi, The Spectator (UK)

"A timely and capacious history which leaves the over-trodden Flanders mud and football truces in favour of the various campaigns—at best imperfectly understood, at worst woefully unfamiliar—which the Allies waged in the Middle East. It's in the former Ottoman lands, traumatised by war, sectarianism and repression, that the legacies of the Great War continue to be grievously felt.... Here's a book whose instructive geopolitical relevance should be immediately apparent.... [A] compelling and brilliant book."—Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"Admirable and thoroughly researched.... A comprehensive history of World War I in the Middle East."—New York Review of Books

"As the Middle East is collapsing all around us, if you wanted to know where it all began and when, read this great book by a great Oxford historian."—Fareed Zakaria GPS, Book of the Week

"Eugene Rogan has given us an absorbing history of the war's principal military and political battles in the Middle East through the eyes of those who fought them. Weaving together accounts of the horrors of life in the trenches with those on the home front, he exposes the deadly dynamic emerging between the two—from the disastrous Ottoman attempt to invade Russia to the horrors of the Armenian deportations, and from the British invasion to the Arab revolt and the empire's final defeat and partition."—Mustafa Aksakal, Georgetown University

"A fantastic, readable, and much needed study of the most chronically neglected of all of the Great War's participants: the Ottoman Empire. Informative and enlightening."—Alexander Watson, author of Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I

"This is a gripping, masterful account of World War One in the Middle East from the vantage point of the Ottoman Empire.... Combining magisterial scholarship with a keen sense of drama and lively narrative style, it tells a grim story but a fascinating one.... If you want to understand the underlying causes of conflict and violence in the Middle East in the last century, you will not find a better book."—Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

"This book opens up a window on vital chapters in the shaping of the Middle East as well as the history of the Great War, bringing together vivid personal details with a broad historical panorama of human suffering and heroism, the incompetence and folly of the general staffs, and the scheming of the great powers."—Rashid Khalidi, author of Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East

"Thoroughly researched and elegantly written by one of the leading experts on the region, The Fall of the Ottomans reminds us that the 1914-18 conflict was truly a world war with huge and continuing consequences. No one is better equipped than Eugene Rogan to handle the course and impact of the war in the Middle East and he does a superb job, telling a complex and multifaceted story with great clarity, understanding, and compassion. This timely and important work restores the Middle East to its rightful place in the history of the Great War."—Margaret MacMillan, author of The War That Ended Peace: The Road to1914

"Thrilling, superb, and colorful, Eugene Rogan's The Fall of the Ottomans is brilliant storytelling. Filled with flamboyant characters, impeccable scholarship that illuminates the neglected Near Eastern theater of WWI—showing how the Ottomans managed repeatedly to defeat the Allies—and revelatory analysis that explains the modern Mideast, The Fall of the Ottomans is truly essential but also truly exciting reading."—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography

"Eugene Rogan has written a meticulously researched, panoramic, and engrossing history of the final years of the Ottoman Empire. This book is essential reading for understanding the evolution of the modern Middle East and the root causes of nearly all the conflicts that now plague the area. An altogether splendid work of historical writing."—Ali Allawi, author of The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace

"An illuminating work that offers new understanding to the troubled history of this key geopolitical region." —Kirkus

02/15/2015
The Ottoman empire, dating back to 1299, quickly dissolved after the end of World War I, and there have been few works about its role in the Great War. The empire's most famous battle and victory, Gallipoli, is often told from the side of the British. Rogan (History, Oxford Univ.) aims to correct this. Beginning with the revolution of the "Young Turks" in 1908, his account chronicles the story of the Ottoman empire in World War I and its eventual collapse. The author contends that the entrance of the empire is what truly made World War I a "world" war. And the empire's sacrifices were great: 3,800 British died at Gallipoli while 14,000 Ottoman soldiers were killed. Rogan's work is even more pivotal because researching the Ottoman Army was not an easy task. Access to Turkish military archives is limited, and World War I is rarely memorialized in the Middle East. This well-researched and well-written book is not strictly military history, however, but an overview of the last years of the empire and its experiences in the Great War. VERDICT A much-needed addition to World War I scholarship that is recommended for anyone interested in that conflict and the history of the Middle East or Turkey.—Jason Martin, Stetson Univ. Lib., DeLand, FL

This superb audio production illuminates a neglected side of WWI, and the origin of many of today’s conflicts in the Middle East. Rogan (author of THE ARABS) reconstructs a bloody and controversial history with objectivity and utter truthfulness, and narrator Derek Perkins maintains that same distance and balance—while conveying with stark immediacy the awful drift of events. The slaughter at Gallipoli, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, the postwar European betrayal of peoples who had fought and died for their independence—none of this “reads” very well today, however well it’s told. But this is THE source for those who really want to understand all that’s gone wrong in the Middle East these last hundred years. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

2014-12-13
Rogan (Modern History of the Middle East/St. Antony's Coll., Oxford Univ.; The Arabs: A History, 2009, etc.) corrects Western assumptions about the "sick man of Europe."In this well-researched, evenhanded treatment of the Ottomans' role in World War I, especially in its assessment of the Armenian genocide of 1918, the author delineates the urgent internal and external causes spurring the crumbling Turkish empire to seek a defensive alliance with Germany and counter Britain, France and Russia when war broke out in 1914. The coalition of fiery Young Turks had risen against the aging autocratic sultan and demanded a restoration of the constitution in 1908, but during the tumult, they allowed Turkey's European neighbors to annex more territory. Russia's territorial ambitions were most feared, while Britain and France could not be trusted. The war became a "global call to arms" for all parties, with the Ottomans declaring a jihad in order to unite Muslims. Rogan walks through the "opening salvos" of the war, at Basra, Aden and Egypt, showing the vulnerability of the Ottoman defenses; yet the Ottomans showed enormous spirit and ingenuity against the Entente assault on the Dardanelles in February 1915. Rogan elucidates the Allied debacle at Gallipoli—although the lack of maps is frustrating—a reckless campaign he blames more on Lord Kitchener than on Winston Churchill and which provoked a government crisis back in Britain. The dire campaigns in Mesopotamia, Suez and Palestine were not a "sideshow" to be dismissed by the Allied planners in their hopes for a quick victory over a weak Ottoman Empire. Actually, they produced—through the Arab Revolt galvanized by T.E. Lawrence and the drafting of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration—an uneasy armistice and partition that promised to be deeply divisive for another century. An illuminating work that offers new understanding to the troubled history of this key geopolitical region.