The Fall of the Ottomans

Reviews / Votes

An Economist Best Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal Best Book for History Buffs Mark Mazower, Financial Times "A remarkably readable, judicious, and well-researched account of the Ottoman war in Anatolia and the Arab provinces." New York Times "Gripping... An extraordinary tale." Economist "[An] assured account... The book stands alongside the best histories." Wall Street Journal "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." New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Rogan offers an intricately worked but very readable account of a theocracy's demise." New Yorker "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." Daily Beast "The Fall of the Ottomans is a remarkably lucid and accessible work of history... [Rogan] seems equally at home explaining the parameters of Ottoman grand strategy and the tensions of the British-Arab Alliance as he is at conjuring up the unique challenges of maneuver warfare in the Sinai and Palestine, or the brutal stalemate in the Gallipoli trenches. Telling quotations from diplomats, field commanders, and ordinary soldiers of all the combatants lend the narrative a powerful sense of immediacy." Sunday Telegraph (UK) "[A] timely and capacious history which leaves the over-trodden Flanders mud and football truces in favor 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." Washington Independent Review of Books "[A] fresh and meticulous portrait of the Ottoman Empire: modern and modernizing, then declining, and eventually kaput." Spectator (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." New York Review of Books "Admirable and thoroughly researched... A comprehensive history of World War I in the Middle East." The Times (UK) "[A] comprehensive, lucid and revealing history... This book will surely become the definitive history of the war." Guardian (UK) "Compared to the western front, the Middle East was a sideshow for all but those who called it home. Rogan has rightly put these Turks, Armenians and Arabs at the centre of his account."