Reviewed for Research Institute for Mezalim (FEM) by Ilker Akgül
In his book “The Last Ottoman Wars: The Human Cost, 1877-1923”, Prof. Jeremy Salt deals with the suffering of the various peoples during the agony of the Ottoman Empire. He pays particular attention to the effects of the wars on the Ottoman Muslims. The book consists of an introduction, four main chapters with several sub-chapters and an epilogue. Jeremy Salt begins by describing the financial problems and their influence on Ottoman politics and then turns his attention to the social structure at the end of the 19th century. He takes a look at the Orient policy of the major powers, the Sultan’s reform policy and the reactions of the various religious and ethnic groups. It provides an important insight into the conflicts between Kurds and Armenians, as well as the Armenian uprisings at the end of the 19th century.
The second chapter begins and ends with a description of the flight and expulsion of the Muslim Ottomans between 1877 and the beginning of the First World War. These important demographic, political and territorial changes serve to provide a better understanding of the last great Ottoman war. While the Young Turk revolution of 1908 still raised hopes for the continued existence of the empire, reality caught up with them. The Battle of Tripoli (1911) and the two Balkan Wars (1912/13) ended Ottoman rule over North Africa and Europe. Apart from a small part of Eastern Thrace, the empire had thus lost important provinces.
How should the beginning of the First World War be interpreted from an Ottoman perspective? From an Ottoman perspective, the period between 1911 and 1923 should be seen as one long war. Before the start of the First World War, the Reich had attempted to reform the military and the state, but the wars fought, the financial losses and the new challenges had torpedoed these efforts.
In the third chapter, Salt gives an overview of the First World War and the effects of the war on the civilian population. It deals with the flight, the shelters, the murders, the diseases and epidemics as well as the settlement policy. His critical view of Ottoman Armenian policy offers a comprehensive overview of this controversial topic.
The last chapter deals with the Caucasus policy of the Young Turk leadership up to the founding of the Republic under Mustafa Kemal Pasha. He also gives an outline of Greek-Turkish relations from the end of the 19th century until the liberation of Izmir on September 9, 1922. His assertion of the “population exchange of ethnic Greeks from Ottoman lands and ethnic Turks from Greece” (p. 310) must be contradicted, as the population exchange was carried out on the basis of religious affiliation, so that Orthodox Christians of Turkish origin had to emigrate to Greece and Muslim Slavs to Turkey.
The book is well structured and offers an important overview of the last decades of the Ottoman Empire based on the current state of research. The imperialist aspirations of the major European powers and their support for the nationalist interests of the Christian minorities to establish nation states, as well as the active policy to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and the associated expulsion and destruction of Ottoman Muslim existence in the Balkans and the Caucasus, are described in detail. The book is not based on own source research, but combines the current secondary literature with printed sources. Turkish-language literature is rarely consulted. As the book deals in particular with the suffering of the various ethno-religious groups, with a special focus on the Ottoman Muslims, it is an excellent addition to Şükrü Hanioğlu’s work “A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire”.
Product details
| Title | The Last Ottoman Wars: The Human Cost, 1877-1923 |
| ISBN | 978-1-607-81704-8 |
| Publication date | 25.10.2019 |
| Scope | 432 pages |
| Price | 40 € |
| Genre | History, First World War, Ottoman Empire |
| Format | Book |
| Publisher | Utah University Press |