Chapter Nine: The Twilight of the Ottoman Empire, 1878-1916

Travis Ritt

Chapter Nine: The Twilight of the Ottoman Empire, 1878-1916

The four-decade period that followed Sultan Abdülhamit II’s (r. 1876-1909) suspension of the constitution was a time of dizzying change, during which the Ottoman Empire struggled to secure its territorial integrity in the face of threats from within and without. Paradoxes abounded. The government formally abandoned the Tanzimat program in favor of a return to traditional Ottoman practices while also quietly pressing forward with a remarkably similar modernization program. Likewise, the liberal revolution that the sultan’s subjects jubilantly cheered in 1908 seemed for a time to herald a new, democratic dawn but instead paved the way for a secretive cabal to transform the empire into a one-party state that was even more autocratic than that of the recently deposed sultan. Perhaps most obviously, while the Ottoman military endured demoralizing setbacks at the hands of Italy and the small, impoverished nations of the Balkans in the early 1910s, it followed by winning a number of significant victories over the world’s most powerful empire just a few years later.

There was nothing paradoxical about the effects of nationalism on the Ottoman Empire, however. Despite the Tanzimat reformers’ promotion of the supranational concept of Ottomanism, nationalism increasingly eclipsed all other constructions of identity in the region in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For many, the reason was simple: in their eyes, nationalism was a liberating ideology, one that provided a pathway to a better future outside of an empire that they had come to view as alien. Problematically, however, nationalism had also acquired a dark side. Once seen as a partner to liberalism, it increasingly brought new ethnic rivalries, chauvinisms, and sinister hatreds to the region. The result would be violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide on a heretofore unimaginable scale.

The Hamidian Age, 1878-1908

Known as the Hamidian Age, the era of Abdülhamit II was emblematic of the contradictions of the late Ottoman Empire. Outwardly, his reign was a time of retrenchment, a period in which the sultanate demonstratively repudiated modernity in favor of a return to the traditional values and practices of the Ottoman past. However, it was a very different story beneath the surface. There, in direct contrast to the official line emanating from the central government, Abdülhamit II oversaw an efflorescence of innovation and reform that differed little from the social, political, and economic restructuring promoted by the reformers and Young Ottomans whom he had so unceremoniously shoved aside.

From the time that he suspended the constitution in 1878, Abdülhamit II had made emphatically clear that he intended to abandon the Tanzimat. Publicly disdainful of both democracy and the idea of restructuring along Western lines, he joined conservatives in arguing that the empire could best respond to the challenge that Europe posed not by modernizing but instead by returning to the traditions and values of the Ottoman golden age. Accordingly, armed with sweeping emergency powers that the liberal constitution had accorded him, Abdülhamit II effected a dramatic, reactionary shift in the distribution of power in the Sublime Porte that sidelined the Tanzimat reformers and their Young Ottoman allies. Thereafter, it would be the sultan and his conservative courtiers rather than the liberal bureaucrats who would direct the Ottoman state.

Now firmly in control, the new sultan acted aggressively to pursue his reactionary agenda. He began by devising a new conception of identity designed to retain the allegiance of the bulk of his remaining subjects. Acknowledging that Ottomanism had failed to secure the loyalty of the sultanate’s Christian subjects, he formally jettisoned that ideology and, with it, the reformers’ goal of retaining the allegiance of all people living in the empire. In its place, he promoted Pan-Islamism: a narrower, though still supranational, identity designed to provide the ideological glue needed to bind his Sunni subjects to the state on the basis of a common religious identity, an approach that appeared to have a great deal to recommend it now that Sunni Muslims constituted the overwhelming majority of the empire’s population.

Central to his effort to promote Pan-Islamism was the dynasty’s longstanding claim that the reigning sultan was also the caliph and thus the head of the global Sunni community. Abdülhamit II believed that this title gave him enormous authority that he could use it to achieve two critical goals. First, he was confident that emphasizing his standing as Muhammad’s successor would ensure the continued loyalty of his Sunni subjects and forestall the emergence of nationalist movements among them. Second, he believed that publicly promoting his position as caliph would win the religious allegiance of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who lived in the French, British, and Russian Empires. He believed that this loyalty would bolster the sultanate by giving him valuable leverage over those states in any future conflict.

He followed by undertaking a series of high-profile actions designed to burnish his standing among the world’s Sunni Muslims. Most notably, aware that the caliph was the traditional protector of the Holy Places, he ordered the construction of the Hijaz railway to facilitate the movement of people to Mecca during the hajj, and he lavished fifteen times as much revenue on the province as it generated in taxes to ensure the pilgrims’ ongoing health, safety, and comfort. These were significant expenses. However, given the potential domestic and international benefits, they were, so far as the sultan was concerned, well worth the cost.

Abdülhamit II’s embrace of his role as caliph and criticism of the Tanzimat reformers earned him a reputation then and later as a reactionary who waged a fierce, if doomed, rearguard action against modernity. A closer look reveals, however, that his call for a return to traditional Ottoman and Islamic practices was a largely rhetorical one that disguised both a genuine embrace of modernization and a deep commitment to the spirit if perhaps not the letter of the Tanzimat reformers’ efforts to restructure the Ottoman Empire. His actions made this clear. As sultan, he promoted the rationalization of provincial administration, doubled the number of upper-elementary schools, modernized the army with German help, and aggressively pushed economic development schemes. Most notably, he oversaw the construction of the first significant railways in the empire, the very symbol of modernity in the nineteenth century, and signed an agreement in 1899 granting Germany a concession to build a line linking the capital to Baghdad. Indeed, he was so committed to the development of the rail network that he once urged an advisor to “[j]ust get it built; run it over my back if you must.”

Even Abdülhamit II’s promotion of his status as caliph did not constitute a case of retrenchment. On the contrary, it was an example of innovation and a clear break with longstanding dynastic practice. It is true that Ottoman sultans had long held the title of caliph, a claim that nominally dated to Selim I’s (r. 1512-1520) conquest of Egypt in 1517. From the beginning, however, the dynasty’s use of the title had been more notional than real. Successive sultans held it largely as an honorific much in the way that they had also claimed to be the Kayser-i Rum or Emperor of the Romans. In other words, as is so often the case with self-conscious efforts to revive long-dead practices, Abdülhamit II’s assertion that he was the rightful leader of all the world’s Sunnis was less a return to an older tradition than a novel invention. One designed, in this case, to dramatically expand sultanic power.

Political thinking and social attitudes outside of the governing elite also followed currents that ran counter to Abdülhamit II’s avowed embrace of tradition. Politically, the sultan’s prorogation of the assembly and suspension of the constitution were unpopular and sparked anger rather than mute acceptance. In the wake of those actions, many would come to join new, underground opposition organizations that called for liberalizing the government and for effecting a top-down restructuring of Ottoman society along lines similar to Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Meanwhile, in spite of the sultan’s promotion of traditional values, social practices continued to evolve dramatically during the Hamidian Age. Three changes stood out. First, as the large number of photographs taken of women with uncovered faces suggests, a growing feminist movement was beginning to challenge longstanding attitudes towards veiling at the very moment that the sultan was publicly calling for a return to traditional Muslim practices. Second, the technical impossibility of separating people by gender on popular new technologies such as ferries and streetcars made a mockery of Abdülhamit II’s efforts to enforce Islamic customs such as segregation along gender lines. Finally, changes to urban social mores during this period reflected the middle class’s newfound openness to modern, European cultural practices. Most notably, it was during the Hamidian Age that the middle class abandoned the traditional custom of sitting on pillows in favor of the Western practice of using chairs, tables, and sofas. Thus, despite Abdülhamit II’s rhetorical opposition to reform and social innovation, many of the ideas implicit in the Tanzimat reform effort continued to gain traction in the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, often at the direct, if quiet, urging of the sultan.

The Second Constitutional Period, 1908-1913

Abdülhamit II’s long reign finally came to an end early in the twentieth century. To the joy of the growing number of Ottoman subjects who supported democracy, a revolution that took place in 1908 restored both representative government and the constitution that the sultan had suspended in 1878. The result was a brief era of democratic rule known as the Second Constitutional Period, a time that began with the optimistic belief that the empire was at last poised to become a modern state that enjoyed a thriving economy and, importantly, the respect of the European countries. The euphoria that had greeted the revolution quickly faded, however. The new government proved no more capable of guaranteeing the empire’s borders in the face of continued European predation than had the Hamidian regime it supplanted and thus soon began hemorrhaging popular support. Ultimately more interested in aggrandizing power than in institutionalizing the democratic constitutionalism that so many wanted, it responded by solidifying its control over the levers of power. As a result, the Ottoman Empire emerged from the Second Constitutional Period not with the representative government that many had wished for, but instead with an undemocratic state dominated at every level by an autocratic and secretive ruling party.

The Young Turks

Organized opposition to Abdülhamit II first emerged in 1889 when a group of medical students at the Imperial Military School of Medicine established a secret, revolutionary society called the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Popularly referred to as the Young Turks, the CUP soon evolved into a broad umbrella organization that sought to coordinate a number of secular groups that opposed the sultan’s rule. Those bodies varied widely in terms of membership and goals. They included organizations created by officials angry that political power had shifted from the bureaucracy to the court, groups formed by non-Turkish Muslims such as Albanians who feared that their territory might be taken by Christian European states, and secret societies established by Turkish-nationalist military cadets who doubted the sultan’s ability to maintain the territorial integrity of the empire in the face of the challenge that Russia and the newly independent Balkan states posed. It even included representatives of Armenian nationalist groups.

The CUP faced two significant hurdles that prevented it from constituting an effective opposition during its early years. First, harassed by Abdülhamit II’s secret police, the Young Turks could not operate within the empire and instead confronted the difficult task of trying to shape public opinion from exile. Second, and more importantly, the groups that made up the CUP were unified only by their fervent opposition to the sultan and their shared desire to restore the constitution that he had suspended in 1878. In other regards, particularly in terms of the objectives that they sought and the methods by which they hoped to attain them, they differed substantially.

While the constituent groups in the CUP were able to look past their differences during the 1890s, they began to split over them shortly after the turn of the century. The final break occurred in 1902 over a proposal that called for the CUP to overthrow Abdülhamit II with British help after which the organization would transform the empire into a decentralized state that afforded ethnic and religious minorities substantial autonomy. While this plan found support among liberal former bureaucrats and many non-Turkish elements, it was an absolute non-starter for the Turkish nationalist organizations in the CUP. Fearing that foreign intervention and decentralization were merely waystations on the road to the empire’s eventual partition and liquidation, those groups split from the CUP in protest and formed a new umbrella organization called, confusingly, the Committee of Progress and Union (CPU). Rejecting foreign intervention, it called for the restoration of the constitution and for the transformation of the empire into a highly centralized state.

The proponents of decentralization appeared to be the better positioned faction immediately following the Congress of Ottoman Liberals, but it was the CPU that ultimately emerged as the dominant opposition organization. Its success was a function of its clearer understanding of the structure of political power in the empire. Concluding that no revolutionary movement could hope to overthrow the sultan without the support of the military, the group began to make contact with sympathetic officers in the Ottoman army. Their efforts bore fruit in 1907 when the CPU absorbed the secret Ottoman Freedom Society, a revolutionary organization made up of Turkish officers in the Third Army stationed in Macedonia. Now enjoying military backing, the CPU was finally in a position to move against the government. Accordingly, over the next year, it began laying plans for a revolution in which the Third Army would first seize control of Macedonia and then force Abdülhamit II to restore the system of constitutional rule.

The Revolution of 1908

Two events impelled the CPU to launch its revolution prematurely. First, it worried that a meeting between Russian Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917) and British King Edward VII (r. 1901-1910) presaged the impending partition of the empire. Second, the CPU received word that Abdülhamit II’s secret police were readying an imminent preemptive action against it in Macedonia. Fearing disaster if they failed to act, the organization’s leaders responded by ordering sympathetic elements of the Third Army to rise up against the Hamidian regime in July 1908. Quickly securing control of Macedonia, the revolutionaries proclaimed the reestablishment of the constitution on July 23 and began marching on the capital. The end came swiftly. Bowing to the inevitable, the sultan declared the next day that he was restoring the constitution and recalling parliament. His announcement met with an enthusiastic reception among his subjects. As elated as they were stunned, they poured into the streets where they organized a series of huge, spontaneous mass celebrations throughout the empire. A new day appeared to have dawned.

The popular response to the restoration of democratic rule created a critical misperception about the events of July 1908. Bewitched by the euphoric crowds cheering for liberty, fraternity, justice, and equality, Western observers and Ottoman subjects alike assumed that a mass democratic movement had sparked the revolution and concluded that the Ottoman Empire was en route to becoming a pluralist, liberal state. Though widespread, this interpretation was far off the mark. As the fact that the celebratory crowds emerged only after the sultan had announced the reinstatement of the constitution makes clear, the revolution was not a popular movement effected by a broad, democratic coalition. Instead, it was a narrow military insurrection organized by a secretive, conspiratorial society. More significantly, the CPU, which, confusingly, had reappropriated the CUP name, did not revolt in order to reform the empire along liberal lines or to promote democracy as many people had assumed. Instead, it had seized power in pursuit of a fundamentally conservative objective: the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire’s territorial integrity in the face of both foreign aggression and the challenge of internal nationalist movements. In other words, despite appearances, the revolution was not a popular uprising, but instead a military putsch.

The Struggle for Power

In the meantime, unaware of the CUP’s reactionary ideology, middle-class liberals and others threw their support behind the party. Indeed, the restoration of constitutional rule created a honeymoon period during which the Young Turks enjoyed overwhelming popular backing, sufficient to give them a majority of seats in parliamentary elections held in December 1908. By that point, however, the loss of additional Ottoman territory had already begun to eat into the party’s support. Seizing the opportunity that the revolution presented, a group of predatory states had moved against it in a series of coordinated actions in October 1908. Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece had taken formal possession of Crete, and Bulgaria had declared its full independence. It is true that these were paper losses: all of those territories had been under foreign rule for some time and had been connected to the empire by only the thinnest of legal fictions. Nonetheless, this new round of contraction was demoralizing and seemed to demonstrate that the Young Turks were no more capable than Abdülhamit II had been at preserving the Ottoman state’s territory. Reeling from the domestic fallout of these diplomatic defeats, the CUP thereafter struggled to maintain its dominant political position in the face of competing challenges from a diverse array of groups including conservative religious scholars, liberal proponents of civil liberties, and ethnic minorities who, with growing volume, demanded immediate autonomy or outright independence.

The Young Turks responded by gradually abandoning their already lukewarm commitment to constitutionalism and by moving to solidify their grip on the government. They secured their right flank in April 1909 by successfully putting down a reactionary “counter coup” organized by a combination of ulema, madrasa students, and non- commissioned military officers and by using the failed revolt to compel Abdülhamit II to abdicate in favor of his more pliant brother, Mehmet V (r. 1909-1918). With the sultan and the religious conservatives contained, they next moved to curb the threat that the liberals posed. Using the counter coup as a pretext, they enforced limits on public assembly, banned strikes, and curbed press freedoms in order to weaken advocates of refor. They also made abundant use of violence and electoral fraud to score a resounding victory over the Entente Libérale Party in the 1912 parliamentary elections.

In so doing, however, the Young Turks badly overplayed their hand. While their efforts to limit popular protests, to ban strikes, and to censor the press had been successful, their use of vote rigging and intimidation in what came to be known appropriately as the “‘big stick election’” was so glaring that it produced a powerful political counterreaction. Dismayed by the CUP’s disregard for democratic norms, constitutionalists and disaffected army officers came together immediately after the vote to force the dissolution of parliament and to compel the formation of a new cabinet composed of liberals. As a result, the reign of the Young Turks appeared to be over.

The Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars, 1911-1913

Thanks to a series of wars fought between 1911 and 1913, however, the CUP managed to achieve a remarkable reversal of fortune. The first of those conflicts, the Italo-Turkish War, began in 1911 when Italy invaded the last Ottoman possessions in Africa, the provinces of Tripoli and Cyrenaica in modern-day Libya, in a bid to enlarge its empire. The ensuing war did not go well for the Ottomans. Despite the organization of a successful guerrilla resistance movement by army officers, the Italian navy’s control of the supply lines to Libya compelled the liberal government of Kamil Pasha (1833- 1913) to grudgingly agree to cede Tripoli and Cyrenaica to Rome in October 1912.

Italy was far from the only vulture circling the empire. Immediately on the heels of its defeat in Libya, the Sublime Porte faced a new and more-dangerous threat much closer to home when Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece invaded the empire in an effort to strip it of its remaining European territories. The combination of so many enemies overwhelmed the Ottoman military. By the time a ceasefire brought the First Balkan War to a halt in December 1912, the empire had lost Macedonia and most of Thrace and was in imminent danger of surrendering the besieged city of Edirne, the empire’s symbolically important former capital.

These military defeats prodded the Young Turks into action. Fearing that Kamil Pasha was going to yield Edirne in peace negotiations, a group of CUP officers led by Enver Pasha (1881-1922) and Talat Pasha (1874-1921) launched a bloody coup known as the Raid on the Sublime Porte in January 1913 that deposed the liberal cabinet and replaced it with a CUP-controlled government committed to pushing on with the war.

The decision to continue the conflict was popular at first and resulted in a surge of support for the CUP. However, the Young Turks proved no more capable of defending the empire than had the liberals they had overthrown. Indeed, rather than producing an Ottoman victory, the decision to abandon diplomacy in favor of a continuation of the war resulted in the surrender of Edirne in March 1913 and left the empire vulnerable to further territorial losses.

Reeling from the defeat, the CUP had no choice but to return to the bargaining table. The resulting agreement reflected the Ottoman Empire’s feeble position. Signed in May 1913, the Treaty of London cost the empire the city of Edirne, four-million subjects, and about 60,000 square miles of territory including nearly all of its remaining possessions in the Balkans. The agreement was a crushing political blow for the CUP. Saddled with responsibility for the treaty, it quickly lost all of the support that its decision to continue the war had gained it in the winter. Once again, as a result, it appeared doomed to political irrelevance.

Surprisingly, however, the Young Turks managed to stage a remarkable comeback in the summer of 1913. Their revival was a product of both the party’s domestic initiatives and the vicissitudes of international relations. Internally, the Young Turks broke the power of the liberal opposition by using the assassination of popular Grand Vizier Mehmet Sevket Pasha (1856-1913) as a pretext to arrest a number of Entente Libérale Party leaders and to force most of the rest into exile. In the meantime, they scored a rare international victory when they managed to retake some of the territory that the empire had lost during the First Balkan War. They were able to do so not because of Ottoman military prowess but instead because the victors of that conflict had begun to fall out over the spoils almost before the ink had dried on the Treaty of London. The result was the outbreak in June 1913 of another conflict: the Second Balkan War. Pitting an overmatched Bulgaria against a coalition that included Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Greece, the new conflict created an opportunity that the Young Turks were quick to seize on. Exploiting Bulgaria’s isolation, they ordered the army to reoccupy much of the territory in Thrace that they had recently ceded in the Treaty of London. Facing no meaningful opposition, Ottoman troops easily retook control of the region including, most importantly, the symbolically important city of Edirne. It was a substantial, and welcome, change of fortune. Long conditioned to expect military and diplomatic defeat, the Ottoman public was ecstatic upon receiving news of the victory. As a consequence, support for the CUP soared to heights not seen since the heady days of the revolution.

With its position temporarily solidified, the CUP followed by mounting a successful effort to institutionalize a system of one-party rule. It did so by making advancement in the bureaucracy contingent on loyalty to the party’s shadowy central committee and, more importantly, by creating an extraconstitutional, CUP-controlled apparatus that paralleled the government’s official administrative structure. Giving the Young Turks unprecedented control over the workings of the state, this mechanism proved invaluable to Enver, Talat, and another CUP leader, Djemal (1872-1922), who, together, had taken control of the cabinet in a shakeup in 1913. Known as the Three Pashas, these members of the CUP inner circle thereafter used it to rule through a series of nominally temporary decrees that permitted them to sideline parliament.

Meanwhile, the Young Turks also moved to strengthen the empire militarily and diplomatically in an effort to prevent any further territorial loss. Here, they had at best mixed success. On the one hand, the order for two modern, dreadnought battleships from Britain in 1913, the Sultan Osman I and the Reshadieh, and the establishment of a German military mission under General Otto Liman von Sanders (1855-1929) in 1913 promised to go a long way toward improving the empire’s military capabilities. On the other, despite their vigorous efforts, the Three Pashas were unable to secure a defensive pact with one of the Great Powers that could guarantee the empire’s territorial integrity, hardly a favorable sign for a state facing the threat of further dismemberment. Even Germany, which had enjoyed close diplomatic relations with the Hamidian regime, was unwilling to discuss a binding alliance with an empire that many believed was on its last legs.

Nationalism Comes to the Middle East

Since the early nineteenth century, the ideology of nationalism that had produced the Balkan Wars had constituted the driving force behind the Ottoman Empire’s loss of European territory. Whether used by local Balkan elites or manipulated by Great Powers such as tsarist Russia, it provided a powerful new conception of identity that had fueled independence movements throughout the empire’s Balkan territories. Indeed, the impact of nationalism on the region had been so enormous that, by 1914, the sultanate’s European possessions had been reduced to little more than Istanbul and its immediate hinterlands.

In contrast, nationalism had a much more difficult time establishing roots in the Middle East. Indeed, it only began to percolate into the region during the Hamidian Age and the Second Constitutional Period, and, even then, commanded far less popular support there than it did in the Balkans. What explains this discrepancy? Why was it less popular in the empire’s Middle Eastern provinces than it was in its European territories? To a substantial degree, nationalism’s more-limited penetration of the Middle East stemmed from the enduring appeal in the region of supranational forms of identity such as Ottomanism and, especially, Pan-Islamism. With deep roots among the empire’s Muslim subjects, Pan-Islamist notions of identity resonated far-more deeply with the people of the region than did ethnically and linguistically based appeals to national identity. As a result, on the eve of the First World War, nationalism in most of the Middle East had no mass following and remained largely confined to small groups of intellectuals and cultural leaders, particularly among minority groups that faced discrimination or the threat of organized violence.

Armenian Nationalism

The Armenians were one such group. Experiencing stepped-up violence during the late-nineteenth century, they were the first people in the Middle East to develop a full-blown nationalist movement. It began among expatriate communities in Europe where the gravitational influence of Western ideas of nationalism was strongest. There, Armenian activists developed two rival organizations: the Dashnak Party in Russia and the Hunchak Party in Switzerland. The two groups differed largely in terms of goals. Aware that the Armenians did not constitute a majority in any part of Anatolia, the more moderate Dashnaks accepted continued Ottoman rule as inevitable and pressed for greater autonomy within the empire. In contrast, the more-radical Hunchaks demanded nothing less than outright independence.

Both the Dashnaks and Hunchaks used a combination of approaches to advance their goals. Many of their methods were peaceful. For example, both groups organized demonstrations calling for autonomy and pressed for Armenians to have the right to possess arms so that they could defend themselves from the depredations of local Muslims, particularly from the nomadic Kurds who had long extorted protection money from them. At the same time, however, the two organizations were not afraid to use violence to advance their objectives. Indeed, both launched terrorist attacks in hopes of sparking reprisals that would compel the international community to intervene on the Armenians’ behalf. In this effort, they were partially successful. Dashnak and Hunchak terrorist operations sparked massive reprisals by mobs of Muslims in eastern Anatolia and Istanbul between 1894 and 1896 that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Armenians. While they were able to arouse violence against the empire’s Armenian population, however, these actions failed to secure the sustained Western intervention that the nationalists sought. Worse, at times, such as when the Dashnaks seized a Western-owned bank in Istanbul in 1896, the violence even alienated the European states whose help the Armenian nationalists hoped to win.

As a consequence, shortly after the turn of the century, both the Hunchaks and Dashnaks felt compelled to abandon violence. In its place, they began to cooperate with the more liberal elements in the CUP in hopes of achieving greater rights for their people if and when the Young Turks managed to depose Abdülhamit II. Their shift to a moderate strategy appeared to pay off with the revolution of 1908. Not only did the Armenians gain greater liberties and privileges as a result of the restoration of the constitution, but they even managed to elect fourteen representatives to the new parliament. As a result, at least for a time, it seemed as though the Armenians would finally be able to secure real autonomy within the empire.

Violence soon destroyed that sense of hopefulness, however. Most notably, Turkish mob attacks in the city of Adana in the aftermath of the counter coup in 1909 resulted in the massacre of as many as 30,000 Armenians. It was a sobering moment for the Armenian nationalist groups. The sheer scale of the violence threw cold water on the idea that the revolution marked the start of a new era in intercommunal relations. More importantly, it dashed once and for all any hope that the Armenians would be able to achieve genuine autonomy within the structure of the Ottoman Empire.

From Ottomanism to Turkism

In contrast to Armenian nationalism, Turkish nationalism, or Turkism, emerged only very gradually in the years leading up to the First World War. That it was slow to develop was largely a function of the fact that the governing elite had not endorsed it. Instead, seeking to preserve the empire, successive regimes had promoted broader forms of identity. As we have seen, the Tanzimat reformers had championed Ottomanism as a way to bind all of the empire’s ethnic and confessional groups together through shared loyalty to the dynasty. Abdülhamit II’s Pan-Islamism was narrower in scope but similarly sought to provide a conception of identity sufficiently broad that it could subsume particularist forms of national identification.

Once in power, the Young Turks picked up where their Tanzimat forebears had left off and officially espoused the ideology of Ottomanism as a unifying principle. Privately, growing numbers of Young Turks rejected Ottomanism in favor of Turkish nationalism, or Turkism. Influenced by the intellectual Yusuf Akcura’s (1876- 1935) contention that Ottomanism was a dead end in a world increasingly defined by national identity, they believed that the Turks needed to abandon the effort to maintain a multi-ethnic empire in favor of a focus on establishing a unified and homogeneous Turkish state. During the first few years of the Second Constitutional Period, however, they felt compelled to keep such views to themselves. Instead, aware that Turks did not constitute a majority in the empire, the adherents to Turkism within the CUP saw utility in downplaying their nationalist sympathies and thus continued to publicly endorse Ottomanism.

The disastrous Balkan Wars radically altered the logic that underlay this approach. Rampant desertion by ethnic Greek and Bulgarian troops in the Ottoman army combined with the victors’ brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Macedonian and Thrace led to the winners expelling over 300,000 Muslims immediately following the conflict. This inflamed the empire’s Turkish population and produced a surge of Turkish- nationalist sentiment. At the same time, the loss of nearly all of the empire’s European territory meant that Turks constituted a majority of Ottoman subjects for the first time since the early-fifteenth century. As a result, while the CUP continued to officially espouse Ottomanism, it increasingly conflated that idea with Turkism. State policy reflected this change. Thereafter, the government promoted Turkish nationalist policies such as requiring that education and court proceedings be conducted in the Turkish language and adhered to a new construction of Ottomanism wherein ethnic Turks would hold a dominant cultural and political position in the empire similar to that occupied by Germans in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Young Turks also began to cast Anatolia as not merely an important part of the empire, but as its Turkish heart, a mental remapping that bode ill for the millions of Armenians who lived in that region.

Zionism

Zionism, the movement dedicated to the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in the biblical land of Canaan, arose in Europe at the same time that Turkism took root in the Ottoman Empire. Named for a hill in Jerusalem that had come to symbolize the promised land, Zionism emerged in response to the shifting circumstances that the Ashkenazi, or Central and Eastern European Jews, had experienced in the 1800s. During the early part of the century, their position had improved dramatically. Thanks to the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution, the Ashkenazi had enjoyed rapid improvements in their social, economic, and political circumstances. Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1804-1814, 1815) was pivotal in effecting these changes. Dominating or outright ruling much of Europe during his reign, he had compelled most of the Continent’s states to follow France’s lead in emancipating the Jews. Thereafter, Jewish people no longer had to wear clothing that identified their religion, could live outside the ghettos to which urban Jews had long been confined, and were free to enter the professions. It was a heady time for the Jews of Europe. Enjoying new freedoms and the economic benefits that the Industrial Revolution had brought, many in the growing Jewish middle-class concluded that the bad days of outright discrimination and pogroms, state sponsored riots, were behind them.

However, a series of high-profile anti-Semitic incidents at the turn of the century soon disabused them of that notion. The Dreyfus Affair, which concerned the wrongful conviction of a Jewish French army officer in 1894, and the election of the openly anti-Semitic Karl Lueger (1844-1910) as mayor of Vienna in 1897 made it clear that a new and more insidious form of anti-Semitism based not on religion but instead on race had emerged as nationalism’s handmaiden. Everywhere in Europe, it seemed, nationalists were constructing the Jewish people as the Other, those who did not belong within the uniform “imagined community” of the nation-state.

As bad as it was in Western and Central Europe, the situation was far bleaker in the Russian Empire. Home to more than five million of Europe’s nine-million Jews, Russia had not followed the other European states in emancipating the Jewish people. Instead, it continued to confine them to the Pale of Settlement: the region of far-western Russia where they resided in urban ghettos, or, more commonly, in poor agricultural communities called shtetls. Barred from most professions, facing strict quotas for admission to universities, and lacking steady employment, they lived in abject poverty. As bad as life had been for Russian Jews in the mid-nineteenth-century, however, it grew dramatically worse following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855-1881) in 1881. Blaming the Jews for his death, Russian mobs took part in a series of huge pogroms that resulted in the murder of thousands of Jews and the large- scale destruction of Jewish-owned property.

In response, a nascent Zionist movement arose in Russia. Inspired by the Russian physician Leo Pinsker’s (1821-1891) Zionist pamphlet Auto Emancipation, a trickle of Jewish people began to leave Russia for Palestine following Alexander II’s assassination in a wave of migration called the First Aliyah, a term derived from the Hebrew word for “going up to Jerusalem.” However, this early Zionist effort was not very successful. It involved only small numbers of people, and it lacked the financial reserves needed to adequately support those who emigrated. As a result, while several thousand Russian Jews managed to relocate to Palestine in the 1880s and 1890s, a large proportion of them could not overcome the lack of resources or the harsh environment and soon left. Zionism appeared to be stillborn.

The movement gained a new life thanks to the writings of Theodore Herzl (1860- 1904). Widely considered the father of Zionism, Herzl was a middle-class Viennese journalist who initially championed integration and assimilation in Europe. Thanks to his experience covering the Dreyfus Affair, however, his views underwent a rapid change in the 1890s. Shocked by the anti-Semitism that the episode had revealed, he came to the conclusion that the Jewish people would never gain genuine acceptance in Europe and began to argue that they could only ensure their security by establishing their own nation-state. But where should they construct it? To Herzl, the answer was clear: they should do so in the Jewish people’s historical homeland of Palestine. Hoping to persuade European Jews to support Zionism, he put these ideas into words in 1896 in the influential book, Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State. Pleased with the interest it generated, he followed by helping to organize the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland the next year. There, the assembled delegates established the World Zionist Organization, which, under Herzl’s direction, lobbied European governments for support and purchased land in Palestine on which pioneers could settle using funds provided by wealthy Jews.

While Herzl and the World Zionist Organization were creating the necessary infrastructure to sustain the movement, a sudden upsurge of anti-Semitism in Russia persuaded a large number of Jews to leave the tsarist empire for Palestine. Once more, political instability in Russia lay at the heart of the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and the outbreak of a revolution in 1905 had sparked a series of brutal pogroms throughout the empire. In response, thousands of the tsar’s Jewish subjects decided to make a better life for themselves by moving to the Holy Land in a wave of immigration known as the Second Aliyah. They were far-more successful in establishing a permanent Zionist presence in Palestine than their predecessors who had come a generation earlier. Now able to draw on the substantial financial resources of the World Zionist Organization, the immigrants of the Second Aliyah were able to establish the sinews of a Jewish nation there. They founded settlements such as the city of Tel Aviv, started communal farms called kibbutzim, and revived the Hebrew language. Above all, they turned the idea of a Jewish community in Palestine from a dream into a reality; indeed, without the Second Aliyah, Zionism may well have died out.

Despite this success, however, Zionism very much remained a niche movement. Most Central European Jews were indifferent to it and expressed no interest in leaving their comfortable lives for the impoverished and undeveloped Holy Land. Others outright opposed Zionism out of fear that it would undermine the rights and status that Jewish people had gained in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. More importantly, Palestine simply compared unfavorably to the other, more-attractive options that beckoned to those who sought to leave Europe. Indeed, of the staggering 2.5 million Jews who emigrated from the Russian Empire between 1904 and 1913, only 60,000 were willing to endure the difficult conditions in Palestine. The overwhelming majority instead opted to move to the United States.

There was another problem as well. Palestine was not an unoccupied land available for colonization, but instead a region that had a substantial population of Christian and Muslim Arabs. Herzl and his allies were well aware of this issue. Indeed, there is a famous tale of two rabbis who, sent by the World Zionist Organization to Palestine to assess its suitability as a homeland for the Jewish people, reported back after a few weeks that “[t]he bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” The story is of course fictive, but, like many apocryphal accounts, it also conveys an important truth. That is, it accurately captures the fact that the early Zionists knew that the land on which they sought to establish a Jewish state was already occupied. In the face of surging anti-Semitism in Europe, however, they chose to brush aside the idea that the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who lived in Palestine would pose a serious obstacle to their goals. Instead, airily assuming that the issue would resolve itself in due course, they pushed forward with their effort to establish a Jewish state in the territory.

Arab Nationalism

Like Zionism, Arab nationalism also emerged during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. It first originated in Egypt, where it gained a small following among the educated classes thanks to the tireless efforts of two newspaper editors, Ahmad Lufti al- Sayyid (1872-1963) and Mustafa Kamil (1874-1908). Drawing inspiration from the ʿUrabi revolt, they promoted the idea that Egyptians were a distinct people who, as such, should rule themselves in their own independent nation-state. The two men made some inroads with this idea at the turn of the century among educated Egyptians; thanks to the relatively light hand of the British colonial regime, however, their message failed to gain a mass following. That situation changed with great suddenness in 1906 as a result of the Dinshaway Incident: a confrontation between overbearing colonial officials hunting pigeons and Egyptian peasants in the Nile River Delta that resulted in the death of a British officer. The episode itself was comparatively unremarkable. However, Britain’s decision to make an example of the incident by sentencing two of the peasants involved to hard labor for life and by condemning four others to death shocked the Egyptian people. The result was a sudden, brief upsurge of nationalist sentiment.

Syria, too, had an embryonic nationalist movement prior to World War I. Influenced by European ideas, educated Arabs in Damascus took umbrage in the years immediately preceding the conflict with the Ottoman government’s new requirement that education and court proceedings in the Arab provinces had to take place in Turkish, a decree that was itself a function of rising nationalist sentiment. In response, a small group of academics, bureaucrats, and military leaders in Damascus began to develop a distinctive Arab sense of identity and to emphasize the uniqueness and glory of the Arabs’ history.

However, despite these early stirrings Arab nationalism failed to gain traction in the years before the First World War. Two factors accounted for its relatively slow development. First, as previously noted, it faced stiff competition from the existing ideology of Pan-Islamism. Well established, Pan-Islamism provided a popular and well- established form of identity that muted the appeal of nationalism among the Arab people. Second, the Arab nationalists were themselves divided between those who favored Pan-Arabism (qawmiyya), the idea that all Arabs shared an identity and should live together in a unified state, and those who promoted narrower conceptions such as Egyptian or Syrian nationalism, or wataniyya. Facing these headwinds, Arab nationalism simply could not make meaningful progress prior to 1914. As a result, it remained a fringe movement until European dominance of the Middle East in the interwar period and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I established conditions more conducive to its growth.

War Comes to the Middle East

Breaking out in July 1914, the First World War seemed destined to effect huge changes to the Middle East. Most obviously, as nearly all observers at the time assumed, the conflict appeared almost certain to end in the rapid defeat of Ottoman armies and in the subsequent dismemberment of the empire. They were half right. The Ottoman Empire lost the war and soon thereafter faced partition at the hands of the victors. However, it did not go down to defeat quickly or easily. On the contrary, in the short term, the sultan’s armies acquitted themselves very well. Indeed, they fought so effectively in 1915 and 1916 that they compelled the Allies to make a series of fateful decisions that would powerfully shape the future of the Middle East.

The Outbreak of the First World War

As many had feared, the First World War originated in the Ottoman Empire’s former Balkan territories. On June 28, 1914, a member of a Serbian terrorist organization called the Black Hand assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914) in Sarajevo, the capital of the former Ottoman province of Bosnia- Herzegovina, as part of a terror campaign aimed at to compelling Vienna to cede the territory to Serbia. The killing produced the “July Crisis,” a gradually worsening diplomatic impasse that gripped the capitals of Europe for the next five weeks. Despite hopes for a peaceful resolution, the situation slid irrevocably toward war when Austria- Hungary, after first securing German support, issued a harsh ultimatum to Serbia in late July that, by design, proved unacceptable to the Serbian government. From that point, the crisis quickly spun out of control. Beginning with Tsar Nicholas II’s decision to order a general mobilization of the Russian army on July 30, the three Triple Entente powers, France, Britain, and Russia, and the leading states of the Triple Alliance, Germany and Austria-Hungary, quickly entered the conflict. Italy, the third member of the Triple Alliance, did not honor its treaty commitment in 1914 and would instead join the war on the Allied side in 1915.

Many in Europe cheered on the impending conflict, believing that it would be brief, glorious, and triumphal for their side. Indeed, vast crowds gathered in cities across the continent to express their unbridled enthusiasm for the coming war. However, the conflict that ensued did not live up to their euphoric predictions. Neither brief nor glorious, it was, at least until its third year, anything but triumphal for its participants.

The war also defied Berlin’s strategic assumptions. The commander of the German military, Helmuth von Moltke (1848-1916), had hoped to deal with the dilemma of fighting a two-front war by initially going on the defensive in the east so that he could concentrate his forces for an offensive designed to quickly knock France out of the conflict. Germany would then shift its armies to the Russian front where they would defeat the tsar’s huge military and bring the conflict to a swift and victorious conclusion. Despite a vast amount of prewar preparation and planning, however, the offensive did not go off as designed. Instead, while Germany scored a surprising victory over Russia in the fall of 1914, it proved unable to achieve the decisive triumph over France on which von Moltke’s entire strategy hinged. Now facing the prospect of fighting a two- front war against a coalition of enemies that enjoyed vast superiority in terms of resources and economic productivity, Berlin was forced to shift to the defensive on the Western Front.

Thereafter, neither side could achieve a meaningful victory. Despite enjoying a huge material advantage thanks to their vast empires and control of the seas, the French and British repeatedly failed in their efforts to crack their way through the elaborate trench fortifications that the Germans had constructed in northern France. Meanwhile, denied access to critical raw materials as a result of a highly effective Allied blockade, Germany faced the daunting prospect of fighting a long war while enduring severe material shortages and declining economic productivity. The result was a brutal, slowly escalating stalemate in which literally millions died in futile frontal attacks on heavily defended positions.

Germany Gains an Ally, October 1914

In the meantime, the outbreak of the conflict put the Ottoman government in a difficult spot. As we have seen, many of the European states had designs on the empire’s territory but had heretofore been prevented from acting on those desires by the other Great Powers. Now, thanks to the exigencies of war, they no longer faced those diplomatic constraints and were free to seize Ottoman territory. Thus, the outbreak of the war left the sultanate facing almost-certain destruction.

In response, the Three Pashas frantically stepped up their search for a binding defensive alliance with one of the European states in hopes that such an agreement would dissuade the other Great Powers from helping themselves to Ottoman land. They differed, however, over which state they should approach. Arguing that geography prevented Germany from providing meaningful aid to the empire, Djemal made approaches to Britain and France in July 1914. Unsurprisingly, his overtures went nowhere. Well aware that the tsar’s government would insist on acquiring the straits as the price of its participation in the war, Paris and London felt that they had no choice but to reject his proposal for an alliance. Making matters worse, the British government followed by requisitioning the nearly completed dreadnoughts Sultan Osman I and Reshadieh on August 1 for service in the war against Germany. Meanwhile, just as Britain and France were rebuffing Djemal’s entreaties, Talat and Enver approached Berlin about an alliance. Unlike Djemal’s pitch to Paris and London, their proposal met with success. Signed on August 2, the alliance, which remained secret for the time being, called for Germany to guarantee the Ottoman Empire’s borders and to provide it with military aid; in exchange, the Three Pashas promised that they would bring their state into the war on the side of the German-led Central Powers.

Why did Djemal, Enver, and Talat take the fateful step of entering into this agreement? After all, Djemal was correct in pointing out that Berlin could provide only limited assistance to the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, as events would prove, the alliance with Berlin failed spectacularly to provide the security that the triumvirate sought even as it obligated the Ottoman Empire to join a war that it could not win. As such, historians have long concluded that the decision to ally with Germany and thus to join the war had been a shortsighted one rooted in desperation and wishful thinking, a clumsy mistake that doomed the empire to defeat and dismemberment.

This interpretation has dominated historical understandings of Türkiye’s decision to enter the conflict since the war’s conclusion, and has done so, in part, because it contains more than a few grains of truth. After all, the decision to enter the war did put the empire in a conflict that it could not win. Likewise, the alliance with Germany did give sanction to the Allies’ decision to apportion Ottoman territory among themselves at the conclusion of the war.

In recent years, however, a new generation of historians has challenged this view. They argue that it ahistorically locates Ottoman decision making in the context of the war that occurred, rather than in the environment and expectations that existed in 1914. As the historian Mustafa Aksakal notes, most educated observers did not expect a long, bloody conflict that would conclude with one side achieving a total victory but instead believed that any general European war would be brief and would end in a negotiated settlement. Seen in this light, the treaty makes a great deal more sense. In the short run, it offered the security that the triumvirate believed the empire required to survive the war intact; in the long term, meanwhile, it promised to provide the permanent defensive alliance needed to guarantee the empire’s borders. Joining with Germany also made sense as it was the only major European power that the Ottomans did not have a negative relationship with.

What did Germany stand to gain from the alliance? Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888- 1918) and his cabinet perceived three benefits in the agreement. First, they believed that by closing the straits that were so vital to Russian trade, 37 percent of its exports passed through them, the alliance with the Ottoman Empire would greatly weaken the economy on which the tsar’s massive military depended. Second, they were confident that Ottoman armies could divert troops away from other fronts by invading Russian territory in the Caucasus and by attacking the Suez Canal. Finally, and most importantly, Berlin was convinced that the Ottoman Empire possessed a unique and potentially devastating ideological weapon: the authority that the sultan held in his capacity as caliph to issue a fatwa calling for all Sunnis to wage jihad against the Entente powers. German officials placed great stock in such a declaration, believing that it would spark a series of massive revolts in British, Russian, and French colonial territories.

Having finally secured the alliance that they had been desperately seeking since the end of the Balkan Wars, the Ottomans promptly repaid the favor by deliberately extorting and stonewalling their new ally. They did so in two ways. First, they exploited the perilous situation of two German warships then facing imminent destruction at the hands of Britain’s Mediterranean fleet, the powerful dreadnought S.M.S. Goeben and the light cruiser S.M.S Breslau, in order to squeeze new concessions from Berlin. To rescue the vessels, they proposed a fictive sale of the ships to the Ottoman government, a paper exchange that would save the Goeben and Breslau from destruction and partially offset the loss of the dreadnoughts that London had requisitioned. However, it was a far-more one-sided proposal than it appeared at first blush. In exchange, Germany would have to agree to a series of concessions including promises to help the Sublime Porte regain several strategic islands in the Aegean Sea from Greece and recover territory in the Caucasus it had ceded to Russia in the nineteenth century. Most importantly, the proposal required Germany to abolish the capitulatory privileges its subjects enjoyed in the Ottoman Empire. The kaiser’s ministers spluttered with rage at what they saw as blackmail on the part of their assumed ally. Aware that their ships faced sure destruction, however, they gritted their teeth and agreed to the Sublime Porte’s terms.

Second, citing the need for further military and financial assistance, the Three Pashas repeatedly rebuffed German demands that they honor the terms of the alliance and declare war on the Allies. Indeed, it was only after the Sublime Porte had squeezed out one last concession from Berlin that the two governments finally came to terms regarding Ottoman entry into the conflict. According to the arrangement they worked out, the Sublime Porte agreed to permit the now-nominally Ottoman Goeben and Breslau to attack Russian ports. In exchange, Berlin promised to provide the Ottoman government with a loan of five-million Turkish pounds in gold.

To this point, the Three Pashas had played a weak hand very well. They had exploited the July Crisis and Germany’s growing desperation for help against the Allies with great skill and effectiveness. They had gained valuable concessions, acquired urgently needed financial aid, and secured vital war materiel. They had even won Germany’s agreement to abolish the hated capitulatory agreements. The decision to authorize the bombardment of Russian territory marked the point of no return, however. Once the Goeben and Breslau began shelling the Russian naval base at Sevastopol on October 29, the Ottoman Empire could no longer turn back from the brink and was thereafter irrevocably bound to its ally’s fate. It was, in sum, a momentous decision, one that was pregnant with significance for the empire and its people. With it, the conflict that would so profoundly shape the Middle East’s future had finally come to the region.

The Early War

Ottoman Offensives

Having finally brought the empire into the war, the Three Pashas wasted little time in joining the fight. They began by readying large offensives against Russian positions in the Caucasus and against the Suez Canal. More importantly, they moved to play the religious card on which Berlin had placed such high hopes. Almost immediately after entering the conflict, the Three Pashas had twenty-nine legal scholars draft five fatwas justifying holy war; they followed by arranging for Sultan Mehmet V, acting in his capacity as caliph, to formally call a jihad against the Allies on their basis. The Germans were elated. After a rocky start, the alliance with Istanbul finally appeared to be bearing fruit.

The results turned out to be bitterly disappointing. To German dismay, neither of the military offensives proved successful in the least. The first, the advance on the Suez Canal, was merely ineffectual. Under Djemal’s direction, the attackers did manage to get as far as the waterway’s east bank in December 1914; facing entrenched Indian troops that the British had deployed on the opposite side, however, they were forced to retreat back to Palestine with substantial losses. In contrast, the second offensive, Enver Pasha’s effort to unhinge the Russian position in the Caucasus in late 1914, was an outright debacle. Seeking a quick victory, he sent inadequately provisioned soldiers, many even lacked shoes, on a winter offensive in the mountains against entrenched Russia formations. Despite the poorly contrived and supported attack, the Ottoman troops initially made good progress. However, the arrival of Russian reinforcements and, worse, the onset of blizzard conditions that brought temperatures as low as -33°F dramatically altered the situation. Exposed, suffering enormous casualties, and out of supplies, Enver’s army soon broke and retreated in disarray. By the time it returned to its starting position, it had lost 60,000 of its 95,000 soldiers.

Still, the Germans were buoyed by their expectation that a declaration of jihad would turn the war in favor of the Central Powers. Like many Europeans, they put great stock in the power of Muslim holy war. They believed that the caliph’s formal call to jihad would produce massive uprisings of zealous Muslims rendered fearless by their belief that Heaven awaited those who died fighting to defend Islam. Facing the rebellion of millions of fanatical Sunnis, the Allies would be unable to prosecute the war against the Central Powers and would thus be compelled to sue for peace.

In the end, however, the call to holy war failed to live up to the German government’s inflated expectations. Despite a vigorous and well-funded propaganda effort, the caliph’s declaration of jihad produced no meaningful uprisings in the Allied empires and had little impact on the war. Why had it proven unable to meet Berlin’s expectations? In part it failed because it faced an uphill fight. That is, despite German expectations, the sultan enjoyed little influence in regions such as French West Africa or British India. At least as important, the declaration failed because the Entente had responded to it with a highly effective public relations campaign. Central to that effort was King George V’s (r. 1910-1936) assurance to the British Empire’s 100 million Muslim subjects that his government would refrain from attacking or damaging Mecca, Medina, or the important religious centers in Iraq. Reassured in this way, prominent Muslim leaders including the Aga Khan, the nawab of Dhaka, and the bey of French- ruled Tunis instructed their subjects to continue to abide by the authority of the colonial powers.

Britain’s Response

Still, the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war seriously complicated Britain’s position in the Middle East. Two vulnerabilities stood out. First, Ottoman forces located in modern-day Iraq menaced the British-owned oil wells and refinery facilities in western Iran that lay just across the Shatt al-Arab Waterway. This threat was a serious one. Iranian petroleum was not merely an economically valuable commodity but one of great strategic significance thanks to a key policy change made just before the war. In 1912,

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (1874-1965) had ordered the conversion of the British fleet from coal powerplants to more powerful and flexible oil-fired ones. This move gave the Royal Navy vastly greater mobility but came at the cost of making the fleet, the first line of imperial defense, dependent on imported petroleum from Britain’s oilfields in Iran. Second, Ottoman control of Palestine posed a constant danger to the Suez Canal, the vital artery through which massive quantities of resources, goods and personnel vital to the war effort flowed. As British officials keenly grasped, without the canal, Britain would no longer be able to prosecute the war with Germany. London moved aggressively to safeguard these vital assets. First, on the basis of contingency plans drafted shortly after hostilities had broken out, Indian troops acted to secure the vital Iranian oilfields by landing in Ottoman territory at the head of the Persian Gulf. Quickly taking control of Basra, they ensured that the oil that had become so essential to British security continued to flow unimpeded.

Second, London moved to secure the Suez Canal by assuming complete control of the province of Egypt. Doing so was more complicated than it first appeared. While a de facto British colony, Egypt was still technically part of the Ottoman Empire; London would thus have to tread carefully lest its actions breathe into any latent loyalty to the sultan. To address this challenge, it pursued a carrot-and-stick approach. On the one hand, it imposed censorship, maintained a substantial number of troops in the Canal Zone, implemented martial law, and, most importantly, decreed that Egypt was henceforth a British protectorate rather than a part of the Ottoman Empire. On the other, it softened these harsh policies by promising that the Egyptians would not have to contribute in any way to the war effort and by hinting that formal inclusion in the British Empire could lead to eventual self-government.

This approach was a savvy one and it might have kept Egypt quiescent if the British government had been able to prevent the war from adversely affecting the Egyptian people. London proved unable to do so, however. Instead, in two critical ways, the conflict imposed substantial costs on the protectorate. First, the insatiable war-induced demand for textiles led Egyptian farmers to switch from growing cereal crops to cotton, a change that produced surging food prices, sustained inflation, and widespread hunger. Second, military exigencies led London to renege on its promise that Egypt would not have to contribute to the war effort. Indeed, it took less than a year for colonial officials to begin confiscating transport animals and conscripting men for service in labor battalions. As a result, the Egyptian people grew increasingly frustrated and restive under British rule and came more and more to expect that they would, as compensation, enjoy some significant measure of self-government immediately following the conclusion of the conflict.

The Gallipoli Campaign, March 1915 to January 1916

Meanwhile, British officials appraising the broader significance of Ottoman entry into the war were gradually coming to conclude that the empire’s participation on the German side presented them with both a crisis and an opportunity. As they were well aware, its belligerency prevented Britain and France from sending Russia the munitions and resources needed to prosecute fully the conflict on the Eastern Front and thus imperiled the broader Allied war effort. At the same time, however, Istanbul’s vulnerable coastal location and the abysmal performance of the Ottoman army in the early fighting suggested to some British officials that the Allies could knock the sultanate out of the conflict by seizing its capital in a surprise naval attack. If successful, such a move would pay manifold dividends. It would enhance British prestige among its Muslim subjects, potentially sway neutral Balkan states such as Greece and Bulgaria to join the Allied cause, and, most importantly, permit France and Britain to supply Russia with war materiel. Given the mounting frustration and staggering casualty count on the Western Front, it was an appealing idea. Accordingly, Secretary of State for War Horatio Kitchener (1850-1916) ordered Churchill and his staff to draw up plans for a sudden attack on Istanbul through the narrow Dardanelles Strait.

The proposal that Churchill presented to the cabinet was a bold one. Arguing that the Ottoman gun emplacements along the Dardanelles were obsolete and poorly supplied, he proposed having a squadron of Anglo-French battleships force its way through the narrow strait in a sudden attack. Once past the Turkish defenses, the ships could then sail unmolested across the Sea of Marmara to Istanbul where they could train their guns on the city and compel the Ottoman government to surrender.

Unfortunately for the Allies, the attack turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Churchill’s plan had much to recommend it and might well have succeeded had they proceeded with it in December 1914. However, by the time the Allies launched the attack in March 1915, the Ottomans and their German partners had dramatically reinforced the defenses at the mouth of the Dardanelles. As a result, the attempt to force the strait failed with the loss of three battleships. Realizing that they could not push their way through without first silencing the Ottomans’ shore defenses, the Allies followed by landing British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula that commanded the western side of the strait. This effort, too, ended in disaster. Under the direction of Liman von Sanders, the well-led, deeply entrenched, and highly motivated Ottoman Fifth Army defending the peninsula prevented the invading troops from seizing the high ground and instead pinned them on their vulnerable beachheads. Eight grueling months of brutal trench warfare followed before the Allies finally admitted defeat and withdrew. The campaign thus ended in triumph for the Ottoman army. Though it had suffered 300,000 casualties to the Allies’ 230,000, it had protected the capital and had achieved a decisive victory over the powerful British Empire.

For the Allies, on the other hand, the Gallipoli campaign had been an unmitigated disaster, one that had set the war effort back on multiple levels. First, the successful Ottoman defense of the peninsula persuaded Bulgaria to throw in with Germany in September 1915; in other words, rather than leading key Balkan states to join the fight against the Central Powers, the campaign had instead worsened the Allied position in Southeastern Europe. Second, the British defeat was a huge morale boost for the

Ottoman Empire that breathed new life into its heretofore faltering war effort. Finally, and of greatest concern to London, the abject failure of the Gallipoli campaign greatly eroded British military prestige in the Middle East and South Asia and raised renewed fears that, emboldened by the apparent weakness of imperial military forces, the empire’s Muslim subjects might rise in revolt in response to the caliph’s summons to jihad.

Kut al-Amara, December 1915-April 1916

What could the British do to forestall such an uprising? To British officials, the answer seemed obvious: the best way to put to bed any lingering questions about the efficacy of the British army was to achieve a swift, symbolic triumph over the recently victorious Ottoman military. To their delight, there appeared to be a golden opportunity for them to do so in Mesopotamia. Defended by a small army suffering from poor morale and leadership, the city of Baghdad, of enormous historical and symbolic importance to Muslims, provided a perfect target. The opportunity was simply too good to pass up. Confident that they could achieve a quick victory at little cost, British officials accordingly prepared to mount an offensive in the fall of 1915 aimed at taking possession of Baghdad.

Begun with high hopes, the campaign ended in disaster. In September 1915, Major General Charles Townshend (1861-1924) departed from Basra with a division of Indian troops. The operation started auspiciously. After brushing aside early resistance, his soldiers headed north confident that they would take Baghdad by Christmas. In short order, however, the campaign began to go off the rails. Under a new commander, the reinforced Ottoman Sixth Army stopped Townshend’s force near the old Persian capital of Ctesiphon in November and then forced it to retreat. Overwhelmed by the speed of the enemy pursuit, Townshend’s beleaguered troops were compelled to take refuge in the town of Kut al-Amara on the Tigris River where they waited for a relief army from Basra to rescue them. It never came. Instead, while their supplies rapidly dwindled, successive efforts to break through to Townshend’s troops faltered in the face of determined Ottoman resistance. Finally, with no prospect of relief in sight and with his stores exhausted, Townshend surrendered his force of thirteen-thousand men in April 1916.

The loss of Townshend’s army created a panic among British officials. Coming so soon after the disaster at Gallipoli, this second defeat at the hands of the Ottoman military further emboldened the Central Powers, and, more importantly, seemed to raise questions about the fundamental pillar on which British colonial authority had long rested: the belief that its military was invincible against non-Europeans. Coupled with the sultan’s call to jihad, such doubts appeared to have the potential to produce massive uprisings among his majesty’s Muslim subjects, rebellions that could threaten not merely the war effort but even the empire itself. To British officials the defeat at Kut seemed to have an obvious lesson; they had to do something to ensure the loyalty of the empire’s millions of Muslim subjects, and they had to do it fast.

The Historical Debate: The Armenian Genocide

In the meantime, the Allied attacks in the Dardanelles and eastern Anatolia helped to set the stage for the worst incident of ethnic cleansing to occur during the war: the Armenian Genocide. The mass murder of Armenians that occurred under the Young Turk government was at root the product of the increasingly reactionary and militant Turkish nationalist thinking that had become more-and-more prevalent in the empire during the prior two decades. Its immediate trigger, however, was a series of scattered Armenian uprisings in eastern Anatolian that raised fears among Muslim Ottoman subjects that the Armenians constituted what one leading CUP member called an “enemy within,” a disloyal fifth column that was ready to help the Allies defeat and dismember the empire. It did not help that Russian forces had launched an invasion into the Caucasus region in November 1914 where they were assisted by an estimated 150,000 Armenians.

The large-scale murder of Armenians began in earnest in the spring of 1915. In April, the government ordered the arrest and deportation of 240 prominent Armenians in Istanbul in order to prevent the community they led from cooperating with the Allied forces that were about to land at Gallipoli. The campaign picked up steam dramatically the following month when Interior Minister Talat issued the infamous Deportation Law, which authorized provincial governors to remove Armenians from the critical border provinces of eastern Anatolia and to resettle them in Syria. The Kurds who composed the irregular formations that oversaw that effort did so in brutal fashion. In each city or town targeted for deportation, the militias murdered all male Armenians aged twelve and up before force marching the poorly provisioned women and children into the desert. While en route, they killed any stragglers and permitted armed bands to periodically attack the columns. Unsurprisingly, precious few Armenians made it to Syria alive. The situation became even worse when the Russian forces withdrew in November 1917 due to the Bolshevik Revolution, as those troops were needed to engage in the fight for the future of the now defunct tsarist empire.

For over a century, a highly politicized debate has raged over the massacre of the Armenians. It has centered on two related points: the intentions of the Ottoman government and whether the attacks constituted a deliberate act of genocide. Drawing on evidence provided by contemporary observers such as American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau (1891-1967), Armenian nationalists today maintain that the CUP murdered between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians and argue that the violence was a centrally directed, deliberate act of genocide designed to purge Asia Minor of Armenian Christians. In contrast, the Turkish government claims that the Young Turks did not plan a campaign of systematic murder and that they merely ordered the deportations in response to Armenian collaboration with Russian forces and attacks on Turks. A substantial number of Armenians were killed in intercommunal violence, it concedes, but those people died as a result of a civil war between Muslim and Armenian militias in eastern Anatolia and not due to deliberate state policy. As evidence, the Turkish government cites the fact that Talat’s deportation orders explicitly instructed government forces to treat the Armenians well. Thus, in the official Turkish view, the mass murder of Armenians during World War I was neither a case of genocide nor the product of deliberate, state policy but instead a function of deep-seated intercommunal animosity.

While some scholars accept the broad outlines of the Turkish government’s interpretation, others instead agree with the historian Taner Akçam that it badly and deliberately mischaracterizes what was, in fact, a clear case of genocide. Drawing on heretofore-unexamined documents from the Turkish archives, Akçam rejects the view that the massacres were an unfortunate but also unintended consequence of the war and the contention that the people who perpetrated them did so without official sanction. Instead, he argues that the mass slaughter of Armenians stemmed from a policy that the CUP developed immediately after the Balkan Wars that was aimed at demographically restructuring Anatolia to ensure that no minority group was sufficiently concentrated in a given area that it could, with Great Power help, secure its independence.

It was the First World War, Akçam continues, that provided the ruling party with the opportunity to put this program into action. Taking advantage of the cover that the conflict afforded them, the Young Turks moved to homogenize Asia Minor through the relocation of Armenians and other ethno-religious minorities such as Assyrian Christians so that those groups constituted no more than 10 percent of the population of any province. Since the large size of the empire’s Armenian community rendered impossible the achievement of that goal through relocation alone, the CUP instructed local officials to murder hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations. However, the Young Turks did not order those deaths openly. Instead, taking advantage of the extraconstitutional, party-controlled apparatus that the CUP had set up to control the bureaucracy following the Balkan Wars, leaders such as Talat employed a dual-track mechanism wherein they sent one set of orders through official channels instructing local authorities to take great pains to treat the Armenians well during the deportations and another through the unofficial, CUP-controlled administrative structure ordering its agents to engage in mass murder. Thus, Akçam concludes, the massacre of the Armenians was neither accidental nor a function of wartime exigencies; instead, it was a carefully camouflaged but ultimately deliberate act of genocide on the part of the CUP government designed to ensure permanent Turkish dominance of all of Anatolia. The government of the Republic of Türkiye maintains the innocence of its predecessors in the Ottoman regime. This is one reason that Türkiye’s application for membership in the European Union has stalled.

Conclusion

Meanwhile, even as the genocide of the Armenian people worsened, the situation on the Ottoman front remained shockingly dire for the Allies in early 1916. Not only had the British suffered costly reversals at Gallipoli and Kut at the hands of Ottoman forces that they had believed to be incapable of standing up to Western troops, but thanks in part to those defeats, Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers while countries favorably disposed to the Allies such as Greece continued to remain on the fence. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire’s stunning victories over British forces threatened to breathe new life into the caliph’s call for jihad and thus raised the specter of armed revolts breaking out among the hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects in the French, Russian, and, especially, British Empires.

In response to this danger, London would pursue a series of actions that would prove enormously consequential for the future of the Middle East. Most notably, the reversals at Gallipoli and Kut and the dangers inherent in the sultan’s call for jihad impelled British officials to seek new allies by dangling before them the possibility of acquiring parts of the Ottoman Empire if they joined the fight. Critically, the desire to offset its military setbacks in the Middle East also led London to promise territory to non- state actors that had the potential to undermine the Central Powers or to mute the caliph’s call to holy war. Britain’s diplomatic outreach would ultimately bear fruit and would play a small role in the Allied sides’ eventual victory. In the process, however, it would also fuel competing and ultimately irreconcilable expectations and would embed conflict in the Middle Eastern state system that would emerge from the war. It is the negotiation of the agreements that created those expectations and to the complex, postwar process of resistance and accommodation that would ultimately produce the modern Middle East to which we shall now turn.

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