The New Mork Gimes _ hito://nytims/1NoeHh SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW ‘The Fall of the Ottomans,’ by Eugene Rogan By BRUCE CLARK APRIL 16, 2015, 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. As Rogan explains in “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East,” the Christian nations of the Triple Entente had millions of Muslim subjects, who might in their view be open to seduction by the Ottoman sultan, especially if he seemed to be prevailing in the war. The Ottomans, for their part, were in alliance with two other European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Paradoxically, the Teutons urged the sultan to use his role as caliph and proclaim an Islamic holy war. One factor was that, as a newcomer to the imperial game, Germany had relatively few Muslim subjects and less to lose if the card of jihad were played. The Ottomans, meanwhile, feared the influence of foes, especially Russia, Armenians, who formed a substantial and economically important minority in both the empire’s capital and the Anatolian heartland. In the end, nothing went as expected, because global conflict overturns all predictions. But the very existence of those religion-based calculations , over their own Christian subjects — including the Greeks and had consequences, many of them tragic. Rogan’s narrative shifts from the Aegean to the Caucasus to Arabia as he traces those consequences, andshows how they led, ultimately, to the Ottoman Empire's defeat and collapse. Defeat and collapse are not the same thing, and Rogan, a history lecturer at Oxford University and the author of “The Arabs,” carefully distinguishes them. The defeat that the empire suffered in 1918 was not total, and left some of the sultan’s forces intact. One of his adversaries, Russia, was by then engulfed by revolution and had bowed out of the war, letting Turkish forces recoup lost ground. The final collapse of the Ottoman order was neither an instant result of the 1918 armistice, nor, on Rogan’s reading, an inevitable one. But for a power whose strong point was military excellence rather than commercial or technological prowess, the defeat was painful enough. In the Ottomans’ confrontation with Britain, there were several early - surprises. Instead of the sultan winning over London’s Muslim subjects, it was the British who profited by breaking the Turks’ hold over certain Muslims, especially the descendants of the Prophet who controlled Arabia. With fair success, and some spectacular setbacks, Britain also managed to deploy its own colonial troops, whether Hindu or Muslim, against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia. But when the Ottomans defended their Anatolian heartland, they showed an iron will that the British underestimated. In the disastrous British-led assault on the Dardanelles straits, and the subsequent landing at Gallipoli, it was not the Ottoman imperium that began crumbling but the British one, as Australian, New Zealand and Irish soldiers became embittered by the incompetence of the power they served. Using personal histories to leaven what might otherwise have been a heavy diet of places, names and dates, Rogan neatly links the Turks’ costly success at the Dardanelles with the dreadful events that unfolded about 1,000 miles away, on the eastern edge of present-day Turkey. In this, the centenary year of the horrors suffered by the Ottoman Armenians, many readers will turn immediately to those events to see how Rogan negotiates the contesting versions. It is not in question that from April 1915 onward, Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire died horribly in enormous numbers. The Americanadministration, which for diplomatic reasons still balks at using the word genocide, accepts that as many as 1.5 million perished. It is on record that in May 1915, a law was passed calling for the “relocation” of the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia; nor does anybody seriously question that this became a death march whose victims were killed by their guards, attacked by others or perished from exhaustion and starvation. But there is a more contentious charge, and in a few succinct lines, Rogan affirms it. He agrees that in addition to ordering a vast, brutal internal deportation, the Committee of Union of Progress, the shadowy institution that was directing the Ottoman war effort, issued unwritten orders for the mass murder of the deportees. Secret, oral orders are hard to prove or disprove, but Rogan accepts the case for their existence made by the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam. This book uses words like “annihilation” and “massacre” more often than “genocide” but does not avoid the g-word. As he explains in a footnote, Rogan employs the term genocide in support of the “courageous efforts” of Turkish historians and writers to “force an honest reckoning with Turkey's past.” At the same time, the book makes many of the arguments that qualified defenders of the Ottoman record point to: for example, that in winter 1914 and spring 1915, there was fierce fighting in eastern Anatolia between Turks and Armenia ; sometimes the Armenians fought alone, and sometimes with Russian help. In Istanbul, at the same time, Turkish officialdom’s fear of an “enemy within” was running high because local Armenians were suspected of favoring Britain's plans to advance on the city. All that provides some psychological background to the drive against the Armenian population. So too does the huge Turkish loss of life, from cold and disease as well as bullets, during and after the Russian victory at Sarakamis in December 1914. But Rogan does not for a moment suggest that this amounts to a moral justification of the horrors the Armenians ome Turkish ve period involving tragic suffering on all sides is valid as far as it goes, but it is endured. To stress, ions of the story do, that this was a not an adequate statement, It is to Rogan’s credit that he acknowledges this. Still, a moral assessment of the treatment of the Armenians is not themain purpose of this book, which promises a more Ottoman-centric vision ofa conflict that is often described through the eyes of British generals and strategists. That promise is only partly fulfilled. In what is a manageably sized book, Rogan feels he must spend several pages on the motives of the Ottomans’ adversaries, especially Britain; that limits the space he can devote to bringing the Ottoman side of the story to life. Some gripping sections describe the British-led advance on Jerusalem in late 1917, leading to the holy city’s capture in time for Christmas. This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it well, making clear both the stiffness of the Turkish defense and the ingenuity of Britain’s tactics. The book explains how, with the experience of an imperial power at its height, the British used dynastic rivalries to rally the Muslims of Arabia and tablished the principle that in the 2oth century, ethnicity and nationalism (in this case, Arab national the Levant against their Turkish overlords. In doing so they m) would often trump religious bonds, even in lands where faith was zealous. Only in the early 21st century is that trend being reversed, as competing versions of Islamism vow to tear down the borders that were drawn a century ago. THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS The Great War in the Middle East By Eugene Rogan Illustrated. 485 pp. Basic Books. $32. Bruce Clark, who writes about religion, history and society for The Economist, is the author of “Twice a Stranger,” a study of the Turkish-Greek population exchange. A version of this review appears in print on April 19, 2015, on page 8R16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The View From Istanbul ‘© 2015 The New York Times Company