In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai, China’s premier on the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s too soon to tell,’ was Zhou’s answer.
Zhou was not simply being enigmatic. His answer had a great deal to do with the enormous consequences that flow from cataclysmic events such as revolutions and wars, which influence the course of peoples and nations in ways that cannot be easily foreordained or traced. The Great War led to the dissolution of three European empires — Russian, Austrian and German — from which emerged unimaginable consequences for the future of Europe and indeed the world.
A fourth empire, that of the Ottomans, also suffered the same fate; but it was on the periphery of Europe and its fall did not merit the same attention as the other doomed European empires. However, the fall of the Ottoman empire mattered a great deal to the peoples of the Middle East, and it can be rightly said, in the manner of Zhou Enlai, that only now are we witnessing the true enormity of the aftershocks of its dissolution. This is the great virtue of Eugene Rogan’s masterly history of the Ottoman empire in its final years. The vast hole that the dissolution of the empire left was only partly and inadequately filled by the successor states that came into being in its wake. The monumental crisis of state sovereignty and even legitimacy that is being played out now in the Middle East can be linked directly to the circumstances which put an end to the Ottoman empire.
Rogan meticulously details the unfolding drama that began in the failure of the empire’s own political spring, the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908.
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