When the War Came Home

Reading this book you will come to understand the extent of the suffering brought on by World War I to Ottoman society.

I particularly like Akin’s retelling of the experience of ordinary people who lived through the ordeal. Accounts of the war by soldiers and survivors of the nearly decade-long conflict that engulfed Ottoman lands add texture and shape to the military narrative that began in 1914 and only came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

The book is a well-written account on the Ottoman home front detailing the Ottoman experience of the Great War from a perspective of social history. It deals not only with the difficulties of the Ottoman conscription and the provisions, but also provides deep insight into the lives of women, Armenian deportees, and refugees. The book tells us that besides the political and military defeats it was the home front that mattered when it came to the legitimacy of the empire; after all the suffering that the population had to endure, people were alienated from the state and began to question… show more.