100 books like The Ottoman Endgame

As a historian, I pick books outside my area to read for pleasure, so can enjoy them without feeling like I need to take notes for my next academic project. I picked up Madden’s book in an airport bookstore before a long coast-to-coast flight. By the time we landed, I had finished this compelling story. Put aside what you think you know about the Crusades from Hollywood, novels, and school; this is the real story, of religious devotion, climactic battles, kings in conflict, and changing the world. The clash of Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages made Europe and the Middle East, in ways that Madden helps us understand.

Few cities in history have had powerful claims to be at the center of the world: Rome in the ancient world, Constantinople in the early Middle Ages, London in the late 19th century, and Washington during the early Cold War. To this we need to add another city: Baghdad from the 9th to 11th centuries. Not only was it at the center of the most powerful and united Islamic dynasty, it accumulated and created the greatest library and center for learning in world history. With an empire stretching from India to North Africa, the Abbasids were the hub for global trade, intellectual life, and military strength. This book tells the story of the dynasty and their capital, a remarkable city with incredible technology, religious dynamism, and tolerance for diversity. It’s a captivating story, well-told and deserving of more attention. 

The Arabs, as the most widespread and influential ethnic group in the Middle East, challenge historians to tell their stories in a way that is coherent, consistent, and engaging. This book accomplishes this task well, weaving together a disparate history, that reaches from the Atlantic to South Asia, across multiple kingdoms, dynasties, nations, republics, and political movements. At times rulers, and at times subjects of foreign empires, the Arabs nonetheless maintained a consistency of culture and civilization, in the midst of wildly divergent political systems and geographic locations.  Hourani manages to tell a single story, but while still doing justice to this dispersed people. 

Bernard Lewis was, in many ways, the founder of modern Middle East studies in the United States. I was fortunate to share a breakfast with him several years ago at a conference, and was so impressed of course by his knowledge, but even more by his graciousness, good humor, and indulgence of younger colleagues, including me. This book is a monumental view not only of the development of Western views of the Middle East, but the development of the academic profession, the relationship of the US to the region, and his progress as a scholar. It’s that rare memoir that diverts attention from the author to broader subjects, while nonetheless allowing readers to identify this historian’s richness of perspective and dramatic lived experiences. 

Based on a wide array of archival sources, the book discusses the Ottoman governance of Greater Syria during the First World War. During the war, the Ottoman government-appointed Cemal Pasa, one of the chief names of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, as the commander of the Fourth Army and the military governor of Ottoman Arab provinces to lead a campaign against in the British-held Suez Canal. However, in addition to the military aim of this appointment, there was also a political and social one that can briefly be summarized as further centralization of the state through the “iron fist” of the governor. The book presents us the power struggle in the region between the Ottoman government, Arab leaders, Zionists, and the Central Powers (the allies of the Ottoman Empire during the war) who attempted to increase their influence in the region after the British and French were declared… show more.

Hot off the press, and building on the success of Aksan's earlier volume on the later Ottoman empire, this book charts the transformation of this once-formidable state into a colonial client of Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. It traces the lives of friends and foes of the Ottomans who witnessed the rise and fall of a constitutional experiment in an era of shrinking borders, global consciousness, ethno-religious nationalism, and revolutionary fervour. The narrative's primary focus is on those who negotiated with, fought for, defended, and finally challenged the sultan and the system in its final days just prior to WWI, resulting in a legacy of international relations and communal violence that continues into the present.   

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.

This magisterial and sweeping history explains why the Ottomans went to war on the side of the Central Powers and how they failed to achieve victory. It discusses the military confrontations and battlefront traumas that resulted from the decision to go to war against the Allies in 1914 in a highly readable and engaging style.

This volume makes clear that without knowing the Lausanne Conference we cannot understand how the Middle East became the crisis-ridden hotspot it is today.

Carefully prepared, this is a reader-friendly history book with an excellent introduction. Its main theme is the challenge of world peace after the First World War which was followed by wars in Anatolian Turkey.

In Lausanne, diplomacy endorsed victorious ultranationalism and dictatorship. It gave factually up the League of Nations’ project of international peace by law, not force.

Twenty experts develop a rich variety of perspectives on the pivotal moment that was the 1922-3 Lausanne Conference for Europe and the Middle East. 

Like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to which this compares in the breadth of scope and depth of knowledge, this is a huge, rich feast of a book and one of the best you can read on World War I as well as on the formative geopolitics of the modern Middle East. Like the greatest of the imperial geographers, David’s scholarship was omnivorous but his original discipline was law: his discussion of the rashly-drawn boundaries that are at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace is without peer.

Full disclosure: David was also a friend who, like his book, was incredibly generous. I owe my book to a particularly compendious footnote in A Peace to End All Peace. It caught my eye and I became obsessed with why I didn’t know more about such an enormous presence, eventually traveling to Britain, France, Israel, and the Isle… show more.