For obvious reasons, most English-language books published on the Great War of 1914-1918 are Eurocentric, focused on the grinding trench warfare of the Western Front. Even the occasional glances eastward seldom got beyond the Gallipoli campaign, and even these accounts stressed the role of Australian and New Zealander troops, not the Middle Eastern armies.
Now comes an absolutely magnificent account of the war from the viewpoint of the Ottoman Empire, which sided with Germany during the conflict and suffered a crushing defeat that turned much of the Middle East into British and French colonial satraps. Eugene Rogan, a British scholar now teaching at Oxford, lived in the Middle East for years. Importantly, he had the linguistic ability to do research in Turkish and other archives seldom visited by Western historians.
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