This interview is also available on Rumble and podcast platforms.
Modern borders represent mere lines in the sand when understanding the deep history behind the forces that drew them. In the contemporary Middle East, nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and most notably Palestine, cannot be fully understood without delving into the region’s intricate past—especially the pivotal role of the Ottoman Empire’s influence. Eugene Rogan, the Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East,” and explain how the modern geopolitical makeup of the region came to be.
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While not the sole source of all conflict in the modern Middle East, studying the Ottoman Empire is essential for understanding both the region and the European powers that dominated during that era. World War I, in particular, marked a pivotal moment in the formation of modern nation-states. Britain, Russia, and France emerged as key beneficiaries of the early 20th-century battles that reshaped global power dynamics.
Rogan provides an in-depth analysis of the complex relationships between monarchs, religious leaders, ambassadors, and consuls, highlighting their crucial roles in shaping the region’s historical developments. His detailed and thorough examination provides a clear picture of how the region evolved as a result of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Rogan tells Hedges, “Britain had maintained that the preservation of the Ottoman Empire was in the best interest of the British Empire, that it was a buffer state that bottled up Russia, kept it out of the Mediterranean world, and that, were this Ottoman State to collapse, all that geo-strategic territory in the Mediterranean world would soon become the stuff of European rivalries that could lead to the next major European war.”
On the question of Palestine, Rogan notes, “Protestants in Britain, Catholics in France, Orthodox in Russia, all wanted a claim to the holy cities and the holy places of Palestine, and so Palestine was painted a kind of brown and internationalized.”
Rogan delves into the Zionist project, tracing its origins through collaboration with the British Empire and examining its evolving connection with the United States. He highlights the growing involvement of the U.S. in the region, which it thrusted itself into at the close of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st.
Credits
Host:
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges: Welcome to The Chris Hedges Report. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner writes in his novel Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” Perhaps nowhere, historically, is this truer than in the Middle East. The fall of the Ottoman Empire — which for six centuries stood as the greatest Islamic empire in the world — in the wake of World War I saw the victorious imperial powers, especially Britain and France, carve up the Middle East into protectorates, spheres of influence and colonies. The imperial powers created new countries with borders drawn by diplomats in the Quai d’Orsay and the British Foreign Office who had little understanding of the often autonomous and at times antagonistic communities they were attempting to herd into new countries. They sponsored the colonization by Zionist settlers from Europe in the land of Palestine, setting off a conflict that continues with savage intensity today in the occupied Gaza
and the West Bank. They propped up autocratic dictators and monarchs – their descendants still
ruling countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan — to do their bidding, crushing the aspirations
of democratic independence movements. They flooded, and continue to flood, the region with
weapons to pit ethnic and religious factions against each other in the great imperial game that
often revolved, and still revolves, around control of Middle Eastern oil. The heavy-handed
intervention in the Middle East, often based on false assumptions and a gross misreading of the
political, cultural, religious and social realities, later exacerbated by the disastrous interventions
by the United States, have led to over a century of warfare, strife and immense suffering of
millions. It is impossible to grasp the conflicts of today in the Middle East if we do not examine
the causes and roots. There are three books that are vital to this understanding, David Fromkin’s
A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922, Robert Fisk’s The
Great War for Civilization and Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the
Middle East. We speak today with Eugene Rogan, the Professor of Modern Middle Eastern
History at the University of Oxford about his book The Fall of the Ottomans and the creation of
the modern Middle East.
Eugene Rogan: Well, first off, Chris, thank you so much for having me on, and it’s a real pleasure getting to have a little time to talk over the book with you. And, you know, as you rightly point out, it’s a book that had kind of family roots to it. It was a moment of exploration, having spent my career studying the Middle East and to better understand the Middle East of the 20th century, I was drawn into studying the Ottoman Empire, because all the origins of the modern Middle East can be traced back to the previous state that had ruled this area. So to answer your question, you know, the Ottomans first make their entry into the Arab world in 1516 and 1517, when they turf out the then ruling Mamluk Empire, based in Cairo. They had an empire that spanned all of Egypt, greater Syria and the Hejaz, Red Sea province of the Arabian Peninsula. And they were able to, you know, the Ottomans were able to draw on gunpowder technology to affect a total decimation of Mamluk ranks.
Mamluk’s knights in the old fashion, you know, they were trained in swordsmanship and in horsemanship, and they thought that real men fought like chivalric knights, and they found themselves up against real men with guns, and men with guns won. And that was to take the Middle East down the road of being part of what was then the largest, most successful Islamic empire in the world, and for a Europe or America that’s used to thinking of the West as dominant, I assure you that that Ottoman Empire was the most terrifying state in the whole of the Mediterranean basin, and was to remain so right through until the 18th century. Their last drive on a European capital would be in the 1680s when they laid their last siege to Vienna. So it’s just a corrective, you know, before we write this Ottoman Empire off and assume that it was slated to lose in the First World War, this was one very powerful empire that spanned three continents, and, you know, was basically the scourge of Europe right up until the 18th century. Chris, I assume you’d like shorter answers, rather than for me to go on with, great long speeches.
Chris Hedges: No, I’d rather that you go on. There’s no time constraint here.
Eugene Rogan: All right, very good.
Chris Hedges: So they get up to the gates of Vienna, but then they’re as you write, they’re rolled back. This is all before World War I. So the empire begins a kind of slow disintegration on the eve of the war, perhaps you can just explain what happened.
Eugene Rogan: Well, basically what happens is Europe takes off. I mean, the Ottoman Empire was a perfectly strong and viable empire in its own right, but it found its European neighbors taking off with two major developments. One is the enlightenment, and just the new ideas that spill into politics and how to organize a country better, more efficiently, better at raising tax money, and how to develop cities and whatnot. And then the other, of course, is going to be the Industrial Revolution. And those two developments, coming in the end of the 18th century, are going to impel Europe into a high gear that leaves the Ottoman Empire far behind. And in the 19th century, the Ottomans become increasingly aware that every time they go to the battlefield with their European neighbors, they’re losing and they’re losing territory. It starts with losing territory in the Crimea to Russia, they begin to lose territories to the Habsburgs in Vienna and the Ottomans begin to ask, what is it going to take for us to revitalize this one dominant empire?
And in the 19th century, they settled on a reform program. It spans the years 1839 to 1876, where they just try to affect a root and branch reform of the governments and the economy of the Ottoman Empire, so that they might be able to take advantage of the new ideas of the Enlightenment, the new technologies of industrial Europe, and re-emerge as a player and as a power. But by the time they reach the 20th century, the challenges the Ottomans are facing are almost insurmountable. The gulf between where they stand and where the European neighbors stood was almost unbridgeable. And you know, if you’re trying to buy the technology for your own development from your adversaries, it’s a game you’ll never win. You’ll never overtake Britain and France by trying to buy their own technologies or ideas, they’ll always keep you one step behind. And I think that’s where the Ottomans found themselves in the beginning of the 20th century, as they were sort of coming into their first real conflict of total war with the most powerful states of Europe in World War I.
Chris Hedges: And so on the eve of World War I, there are all sorts of independence movements in the Balkans, the Ottomans are pushed back. Maybe you can explain a little bit about how that happened, and they ultimately built an alliance with Germany. One of the interesting conflicts, of course, within the British government, was that it had been a cornerstone of British policy to essentially leave the Ottoman Empire intact. This is, you know, that battle is lost by the end of World War I, but so just get us up to the eve of the war.
Eugene Rogan: So among the ideas to come out of the European enlightenment, nationalism was to be one of those contagious. And for a multinational, multi-ethnic empire like the Ottomans, it was really an existential threat. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the Balkans. We’re starting with Greece’s uprising in the 1820s. You’ll have a century between 1820s Greece right up until Albania declares its bid for independence in 1913, where virtually every Christian majority territory of the Balkan Peninsula seeks its independence from the Ottoman Empire. All those are territories the Ottomans had conquered from the Byzantine Empire, going back to the 14th and 15th centuries and by the 20th century, you know, on the eve of war, they pretty much lost every last bit of their European territories except a little bit of Thrace, which is that little piece of Europe in modern Turkey, which Istanbul straddles. And, you know, in 1908 the reformists come back to power in a revolution which overturns Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who had, in many ways, tried to put the power right back into the Sultanate and take it away from government, the Young Turk Revolution 1908 reverses that.
It’s a moment where I think many in the Ottoman Empire believed there would be a process of renewal, particularly binding the Muslims of the Empire, recognizing the Balkans were a lost cause. But in the course of the first years after that revolution, the Ottomans were just hammered by a succession of wars. The Italians make a bid for Libya. They want their own patch of imperium in North Africa and invade the territory, to squeeze the Ottomans to finally give up on Libya, the Italians lean on their relations in Montenegro to rise in what becomes the First Balkan War. The Ottomans are thrashed in the First Balkan War of 1912 and then this is when they really lose most of their remaining Macedonian and Albanian and Thracian territories in the Balkans. And then there’s a second Balkan War in 1913 where the Ottomans take advantage of the Balkan states like Bulgaria and Greece and Serbia falling out among themselves over the division of loot, like so many thieves, and are able to reclaim the city of Edirne, and that little stretch of Thrace, as I said before, is still part of modern Turkey. So the Ottomans are just rocked.
By 1914, their economy was, you know, exhausted. They took $100 million loan from France to try and rebuild their economy. Their army was broken. They reached out to Prussia to help them rebuild the Ottoman army. And they needed to reach naval parity with their great adversary, Greece, and they reached out to the British for help with rebuilding their navy. They even commissioned two state of the art dreadnoughts from the Harland shipyards in Northern Ireland. So the Ottomans, by the time they reach 1914, have had enough with revolution and war. They’re counting on a period of calm and peace so they can try and rebuild their empire, their military, their navy, to withstand the challenges of the 20th century. But they just weren’t left much of a breathing period from that sort of autumn and spring of 1914 to the guns of summer in August of 1914.
Chris Hedges: And just a little footnote, Trotsky covered the Balkan War. His book’s actually very good, and then used whatever three or four months there to, after the Bolshevik Revolution, make him Minister of War. So one of the things about the Ottoman Empire is that it, and you make this point in your book about you know, once the war begins, is the diversity of nationalities, ethnicities, not just Shia and Sunni, but Christian, Yazidi, Kurdish, that incorporated, they played such a major role after the war when Sykes–Picot essentially when they redrew the maps and created these modern Middle States. But you also note that the battles in the Middle Eastern battlefields, you say, were often the most international of the war. Australians, New Zealanders, every ethnicity in South Asia, North African, Senegalese and Sudanese made common cause with French, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish soldiers against Turkish, Arab, Kurdish, Armenian, Circassian and their German and Austrian allies.
I mean, that was one aspect of the war, which I didn’t know. The other was a point you make, for instance, on the I think it’s on the Gallipoli campaign, where you talked about how you could be on the Western Front, it could be dormant for months. That wasn’t true in places like Gallipoli. So talk a little bit about, and I think that when we see the creation of the modern Middle East, especially when the imperial powers went in, in order for their own ends, they started pitting these groups, ethnicities—and that’s my dog there, sorry— that these ethnicities, one against the other, but talk about that international aspect.
Eugene Rogan: Oh, it’s one of the most interesting things about studying the First World War from the perspective of the Middle East. I argue that it’s really the Middle East that turned a European conflict into a world war. If you look to what went on in both the Pacific Theater and in the African theater of the war, it really had nowhere near the depth of gravity of the First World War in the Middle East. And I think the expression I use in the book as I describe these battlefields with all these different nations and nationalities as a virtual sort of Tower of Babel, and that just meant that some of those battlefields were absolute chaos, and this gives rise to some funny anecdotes. You know, one of my favorites from Gallipoli was very early after the Allied landing in the beaches of Gallipoli, which went off very badly. They they found themselves coming up against deeply entrenched Ottoman forces who were waiting for them and mowed them down with machine gun fire, or else they found themselves trying to scale cliffs that their maps just hadn’t prepared them for. So they arrived often separated where soldiers and commanders were not together. Soldiers without commanders often really don’t know how to take initiative in the battlefield, and in one case, a group of brown men come up to British commanders and asked to, you know, meet their commanding officers. And so the lieutenants take them to the captains, and the captains take them to the major. And these guys maintain that they’re Indian soldiers looking for their colonel, and instead, they wind up capturing like five or six British officers, because those were Turks in disguise pretending to be Indian soldiers, taking advantage of the credulity of these confused Tower of Babel soldiers. So yeah, it’s an element of the First World War that, you know, you think about the battlefields of the Somme, you know, Germans and Frenchmen and Englishmen fighting against white men. That was not the Middle East. The Middle East was truly a battlefield of diversity.
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Chris Hedges: Let’s talk a little bit about the Ottomans were kind of agnostic as to who their allies would be. They ended up, of course, aligned with Germany, almost by default. The Germans also sent quite a bit of money so the Ottomans could build their forces. But I think, as you said, the main concern was the preservation of the empire they had left. They didn’t, it doesn’t appear that they really cared at that point, which of the warring powers would ensure that. Is that correct?
Eugene Rogan: Well, I mean, if anything, there was a tendency to see Germany as a more reliable ally than either Britain or France. You’re dead right. On the outbreak of war, the Ottomans were willing to cut a deal with virtually any great power to enter into a defensive alliance and protect the territory from the fallout of war. They knew that in February of 1914, Russia’s government had passed policy that in the cloud of war or the fog of war, Russia would seek to take the city of Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, under Russian rule, as well as the vital straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. These are the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles themselves. This is a really important sea corridor for all of Russia’s exports, from Ukraine and Russia, to the Mediterranean world. And of course, you know, the coming war, it was going to be an important line of communications, were it open, between the Entente powers. So Russia had geo-strategic as well as cultural reasons for wanting to try and seize these Ottoman territories. And they wanted to make this bid because they’d seen how in two Balkan Wars, the Ottomans have proved quite weak. And I think Russia was worried that maybe the Greeks would get to Constantinople first, as protectors of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Russia really wanted Constantinople, the Hagia Sophia Basilica, and all of the Byzantine treasures to come to their credit.
So, you know, with these drivers, the Ottomans were very concerned to keep their longest standing rival, Russia, at arms length. And if they could have carved a deal with France, who, as I just said, had given the Ottomans, in the spring of 1914, a $100 million loan. Or the British, who, as I just said underwrote a mission to help rebuild the Ottoman Navy, and had commissioned, you know, dreadnoughts for the Ottoman navy. If they could have gotten the British or the French to sign a deal that would protect their lands against the Russians, they would have done it. But of course, there’s no way that the British or French were going to guarantee Ottoman territory against their ally, Russia. Germany, by contrast, had no territorial ambitions in the Ottoman Empire. They never colonized an inch of Ottoman land. The French had, the British had, the Russians had. And so, they were militarily strong. They were technologically strong, very ahead of most of European powers. And if you were taking a bet, if you were a betting man, Chris, in the opening days of summer war of 1914 you might well have thought that Germany was going to win that war. I think the Ottomans made a bid to go with Germany, in the hope that their bet would pay off and that they’d be among the victors being able to reclaim lands that they’d lost to the Balkan neighbors, or to Russia, or islands to Greece, having been on the winning side of the First World War in siding with Germany. But the question is, what did the Germans get out of making an alliance with a country that most of Europe really did see as the sick man of Europe? And I guess that’s the harder one to explain.
Chris Hedges: Well, the British certainly furthered that process by seizing the dreadnoughts.
