Introduction: pursuing sovereignty in the age of imperialism

Summary

The Ottoman Empire's expulsion from Europe, where it had been a major power for more than four centuries, marks one of the major turning-points in modern history, one whose consequences for Europe and the Middle East we have still to absorb. Among the stages of this expulsion – the Balkan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the occupation of the Ottoman capital by the Entente Powers in 1918, the empire's subsequent and comprehensive dissolution in 1922 – the government's decision to intervene in an intra-European war in 1914 played a crucial role. Yet the decision is a puzzling one, since the conflict between Europe's two alliance systems was one in which the Ottomans had no immediate stake.

Given the war's disastrous consequences and its human cost for the entire Middle East, it is not surprising that the decision taken by the leadership in 1914 has been roundly blasted by historians and memoir-writers alike. In these accounts Enver Pasha, the war minister, a hawk in thrall to Germany, more or less single-handedly pushed the empire into a war it did not want. Alternatively, intervention has been ascribed to the hare-brained ideas of a tiny inner circle of the Young Turk leadership who had hijacked Ottoman policy – either because they were corrupted by German gold, blinded by German promises, pressured by German diplomats, or moved by voracious personal ambition, megalomaniac expansionism, or naïveté, attributable to their “below-average” intelligence.