Ryan Gingeras. Fall of the Sultanate

The peoples of the Ottoman Empire lived through more than a decade of protracted warfare between the years 1911 and 1922. At the end of that period, the successor government of Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) abolished the Ottoman sultanate, terminating a dynasty that had molded the region for over six hundred years. Ryan Gingeras begins Fall of the Sultanate: The Great War and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1922 with the Constitutional Revolution of 1908, a sensible starting point that will appear familiar to specialists. Gathering in the aftermath of that revolution, and meeting for the first time since 1878, the Parliament brought together delegates representing the empire’s various religious and ethnic affiliations. The promise of improved governance through the institution of Parliament quickly dissipated in the mayhem of war, however. Gingeras continues the story with violent unrest in Albania and Yemen, Italy’s invasion in 1911 of Benghazi and Tripoli and its occupation of the Dodecanese islands, war in the Balkans in 1912 and again in 1913, the horrors of the First World War, and the ongoing fighting after 1918 in the remnant parts of the empire from Izmir to Damascus to Cairo.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Economic history · Empire · Ottoman empire · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Successor cardinal · Unrest · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies