In two years, the world will mark the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, the war to end all wars, which is the subject of Michael Reynolds’ lucid and dispassionate work Shattering empires. The author is clearly fluent in a number of fields. The first is the better-known and much-published history of Russia that concerns both Romanov and Bolshevik engagement with the southern tier of empire, and especially the borderlands of the Caucasus. Reynolds is equally comfortable in describing the Ottoman, Young Turk, and Unionist (Committee of Union and Progress) aspirations in the Caucasus in the last, desperate days of the First World War. Finally, the work evinces a rare authority on comparative imperial politics in contested borderlands and margins of empires, especially on questions of ethno-nationalism, self-determination, and the role of Islam, or pan-Islamism. Reynolds’ ability to make the bewildering array of conflicting agendas in eastern Anatolia intelligible is particularly laudable.

The book opens with a discussion of the geopolitical context of the late nineteenth century in the Middle East – what used to be called the Eastern Question. Reynolds prefers to concentrate on the ‘national question’, that is, what impact great power politics had on the ethnic populations of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus in particular. He begins with the Berlin Treaty of 1878, following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, when ‘the national idea emerged as a principle around which the powers organized their competition’ (p. 14). Article 61 of the Treaty privileged Armenian ethnicity as a ‘minority’ requiring protection against the depredations of equally miserable Assyrians, Kurds, and Circassians, as well as some 700,000 Muslims expelled from the Balkans by that same war. This is a powerful explanation of much of what then unfolded, although I think that its roots lie much earlier in the century, under Mahmud II (1807–39), and in the Greek question.

Telling the story from the Ottoman point of view, until very recently largely undifferentiated, and laden with polemic around the debates over the Armenian genocide, Shattering empire brings all the threads of frontier politics, tribalism, emerging nationalisms, and waning imperial realpolitik into an engaging and readable narrative. While there is much new literature on the Ottomans and the First World War, most of what is available in English does not focus on this particular tale.

One of the underlying aims of the book is to address the oft-repeated but rarely substantiated claims about the strength of Ottoman pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic policies as regards the world Muslim audience in general and/or the tribal peoples of the south Caucasus in particular. Though not dismissing the power of Ottoman Muslim or Turkish rhetoric, Reynolds is quick to point out that the obsession of the Unionists after 1908 had much more to do with security and the preservation of what remained of Ottoman territories. Religion had no place in their modern world. Particular Pan-Islamic moments, such as the declaration of a jihad in 1914, instigated by the Germans in this instance, or Enver Pasha's formation of the volunteer Caucasus Army of Islam in 1917, had little impact on the overall direction of events. Similarly, pan-Turkism faced the multifaceted nationalist question of tribal rivals in the south Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and Iran. Then, as now, fears of pan-Islamism in Europe and North America frequently blended the possible with the highly implausible, very often with tragic consequences.

What Reynolds is particularly able to shed light on is what he describes as the importance of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, which turned the Ottoman's greatest enemy into ‘the best hope for Muslim sovereignty in Anatolia’ (p. 255). Chapters 6–8 focus on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and subsequent Ottoman–Russian engagements in the cities of Baku, Batumi, Kars, and Ardahan. In an epilogue, Reynolds describes the final outcome under Ataturk, who signed a treaty in 1921 that left Kars and Ardahan to Turkey, while Batumi went to the Bolsheviks, hence establishing the firm boundaries of the new secular Turkish state from which the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had largely been eliminated and the Kurds (and Azeris, for that matter) denied their national ambitions.

This is a tragic tale. Less than a decade ago, apart from international efforts to confirm the Armenian genocide, the tale of woe and destruction of other ethnic populations remained untold in English. Reynolds does not shy away from assessing the human costs of this transition from empire to nation-states (some twenty-five) created out of former Ottoman territories, describing in depth Talât Pasha's intention to homogenize Anatolia – necessary to stabilize surviving territories above all costs, but consistent with practices of population transfer then prevalent among theorists of the modern state. Reynolds concludes: ‘In short, in order to save the state, the Unionist had to destroy the empire’ (p. 153). Ryan Gingeras’ Sorrowful shores: violence, ethnicity, and the end of the Ottoman empire, 1912–1923 (Oxford, 2009), draws the same conclusion from events in western Anatolia, where the Greeks not so much decimated as transferred, a process completed by the large population exchange of Turkish-speaking Greeks with Greek-speaking Turks following the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. Some 15% of the population of the last Ottoman territories perished in the war, far more from starvation and disease, greater than the losses of any of the nations of Europe.

Under international pressure, the debate about whether or not to recognize the Armenian genocide, reaching its centenary in 2015, has been much broadened of late, as a generation of Armenians and Turks outside Turkey talk to one another. A recent publication, A question of genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman empire (Oxford, 2011), edited by Ron Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman Naimark, definitive in many ways, is the result of workshops underway since 2000. Even in Turkey, where such debates are fraught with personal political consequences, the topic is on the table, as one more hurdle to clear in order to become part of the extended European community. Many in Turkey wonder about the virtue of joining the European Union, as they know perfectly well that the real issue has much more to do with the fact that the population is almost entirely Muslim, simultaneously both a testimony to the triumph of nation-state modernity and ethnic relocation and also a badge of exclusion from Europe.

There is considerable food for thought in this carefully crafted book, which is accessible to classroom and general reader alike. Reynolds’ even-handed conclusion about the catastrophes endured by so many suggests that all the peoples of the Middle East need to be included as part of the First World War centenary ahead of us.