Fall of the Sultanate is the newest title by Ryan Gingeras, a prolific California-based historian of modern Turkey. In the book, he provides an ambitious narrative that focuses on the end of Ottoman rule, framed as the period from the Young Turk Revolution to the abolition of the sultanate (1908–22). His rich and, in many respects, original examination also delves, in substantial passages, far before 1908, thus often not progressing chronologically.

After a short introduction, Fall of the Sultanate starts with a vivid account of Grand Vizier Mahmud Şevket Pasha's assassination in Istanbul on 11 June 1913. It then recalls the “Auspicious Event” of 1826—the massacre of the Janissaries—whence Gingeras presents in Chapter 1 a late Ottoman history of violence, reform, reaction, and revolution, centered on the Ottoman capital, leading up to 1913. In 1913 began the dictatorial regime of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), whose young revolutionaries needed the venerable general Mahmud Şevket Pasha as a figurehead after the putsch in January. The CUP definitively implemented its rule after the latter's assassination. A major flashback in the narrative occurs again in Chapter 5, which considers the Arab lands from the early 19th century to the dismantling of Ottoman rule and the Mandate era.

Chapters 2 through 4 focus on the first years of the Ottoman world's catastrophe, starting with the “Collapse on the Margins”—the title of Chapter 2—in the Balkans, Libya, and Yemen. Gingeras’ account renders convincingly the “signposts for catastrophe” (subtitle of Chapter 2) during the three years preceding 1914. This is particularly true in his discussion of the wars in the Balkans that catalyzed a new regime henceforth galvanized by a rhetoric of war, restorative revenge, and the fight for sovereignty that—I might add—later culminated in celebrating the World War I victory at Gallipoli as the cornerstone of a modern Turkish and Muslim history of national salvation starting in 1913.

The first pages of Chapter 3 on the “Great War” immerse the reader in the atmosphere of the summer of 1914, an effect heightened by the individual perspective in the diary of Münim Mustafa, a young Ottoman soldier. Through a great deal of personal research into late Ottoman history and the “End of the Empire” (the title of his 2009 book), Gingeras has grown familiar with a broad range of topics and the latest scholarly literature, which enhances the quality of his encompassing yet concrete, colorful, and piquant narrative. He duly delves into Ziya Gökalp's dominant role as the main prophet of a new Turkish future, notably in relation to Central Asia, the core land of Gökalp's mythic “Turan.” Gingeras conveys important and multifaceted findings also in the last chapter of his account (Chapter 6), which deals with the post-1918 wars in Asia Minor and a new power center in Ankara that put an end to six centuries of the Ottoman sultanate, but nevertheless continued fundamental lines set by the CUP predecessors.

A few points must be critically addressed. The relevant Unionists close to Mehmed Talaat, the strongest CUP leader, took the European July 1914 crisis as an opportunity—they felt galvanized, not troubled, by the chance of an alliance with Germany, even though it implied active participation in a general war (p. 106). For a correct assessment of the CUP leadership then and during war, the study of diaries and correspondence is advisable. Much of the latter has become accessible, and parts have even been published, such as the diaries of Cavid Bey and Sheykhulislam Mustafa Hayri, both Unionists close to Talaat, and Henry Morgenthau Sr.’s diary (a solid source in contrast to Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, which is used here). British Foreign Office documents are largely secondhand material compared to firsthand correspondence, diaries, German and, of course, Ottoman documentation. Correspondence with Talaat, for example, reveals wali Tahsin Pasha (one of several devoted young high functionaries working for Talaat) as being far from moderate in late 1914, even though people on the ground, including Armenians and American missionaries, believed him still to be so (he had apparently been moderate beforehand; p. 179). Tahsin was in fact an enthusiast of Gökalp's Turan from late summer 1914, when he started organizing irregular war. From spring 1915, he acted as a willing anti-Armenian executor but used deceiving language, for instance, vis-à-vis the German vice-consul in Erzurum. The reader is given some, but not many relevant hints at “war before the war” in the southern Caucasus and northern Iran, triggered by the CUP luminaries Enver, Talat, Shakir, and Nazım, and desired by earliest German war policy. The strategy aimed not only at—in contemporary Ottoman and German diction—“revolutionizing” enemy territory through jihad and, in a wave of Turanist exaltation, “liberating Russia's Turks.” It also wanted to prevent, once and for all, “a new Macedonia,” that is, international supervision in the eastern provinces. The unofficial war at the Caucasian front was the first fevered fruit of the Ottoman–German alliance. Yet, recent comprehensive views of the Ottoman world war, including Fall of the Sultanate, underrate this early internecine warmongering. It remains hidden behind Enver Pasha's later failure at Sarıkamış, although from summer 1914 it fatally polarized Christians and Muslims on this and the other side of the border.

Compared with the treatment of other peripheries, Fall of the Sultanate thus appears less successful in its attention to the catastrophic developments at the eastern side of the empire. Yet, the eastern provinces were decisive for the CUP's embrace of cataclysm—instead of reforms and neutrality—in 1914, notably because of the international Reform Agreement concluded on 8 February of that year (dealt with briefly in Chapter 3 and in a flashback in Chapter 4 on “Deportation”). Targeting a more democratic and regionalized future of the eastern Asia Minor, this agreement was a litmus test for war or peace, for the intentional destruction of the existing precarious social fabric, or for internationally monitored reform. (Because the Armenian-speaking Muslims in the eastern Black Sea region, the Hemshinli, were crypto-Christians, the view of a preceding harmonious multilingualism, p. 142, must be problematized: individuals who had wanted to return to their former faith were obstructed from doing so despite late Ottoman liberal reforms.) The final Reform Agreement, signed in February 1914, was very different from the first Russian draft of summer 1913, but they are often confused in retrospect. CUP and Kemalist authors refer often to the first draft, as do later authors based on them. The final agreement concerned seven—not six—provinces, including Trabzon (comprising parts of the Hemshinli), and thus nearly the entire eastern half of Asia Minor, and it stipulated two inspectors-general (not one, p. 156). German diplomacy considered the final compromise a success, after it had strongly backed the CUP negotiators, but also supported internationally monitored reforms because such reforms were indispensable for economic progress. The final agreement was a far cry from Armenian autonomy—the CUP's specter—but purposed functioning provincial administrations that gave the various populations and languages of the region security and their fair share under temporary supervision by inspectors from neutral countries.

The “Coda” at the end of Gingeras’ book tells the story of Ertuğrul Osman, the last heir of the Ottoman dynasty, born in Istanbul in 1912 and deceased in New York in 2009. Through the prism of Osman coming to terms with the end of empire and the Kemalist republic, the section offers the reader a peaceful and conciliatory end. This may speak for the person of Osman and the author's wish for a harmonious conclusion of his book, yet it stands at odds with the reality of present-day Turkey and its unreconciled past. Since 2015, in the context of war in Syria and Iraq, a new palace regime in Ankara has been situating itself rhetorically in the continuation of an unfinished World War I and in strong sympathy with the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate. It terminated peace talks with the Kurds. It gave up regionalizing reforms that had breathed the spirit of the February 1914 Agreement and—temporarily—restored some multicultural life to a region devastated a hundred years earlier by the Armenian genocide.

Finally, isn't there a touch of scholarly defeatism when the historical narrative situates itself between dominating poles of European imperialism, on the one hand, and the “chauvinism and brutality of the Young Turk government,” on the other, and makes do with blurredly stating the universal experience of tragedy and victimhood as a result of this constellation (p. 8)? We well know the answers to basic questions such as: Who embraced cataclysm? (The core figures of the CUP.) Who designed the destruction and dispossession of non-Muslims in the interest of a Gökalpian future for Turks and Muslims alone? (The same.) Who profited? (Again, the same, with very many acolytes in the capital and the provinces.) The term “deportation” therefore fails in replacing an apt term such as extermination and genocide. As a result, an understatement pervades elements of Fall of the Sultanate, even if the chapter on “Deportation” is instructive and the book itself worth reading and studying.