Yiğit Akın's When the War Came Home is a welcome addition to a slowly but steadily expanding literature on the Ottoman empire in World War I. The topic of the Ottoman experience is a vast one, worthy of many volumes. Akın's study, as the title suggests, focuses on the domestic front. Recovering the thoughts, emotions, and memories of a population that was overwhelmingly illiterate and consequently left few textual clues is a challenge that Akın meets, in part, by examining folk songs and laments from the war. Taking a cue from the lyrics, Akın's study approaches “the war through the prism of the family and the individual, rather than that of empire and religion” (2). This shift in focus from the abstract categories of state and religion that the great majority of studies adopt to the more tangible ones of family and person lends When the War Comes Home freshness and originality. The book has a number of additional qualities that recommend it.
The first is that, at the same time that it looks to folk songs and stories for insights, it is grounded in archival research. It makes very good use of Turkey's Prime Ministerial (now Presidential) Ottoman Archives, the largest and most important repository of Ottoman documents, particularly for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Akın supplements these sources with Ottoman newspapers and periodicals as well as documentation from US and British diplomatic and private sources. The book does not take advantage of the archives of the Directorate of Military History and Strategic Studies in Ankara, which houses the enormous holdings of the Ottoman army in World War I. Given that the focus of the book is on the experience of the war on the domestic front and not on the Ottoman armed forces, this is not a critical defect. Nonetheless, those archival holdings might have yielded insight into how the difficulties on the domestic front that Akın catalogs affected and influenced the strategic thinking and behavior of the Ottoman army during the war.
A second virtue is that, as noted earlier, Akın makes use of folk songs, poetry, and stories to extract a portrait of how common people understood and made sense of what was truly a great tribulation. While earlier publications and studies gesture toward the same conclusions that Akın presents, such as the alienation of much of the population from the Ottoman state and government, his conclusions are based in carefully-sourced argumentation.
A third virtue of the book is its consistent presentation of fine analysis. Akın delivers his observations, conclusions, and judgments after presenting to the reader empirical evidence and arguments using transparent logic. He avoids drawing hasty or sensational conclusions, and judiciously weighs the interplay of multiple factors. The fourth prominent virtue of the book is the quality of the writing. Throughout the book Akın's prose is fluid, clear, and a pleasure to read.
When the War Came Home is divided into six chapters along with an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter addresses the Balkan Wars, which are widely recognized for the physical and psychological trauma that they inflicted on Ottoman society. Akın, however, perceptively contrasts the initial mass enthusiasm for the Balkan Wars with the dread of war and cynicism toward the state that characterized popular sentiment at the outset of the Great War. Chapters 2 and 3 address the question of mobilization and conscription, with the former focused on conscription itself and its effects on the soldiers and the latter on exploring how the absence of men affected the women, families, and communities that they left behind.
Chapter 4 plumbs the enormous question of food supply, and skillfully shows how interconnected conscription, agricultural production, and the war effort were. The diversion of men to the front caused harvests to plunge. This, in turn made it difficult to feed the ranks and thereby maintain the army. The fifth chapter looks at the war through the eyes of the wives and mothers of the soldiers. It reveals just how devastating conscription was to families and describes the considerable suffering incurred by women on the home front. The sixth and final chapter takes up the harrowing experience of refugees and the horrific fates of the Christian Syriacs, Armenians, and Greeks who were subjected to mass deportation and massacre. Among its findings are the counterintuitive one that the Ottoman press regularly emphasized the Ottoman Armenians’ contribution to the war effort, and the less surprising but rarely acknowledged one that deep uncertainty about the future inflicted severe psychological strain upon the deportees and often overwhelmed them.
When the War Came Home concerns itself primarily with wartime Anatolia, and has less to say about the Arab lands of the empire. Because it concentrates on the domestic experience, readers unfamiliar with the general course of the war would benefit by reading another volume alongside it. Nonetheless, its solid research, fresh approach, and clear writing make it valuable scholarship.
