The imbalance in the scholarship on the First World War in the Middle East is a strange phenomenon. In the last century, there have been many books on T.E. Lawrence, the Gallipoli campaign, and the highly politicized Armenian Genocide, but other aspects of the war have been written about only intermittently. This has changed in the last decade or so, with the publication of numerous empirically impressive studies that seek to tell the broader story of the war in the region. Although books from the previous era of scholarship continue to proliferate (particularly books on Lawrence), it is this other literature that is beginning to garner its fair share of attention.

The edited volume World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide is firmly grounded in this new wave of scholarship. The editors, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem and Maurus Reinkowski, have collected a coherent group of essays from top scholars in this field. The broader argument and primary organizing principle of the volume, as laid out in the editors' introduction to the book, is that the final moment of “Ottoman cataclysm”, meaning the moment at which the pluralist Ottoman imperial project ceased to be viable, began with the First Balkan War and culminated in the Armenian Genocide (essentially 1912–15). Communal bonds were broken beyond repair during this short time period and any sort of common “Ottomanity” disappeared, despite having had a short-lived revival in the aftermath of the 1908 revolution.

All of the essays in the volume have merit and support this argument. Hans Lukas-Kieser's chapter about the nature of “total war” in the Ottoman context begins the book's first section, which is entitled “Toward war”. Kieser contends that the First World War was seen by the Ottoman leadership as a fight for sovereignty and survival, which led to it being a “total war”. The uniqueness of the war's totality in the Ottoman case, according to Kieser, was the campaign to destroy a perceived internal enemy. Yiǧit Akın follows this with a chapter that is certainly the best existing summary of the Ottoman mobilization for the First World War, detailing its rationale, implementation and disastrous consequences.

The chapters in the next section support the argument that the Armenian Genocide can only be understood in the context of the traumatic era that began with the Balkan Wars. In the first chapter of this section, Y. Doǧan Çetinkaya shows that the new nationalist elite, largely represented by the increasingly dominant Committee of Union and Progress, created a culture of revenge against the Christians of the empire by employing propaganda based on atrocities against Muslims during the Balkan Wars. In the following chapter, Emre Erol argues that the expulsion of approximately 160,000 Greeks from western Anatolia to help make way for the resettlement of some of the roughly 300,000 muhacirs (Balkan Muslim refugees) was essentially an extension of the “Macedonia Question” into the empire's heartland. This, in turn, led to the increasing radicalization of the Young Turk leadership, the growing demonization of the empire's Christians, and the Armenian expulsion orders after the catastrophic early Ottoman defeats in eastern Anatolia during the First World War.

The volume then continues with two chapters analysing the communal dynamics of Palestine in this era. In her contribution, Michelle Campos reviews the breakdown of the communal relations in Palestine through the lens of the regional press. Yuval Ben-Bassat argues similarly that the relationship between the local population and the Zionists had indeed broken down during the pre-war years. In a minor caveat to the overall thrust of the book, however, he contends that although there was disillusionment with the Ottoman whole in the 1912–15 era, opposition to the empire as a construct in Palestine did not occur until late in the First World War.

The book then moves to eastern Anatolia, the region in which the disintegration of the Ottoman project manifested itself in its most extreme form. In separate chapters, Mehmet Polatel and Thomas Schmutz each analyse how land disputes between the Armenians and the Kurds in the region set the stage for much that followed during the war, with Polatel focusing more on Ottoman sources and Schmutz analysing the internationalization of the issue via the German archives. Vahé Tachjian then provides a case study of the disintegration of communal ties in the Harput-Mamüretülaziz region via the writing of two Armenians who lost their lives during the era. Uǧor Ümut Üngör provides a broader contextualization of the Armenian Genocide in the field of genocide studies and argues, using the examples of Adana and Dyarbekir, that regional variations in the Armenian Genocide can be explained via a close analysis of the interaction between national imperatives and local conditions. Finally, Hamit Bozarslan bookends the volume by concurring with the book's general argument and applying the implications of the sub-arguments to the ensuing century of unrest and violence in the region.

Overall, these essays show that the causes and implications of the Ottoman Empire's decline and ultimate demise will be much better understood when more localized studies are undertaken. The historical moment explored here (1912–15), which Bozarslan aptly describes as a “hybrid historical situation between the postimperial and prenational realities” (p. 266), played out differently in the varied parts of the empire. Understanding the lasting impact of the empire's unravelling on the different parts of the region, as Bozarslan also suggests, is key to comprehending the painful century that followed. World War I and the End of the Ottomans is a welcome sign of maturation for a field that has developed slowly. It is an important volume that deserves a place on the shelves of research libraries.