Jeremy Salt. The Last Ottoman Wars: The Human Cost, 1877–1923. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 424, with bibliography and index. $40.00 (hardcover); $32.00 (ebook). ISBN: 9781607817048 (hardcover); 9781607817055 (ebook).
The period from the onset of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 to the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 was a tumultuous one for the Ottoman Empire and its subjects. Jeremy Salt treats these nearly fifty years as a distinct period in Ottoman history defined by a series of military conflicts. His stated goal is to highlight the suffering of Ottoman-Muslim civilians, which he accuses the “‘western’ cultural mainstream” and “‘western’ historians” of ignoring (pp. 2, 80).
The Last Ottoman Wars weaves its way through the war with the Russian Empire, the Young Turk revolution, the Italian War, the Balkan Wars, World War I, and post-war Anatolian and Caucasian conflicts, always with an eye toward their impact on the empire’s Muslim majority. The literature, Salt argues, has paid outsize attention to Ottoman Christians, rendering Muslims invisible (p. ix). To correct for this fault, he provides snapshots of wartime civilian life through archival documents and reports of Ottoman as well as Western provenance, embedding them within broader contextual discussions.
This source base, however, is the book’s most glaring problem. Though Salt wants to focus on the “human cost” of the wars in the late Ottoman period, actual humans are mostly absent. Diaries, memoirs, and other ego-documents are rarely used. Five of those cited directly are written by Ottomans: a translation of Cemal Paşa’s memoirs, the second volume of Halide Edib’s English-language autobiography, the memoirs of a brigadier general, the diary of a corporal, and the memoirs of a reserve officer. (All five cover the WWI and post-WWI periods.) These are doubtlessly useful sources, but they are hardly adequate for a book concerned with Muslim civilians over the course of the empire’s final half century. Granted, these sorts of sources are difficult to come by, especially for the period before the war. Salt admits this in the acknowledgments, citing the low literacy rate as the chief cause of this dearth of material (pp. viii–ix). But his other sources provide little texture beyond statistics and macabre anecdotes. Other Ottomanists, such as Selim Deringil and Yiğit Akın, have managed to get around this problem in their recent monographs.[1]
Salt does not take the question of sources lightly. In a few instances, he veers into short discussions on the topic, and these are crucial to the book’s overall project. He refers—not without a bit of snideness—to the importance of “real” and “genuine” Ottoman archival documents, taking other historians to task for their credulity vis-à-vis narrative sources (pp. 254–55). On its face, his critique is a valid one. Some may take issue with the undercurrent of archive fetishism present in this particular argument, but Salt’s stance is well within the norms of Ottoman historiography. What cannot be overlooked, however, is Salt’s heavy reliance on compilations of documents rather than on the archive itself. Published by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, the Turkish Historical Society, the Prime Ministerial State Archives General Directorate, and others, these volumes—bearing titles such as Archive Documents about the Atrocities and Genocide Inflicted upon Turks by Armenians, Documents on Massacre [sic] Perpetrated by Armenians, and so on—make up a good deal of Salt’s primary sources. At no point are Ottoman archival documents cited directly, and the bibliography makes no distinction between archival, primary, and secondary sources. To his credit, Salt does note the necessity of reading archival materials critically (p. 254), but when they bolster his argument, he merely gestures toward skepticism without practicing it. Railing in some places against overdependency on Western diplomatic sources and newspaper reports—another valid point—he leans on them in others.
The Last Ottoman Wars promises to challenge mainstream historiography. Rather than posing such a challenge, it relies in large part on documents curated by institutions of the Turkish state to craft narratives and draw conclusions that come across as old hat to those who have read Salt’s past work[2] and other studies on similar subjects published by University of Utah Press.[3] A source base as narrow and selective as this could not have produced anything else. Though there are more successful surveys available, the non-specialist—Salt’s primary intended audience (p. 8)—can learn much about late Ottoman political history from this volume. Ottomanists, however, will likely have difficulty looking beyond its methodological shortcomings.
Aram Ghoogasian
Princeton University
[1] See Selim Deringil, The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands: Turkish Memoirs and Testimonies of the Great War (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019); and Yiğit Akın, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
[2] Jeremy Salt, Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878–1896 (London: F. Cass, 1993); Jeremy Salt, “The Narrative Gap in Ottoman Armenian History,” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 1 (2003): 19–36.
[3] Yücel Güçlü, Armenians and the Allies in Cilicia, 1914–1923 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010); Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005); Justin McCarthy et al., The Armenian Rebellion at Van (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006).