The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

“A scholarly, readable and balanced history.” —The Independent on Sunday

Like England’s Charles II, the Ottoman Empire took “an unconscionable time dying.” Since the seventeenth century, observers had been predicting the collapse of this so-called Sick Man of Europe, yet it survived all its rivals. As late as 1910, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents. Unlike the Romanovs, Habsburgs, or Hohenzollerns, the House of Osman, which had allied itself with the Kaiser, was still recognized as an imperial dynasty during the peace conference following World War I.

This book offers a provocative view of the empire’s decline, from the failure to take Vienna in 1683 to the abolition of the Sultanate by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in 1922 during a revolutionary upsurge in Turkish national pride. The narrative contains instances of violent revolt and bloody reprisals, such as the massacres of Armenians in 1896, and other “ethnic episodes” in Crete and Macedonia. More generally, it emphasizes recurring problems: competition between religious and secular authority; the acceptance or rejection of Western ideas; and the strength or weakness of successive Sultans. It also highlights the special challenges of the early twentieth century, when railways and oilfields gave new importance to Ottoman lands in the Middle East.

Alan Palmer offers considerable insight into the historical roots of many contemporary problems in the Middle East and the Balkans as well as the Kurdish struggle for survival. He also recounts the Ottoman Empire’s lingering interests in their oil-rich Libyan provinces. By exploring that legacy over three centuries, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire examines a past whose effect on the present may go a long way toward explaining the future.

“Alan Palmer writes the sort of history that dons did before ‘accessible’ became an academic insult. It is cool, rational, scholarly, literate.” —John Keegan