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INTRODUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

Mustafa Aksakal
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Extract

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

Type
Introduction
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4: World War I , November 2014 , pp. 653 - 656
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 Gelvin, James L., The Modern Middle East: A History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 182Google Scholar.

2 Thompson also remarks that the “Ottoman defeat in World War I caused the defeat of constitutionalism.” Thompson, Elizabeth F., Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Provence, Michael, “Ottoman Modernity, Colonialism, and Insurgency in the Interwar Arab East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 205–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halabi, Awad, “Liminal Loyalties: Ottomanism and Palestinian Responses to the Turkish War of Independence, 1919–22,” Journal of Palestine Studies 41 (2012): 19–37Google Scholar.

4 See also, in this regard, Çetinkaya's book on The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the Working Classes in the Formation of Modern Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); and Brummett, Pamira, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

5 This body of scholarship is too voluminous to recount here, but for a discussion of the war's historiography focusing on Turkey, see Alexandre Toumarkine, “Historiographie turque de la Première Guerre mondiale sur les fronts ottomans: problèmes, enjeux et tendances,” in Histoire@Politique: Politique, culture, société (January–April 2014): 1–20 (http://www.histoire-politique.fr).

6 Yanıkdağ, Yücel, Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 16–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Gelvin, James L., “World War I and the Palestine Mandate,” in The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 77Google Scholar.