On When the War Came Home

When the War Came Home is historical scholarship at its best.

When I first began to read this book, I thought it was going to be a text about the way in which World War I led to long historical memory as a result of grief in the same manner as This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. That is not at all what this book is about. Although Akin nods to the lamentations that Ottoman people (especially Turks, the book is mostly concerned with the core provinces of Anatolia) had, the historical question driving the book is: Why was World War I so devastating in the Ottoman Empire?

I think that most Euro-American know plenty about the butchery of the Western Front, which was immortalized by All Quiet on the Western Front. We also know that conditions on the “home front” in western Europe were really bad, although not necessary devastating outside of the Low Countries. Yet, Akin argues that post-Ottoman (Turkish) society was fundamentally transformed by the First World War. In spite of all of the deaths by combatants, non-combatants had a hellish experience beyond that.

First of all, Akin argues that the First World War fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the Ottoman state and its subjects. This occurred in a number of different ways, including the introduction of conscription, requisition of food, forced employment in industries necessitated by the war, and more. This was not a “neutral” intensification of contact between a state and its subjects, it was a net-negative for nearly everybody—the CUP initiated policies of deportation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, fields lay fallow (perhaps watered by blood, in some areas), and anything bought was done so far below market values.

Akin then argues that there were four interrelated characteristics that demanded Ottoman authorities engage is such brutal policies. First, the Ottoman Empire’s infrastructure was some of the weakest in Europe; while there were some infrastructural development projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the construction of the Hijaz telegraph, for instance, European debt commissions seriously hindered the Ottomans’ ability to develop and industrialize in a way that would make them competitive with other countries. Second, the Ottomans’ experience of World War I occurred nearly entirely within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, ensuring that internal resources were threatened by war; moreover, British and French blockades of Ottoman ports made it impossible for them to access global markets. Third, the outcome of the Balkan Wars primed CUP members to believe that this war was existential; should they lose the war, the Ottoman Empire as a state would be dismembered—as it turns out, they were right. Fourth, members of the CUP actually saw the First World War as an opportunity—as Petyr Baelish says in Game of Thrones, “chaos is a ladder;” unfortunately for Ottoman subjects, this “ladder” was an attempt to wipe out peoples that could “betray” the Ottoman Empire. We all know the results: Unionists committed the Armenian Genocide out of fear that Anatolian and Caucasian Armenians were collaborating with Russia, Greeks were murdered or deported in Aegean cities like Izmir, and other non-Turkish populations were forcibly expelled or killed.

This is a bleak book—it does not tell a happy story. As a peasant that Akin references at the end of the introduction states [speaking in 1940]: “The Great War spoiled things for everyone. For four years, people suffered lots of misery. Now, they cannot forget it, no matter how hard they try. Before the war, our weddings would last all week. Since the war, weddings have lost all joy” (13).

Nevertheless, this is a welcome addition to the scholarship that gives a really good sense of the brutality of the “home front.”