Review by Choice Review
With greater frequency WW I has been referenced in service to nationalist historiographies, to distinguish 20th-century nation-states from their imperial pasts. In those modern states emerging from the Ottoman Empire, especially Turkey and the Arab states, designating what had transpired during the war as an ethnic conflict proved crucial to such a violent process. This volume from Deringil (Lebanese American Univ.) encourages critical engagement with this distortive nationalist historiography through a careful analysis of five heretofore neglected memories of Ottoman-era soldiers. Witness to the manner in which "Turkish" officers interacted with a multi-ethnic population in the empire's Syrian territories (today's Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria), these five memoirs will serve the next generation of scholars as an invaluable window into the complicated relations maintained by a state at war with its diverse subject populations. As debates arose during the course of the war over the survival of an empire that had witnessed the rise of internal divisions along sectarian and ethnonational lines, Deringil's deep analysis of these postwar testimonials adds a new layer to the English-language scholarship on the still-understudied historiography that would co-opt such narratives. This should be required reading for students and scholars alike. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Isa Blumi, American University of Sharjah
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
