"This is a landmark new history of the origins of war and dictatorship in the modern Middle East. Mustafa Aksakal deploys an astonishing breadth of research to weave a tragic story about the disastrous choices made by Ottoman rulers confronting existential threats during World War I. He shows how the Ottoman Empire, like so many other states, destroyed its own people in a war against both external imperialists and internal opponents. A must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the Armenian Genocide, Islamic politics, Middle Eastern dictatorship, and the region's ongoing trauma." --Elizabeth F. Thompson, author of How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs "Few wars have more profoundly affected the future than World War I. Mustafa Aksakal, the leading expert on the final struggles of the Ottoman Empire, demonstrates in clear, powerful prose that the Young Turk radicals who seized control of the empire on the eve of the war were the architects of Ottoman destruction. Going deeper than diplomatic or military history, Aksakal grounds his book in the social realities and misperceptions that led Ottoman leaders to kill hundreds of thousands of their Armenian and Assyrian subjects in a desperate, ill-conceived fight against perceived internal enemies.

" --Ronald Grigor Suny, author of "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide " The War That Made the Middle East explores the Ottoman Empire's struggle to preserve its beleaguered sovereignty and reconstitute itself through the crucible of the First World War. Offering a corrective to Eurocentric diplomatic accounts, deterministic national histories of successor states, and reductionist genocide-centered narratives, Aksakal draws on rare Ottoman archival materials and overlooked German sources to illuminate the complexity of a transformative war." --Hasan Kayali, author of Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations.