Middle East and North Africa

Following its defeat in World War I, the Ottoman Empire came to an end on Nov. 1, 1922. After six centuries of splendor, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the gates of Vienna, the once-great sultanate stumbled spent into the 20th century and finally collapsed.

But what if it hadn’t?

Following its defeat in World War I, the Ottoman Empire came to an end on Nov. 1, 1922. After six centuries of splendor, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the gates of Vienna, the once-great sultanate stumbled spent into the 20th century and finally collapsed.

The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Aksakal, Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $32, January 2026

But what if it hadn’t?

The fall of the Ottomans was once seen as an inevitable end for “the sick man of Europe,” especially during a historical moment that left empires from the Qing to the Hapsburgs in tatters. But a growing number of works by historians such as Donald Quataert and Hasan Kayali argue that the Ottomans’ decline was overstated and its collapse was not predestined. In fact, had its leadership stayed out of World War I, or had its German and Austrian allies proved victorious, the empire might well have survived.

Mustafa Aksakal’s The War That Made the Middle East offers the latest and most compelling take on this argument. Aksakal, a historian at Georgetown University, argues that on the eve of the Great War, the Ottoman Empire was not a sick man, doomed to decline by sectarian and national separatist movements. Rather, it was a viable political entity that was destroyed by catastrophic decisions, external invasions, and the profound strain of an existential conflict. As Aksakal writes, “A different future for the empire was also on the table, one that kept alive and extended the empire’s history of a multiethnic and multireligious society.”

What would this hypothetical, post-war Ottoman state have looked like? Perhaps wisely, most historians are hesitant to delve too far into the speculative realm of alternate history. But their scholarship nonetheless provides clues for anyone foolhardy enough to try.

A Proclamation of the Constitution of the Ottoman Empire, dated July 24, 1908. Museum private collection/Alamy

In the decades leading up to World War I, the Ottoman state had seen bold political experiments toward liberal rights and constitutional rule, alongside ugly outbreaks of intercommunal bloodletting. As the historian Ussama Makdisi writes, “Ottoman modernity … promised both a multiethnic and multireligious sovereign future and a xenophobic world without minorities.” In the course of the war, this contradiction would be resolved, culminating in a tragic moment where, as recounted by Aksakal, a politician named Ahmed Riza spoke out in the Ottoman senate, citing the Ottoman constitution to unsuccessfully protest the Armenian genocide as it was being carried out.

But if the Ottoman government had not plunged into a global conflagration and lost, would things have turned out better? Could the empire have emerged as a pluralistic state in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews—not to mention Turks, Kurds, and Arabs—all enjoyed some measure of civic equality within a functioning parliamentary monarchy?

There is some evidence for optimism. What stands out, though, is that by 1914, the empire looked much more promising as a multiethnic society than a multireligious one. If the Ottoman state survived in some meaningful form, it would most likely have been as a predominantly and explicitly Muslim one. Imagine a political entity where Turks, Arabs, and Kurds were granted equal rights and official recognition as the empire’s constituent ethnic communities, but where many Christians had been ethnically cleansed, and several key Christian regions had been seized by Western powers.

The growing salience of religion in determining loyalty and belonging is evident in the actual history of the Ottoman Empire before and during World War I.

Throughout the 19th century, European powers, particularly Russia, had helped Christian groups, including the Greeks (1832), Serbs (1867), and Bulgarians (1878), secure independence from........

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