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 the Sublime Porte, the empire’s central government. Despite, or because of, this, the Ottoman Empire demonstrated its political sophistication in managing relations with Christians who remained in the empire. According to historian Eugene Rogan, for instance, after a violent pogrom against Christians in Damascus in 1860, Ottoman administrators sought to identify and punish the perpetrators in order to simultaneously reassure the survivors and avert a French intervention. Historian Michelle Campos, in turn, has argued that efforts to create a religiously inclusive form of Ottoman civic identity came to a head with the empire’s 1908 constitutional revolution. But they proved short lived.
In 1909, as many as 30,000 Armenians were killed in a series of massacres in the territory of Adana. The Balkan Wars, between 1912 and 1913, cost the empire much of its remaining territory in Europe and led many of the empire’s rulers to conclude that Christians would always represent a security threat. In February 1914, the Porte, under European pressure, signed an Armenian reform package with Russia—an agreement that placed six of the empire’s Armenian-populated provinces under the authority of two European inspector generals. Many Ottoman Muslims worried it was a prelude to eastern Anatolia’s eventual independence, and Aksakal quotes the British ambassador at the time expressing sympathy with these fears.
By this point, the empire’s leadership had largely lost faith in the prospect of a multireligious future. In 1913, the Ottoman Ministry of War called for a nationwide boycott against Christian businesses, calling it an “economic holy war.” In the spring of 1914, the government began a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing against Greeks on the Aegean coast. Only by forcing the Christian inhabitants to flee, they believed, could the territory be secured.
The late 19th and early 20th century also saw the rise of Arab national identity, particularly in the cities of the Levant, as well as an increasing attention to Turkish-Arab ethnic differences in the imperial capital. But this took a less separatist course among the empire’s largely Muslim, Arabic-speaking population. Arab nationalism was initially focused on linguistic and cultural revival. On the eve of World War I, its champions generally advocated greater political recognition and representation, pushing for political parties or autonomy instead of full independence. One widely discussed idea was to preserve the Ottoman state as a Turco-Arab dual monarchy on the model of Austria-Hungary.
Popular accounts of World War I often highlight T. E. Lawrence and Faisal’s Arab Revolt in the Hijaz. Aksakal also describes uprisings in Shia Iraq, as well as Ottoman suspicions about the reliability of Arab conscripts. But that’s only part of the story. Faisal, for example, claimed he was rebelling against the specific abuses of the wartime Ottoman government, not the Sultanate itself.
What’s more, work by historians Michael Provence, Alp Yenen, and Hasan Kayali has shown that, in the face of widespread famine and persecution, the empire’s Arab elite largely remained committed to the empire until the end of the war, and sometimes after. Figures who would later emerge as prominent Arab leaders often still saw themselves as Ottomans until that was no longer a viable option. Many Arab Ottoman military officers like Nuri al-Said, who went on to become prime minister of Iraq, only joined the Arab revolt after ending up in British prisoner of war camps. When the revolt succeeded, Said continued to explore, however opportunistically, continued political ties. In 1918, he transmitted a proposal on Faisal’s behalf suggesting a federal arrangement where “Arabia” would be “to the Ottoman state what Bavaria is to Germany.”
Turkish troops take part in a drill in Syria during World War I.Popperfoto via Getty Images
So what does all this mean for speculation about the Ottoman Empire’s survival? The question is not so much whether the Ottoman sultan himself might have lived on as a figurehead in Turkey or somewhere else. As Ryan Gingeras argues, the fall of the Ottoman royal family was distinct from the end of Ottoman rule over much of the Middle East.
When it comes to the endurance of the Ottoman Empire as a territorial entity, however, historical events set limits on any speculation. Survival might have simply meant a few more decades of formal empire, with Ottoman leadership still unable to navigate foreign threats and domestic tensions, leaving the Middle East with a different, but still fractured, map of newly made nation states.
Ottoman leaders entered World War I on Germany’s side to secure their sovereignty in the face of threats from Russia, France, and Britain. As Aksakal explains, these countries pointedly refused Ottoman offers to remain neutral in return for a formal guarantee of the Empire’s territorial integrity—meaning that if the Ottomans had stayed out of the war, they might have been attacked anyway, either immediately or down the road.
Perhaps even in an alternate history, the Soviet government, after recovering from the Russian civil war, would eventually have taken a renewed interest in the plight of the Ottoman Armenians across its border. Perhaps Britain, still worried about the security of the Suez Canal, would have kept eyeing Palestine. Suppose at some point in the 1920s, an Armenian uprising prompts a Russian intervention in northeastern Anatolia. Following several years of intense fighting, the front lines stabilize at roughly the same place they actually stood in 1917, and a new border emerges.
The war prompts intercommunal violence on both sides, leading many Armenians to flee into Russian-held territory and Muslims to flee toward the Ottoman Empire. Tensions also flare between Muslims and Armenians in Jerusalem. Britain, taking advantage of the disturbance, seizes the Holy Land in the name of restoring order and declares it an international zone. Ibn Saud takes the Hijaz. France, refusing to be left out, launches a campaign to capture the Maronite region of Mount Lebanon. After an initially successful naval landing outside of Beirut, French forces eventually advance as far as Maysalun, where they are stopped by an Ottoman force led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Kemal Ataturk circa 1919 with his advisors. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Where does this scenario leave the rest of the empire? It’s easy to imagine its ethnically diverse Muslim inhabitants rallying together in the face of European invasions. But even in a more fanciful alternate history, nationalism wouldn’t disappear. As Kayali has shown, a growing political divide between Turks and Arabs may not have been inevitable, but it wasn’t purely a matter of chance—or European instigation—either.
Indeed, as Ottoman leadership worked to build a stronger and more centralized state, this process itself drove resistance. In the early 20th century, the Istanbul government sent out a growing number of judges, gendarmes, teachers, and tax collectors to more effectively govern the Arab provinces. Most spoke Turkish and some carried distinctly chauvinistic attitudes, both of which registered with locals who didn’t necessarily appreciate what these bureaucrats were doing in the first place. Even democratic measures could fuel nationalism. Creating a parliament, for example, inevitably provoked debate about which language or languages should be spoken on its floor.
Notably, the one major multiethnic empire that in some sense survived World War I was Russia, which emerged reconstituted as the Soviet Union. But even though the Soviet government in Moscow kept the vast bulk of the power, it made a point of co-opting national sentiment by reorganizing the empire as a series of nominally autonomous republics and taking steps to at first pander to, and later brutally suppress, their national identities.
It’s possible that the Ottoman Empire, if it survived, would have taken a similar approach, only with Islam instead of communism as the glue. Imagine the government recognizing, even celebrating, the Turkish, Arab, and perhaps Kurdish people as constituent elements of the empire. Each group would be able to use its language in circumscribed local situations, even as the Porte increasingly promoted Turkish as the language of government, business, and public life.
In trying to manage ethnic divisions, the Ottoman Empire, no less than the European powers that actually took over the Middle East, would have been tempted to manipulate borders to its advantage. As Samuel Dolbee has shown, the Ottoman government had previously redrawn internal provincial boundaries to enhance the state’s power at the expense of local populations. Post-war Ottoman leaders might well have created new geographic territories in order to break up the empire’s Arab population and dilute its political influence. Perhaps, in keeping with some actual proposals for Ottoman decentralization, they would have ended up with Syria and Iraq.
Would this have worked? Maybe. An Ottoman state flush with oil wealth might have had more resources with which to improve the lives of its Arab subjects and win their allegiance. Or maybe not. It’s also possible the Ottomans would have eventually faced a determined anti-colonial uprising by Arabs across the southern part of their empire: In the aftermath of World War II, Arab activists grow increasingly resentful as Istanbul hoards the region’s oil revenues. They quickly secure Soviet support in their bid for independence. The United States deploys military advisors to assist the Porte in a rapidly escalating proxy war.
Here, fans of the everything-basically-turns-out-the-same school of alternate history might be tempted to imagine the Ottoman Empire’s trajectory proceeding something like Pakistan’s. Pakistan was founded in a 1947 as a multiethnic state for Muslims in the former British Raj. Following a civil war in 1971, East Pakistan, a geographically and ethnically distinct part of the country, split off to become Bangladesh. Maybe in the Bangladesh scenario, Istanbul’s loss of the Middle East would prompt a coup against the Ottoman government, ultimately leaving a geographically smaller republic that looked a lot like Turkey.
All this, of course, is impossible to know. But what makes this foray into alternate history more than a silly diversion is that it speaks to the enduring question of what political futures are possible. From Syria to Iraq to Israel-Palestine, high stakes debates continue to rage over whether people can realistically be expected to live together in the same political entity, or whether they would be better off divided into separate states.
Alas, the best history can do is offer a lot of contradictory examples of what works and what doesn’t. Even with the benefit of hindsight, it remains remarkably difficult to parse when religious and ethnic differences will prove insurmountable. People certainly don’t need to be divided up. But divisions, once inflamed, can prove nearly impossible to reverse.
What stands out in the Ottoman case is that some of the fundamental problems would almost certainly have endured, even as the specific conflicts may have differed. Alternate history can never offer some kind of panacea—a perfect path not taken. Instead, it offers us a series of lesser evils to sort through.
