Over the last decade, the field of war and society studies has made a brilliant upsurge in Ottoman historiography, and no doubt the history of World War I constitutes the most dynamic aspect of this phenomenon. Yiğit Akın’s When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire represents a fresh contribution to this burgeoning field. This original study combines a wide spectrum of sources, from official Ottoman archival documents to multiple contemporary periodicals, and from soldiers’ memoirs to folk songs about the Ottoman mobilization experience. The study is built on the premise that the Ottoman mobilization for the war effort was so intensive that it, in turn, intensified the interaction between the state and society. Akın argues that, as military success in the war came to depend upon obtaining as many resources from the home front as possible, the state increasingly made more and more demands on its people, including not only an extended system of conscription, but also such harsh interventions into people’s lives as the requisitioning of agricultural products, the commandeering of farm animals, forced employment in transportation and agriculture, and deportation and forced relocation. What ultimately made these wartime policies as destructive as the defeats on the battlefield was the distinct context of the Ottoman war effort. In particular, Akın mentions four interrelated factors that characterized this context: the military had just emerged from a traumatic defeat in the Balkan Wars; the state’s infrastructure capacity was poor; the empire had very limited access to global resources; and the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) saw in the war an opportunity to redesign the empire demographically.

When the War Came Home consists of six chapters that elaborate on Akın’s aforementioned argument. Chapter 1 (“From the Balkan Wars to the Great War”) draws the background via a compact analysis of how the impact of the Balkan defeat reshaped society, the military, and politics in the Ottoman Empire. One interesting point deserving emphasis in Akın’s discussion of this much studied topic in Ottoman historiography is how the Balkan defeat deteriorated “the already negative image of military service” (p. 50) in Ottoman society, as thousands of Ottoman soldiers returned home with painful memories of everyday life on the battlefield in a brutal industrial conflict. As a result, unlike the pro-war elites, large segments of Ottoman society were already actually reluctant to engage in another major conflict so soon, which posed a difficult challenge for the Unionist government both on the threshold of World War I and during the actual conflict itself.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 attest to the process through which the boundaries between front line and home front became blurred in this age of the totalization of warfare—a process in which the waging of war and civilian daily life grew remarkably intertwined. Chapter 2 (“From the Fields to the Ranks”) deals with conscription and mobilization’s impact on civilian life. Here, Akın discusses how the enlistment of hundreds of thousands of peasant men into the army at the peak of harvest season came as a devastating shock to the predominantly rural Ottoman society. Chapter 3 (“Filling the Ranks, Emptying Homes”) focuses on the practice of soldiering. An especially important point highlighted in this chapter is how, throughout the war, morale on the home front was closely linked to morale on the battlefield: constantly deteriorating conditions at home made soldiers ever more concerned about their families’ dire straits, even as they themselves were serving on multiple fronts where the living conditions were already quite dire. Low morale not only turned thousands of enlisted men into disloyal soldiers, as attested to by remarkable increases in draft evasion and desertions, but it also made civilians reluctant to contribute to the war effort. At the same time, the Unionist government relentlessly tried to tackle this tension via the use of effective propaganda rhetoric. While religious and nationalist symbolism is an already well-known aspect of this rhetoric, Akın sheds new light on less documented propaganda tools, especially “the cult of the ordinary soldier” (p. 92); this point is especially worth mentioning because, even more than in previous Ottoman wars, during World War I the symbolism of the ordinary soldier occupied a central place in official rhetoric.

Chapter 4 (“Feeding the Army, Starving the People”) analyzes what the author aptly calls “the mobilization of material resources” (p. 112). In this, perhaps the most original chapter in the book, Akın underscores the critical dilemma that haunted the Unionist government throughout the war; namely, the question of how to feed an enormous army on the battlefront without simultaneously jeopardizing the livelihood of civilians. This was indeed a huge challenge, as the mobilizing army was, as one Ottoman officer noted, “like an insatiable giant” (p. 113) that seriously threatened to deplete the empire’s resources. This chapter presents a thorough discussion of this multilayered issue, but one particularly interesting point that receives stress is how the lack of transport vehicles proved to be one of the Ottoman state’s most serious “logistical nightmares” (p. 118). Accordingly, the requisitioning of draft animals became almost as important for the army as the mobilization of actual manpower: one good example representing the significance of this sensitive issue is how one of the military authorities’ first acts in the Ottoman provinces in August 1914 was “to seize all the best horses in the streets” (p. 118). Though one might have expected Akın to dwell in more detail on this aspect of the Ottoman war effort—an important subject that remains largely neglected in the historiography of the Ottomans in World War I—the examples he does provide are still enough to show how the removal of both draft animals and able-bodied men from villages to serve in the war effort had a negative impact on agricultural production, with the area under cultivation declining from 60 million dönüm in 1914 to just 24 million by 1916 (pp. 130–131). The government’s requisition orders also brought about further interventions into civilian life, creating a conflict between the state and the people that led to a wide array of attitudes on the part of the people, ranging from voluntary support to such acts of resistance as hiding draft animals from the authorities.

Chapter 5 (“In the Home: Wives and Mothers”) focuses on Ottoman women, who felt the disastrous impact of the war in both their personal and their social lives. Akın’s approach to the home front here is cautious enough not to ignore class, ethnic, and regional differences regarding how the impact of the war was felt at the civilian level, but he also argues that, when it comes to women, the general observation can be made that the overwhelming majority of women bore enormous burdens and suffered privation, hard work, and abuse during wartime. Even so, as the author vividly exemplifies, Ottoman women did not remain entirely passive in the face of such hardships: the increasingly difficult living conditions, as well as the absence of their men, compelled many women from various parts of the empire to interact with state authorities by sending petitions to government institutions. These petitions are a valuable source of documentation that not only provides many significant clues about how Ottoman women suffered and coped with multiple problems on the home front, but also sheds light on the gender dimension of the Ottoman war effort.

The book’s final chapter (“On the Road: Deportees and Refugees”) is perhaps the least original contribution of this otherwise excellent book. Though it attempts to deal with the huge issue of the large-scale deportations and refugee movements that occurred in the empire during the war, in the end this subject matter is indeed so vast that the chapter can amount only to a critical summary of the issue, concerning which there is an already vast literature (particularly on the Armenian deportation of 1915). The immensity and sensitivity of this particular topic also runs the risk of bifurcating the main focus of the book. That is, rather than attempting to cover every major issue related to the Ottoman home front in World War I within the course of a single study, a better strategy for Akın would have been to be more selective in determining the book’s scope and to give more space to the previous five chapters, which as mentioned represent quite original contributions to the literature.

Finally, When the War Came Home deserves special credit for its utilization of Anatolian folk songs and folk poetry about the Ottoman war effort in World War I. Akın has successfully compiled this material from quite scattered sources and incorporates them well into the documentary basis of his discussion of how simple peasants, widowed women, and disabled veterans actually felt about and responded to the Ottoman mobilization experience. These folk songs and folk poetry, which have never before been used in such a systematic way in previous studies on the Ottoman war effort, provide a valuable contribution “from below” to our understanding of the impact of the war on the Ottoman home front during World War I.