Post World War I: A Comparative Analysis

As humans, we find it difficult to view a series of events, issues, or procedures through an objective lens. As a result – and with particular regard to our past – we produce a historical conception that is “exceedingly teleological,” perverting key processes by pulling them out of context and forcing them into a contrived chain of events (Hanioglu, p. 1). “It is often assumed,” Turkish professor and scholar, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, writes, “that the emergence of the Republic of Turkey in Anatolia, and of the neighboring nation-states in the surrounding territories of the disintegrated Ottoman polity, was the inevitable and predictable result of the decline of a sprawling multinational empire,” (Hanioglu, p. 1). This retrospective examination of the late Ottoman Empire, however, has become an incredible handicap in analyzing this period as a whole. In reality, the build up of consular pressure from foreign imperial powers and broken diplomatic promises drove the Ottomans to collapse. …show more content…
197). In fact, it was this strategic manipulation of the British during and after World War I that ultimately caused the dissolution of the once great Ottoman Empire. When the Ottomans first allied with the Germans in 1914, they were seen as neither a threat to the Entente powers nor as a particularly strong ally to their European counterparts; instead, they were seeking to avoid war altogether because of the heavy toll previous battles of the Balkan Wars and the Italian annexation of Libya and the Aegean Islands had taken on the Ottoman Army. And although the Entente powers began planning the postwar partition of the empire shortly after this new alliance, Britain quickly found itself pinned down by the surprisingly powerful combination of Ottoman and German resistance. In response to the wartime crisis, Britain reached out to