Turkey Book Talk #225 – Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford, on “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World” (Allen Lane).
The book examines how in July 1860 Damascus exploded in communal violence, when a mostly Muslim crowd tried to exterminate the Christian community – a shocking eruption of violence after hundreds of years of relative peace and coexistence. It looks at why tensions built up in the decades before 1860, as well as how the Ottoman authorities oversaw recovery of the region in the aftermath.
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This week I spoke to Eugene Rogan, the author of an authoritative new history “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920.”
Rogan is director of the Middle East Centre at the University of Oxford and also penned a major recent book on the history of the modern Arab world, so I was really happy to speak with him. The conversation was wide-ranging and stimulating, touching on some of the biggest issues around the war – resolved and unresolved – and the continued resonance of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse almost 100 years ago.
Click here to read the interview with Professor Rogan.
Read my review of the book here.
And here’s some footage of Istanbul in 1915 from the British Pathé archives, showing the historic peninsula and various warships heading up the Bosphorus:
PS. I hope my Turkey-based followers can see this post, as WordPress keeps being blocked and unblocked here.
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