A Peace to End All Peace

By the turn of the twentieth century, the progress resulting from the Industrial Revolution had pushed the countries of Western Europe to grow both economically and technologically.

The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, was called “the sick man of Europe.”

The empire was a caliphate, or an Islamic monarchy, based not on nationality but religion. In other words, while the empire was ethnically diverse, the majority of its population was Muslim.

Religion played a central role in peoples’ daily lives. Even for the empire’s minority Christian and Jewish groups, identity was synonymous with religion.

For people in western Europe, however, the Ottoman Empire seemed like a museum, with its subjects’ daily lives frozen in a past century. Constantinople introduced electric street lights only in 1912, for example – an innovation long common in major European cities.

Compared to European empires such as those of France or Britain, Ottoman political power didn’t extend much beyond the immediate Turkish heartland, covering only a small fraction of the empire.

European visitors wondered at the empire’s organization, observing that the vast majority of non-Turkish provinces were self-governed, despite the presence of Ottoman military troops.

This political arrangement did little to help the Ottomans hold territory. By the early twentieth century, the empire had lost significant areas to encroaching European interests.

In October 1912, Italy claimed the Ottoman Empire’s only remaining African territory, in what is now Libya. By that time, the majority of its southeastern European territories located in the Balkans, in Greece and in Bulgaria had also been lost.

So by the start of World War I, all that was left of the great Ottoman Empire was modern-day Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Syria and much of the Arabian peninsula.