Chronicle of an Ending Foretold? The Great War and the Historian’s Toolbox

This essay argues that the historiography of World War I is written as if from the end – the inevitable end of the Ottoman Empire – and that this Europocentric perspective leads to a number of blind spots. The author’s present study on the publication of the Ottoman “family code” in October 1917 illustrates the need to examine the processes that occurred in the Ottoman Empire during the war and the preceding decades from the perspective of historic players who acted without knowing that the centuries-old empire was about to collapse within a few years.