Abstract
Eyal Ginio’s comprehensive research in The Ottoman Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and Their Aftermath is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on how traumatic military defeats reshaped societies and polities in the modern era. Ginio’s case study is the Ottoman experience in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913—a two-phase war that in Western historiography has mostly remained in the shadow of World War I. The book opens by echoing the existing argument that the Ottoman experience in this conflict amounted to a total war, as the Balkan Wars already included many of the features usually identified with World War I. The Ottoman efforts at general mobilization of civilians and the economy for the war effort made the home front an integral part of warfare. Ginio rightly notes that whereas the Ottomans performed this mobilization poorly, the emphasis on its necessity dominated the Ottoman war discourse from the beginning of the war through the post-defeat debates. Though the Ottomans had been defeated in a number of previous wars, this newly total character of conflict was a main contributor in making the defeat in the First Balkan War extremely traumatic. News of mass atrocities and an exodus of Muslim families from the Balkans into Anatolia accompanied the humiliation on the battlefield and the loss of territories in Rumelia, the heartland of the Young Turk movement.