Eventually, World War I provided a solution of sorts. The Ottomans had grown close to Germany since the 1870s, mainly because it was the only Great Power without a direct interest in the Middle East. But in 1914 they allowed their ties with Berlin to draw them into a conflict for which they were completely unprepared. Communications had improved, writes Finkel, but transportation infrastructure was still so rudimentary that it took more than a month to travel from Istanbul to Syria and nearly two months to reach Mesopotamia. The whole ramshackle enterprise was almost begging to be attacked. Soon, hostile armies were invading the Dardanelles, the Caucasus region, eastern Anatolia and the Arab areas, with ghastly military consequences. Casualties zoomed and, by the end of the conflict, the empire had been reduced to little more than its Anatolian core.

Still, radical surgery of this sort was not without certain benefits. By shearing away virtually all of the Ottomans' Arab and Christian possessions, the war paved the way for the rise of ethnic Turkish nationalism, a force that was not only different from Ottoman imperialism but in many ways its opposite. Ottoman writers had used words like "Turk," "Kurd" and "Arab" as terms of disparagement, often with the adjectives "ignorant" or "dishonest" attached. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, no doubt in response to the growth of pan-Slavism and similar ideologies in Europe and Russia, a different view of Turkishness began to emerge. Rather than a term of opprobrium, it came to be seen as a badge of pride. Still, the break with past practice was less than complete. In contrast to the Ottomans, post-World War I nationalists defined Turkishness ethnically, but religious criteria lingered. Thus, Greek Anatolians were a legitimate ethnic minority but Sunni Kurds were not. Since they were Muslim, they had to be Turks. In solving one ethnic problem, the nationalists opened the door to another.

The culmination of this process was the Turkish republic, a secular state with a tradition of military authoritarianism, lingering disputes over mosque-state relations and more than its share of ethnic conflict. The new regime, led by a former military officer named Mustafa Kemal--subsequently dubbed Atatürk, which translates roughly as "father of his people"--moved aggressively to sever its ties with the Muslim imperial past. The sultan was sent packing, the caliphate was abolished, the fez was outlawed, and Sufi lodges and the graves of Sufi saints were closed off. The old Muslim lunar calendar was abandoned, as was the Muslim practice of numbering hours from sunset. The legal code was Westernized, the status of women revolutionized, Arabic script abolished and the language reformed so as to purge it of Persian and Arab influences, a process that further distanced Turkey from its imperial past. It was as if Italy had expelled the pope, nationalized the Vatican and banned the clerical collar. By forestalling change for centuries on end, the Ottomans merely insured that it would be all the more violent when it finally arrived.

Caroline Finkel, who provides a minute account of what each grand vizier did at nearly every passing moment, is plainly one of those historians who believe that God is in the details. The results are not for the faint of heart, and many readers, confronted with a long parade of wars, assassinations and palace coups, will no doubt find the multisyllabic Turkish names swimming before their eyes. She has little sense of drama or how to paint a scene, which makes for a certain narrative flatness. She also pays little attention to underlying social or economic forces. We learn little about urban life, peasant conditions, the technological standstill that contributed to the empire's decline or, for that matter, the special circumstances that enabled it to grow in the first place. For matters such as these, readers will find Stanford Shaw's two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, published by Cambridge three decades ago, to be both more readable and more informative.

Still, Finkel is judicious, evenhanded and objective, qualities not exactly in abundance among historians of the Balkans and Middle East, and Osman's Dream is an impressive and important work. It is also very timely. Readers who delve into it will likely do so with one overriding question in mind: Is it any coincidence that the old Ottoman territory now spans some of the most troubled places on earth? To what degree can the Ottomans be held responsible for the arc of violence extending in recent years from the Danube to the Euphrates?

The answer: To a great degree they can. The empire left behind a trail of impoverishment and underdevelopment at least as bad as that of the Spanish and Russian empires, and maybe even worse. The famous millet system, in which Jews, Armenians, Greeks and other ethno-religious minorities were granted a high degree of autonomy, is an example of how even the more positive aspects of Ottoman rule eventually turned into their opposite. Based ultimately on Islamic law, which grants protection to "People of the Book" as long as they do not challenge Muslim rule as a whole, it served as a model of tolerant pluralism at a time when Europeans were torching synagogues and threatening the few Muslim communities left in their midst with conversion, expulsion or death. Given a record like this, it is hard not to admire the Ottoman sultan who, welcoming Jews that Ferdinand had just kicked out of Spain, reportedly observed: "Can you call such a king wise and intelligent? He is impoverishing his country and enriching my kingdom." But, attractive as such attitudes might be, pluralism was an instrument of control that the sultans used to hold their empire together by, among other things, insuring that political power in each community remained in the hands of the most docile and conservative elements. Once the empire embarked on its long swan dive, communal lines hardened and tensions rose. Jews fared the best, since their lack of ties to any outside power (with the partial exception of Britain) made them seem less politically troublesome. But the Armenians, viewed as virtually a Russian fifth column, suffered enormously when the Ottomans went to war against the czar in 1914. Greeks, Maronites, Druse and Shiites also suffered either because their foreign ties made them suspect or (in the case of the Shiites) they were viewed as heretical. The upshot was the worst of all possible worlds, a patchwork quilt of separate-and-unequal communities united by a common attachment to frozen religious practices and a common disdain for the equally frozen religious community across the way. By the end, the empire was little more than a giant machine for the manufacture of ethno-religious enmity, as the world has since learned to its dismay.

Nowhere are the after-shocks of the Ottoman breakup more evident than in Lebanon and Israel. After being detached from Greater Syria by the French and British, Lebanon took the old Ottoman system to baroque extremes, divvying up political power among some eighteen religious communities. Israel is a millet that has armed itself with all the weaponry of a modern nation-state. One is a collection of confessions jockeying for power, while the other is a modern Sparta that confuses ethnic solidarity with political democracy. A lot of people have contributed to the current debacle--British, French and American imperialists; Zionists; and Islamic jihadists, to name just a few. But as Osman's Dream makes clear, the Ottomans laid the foundation over the course of some six centuries. It is not an achievement to be proud of.

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