The Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East w/ Eugene Rogan
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the territory that we call the Middle East- including Syria, Iraq, Israel and Turkey- were part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman alliance w/ Germany and Austria-Hungary during World War I provided Britain and France w/ the opportunity to divide the once-great empire into many states based on European imperial ambitions. In this episode Bob and Ben speak w/ Eugene Rogan to learn more about why the Ottoman Empire was divided, how that process shaped the Middle East, and how this history helps us understand the world today.
Dr. Eugene Rogan is a Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He is author of The Arabs: A History (Penguin, 2009, 3rd edition 2018), which has been translated in 18 languages and was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His new book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920, was published in February 2015.
We'd also like to say a special thanks to the family of Roscoe L. Strickland Jr. for providing the support that brought Dr. Rogan to MTSU as part of the Strickland Scholars Program. Additional thanks goes to Dr. Susan Myers-Shirk for her work in arranging for MTSU's Strickland Scholars to appear on our podcast.
This is a rebroadcast of episode 112 which originally aired on November 19th, 2018. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:09.0 | Friends, we're gearing up for a 10-year celebration here. |
| 0:13.3 | I don't know if you guys have been tracking us, but we launched this show in May of 2016. |
| 0:20.2 | And so Bob and I have some great episodes lined up coming up, |
| 0:24.2 | some reflections on the past. And that's had me going back through the older episodes. |
| 0:30.2 | And one that we have not shared in a very long time is honestly an episode. I think I've |
| 0:35.7 | quoted Eugene Rogan, our guest for this episode, like three or four times recently, particularly his claim that he's not sure if there's ever been Western intervention in the Middle East that has turned out well. So I wanted to share this episode today. Eugene Rogan is one of the world's experts on Middle Eastern |
| 0:54.9 | history. He is a professor at University of Oxford, and he visited Nashville in 2018, and we |
| 1:02.1 | got to have this great conversation thanks to the Strickland Fund at MTSU. Shout out to the |
| 1:07.1 | Strickland family for supporting that and helping us bring in great speakers. |
| 1:17.1 | This episode gets into the nuts and bolts of the Middle East, the story from the fall of the Ottoman Empire, into the modern states of the Middle East today. And it's so relevant. |
| 1:23.2 | And now, there's not a lot in here about Iran. We do mention that a couple of times. |
| 1:26.7 | But this is more kind of the core issue that has |
| 1:29.9 | drawn us into the Middle East and the way that we are now. |
| 1:33.0 | It also touches on a variety of topics that are so relevant. |
| 1:36.9 | The crazy thing about this episode is it could have been recorded yesterday, about 90% |
| 1:40.6 | of it. |
| 1:41.7 | But, you know, it mentions the Armenian genocide. And for those of you guys who |
| 1:46.1 | aren't familiar, there's a great breakdown of that story here. And we're airing this just a few days |
| 1:51.2 | after Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. So remember, most of the worst things in history happened |
| 1:57.4 | because people believed that they were on the good side of things and they were all |
| 2:01.4 | humans which means they're the same animal that you are same blood in their veins we look into |
... |
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