ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918 ushered in a period which the Turks look back on as the heroic epoch in their modern history. From the outside, it must have seemed that the Turkish state was dead. Its armies appeared to be shattered, its economy in ruins. During the Great War the Entente powers had written themselves post-dated cheques on the territory of the empire. They were now determined to seize what they regarded as the deserved prize of victory, and concocted an elaborate partition scheme which would have reduced Turkish territory to about a third of what it eventually became.
