Forging Armies from Prisons of Peoples
Forging Armies from Prisons of Peoples
How Inequality Shaped Ottoman and Habsburg Battlefield Performance
This chapter compares the Ottoman Empire, a high-inequality belligerent, with its medium-inequality Austro-Hungarian counterpart, during their respective wars in Tripolitania (1911–1912) and on the Eastern Front of World War I (1914–1917). Here the gap in military inequality is modest, at 0.08, suggesting that their observed differences should be far less glaring. Indeed, the chapter finds that while Ottoman performance was poor, the Austro-Hungarian Common Army was only marginally better. Moreover, wartime victimization of its own population pulled Austro-Hungary up the ladder of inequality, resulting in worsened performance that by war's end closely resembled Ottoman shortcomings. The Common Army also pulls double duty in this chapter by demonstrating what happens when military inequality increases during the conflict.
Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Habsburg Empire, Common Army, World War I, Tripolitania, Eastern Front, wartime victimization, military inequality
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
