I Know a little about the fall of the Ottoman empire because of their alliance with Germany and a bit about the Sykes-Picot agreement but I'm having a hard time figuring out not just the physical construction but the political construction and the cultural construction changes which happened because of WWI. I am very interested in any good books where I could learn a proper narrative of this.
Hey there, I just did a book report on this subject! I'd suggest as a good read, A Peace to End all Peace, by David Fromkin. It is a very comprehensive, albeit biased, narrative of the European (mainly British) point of view from about the late 1800s to 1922, when a lot of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire was occurring. Although its a little biased, it contains a dense breakdown of the political interactions between the Brits, Ottomans, Egyptians, Arabs, and Persians at the time. The first chapter also gives a nice breakdown of the political situation in the Ottoman administration at the time with the takeover of a faction known as the Committee for Union and Progress aka Young Turks. Its a very interesting read.
The most important shift was from an identity based around the caliphate in a grantingly increasingly Turkish centric state to one based on ethnicity. For example during the Turkish war for independence Turks and Kurds fought together, it was only after the war ended that the narrative shifted to a wholly national one