The Wider War

From the New York Times best-selling author, an epic account of how the forgotten fronts in the Middle East and Africa shaped the First World War.

The Wider War concludes Nick Lloyd’s lauded trilogy on the Great War, expanding the story beyond the trenches of Europe to depict a truly global conflict. Lloyd reveals how far-flung theaters, long dismissed as peripheral “sideshows,” were in fact deeply interconnected with the Western and Eastern Fronts.

The “wider war” against the Ottoman Empire, Lloyd argues, transformed what had been a European crisis into a sprawling, multicontinental conflict. Drawing on new scholarship and underutilized sources, he brings long-overdue attention to the Ottoman experience, and also shows how the war in Africa and the Middle East exposed the fragility of European empires. From the deserts of Arabia to the bush of German East Africa, survival was as much a battle against the environment as it was against the enemy. The Wider War captures the extraordinary endurance of soldiers operating at the limits of human capacity and demonstrates how the defeat of the Ottomans helped to create the modern Middle East.