The First World War in the Middle East
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- 25,99 €
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- 25,99 €
Publisher Description
The First World War in the Middle East is an accessibly written military and social history of the clash of world empires in the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus. Coates Ulrichsen demonstrates how wartime exigencies shaped the parameters of the modern Middle East, and describes and assesses the major campaigns against the Ottoman Empire and Germany involving British and imperial troops from the French and Russian Empires, as well as their Arab and Armenian allies.
Also documented are the enormous logistical demands placed on host societies by the Great Powers' conduct of industrialised warfare in hostile terrain. The resulting deepening of imperial penetration, and the extension of state controls across a heterogeneous sprawl of territories, generated a powerful backlash both during and immediately after the war, which played a pivotal role in shaping national identities as the Ottoman Empire was dismembered.
This is a multidimensional account of the many seemingly discrete yet interlinked campaigns that resulted in one to one and a half million casualties. It details not just their military outcome but relates them to intelligence-gathering, industrial organisation, authoritarianism and the political economy of empires at war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this concise yet deeply researched book, Ulrichsen (Insecure Gulf) seeks to correct widely held Western misperceptions about WWI and its role in staging the collapse of the Islamic Caliphate and the resultant shaping of arbitrary Middle Eastern borders. Writing primarily for an academic audience, Ulrichsen details the lasting effects of the war, from North Africa through Mesopotamia, and explores how Muslim communities around the world reacted to the war. He notes that the British, for example, feared that Indian Muslim soldiers sent to Egypt would defect to the Ottomans, but that their fear "proved unfounded, owing to the substantive ethnic and linguistic differences that prevented... serious communication or collaboration." Foreshadowing more recent misadventures, Ulrichsen writes that, late in the war, "the War Cabinet in London belatedly grasped the value of gaining control of as a potential source of oil supplies for the British Empire." Long sections of drily catalogued historical minutiae will deter nonspecialists, but Ulrichsen's central thesis, which states that ad hoc and ill-considered decisions made by distracted foreign powers crystallized into immutable realities that continue to constrain life in the region a century later, is relevant for anyone with an interest in the Middle East.
