David Henry Fromkin was an American historian, best known for his interpretive account of the Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), in which he recounts the role European powers played between 1914 and 1922 in creating the modern Middle East. The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Fromkin wrote seven books, ending in 2007 with The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners.
This is an odd book in many ways. Not least because it is a history of the Middle East that is structured around a major character鈥檚 life. Now, you might think that such a life might well be someone who lived in the Middle-East. No chance, really, when you think about it 鈥� books written in the West are much more likely to focus on someone also from the West, even when discussing the history of the East鈥� It鈥檚 just what we do.
The life chosen was that of Winston Churchill. I'm not trying to say that Churchill wasn't an important figure in the history of the Middle East at and around the time of the First World War. Anything but. However, for a book whose subtitle is 鈥榯he fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the Modern Middle East' it wouldn't be outrageous to expect that the author might have focused more on someone other than an English politician.
This book is really about the British Government's role in mucking about in the Middle East during and shortly after the First World War. As such, it is very comprehensive 鈥� well, you know, says someone who is not all that aware of much of this history - and so it might not be nearly as comprehensive or as accurate as l think. Still, he gives lots of examples from documents, conversations, letters, diary entries and so on. All this adds to an interesting account of many of the sorts of events (and so on) that we've all heard something about over the years - however vague or knowledge.
The problem is how British centred this is. You don鈥檛 really get nearly enough of a perspective even from other European nations involved in all this, you know, from say-Germany or France in this long story of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Given Germany was an allay in the war, you might think more of their relationship and the key players involved in that might have made it into this book - but for every page on that there would have been 20 on British politicians.
It is not that you hear nothing about the interests and manoeuvres of other powers in the region. Clearly, they had interests and parts to play, but we often only hear of those to the extent that they relate to the British interests and actors. So, while you come away from this with a fairly detailed understanding of Lloyd George's feelings concerning the likely problems associated with the future of the Middle East after the war, you don't get anything like the same detail of anyone else's opinion from any other nation, other than perhaps Stalin's. But even this is hardly something you could really compare.
You do get endless detail on the motivations and reasoning of the British but pretty well only the basic actions of everyone else.
T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia fame) gets a bit of a kicking here. Not only are we told most of what we know of him from the famous film is basically rubbish, but he comes across as mostly a liar and self-serving fool.
Churchill, however, is the hero of the hour, but one that is overall misunderstood or even the fall-guy for the mistakes of others. Again, this might well be an accurate assessment of him and his role-during this phase of his political career, I don't really know, but this book had the smell of hagiography about it.
Let me give one example of what I had hoped this book would give me and why I ended up feeling that it didn鈥檛 give me nearly what I wanted. A case in point is around the Zionist movement and the relationship it had with the local Palestinians. A long time ago a friend of mine from Lebanon told me the Palestinians couldn't really complain about Israel, as they had sold so much their own land to the Jews it is hard to know what else they could really have expected? This is something mentioned in this book too. So, I was hoping that I would get some idea of just how significant this sell-off of Palestinian land to the Jews might have been. I was hoping to get some perspective of what it might have amounted to. Clearly, land was sold-but how much was sold? As a proportion of the total land area of Palestine-was it perhaps ten per cent? Twenty? Or was it perhaps not a lot of the land, per se, but strategically important land? None of these questions are answered. It seems some land was definitely sold, but how much and what this all amounted to politically or economically or geographically is harder to say. You see my point? Was it enough to justify the Palestinians no longer having a claim to their homeland? What is presented here is enough to make you think, as my friend had said, that they had it coming. But I still don't really know.
Zionism plays a very large part in this book 鈥� both as something coming out of the British government鈥檚 position given the Balfour Declaration, but also from Churchill鈥檚 idea that Jews were likely to fall into 3 categories: those that took an interest in the local politics of the country where they lived, those that wanted a Jewish homeland, or those that supported the Soviet Union. Since the two main options were Zionist or Communism, Churchill supported the Zionists as a way to encourage the Jews away from Marxism. I would have liked more information on the overall implications of all this, but since Churchill is presented as a bit of a saint, it is hard to know if his perspective on even this theme might be considered wise, foolish or somewhere in between. The problem I have with this book, then, is that I sort of don鈥檛 trust what I'm reading, even if I'm left unsure. Because the book is so strongly focused on the English, it is hard to know the motivations of any of the other players. Other countries are presented as inconveniences to English policy, which is too often presented as if it was something other than fundamentally self-serving.
I would have liked more of the perspective of the Ottomans, Turks, Iraqis, Persians...you know, Middle Easterners 鈥� and while there was some of this, it all felt like it was far too little. A book written from inside the Ottoman empire looking out would have been a book about what the title of this book implied. One written from within Whitehall, not so much.
Fromkin's thorough and highly exploratory piece on the creation of the modern Middle East is a delight for the armchair historian and academic alike. With clear and well-developed arguments throughout, a plethora of first-hand documentation, and plausible theses, the book moves effectively through its three main tenets and leaves the reader with a better understanding of the situation at the time and in the current political as well as social denouement. Fromkin argues three key points worth exploring below as it relates to the formation of the modern Middle East: loss of the Great War; post-war treaty divisions; and, the lack of foundational European imperialism. Fromkin argues the aforementioned points effectively and leaves the reader to judge whose fault the entire mess could fall to, though it is doubtful the modern actors would take the credit for their predecessors. A stellar piece of work that anyone with an itch for history would surely find captivating. 'To the victors, the spoils!' So goes the adage and how true it is in this context. Fromkin illustrates, through two-thirds of the book, that the modern Middle East was greatly shaped by the side it (for simplicity purposes, let us unite the Ottoman Empire as a cohesive and non-porous entity) chose in the Great War. Turning to Germany, the Ottomans fought alongside the Kaiser in an attempt to hold its territory and defend the honour it had nurtures for half a millennium. While many readers may be familiar with the European arena of war, Fromkin turns the focus of the book on the Asiatic region, specifically that territory under Ottoman control. Taking direction from German military leaders, Ottoman armies were able, for a time, to hold off troops from Britain, France, and Russia, but did eventually fall victim to the larger defeat that befell the German military. This was, inevitably, the first step towards reshaping the Middle East, as the victors took it upon themselves to claim ownership and direct rule over the defeated (and deflated) Empire. The loss in the Great War did play a key role in shaping the modern Middle East, in that it allowed the intoxicated Powers to bandy about ideas for colonising the region in a way that had partially ruined parts of Europe and Africa. The aforementioned adage could have potentially ruined modern political and geography harmony within the region, all due to the European power gluttony that took place as soon as the ink on the armistice documents was left to dry.
Fromkin's second key argument related to the modern outcome of the region relates to the power-sharing and territorial smorgasbord the victors imposed on the region. France and Britain took special delight in carving up the region and negotiating treaties to shape these newly independent states in their own image. The two other powers, the United States and Russia, were not as effective in wresting power for themselves (the latter due to its democratic system whereby Congress would not uphold the treaties negotiated on Woodrow Wilson's behalf and the latter because of English-French greed to keep any region from falling to the Bolsheviks), but did play a small role in the early stages of treaty negotiations. While seen as a single entity in modern geography (though keeping its independent states), the Middle East was turned into a sausage-making experiment, jamming many ideas into one area in hopes that something productive might ensue. This was not the case, nor did it effectively work in the short-term. Fromkin's arcing thesis for the book can best be summed up in his own words in the latter pages of this work: 鈥淭he Middle East became what it is today both because the European powers undertook to re-shape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would permanently endure.鈥�
In addition to this treaty-negotiation venture, one area bandied about for long periods of time, but never effectively actioned was the role of a Jewish State. Arguments were made by both Britain and France, outlining the importance of this (the Balfour Declaration was also newly minted), but nothing came to fruition, even while its importance spanned pages of Fromkin's narrative. Hindsight being what it is, could proper and thorough negotiations have been undertaken to effectively push for a Jewish State (choosing the modern location of Israel), the 'coming home' might have taken place, leaving the new German regime from enacting its atrocities and keeping Stalin from instilling his demented Soviet pogroms on the Jews. All this can, again, be summed up by Fromkin's aforementioned quote and only goes to illustrate how poorly the victors handled the entire process.
Fromkin's final argument about the development of the modern Middle East flows directly from its second. After trying to instil order in the region with puppet governments and like-minded leaders, the two European powers stood back and watched. They let these regimes flounder and saw countless states revert to old ways, though this time without the umbrella of Ottoman guidance. Fromkin makes a point (and a simplistic one at that) throughout, that these states were not only under Ottoman rule for centuries, but also that their ways of life were completely different from European political and social norms. Nomadic rather than aristocratic; survivalist rather than socially-minded; Muslim rather than Christian. The great differences abound, which only go to show how this loose imperialism could not help but fail, especially when the two political puppeteers would not stand by their work and force its development in their own images. Infighting amongst the allies did not help either, but it was this pathetic straw foundation on which these new nation-states were placed that made their westernised failure all but inevitable. Fromkin pushes this argument from the outset, that Middle Eastern divisions were not made to effectively help the various nation-states to walk on their own two feet after Ottoman rule, but to expand a dwindling imperial dream of two European states whose influence in the world was itself fizzling out faster than anything else.
As a final comment to the reader, while Fromkin's book is by no means a swift read, its attention to detail and strong arguments cannot be matched. Read alongside Margaret MacMillan's PARIS 1919, the reader will see the power (and failure) of post-Great War treaty making and might, if given the chance, help bolster the idea that much of the modern world's issues and challenges, at least from a political and civil unrest perspective in Europe and the Middle East all stem from the negotiations to redesign these regions from 1919-1922. Both books are powerful tomes whose theses leave a full on omelet on the faces of British, French, American, and even Russian politicians. Well worth the invested time and effort of any curious reader.
Kudos, Dr. Fromkin for yet another stellar piece of work surrounding the Great War. I have nothing but the utmost praise for you and all you do.
This book was recommended in the article 鈥淎 Reporter's Arab Library鈥�, N Y Times Book Review, 30 Oct 2005.
This is an excellent book, but will strike different people differently. People used to reading serious history will find it easy to read 鈥� the author's conclusions are clearly stated and supporting evidence easily located. People used to reading novels will find it hard to read 鈥� there is a bewildering variety of place names and personalities to keep track of. People who derive a sense of satisfaction from understanding a complex situation will find this book satisfying 鈥� the author makes a lot of things that appear in the newspaper clearer. People who are dismayed, annoyed, or depressed by the spectacle of the great and mighty screwing up the world will find this book unpleasant 鈥� it is the chronicle of a delicate international situation handled in the worst way possible, with the result of years and years of unnecessary and senseless murder and mayhem.
Comparisons between the present situation and that portrayed in the book are unavoidable. In each case, a tiny cabal of self-proclaimed experts, whose ignorance was matched only by their self-regard, managed to convince a credulous world of a preposterous conspiracy theory. (To be fair, compared to the belief, apparently held by many in powerful British circles at the time of WWI that the Ottoman Empire was secretly controlled by a cabal of Jews and Freemasons, believers in the claim that Iraq had WMD appear almost reasonable.) Another parallel: self-serving native political charlatans latched themselves to western policymakers like barnacles, unstoppable in their efforts to leech as much money and influence as possible from their clients. And, finally, in the end, governments ended up supporting policies they knew to be failures out of bureaucratic inertia and a desire to 鈥渟ave face鈥�.
Read this book. Understand the world. It's your right as a citizen and a responsibility as a human being.
It took me a little longer than I expected to read this rather fascinating book as it slowed down to a crawl toward the end. Most history readers are familiar with the dissection of the Middle East (as well as parts of Europe) as a result of the infamous Versailles Treaty. At the beginning of the war, the Ottoman Empire, caught in the middle of this disruption, was already shaky at best and its own people couldn't decide which side they should take. This was a "empire" that spoke many languages, had many religions, and no common cultural base, so it is not surprising that it was caught in a whirlwind of espionage, broken treaties, and inept leadership.
Moving toward more modern times, the effects of the above stated differences muddied the waters and prevented the creation of a cohesive agreement among the countries involved. The Ottoman Empire disappeared and problems arose that still resonate today. An interesting read which also looks beneath some of the myths of that troubled time. Recommended.