A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East | 
| Author: David Fromkin
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  124 reviews
Sales Rank: 12322
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 636
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0805068848
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.41
EAN: 9780805068849
ASIN: 0805068848
Publication Date: September 1, 2001
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Condition: Used, good; Inscription inside; Foxing on edges of book.Ships within hours from Charleston, SC. Established seller with nearly 10 years of online history.
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Product Description
The critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling account of how the modern Middle East came into being after World War I, and why it is in upheaval today
In our time the Middle East has proven a battleground of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and dynasties. All of these conflicts, including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis that have flared yet again, come down, in a sense, to the extent to which the Middle East will continue to live with its political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed upon the region by the Allies after the First World War.
In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies came to remake the geography and politics of the Middle East, drawing lines on an empty map that eventually became the new countries of Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all-even an alliance between Arab nationalism and Zionism-seemed possible he raises questions about what might have been done differently, and answers questions about why things were done as they were. The current battle for a Palestinian homeland has its roots in these events of 85 years ago.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 119 more reviews...
 This brilliant book - an historical thriller through and through! July 30, 2008
I am an enthusiastic amateur family historian and I have puzzled a while over an important (to my wife and I) family question: how come my wife's great uncle, Captain Thomas John Catchpole (1888 - 1917), of Lidgate, Suffolk, and of the 5th Battalion, the Suffolk Regiment, was killed by the Turks at Gaza?
Subsidiary questions have also been in my mind: why were the Turks/Ottomans our enemies in the so-called 'Great War'?; what determined the demise of the Turkish/Ottoman Empire, under which many races, including Jews, Arabs and Turks, had lived relatively peaceably?; and how did the present-day 'Middle East' become such a problem area?
I am also a member of the 'what if' school of history: this book is one of those that inspire endless speculation. If decisions had been made differently and events had taken a different course, maybe my wife's great uncle's descendants could still be living at Lidgate.
For example, what if the British Cabinet had acted on Winston Churchill's urging in 1911 to make an alliance with the Turks/Ottomans?
And if the 'Great War' had gone on for two years only (the German General Ludendorff believed the entry of the Turks/Ottomans into the war allowed the outnumbered Central powers to fight on for two years longer than they would have been able on their own), my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.
And if Winston Churchill's Dardanelles plans had prevailed over those of Lord Kitchener in March, 1915, Constantinople would have fallen, and my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.
As it was, it appears that numerous attempts were made to subvert, to attack, and to conquer the Turks/Ottomans, the defeat of whom could - and, maybe, should - have been accomplished in 1915, and my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.
This brilliant book - an historical thriller through and through - has provided me with much information and most of the answers and I am so grateful to David Fromkin for researching and writing it and to Amazon for selling it to me.
It is quite clear to me now that the alliance between Germany and the Turks/Ottomans was at best an unintended mistake and at worst the secret design of a very few of the Turkish leaders. It could have been done very differently, with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire continuing to maintain their neutrality, to the benefit of the British and of the world.
And it also appears from Fromkin's account that the successive collapses of the British, French and Russian Governments were directly attributable to the Dardanelles disaster. In the case of Russia, of course, this meant a fatal finale for the Czar and his family and the rise of Lenin and Bolshevism.
There came on the scene in 1917 one Woodrow Wilson, as ignorant regarding Britain, France, Russia and the Turkish/Ottoman Empire as many Americans, but as determined, nevertheless, to do down the British as his later successor, Franklin Roosevelt. Despite having some high-flown thoughts, Mr Wilson helped little.
All in all, it is once again amazing to me that two great British statesmen, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, should have been so full of foresight and wisdom. It's all too obvious that the others, including Wilson, were political pygmies.
I suppose now and with hindsight that I would probably have preferred for the Ottoman Empire to have been maintained, as Churchill often wanted, or, failing that, for the British Empire to have been vastly extended - for good!
I spotted one error (on page 299, in a section on the role of Louis D. Brandeis, later the first Jewish member of the United States Supreme Court): 'Only one Jew [Oscar Strauss] had ever been a member of the president's cabinet.' Not true: Judah Philip Benjamin played prominent roles in the cabinet of President Jefferson Davis.
(An extremely interesting piece of information gleaned from the book is that Baghdad and Jerusalem, before the War, were home to the largest populations of Jews in the Middle East. 'Jews in large numbers had lived in the Mesopotamian provinces since the time of the Babylonian captivity - about 600 BC - and thus were settled in the country a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs in AD 634.').
There has been some criticism that this book is too much about Great Britain and its leaders and people. To answer the criticism I quote the following (from page 385): 'The Prime Minister (Lloyd George) claimed that Britain was entitled to play the dominant role in the Middle East, recalling that at one time or another two and a half million British troops had been sent there, and that a quarter of a million had been killed or wounded; while the French, Gallipoli apart, had suffered practically no casualties in the Middle East, and the Americans had not been there at all.'
Thoroughly recommended: I couldn't put it down!
A personal post-script:
In the Autumn of 1917, following two earlier failed attempts by General Murray in the first half of that year, General Allenby invaded (from Egypt, which was under British protection) Palestine, and my wife's great uncle, Captain Thomas John Catchpole, was killed, during the third battle of Gaza, on the 3rd of November (reportedly fatally injured by a Turk soldier and then shot by a fellow British officer, in the presence of his own younger brother, to put him out of his misery, there being no chance that he would live), and lies buried at the Deir El Belah War Cemetery. And the Middle East is still a problem.
Still Sorting Out the Ottoman Empire June 27, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
World War One brought about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine (including a somewhat conditional Jewish Homeland), and the Transjordan were carved out mainly by the British. Turkey established itself as a separate entity including both European (East Thrace) and Asian parts. David Fromkin leads the reader through the changes that occurred between 1914 and 1922 in meticulous detail. Indeed, this reader found the book's main shortcoming to be the welter of specific facts that sometimes obscured the larger picture.
Fromkin's book was published in 1989 so that it has an interesting historical perspective. The Iranians had thrown out the Americans and the so-called Afghan Arabs had played their (exaggerated) role in pushing the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, but 9-11 remained over a decade in the future. Nonetheless, Fromkin detected the strength of Islam as the most important force in the region.
Fromkin notes that the Middle East was the final area of the world to fall to Western (mostly British) imperialism. He also observes that this extension of Western power had long been anticipated with the main question being which country would get how much. In the end the British obtained more paper power than they could reasonable have hoped for, but then they found that by 1922 they had neither the will nor the wherewithal to exert that power. The Great War drained them of both. The British, and to a lesser degree the French and Americans, created weak countries and left major issues such as the fate of Kurds, Jews, and Palestinian Arabs unresolved.
An even more fundamental challenge remained and remains. In every other area of the globe subjected to Western dominance, Western forms and principles prevailed, but Fromkin notes that "at least one of those assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants...have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all life, including government and politics." Fromkin puts his finger right on the problem that the West has in understanding much of the region.
Even more daunting, Fromkin argues that the Middle East still has not sorted itself out after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He notes discouragingly that it took Western Europe about more than a millennium to "resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity". The region's politics lack any "sense of legitimacy" or "agreement on the rules of the game - and no belief, universally shared in the region...that the entities that call themselves countries or the men who claim to be rulers are entitled to recognition as such." The last such rulers were the Ottoman sultans.
With regard to the current troubles in Iraq, one fervently wishes that someone in Washington had appreciated the penetrating analysis by the British civil commissioner Arnold Wilson in 1920 about the area just then being called Iraq. While he was called upon to administer the provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, he did not believe they "formed a coherent entity". As he saw it the Kurds of Mosul would never accept an Arab leader, while the Shi'ite Moslems would never accept domination by the minority Sunnis, but, to directly quote Wilson, "no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination." And on and on it goes.
The book features a number of familiar figures, Winston Churchill most prominent among them. Fromkin's favorable treatment of Churchill strongly suggests that Winston was repeatedly ill-served by subordinates, bad luck, and bad press. By 1922, Churchill was finished as a British politician (or so it seemed). Other major figures include Lord Kitchener, David Lloyd George, T.E. Lawrence (about whom many questions are raised). A plethora of lesser known British and French military and civil leaders abound in the pages of Fromkin's lengthy tome, not to mention the odd Russia and German. Turkish leaders, such as Enver Pasha and Mustapha Kemal often bewilder their Western counterparts.
Perhaps the oddest historical artifact reproduced by Fromkin was the belief, generally accepted among British intelligence and high-ranking civil and military leaders, in a conspiracy between Prussian generals and Jewish financiers manipulating Russian Bolsheviks and Turkish nationalists to the detriment of British interests! Moreover, in this conspiratorial view, Islam was controlled by Jewry. At this point, the reader is tempted to quietly murmur that the British should go home where they might understand something of what they are about. (The dangers of drawing too direct lessons from history are great and while the US leadership did not harbor any notions quite this crackpot, it bears notice that the US seem not to have understand Iraq, its history, or its people before sending in troops.)
Fromkin produced a fine book, not an easy read, with a wealth of information and an excellent closing summary. It suffered, at times from the size of the subject - the transformation of an entire region during a worldwide war - and the maze of characters and details. A book that bears a second reading and a subject (subjects, really) for further study. Highly recommended.
Fromkin's A Peace to End All Piece May 25, 2008
Well-researched and it reads like a novel. 565 pages flew by before I noticed I was making progress. And timely as all get-out. What more could you posssibly want for the price of five gallons of Middle Eastern gas?
... and the foundation for Endless War. May 12, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Fromkin's seminal work is now almost 20 years old, and it is still the essential history book on the bungled making of the modern Middle East. Like another reviewer, I would gladly have given this a 6-star rating if it were possible. So much today remains the very same, save for the change from one imperial power to another. Consider from the Introduction: "The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today." On page 451 Fromkin quotes the caution of an American missionary to the woman who, by in large, created Iraq, Gertrude Bell: "You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity..... they have no conception of nationhood yet."
From the perspective of a century, in some ways it is difficult to believe that all this was a sideshow, to use William Shawcross's phrase for Cambodia. The "real drama" was the Western Front, a subsidiary drama the Eastern Front, and the rise of Communism, and this very distant front was much like Burma during the Second War World, few players with meager resources.
Fromkin lays much of the blame for the misunderstandings between the West and the Middle East on Kitchener. In a description true of individuals today, he said of Kitchener: "The peculiarities of his character, the deficiencies of his understanding of the Moslem world, the misinformation regularly supplied to him by his lieutenants...... and his choice of Arab politicians...."
His chapter on the Balfour Declaration is strong; balancing the forces and players at work, and making the oft-forgotten point that the vast majority of the world's Jew's were not Zionists. The book is replete with other ironies, such as a footnoted exchange:"... on the Arab question, shows Lord Kitchener asking, "Wahabism, does that still exist?" and Sykes answering, "I think it is a dying fire." So much of the West's impression of Saudi Arabia was initially formed by TE Lawrence, in his half-fictional work "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" so Fromkin's confirmation that Lawrence himself cautioned his biographer, Graves, that his work is "...full of half-truth here." is a valuable reminder to examine the prism and motives of individuals who write about the Middle East.
On page 468, again with an easy substitution, plus ca change.... "In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule."
I agree with some of the criticism of this book: that it is a "big man's" version of history, and neglects describing broader social forces that motivate the "little man" and that it is weak on describing the thinking and motivation of the non-European regional players.
We can only hope that additional parallels with the present situation will occur, from page 561: "By the time that the war came to an end (WW I), British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be a benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue. Viewing imperialism as a costly drain on a society that needed to invest all of its remaining resources in rebuilding itself...."
This book should be mandatory reading for the next American administration.
Best place to start to understand the modern Middle East May 6, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is an absolutely first-rate history book: it covers the complexity without simplification, yet tells a riveting story with a huge cast of larger than life characters (Churchill, Ataturk, Lenin, Lawrence of Arabia, and many others). It is also superlatively written.
The book begins with the machinations leading up to the Great War. The Ottoman Empire - in decline for over 300 years, yet a useful "buffer" for the Western powers against the Russian Empire in the "Great Game" - is finally coming apart with the rise of the western-minded "young Turks." That means that it is finally collapsing and Britain and France must decide whether to continue to prop up its vast territorial holdings or to nakedly seek to carve up its territories for the benefit of their own empires. France coveted Syria and Lebanon, GB the rest. In the end, it is what they got.
Once the Great War began, however, the Turks allied themselves with the Germans, for which CHurchill was unjustly blamed (he confiscated two destroyers that Britain's shipyards had just manufactured for the Turks). This led directly to the catastrophically mismanaged invasion of the Dardanelles, in a bid to end the War by pushing a wedge into the Germanic coalition from the South, again Churchill's idea. (Amazingly, the collapse of Bulgaria was what finally ended WWI 4 years later, as the allies entered the gap). As the Turks rallied, the allies turned to making alliances with the Arabs and others under loose Turkish suzerainty.
The greatest accomplishment of the book is to dissect the mentality of British policymakers, which by today's standards was almost ghoulishly primitive. First, they had a 19C colonialist bias, which meant that they were by nature destined to rule the "brown" races, from India to Arabia, for their own good. WHile there was much strategic calculation, such as guarding the Suez canal for freighter traffic, it was principally to maintain the glory of the British Empire as conceived under Queen Victoria. Second, they utterly lacked basic knowledge of not just the Turks, but also the Arabs and Zionists. For example, beyond sensationalist and romantic travel literature, the only available source to understand the Turk was a history written in the 18C! Few of the aristocratic elite spoke any of the languages and most were openly racist and anti-semitic. Third, there were conspiracy theories that would appear absolutely lunatic today (to paraphrase Fromkin). Thus, there were top policymakers who actually believed that Jews controlled not just the young Turks, but also the emerging Bolshievics and even the German Kaiser's inner circle!
This ignorance and arrogant disregard for other points of view would be laughable were they not responsible for the decisions that set up the system of shakey nation states we see today in the Middle East. To cultivate the non-existent Jewish cabal, the Brits came up with the Balfour Declaration, which recognized the validity of a zionist state. (Interestingly, like many fundamentalists today, this support gained indispensable credence because a state of Jews in Palestine was a Biblical prerequisite for Armageddon and the assumed ascension of Christians to paradise.) In addition, the Brits designated several families, including the Hashemites - Aristocrats chosen first by the Turks and educated in the Harem of the Sublime Port - as a way to gain control over all Arabs tribes as they believed they would obey the dictates of the highest religious authority. Once the Brits chose these people, they were stuck with them, which was how the new states eventually were established.
As the War came to an end, GB and France - now distrustful of eachothers' imperial ambitions to the point that they almost went to war! - were unable to devote attention and resources to nationbuilding, though this did not stop them from setting up what were supposed to become modern states in places that knew neither secular politics nor any sense of national purpose. They just installed people they hoped they could trust (read "control"), which explains who became leaders of what petty kingdoms at that time. Many, though not all of them are still there and almost completely lack political legitimacy over vast territories that were governed by independent tribes under a loose Turkish confederation. It is no wonder that these artificial constructs are so unstable, mixing peoples with modern weaponry and infrastructure who for centuries were isolated and divided by religion, ethnicity, and power politics. The new leaders and their subjects had little idea how to wield the tools of the modern state, while nascent nationalisms were undermining the western empires.
This is the story of the greatest watershed of the 20C: sowing the seeds of the end of western domination as the impulse grew in colonial peoples to govern themselves. Not only did Turkey reinvent itself, but the Soviet Union was born, and the western powers (with the exception of the US) had squandered their human and financial resources catastrophically. Amazingly, what was going on in the Middle East at that time was seen as a backwater sideshow: virtually no one recognized the magnitude of change that was unleashed.
If there is any failing of the book, it is its less diligent effort to penetrate the minds of the Arabs and Turks. The author brilliantly delineates the moribund reasoning from within the 19C western empires, but does not explain what the powerful indigenous peoples were thinking and feeling.
Warmly recommended. This is one of the best history books I have read in years.
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