A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
by David Fromkin
The deals that drew the Middle East in a hurry.
For you if
you want to know who drew the borders everyone is fighting over.
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Fromkin tells how British and French officials, working from maps, rivalries and half-made promises, divided the Ottoman lands after World War I and drew the borders that people are still fighting over. The cast is the colonial office, the generals and a young Winston Churchill, all improvising an empire. It reads as a political thriller about how a century of crisis got started over a few years of bad decisions.
Where This Book Lives
- Topics
- colonialism
Pass with note: the book is from 1989 and follows the imperial officials' point of view, so the people who lived there mostly appear as objects, and later historians have added to and corrected parts of it. Read it beside Orientalism and The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. It fills the gap under The Cauldron and the Palestine and Iran bundles.
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