Book Review - The Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924 by Howard M. Sachar

 The Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924 by Howard M. Sachar

London: Allen Land The Penguin Press, 1970 (first published 1969)  ISBN 0713901586

This is a well-written history in the old style, describing the impact the First World War had on the creation of what we know now as the countries of the Middle East and its littoral - specifically Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine as it then was (Israel now), Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Before World War One, all of these countries apart from Greece were part of the Ottoman Empire, and this book is essentially a description of how that Empire was broken up, mainly through the actions of the victorious members of the Entente, specifically England and France.

Many of us think we know the history of how the modern Middle East came to be, but Sachar's book taught me things I didn't know about what occurred during these years; things that have filled in some gaps in my knowledge and brought to me a greater understanding of why history in that part of the world has developed in the way it has.

The Ottoman Empire's fateful decision to side with Germany during the War brought ruin. The British, fearing for their access to the Suez Canal, went to great efforts to defeat the Ottomans in Palestine, and used everything at their disposal, including inciting the Arabian Peninsula to revolt. This is of course a famous story, and Sachar fills it out in a historical sense, pointing out the limited effectiveness of the revolt in the fight against their Turkish overlords (it was the British army that did most of the "heavy lifting"), and putting the Lawrence legend into proper historical perspective.

A story less well-known is the Ottoman's war against Russia, which was, until the Revolution a successful one for the Entente, as opposed to the disaster at Gallipoli. Iraq was hellish for both sides - initially a tactical failure by the British, although strategically important. Ottoman losses were catastrophic, and when the end came, the carcass of their Empire was up for grabs.

Sachar describes the machinations of the carve-up of the Empire well. He shows us that the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement was in some ways only a minor cause of the current problems in the Middle East. The British imagined a rule over Mesopotamia (Iraq), but initially wanted the Arabs to rule their own kingdom, which included the interior of Syria, all of Palestine, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The French scuppered the Syrian part of the plan, insisting that they extend their rule beyond the coastal strip (including Lebanon) and having suzerainty over the inland as well. After initial talks, an agreement between Feisal and the Jewish communities in Palestine could not be reached: because England had committed to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, they felt that they had the right and indeed the responsibility to rule in that place. The machinations between the pro-Jewish and pro-Arab sections of the British government did much to poison relations between Jew and Arab there, with results that echo down to today.

Feisal was sent to Baghdad to rule over the protectorate of Iraq, while his brother Abdullah was given the Transjordan area as his feifdom, much to the anger of the Jewish people in Palestine, who thought that they would inherit this. It must be remembered that all these areas were not colonies of the two European imperial powers, but protectorates under a League of Nations mandate. As Sachar points out, this kindled the idea and hope within natives of these areas that one day they would be masters in their own lands, which did indeed happen after the next great conflagration.

The remaining part of the Empire, Turkey (Sachar does not really deal with Arabia in this book), was a different story. Defeated, dispirited and exhausted, but the fighting was not over. The Armenians (Sachar devotes a chapter to their war time destruction within Anatolia) attacked the Turks to claim their homeland, assisted by the Russians. After setbacks, Kemal managed to destroy them. The Greeks, based around Smyrna, attacked initially to gain territory that had a plurality of their countrymen, but after initial successes, tried to get to Ankara. Kemal again defeated the Greeks and destroyed their army in Turkey. The Italians, French and English, tired of war and the expense of occupation, forced a solution at the Lausanne conference, beginning the biggest mass exodus of populations in history to that stage, and in the process creating a (basically) ethnically homogenous Greece and Turkey.

There is much base politics and treachery in this story, all of which is well told by Sachar. His descriptions of many of the major players give a good sense of the type of people they were, and he manages to tie this multi-stranded story into one connected thread. When I began this book I suspected that it would turn out to be a dry academic tome, but it's actually quite readable, accompanied with decent maps, notes and bibliography.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell