Amazon.com Review
Empires of the Sand presents the diplomatic and military history of the Middle East, beginning with France's Egyptian campaigns during which Napoleon startled Europe by claiming to have converted to Islam. The conventional wisdom has been that during the 19th century, the Great Powers of Europe actively sought the dismemberment of the region's preeminent power, the Ottoman Empire, finally using its alliance with Germany during the First World War as an excuse to carve it up into artificial entities and thus sow the seeds for the Middle East's problems today. This is not how London-based historians
Efraim and
Inari Karsh approach their subject. They see a constant interplay of interests and intrigue, with pressures from regional forces, such as the Hashemites, as the main impetus for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. When they needed support and protection, local states and rulers didn't hesitate to call on infidels they had previously vilified. The West played similar diplomatic games, for example, preventing Bulgaria from taking Istanbul in 1912 for fear of upsetting the overall European balance of power. In the Crimean War of 1854, France and Britain actually went to war with Russia to defend Turkish interests. Though it is fashionable for relations between the Christian West and Islamic Middle East to be presented in terms of a "clash of civilizations," the well-researched analysis of
Empires of the Sand convincingly reinterprets the turbulent diplomacy of this endlessly fascinating region.
--John Stevenson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This survey of the demise of the Ottoman Empire reeks of academic turf wars. In assessing the last 130-odd years of the Turkish empire, the authors assault the prevailing wisdom that the decline of the "Sick Man of Europe" was inevitable; they claim, rather, that it resulted from a series of poor choices made by its leaders. This approach is both provocative and productive, as the authors, relying on an impressive array of archival and secondary sources, demonstrate how the Ottoman leaders sealed their own fate--their decision to play cat-and-mouse with both sides during WWI was only the final error in a series of blunders. The two London-based scholars also debunk the myth of early Arab nationalism and show that, as the empire was being divvied up after the war, Arab leaders grabbed whatever land they could get in search of personal gain. But the authors' relentlessly negative depictions of the motivations of Turkish and Arab leaders--"Greed rather than necessity drove the Ottoman Empire into the First World War," for example--in contrast to the nonjudgmental ways in which they describe Western leaders seem to derive from an anti-Eastern animus. Indeed, this apparent bias undermines their plausible argument that "there has been no 'clash of civilizations' between the Middle East and the West in the past two centuries, but rather a pattern of pragmatic cooperation and conflict," and prevents this otherwise comprehensive text from being a much more useful source. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
