EMERGENCE OF THE MIDDLE EAST 1914-1924, THE

By Howard M. Sachar

The collapse in the First World War of the Ottoman Empire, the exertions of the great European powers in launching a series of carefully interlocked military and diplomatic campaigns from the Dardanelles to the Persian Gulf, the emergence between 1914 and 1924 of unsuspected national ambitions and realigned political loyalties in the Middle East - this is the historical drama brilliantly re-created in Howard M. Sachar's compelling and scholarly work. 

The author unravels the complex network of subterranean negotiations between Constantinople, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome that charted the fate of the moribund Ottoman realm and eventually partitioned its territories and races. He sheds light on the manner in which both the Allies and Central Powers exploited national and dynastic unrest in Arabia, the Levant, Asia Minor, and the Tatar hinterland of Transcaucasia - maneuvers largely responsible for the first genocide of of the twentieth century (twenty-five years before Hitler's "Final Solution"), the fragmentation of the middle East into a half dozen contentious political entities, and, ultimately, the eruption of the "Palestine Question."

Alfred A. Knopf (1969) First Edition