By Sean McMeekin
ISBN-10: 0674057392
ISBN-13: 9780674057395
The trendy center East used to be solid within the crucible of the 1st global warfare, yet few understand the complete tale of the way warfare truly got here to the quarter. As Sean McMeekin finds during this startling reinterpretation of the battle, it was once neither the British nor the French yet really a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic global into the clash for his or her personal political, monetary, and armed forces ends. The Berlin-Baghdad show tells the interesting tale of the way Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism so one can smash the British Empire, then the biggest Islamic strength on the earth. in the meantime the younger Turks harnessed themselves to German army could to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. instructed from the viewpoint of the foremost decision-makers at the Turco-German part, a few of the such a lot consequential occasions of worldwide warfare I—Turkey’s access into the conflict, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab rebellion, and the Russian Revolution—are illuminated as by no means prior to. Drawing on a wealth of recent resources, McMeekin forces us to reconsider Western interference within the heart East and its lamentable effects. it really is an epic tragicomedy of unintentional outcomes, as Turkish nationalists provide Russia the warfare it desperately wishes, jihad begets an Islamic revolt in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar providing Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour statement. All alongside, the tale is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to accomplish the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the conflict and guarantee German hegemony over the center East. (20100920)
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Extra info for The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power
Example text
Hogarth, the Oxford mentor of Lawrence of Arabia, ‘is one of the gardens of the temperate earth, and perhaps some day European colonists may return from the lands of fever and fly . . ’3 Just as we might expect from her position as historic protector of the Porte, Britain had first made the running in Ottoman rail construction, building the lines from Smyrna (Izmir) on the Aegean Sea inland to Kasaba in the 1860s, and from Mersin to Adana along the Mediterranean. Together with the British buyout of the French shares in the Suez Canal Company in 1875, these coastal railways in Asiatic Turkey seemed to herald British dominance of Near Eastern trade traffic.
Paris, London and St Petersburg’. 16 What was the Kaiser thinking? Interestingly, there does exist a record of the Kaiser’s thoughts during this historic tour of the Orient – in the letters he dispatched, improbably, to his ‘dear friend Nicky’ in St Petersburg. Judging from this correspondence, Wilhelm’s strategic goal was to convince both Sultan and Tsar that their true enemy was Great Britain, thus threatening Germany’s great rival for global supremacy with a pincer movement. The trump card, Wilhelm believed, was the Muslim world, whose fury had most recently been unleashed against British intervention on behalf of the Christians in Crete in 1897.
It has been a long, hard fall for the Baghdad railway and the Germans who planned, financed and built it. Most people now associate the line not with Germany at all, but with British authors and heroes. James Bond stows the Soviet code machine away aboard the Orient Express as he escapes from Istanbul in From Russia With Love. Graham Greene sets one of his classic thrillers blending political intrigue, crime and romance aboard the Stamboul Train. Hercule Poirot solves one of Agatha Christie’s most famous murder mysteries aboard the legendary line, picking up clues in Syria which help him solve the crime somewhere in Bulgaria.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power by Sean McMeekin
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