An animated, impeccably argued historical portrait of British
colonial misrule in the Middle East. Adelson (History/Arizona State
Univ.) takes us back to the early years of the 20th century, when
London was the capital of the world's largest, richest, and most
powerful colonial empire. British policymakers were negotiating
huge slices of the globe like boys wrangling over trading cards,
keen on controlling the military and financial asset of the Suez
Canal, the oil-rich Persian Gulf, and the regions bordering
Britain's prize colony, India. The author personalizes history with
quotes from private documents and public speeches and insights into
the socioeconomic backgrounds and political and religious outlooks
of nine key cabinet ministers who shaped British policy in the
Middle East. They shared a typical British chauvinism toward
non-Christians and foreigners but had strong personal motives for
differing positions on war with the Ottomans and allowing Lord
Balfour's Zionist ties to threaten oil prospects in Iraq. London's
very substantial and free press adds much color, as when the Daily
Mail rails in 1922 against a government press release about the
Chanak crisis in Turkey as designed to promote a costly war; "GET
OUT OF CHANAK," the paper demands. Citations like this back up
Adelson's thesis that it was the inner circle at Whitehall, rather
than the British people, who liked to play monopoly with the world
map. While London invented the Middle East by carving it up into
segments like Syria, Palestine, and Persia, it was actually an
American who coined the term "Middle East" - naval officer and
lecturer Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose books touting naval power
encouraged the British to spread their empire out so thin that it
had to snap. Eloquent testimony to the British government's
unprincipled greed and lust for power, an education for anyone who
wonders why "colonialist" became a favorite slur in the Third
World. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the British
Government, the banks, and leading individuals in London reached
historic decisions that determined the name, shape, nature, and
future of the region known as the Middle East. In this fascinating
and readable book, Roger Adelson examines who made policy, on what
grounds, with what information, and with what results. The setting
for the narrative is London, then the world's greatest metropolis
and its financial and political center. Adelson evokes the
atmosphere of Whitehall, Fleet Street, the City of London, and
Westminster, and paints a vivid portrait of the individuals
(Churchill, Lloyd George, Curzon, Cromer, and others) who
established the international agenda. Using an extensive range of
public and private archives, he identifies issues of money, power,
and territorial ambition at the heart of policy, and he describes
decisions made in ignorance of and often wholly without reference
to local interests. The book explores and explains British
diplomacy both before and after the 1914-1918 War: the protection
of the Suez Canal and Persian Gulf; the fear of a German drive to
the East and subjugation of the Turks; the discovery of oil; the
post-war suppression of nationalist aspirations and the
establishment of collaborative regimes more in tune with London
than with the Middle East itself. More clearly than any previous
work, it identifies the virtual invention of the modern Middle East
and the roots of the ethnic and nationalist antagonisms that
characterize the region today.
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