British-Turkish relations were transformed in the first half of the 20th century, from a state of belligerence during the First World War, through a period of heated confrontation over the fate of Mosul and trade and business access to the new Republic of Turkey, to rapprochement and financial cooperation in the 1930s, and finally a formal military alliance under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The edited collection provides a selection of important chapters by senior and early-career scholars from Britain, Turkey, and the wider world. The chapters use new sources to address issues as diverse as the Turkey-Iraq frontier, colonial governance in Cyprus, the legal rights of foreigners in Istanbul, commercial relations through the era of the Great Depression, contested neutrality in the Second World War, and the search for new alliances in the Cold War. Knowledge of this tumultuous transition and its impact on public memory is key to understanding points of tension and cohesion in present-day UK-Turkey relations. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journals Middle Eastern Studies and the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.

Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 explains the rise and decline and nature and extent of British military rule in the urban eastern Mediterranean during the course of the First World War and its aftermath. Combining novel case studies and theoretical approaches, the volume reveals the extent of military control that Britain established and anticipated maintaining in the post-Ottoman world, before a series of confrontations with nationalist and socialist anti-imperialists forced a new division of the eastern Mediterranean, still visible in the political borders of the present day. Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 tells this story through the eyes and ears of the British servicemen who built this empire, analysing the testimony of over 100 such military personnel sent to Alexandria, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and the towns and islands between them, as they voyaged, made camp, and explored and patrolled the city streets. Whereas histories examining soldiers' experiences in the First World War have almost exclusively focused on their lives at the frontlines, this study provides a much needed in-depth history of soldiers' experience and impact on the urban hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean, where urban planning, nightlife and entertainment, policing, and security were transformed by the presence of so many men at arms and the imperialist interventions that accompanied them.