The End of the Ottoman Empire and the Forging of the Modern Middle East

The End of the Ottoman Empire and the Forging of the Modern Middle East “In one hundred and twenty pages this book provides a compelling account of the shaping of the modern Middle East, and the critical part played in that process by the Ottoman Empire, even as it fell apart. It offers a mine of background information for anyone wishing to understand the current scene. Thirty-four well-chosen documents, mainly culled from the archives, buttress and illuminate the story.” —Jonathan Schneer, Georgia Institute of Technology, author of The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict “The internal dynamics of the modern Middle East can only be comprehended by a full understanding of its Ottoman past. Despite this fact, the starting point of a great majority of the general works on the subject is the Sykes-Picot agreement with a few random references to the Ottoman dissolution. . . . The End of the Ottoman Empire and the Forging of the Modern Middle East is an excellent attempt to remedy this shortcoming in the scholarship. This informative, analytical, and limpid study weaves a detailed tale of the emergence of the new Middle East by situating it within a long durée of imperial and post-imperial structures.” —M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Princeton University “An invaluable contribution to an understanding of the modern Middle East. Better than any other book, it disabuses us of some of the ethnocentric views of the Ottoman Empire, such as the ‘sick man of Europe’ construct, instead suggesting that certain key decisions on the part of Ottoman leaders contributed to its demise.” —Ross Harrison, Senior Fellow, Middle East Institute, Washington D.C.