A Peace to End all Peace
Read A Peace to End all Peace Online
Authors: David Fromkin
The Independence of Nations
The Question of Government
A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE
THE FALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
A HOLT PAPERBACK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
“After ‘the war to end war’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace.’”
Archibald Wavell (later Field Marshal Earl Wavell), an officer who served under Allenby in the Palestine campaign, commenting on the treaties bringing the First World War to an end
6 Crowds gather outside the Sublime Porte, 1913
7 Turkish soldiers at Dardanelles fort, 1915
8 Allied fleet at entrance to Dardanelles
9 Pictorial map of the Dardanelles
12 Australian troops at Gallipoli
15 Russian advance-guard in Turkey, 1916
16 Russian occupation of Erzerum
17 Russian troops in Trebizond
18 British camel column in the Jordan Valley
19 British survey party in Palestine
25 T.E. Lawrence with Lowell Thomas
28 Chaim Weizmann with Lord Balfour
29 Union Jack hoisted above Basra
31 Reading of General Allenby’s proclamation of martial law, 1917
32 Australian Light Horse entering Damascus, 1918
33 General Allenby enters Aleppo, 1919
34 Ottoman soldiers surrender, November 1918
35 British sentry, Constantinople, 1920
36 Admiral Calthorpe’s flagship, 1918
39 Signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, 1920
40 British bluejackets in Constantinople, 1920
41 French quarter of Smyrna after the fall of the city, 1922
42 French troops enter Damascus, 1920
43 Bodies of Greek soldiers in a Turkish field, 1922
50 Ibn Saud with Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell
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, 80 are reproduced courtesy of
The Illustrated London News
Picture Library, London.
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are reproduced courtesy of UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos, New York.
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is reproduced courtesy of the Bettmann Archive, New York.
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are reproduced courtesy of the Zionist Archives and Library.
Maps (Between pages 20 and 21)
The Middle East in 1914
Cartography by Sue Lawes
The idea of writing this book came to me in the course of a conversation with Timothy Dickinson in which he asked my views about the history of the Middle East. Later I put my ideas in written form. Jason Epstein suggested that the book be structured around a personality. I took his suggestion and chose Winston Churchill. Now I cannot think of how the book could have been structured any other way.
As books on my subject appeared in London, my friend and colleague Robert L. Sigmon would buy them for me and send them to me by airmail. And Professor Stanley Mallach of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee helped me find books I could not find elsewhere.
Alain Silvera, Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College and a lifelong friend, kept me abreast of the latest scholarship by supplying me with articles from learned journals as well as valuable ideas, information, and suggestions. He read and re-read the manuscript and offered detailed marginal corrections and comments. He showed the manuscript also to his Ph.D. student Kay Patterson, who offered extensive and careful comments. At my request, Professor Ernest Gellner of Cambridge University kindly arranged for me to meet Professor Elie Kedourie, whom I wanted to persuade to be the other academic reader of my manuscript. Professor Kedourie read the manuscript and gave me the benefit of his immense erudition and authoritative comments. I am grateful to him, and to Mrs Kedourie for her kindness and patience in putting up with my demands on her husband’s time. Dr Nicholas Rizopoulos read the Greek-Turkish episodes and offered valuable suggestions. I hope I need not add that Professor Kedourie, Professor Silvera, Dr Rizopoulos, and Mrs Patterson are not responsible in any way for the opinions and conclusions I express in the book. Moreover, the manuscript has been extensively rewritten since they saw it, so there may well be factual or other statements in it they would have advised me to change.
Academic readers, in particular, will observe in reading the book that I owe an immense intellectual debt to the books and essays of many other scholars—more, indeed, than there is space to name here. Chief among those to whom I am thus indebted are Elie Kedourie, for his masterful studies of Middle Eastern and British history and politics, and Martin Gilbert, whose great life of Winston Churchill is essential to anyone writing about this period. I have leaned heavily on Gilbert’s volumes—as everyone now must. And I was inspired by the example of Howard Sachar to believe that a history of the Middle East can be written—as I was attempting to do—on a very broad scale.
Samuel Clayton, the son of Sir Gilbert Clayton, was kind enough to spend the best part of an afternoon talking to me about his father. My thanks to him, and to his wife, the Lady Mary, for their hospitality in having me to tea at Kensington Palace.
In the course of my research in archives in Britain and elsewhere over the years, I have benefited from the kindness and patience of such unfailingly helpful librarians as Lesley Forbes of the University of Durham, Clive Hughes of the Imperial War Museum, Norman Higson of the University of Hull, Alan Bell of Rhodes House, Oxford, and Gillian Grant of the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford. My heartfelt thanks to them all.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Rob Cowley, my editor at Henry Holt and an authority on the First World War, for his knowledgeable and helpful suggestions and for his constant encouragement and enthusiasm. Marian Wood at Henry Holt and Sara Menguç at André Deutsch saw me through the publication process with unfailing cheer and awesome efficiency.
For permission to reproduce quotations from documents I am indebted to the following:
—The Clerk of the Records, House of Lords Record Office, for permission to quote from the Lloyd George Papers in the Beaverbrook Collection in the custody of the House of Lords Record Office;
—the Sudan Archive of the University of Durham, on whose extensive collection I have drawn freely;
—Mrs Theresa Searight, and the Rhodes House Library, for permission to quote from the diaries of Richard Meinertzhagen;
—the Brynmor Jones Library of the University of Hull and Sir Tatton Sykes, Bart., for permission to quote from the papers of Sir Mark Sykes;
—the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, for permission to quote from their extensive collection, including the papers of Sir Hubert Young, T. E. Lawrence, Lord Allenby, William Yale, F. R. Somerset, C. D. Brunton, and the King Feisal and Balfour Declaration files;
—the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, for permission to quote from Lord Milner’s files;
—the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College, London, for permission to quote from Lord Allenby’s papers.
Transcripts/Translations of Crown copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of H. M. Stationery Office.
For access to documentary material, I wish also to thank the British Library, London; Camellia Investments, Plc, London; the Weizmann Archives, Rehovot, Israel; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Imperial War Museum, London; the Houghton Library of Harvard University; and the New York Public Library.
A Note on Spelling
In spelling Turkish, Arabic, and Persian names and titles, I have used whatever form of spelling I am most familiar with from my reading over the years. So there is no system or consistency in it; but I would guess that the spellings most familiar to me will be the most familiar to the general reader as well.
