An astonishing retelling of twentieth-century history from the Ottoman perspective, delivering profound new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East Between 1911 and 1922, a series of wars would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, in which the central conflict, of course, is World War I—a story we think we know well. As Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history of what he calls the “wars of the Ottoman succession,” we know far less than we think. The Ottoman Endgame brings to light the entire strategic narrative that led to an unstable new order in postwar Middle East—much of which is still felt today. The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East draws from McMeekin’s years of groundbreaking research in newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives. With great storytelling flair, McMeekin makes new the epic stories we know from the Ottoman front, from Gallipoli to the exploits of Lawrence in Arabia, and introduces a vast range of new stories to Western readers. His accounts of the lead-up to World War I and the Ottoman Empire’s central role in the war itself offers an entirely new and deeper vision of the conflict. Harnessing not only Ottoman and Russian but also British, German, French, American, and Austro-Hungarian sources, the result is a truly pioneering work of scholarship that gives full justice to a multitiered war involving many belligerents. McMeekin also brilliantly reconceives our inherited Anglo-French understanding of the war’s outcome and the collapse of the empire that followed. The book chronicles the emergence of modern Turkey and the carve-up of the rest of the Ottoman Empire as it has never been told before, offering a new perspective on such issues as the ethno-religious bloodletting and forced population transfers which attended the breakup of empire, the Balfour Declaration, the toppling of the caliphate, and the partition of Iraq and Syria—bringing the contemporary consequences into clear focus. Every so often, a work of history completely reshapes our understanding of a subject of enormous historical and contemporary importance. The Ottoman Endgame is such a book, an instantly definitive and thrilling example of narrative history as high art.

The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

This is the third volume in a series of private letters written by Sir Ernest Satow (1843-1929) to his close friends. Volume One comprises his letters to Japanologists William George Aston and Frederick Victor Dickins. Volume Two consists mainly of letters to and from John Harington Gubbins who had worked under Satow in Japan. In this third volume Satow mainly discusses international law (law of the sea in wartime, Versailles peace treaty etc.) and the current political situation in the UK and Europe, a far cry from his East Asian focus on Japan which monopolised Volume One, and was still evident in Volume Two. (Lord Reay had no experience of Japan in his distinguished career.) The expert foreword is by Dr. J.E. Hoare, formerly of H.M. Diplomatic Service and a Teaching Fellow at S.O.A.S.

This classic study examines the deployment of U.S. naval vessels in European and Near Eastern waters from the end of the Civil War until the United States declared war in April 1917. Initially these ships were employed to visit various ports from the Baltic Sea to the eastern Mediterranean and Constantinople (today Istanbul), for the primary purpose of showing the flag. From the 1890s on, most of the need for the presence of the American warships occurred in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Unrest in the Ottoman Empire and particularly the Muslim hostility and threats to Armenians led to calls for protection. This would continue into the years of World War I. In 1905, the Navy Department ended the permanent stationing of a squadron in European waters. From then until the U.S. declaration of war in 1917, individual ships, detached units, and special squadrons were at times deployed in European waters. In 1908, the converted yacht Scorpion was sent as station ship (stationnaire) to Constantinople where she would remain, operating in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea until 1928. Upon the outbreak of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson ordered cruisers to northern European waters and the Mediterranean to protect American interests. These warships, however, did more than protect American interests. They would evacuate thousands of refugees, American tourists, Armenians, Jews, and Italians after Italy entered the conflict on the side of the Allies.