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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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THE OTTOMAN ENDGAME

Sean McMeekin

War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923

An astonishing retelling of early 20th century history from the Ottoman perspective, based on groundbreaking work in the Ottoman and Russian archives, and delivering profound new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East.
In The Ottoman Endgame, acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin offers a blistering exposé of the West’s partition plans for the Ottoman Empire, in which the Russians were actually the driving force. British politician Sir Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot, always painted as the main actors of this story, are shown by McMeekin to have in fact been dupes of the Russian negotiator, Sazanov.
World War I’s endgame is magnificently reconceived, beginning with a revolutionary account of Brest-Litovsk and the carve-up of European Russia, with new revelations on occupied Ukraine and German plans to depose the Bolsheviks by force in fall 1918.
Finally, the book relates the story of the birth of modern Turkey, including long-forgotten episodes like the King-Crane commission report, which gave a snapshot of public opinion in the Middle East on the eve of the European takeover. Very little of this story, in short, happened the way we think it did.

Every so often, an important new work of history completely reshapes our understanding of a subject of enormous historical and contemporary importance. The Ottoman Endgame is such a book. It is also written with great wit and storytelling flair, thrilling in both its judgments and as an experience of narrative history as high art.

Sean McMeekin is a professor of history at Bard College. His works include July 1914: Countdown to War (Basic Books 2013), which was reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review; The Russian Origins of the First World War (Belknap Press 2011), which won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize and was nominated for the Lionel Gelber Prize; and The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918 (Belknap Press 2010; Allen Lane), which won the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize. He previously taught at Koç University, Istanbul, and Yale University.
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Published 2015-11-03 by Penguin Press

Book

Published 2015-11-03 by Penguin Press

Comments

Sean McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame pleases like a mouthful of Turkish delight, the flavors, scents and views of the old empire combining in a gripping new history that plunges the Turkish Empire into the Great War and locates Constantinople not at the edge of the conflict but at its very heart.

Sean McMeekin has an infernal panorama to describe, as, over twelve years, the Ottoman Empire fell apart, giving us problems that have gone on to this day. The subject has found a writer with all the linguistic and scholarly qualifications to do it justice.

A real feat of historical scholarship, offering genuinely new interpretations and fresh insights into the origins of the modern Middle East.

A tour de force. Using an unprecedented array of new sources—German, Russian, Turkish, French and British—Sean McMeekin not only describes a key aspect of the First World War but also provides a key to the tragedy of the Middle East today.

A well-timed, well-researched exploration of the empire whose dissolution continues to complicate making sense of the contemporary Middle East. Herein are explanations of how modern Turkey, Iraq, and Syria came to be, as well as how the division of the rest of the region affected its future. Scholars and practitioners alike will benefit from reading it.

UK: Penguin UK China: CITIC Taiwan: Rive Gauche Turkey: Yapi Kredi Kultur Sanat

Where conventional histories of World War One focus on the trench warfare in the West, Sean McMeekin, combining ground breaking archival research with a genius for historical narrative, tells the story of the war in the East. From the Bolshevik Revolution to the Armenian Genocide, McMeekin weaves the dramatic and world shaking events of one of history’s greatest conflicts into a compelling and original story. As characters like Leon Trotsky, Kemal Ataturk and Winston Churchill stride — or in some cases, slink — across these pages, readers will see some of history’s most important events from a fresh perspective. There are many histories of World War One; few are as important or as readable as this one.

McMeekin synthesizes an impressive amount of fresh material from across Europe’s archives in this balanced and perceptive analysis of the twelve-year War of Ottoman Succession, between 1911, and 1923, that ended an empire after six centuries; redrew the map and reshaped the culture of the Middle East; and almost tangentially played a crucial role in the outbreak of World War I and the peace that—temporarily—concluded it.