Sean McMeekin has written a classic of First World War history... superb and original. -- Norman Stone, author of World War One: A Short History A seminal work that demonstrates for the first time that Imperial Germany's jihad strategy in World War I-- exploiting pan-Islamism in the Middle East to stoke the fire of native Muslim revolts against the British and against Russia-- played a crucial role in German plans to win the war. Now students of the 'Great War' will no longer be able to dismiss the German 'holy war' strategy as merely peripheral. There is much to be learned in this superb work about the recent past and today in the Middle East. -- Donald M. McKale, author of War By Revolution: Germany and Great Britain in the Middle East in the Era of World War I
Sean McMeekin is Assistant Professor of History at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Sean McMeekin has written a classic of First World War history...
superb and original.
*Norman Stone, author of World War One: A Short History*
A seminal work that demonstrates for the first time that Imperial
Germany's jihad strategy in World War I-- exploiting pan-Islamism
in the Middle East to stoke the fire of native Muslim revolts
against the British and against Russia-- played a crucial role in
German plans to win the war. Now students of the 'Great War' will
no longer be able to dismiss the German 'holy war' strategy as
merely peripheral. There is much to be learned in this superb work
about the recent past and today in the Middle East.
*Donald M. McKale, author of War By Revolution: Germany and
Great Britain in the Middle East in the Era of World War I*
A riveting account.
*The Independent*
In this excellent, well-researched, and fascinating book, Sean
McMeekin has given us a welcome and stimulating perspective on a
highly important but neglected aspect of the First World War... A
tale of high adventure, ambition and political chicanery with a
cast of colourful, brave and sometimes ruthless characters.
*Literary Review*
An exciting new book by a talented young historian, Sean McMeekin,
who is one of the few to have penetrated the notoriously difficult
Ottoman archives, despite the crucial importance of Turkey in the
first world war.
*The Observer*
A terrific book...McMeekin's learned story of death-defying secret
agents, intrepid archeologists, and double-dealing sheikhs makes
for wonderful entertainment.
*The Sunday Times*
McMeekin has written a powerful, overdue book that for many will
open up a whole new side to the first world war, while forcing us
to be less reticent in confronting indelicate matters, such as the
origins of Nazi-Islamist links.
*The Guardian*
In addition to bringing to life a fascinating episode in early
20th-century history, The Berlin-Baghdad Express contains several
timely lessons and cautionary tales. Purchased loyalty is
worthless. Western countries may possess superior military force,
but they are outwitted time and again by diplomacy as practiced by
Muslim leaders. Lastly, there is no such thing as global Islamic
solidarity—jihad is an expedient, not a belief system.
*Wall Street Journal*
Germany saw the ambitious Berlin-to-Baghdad railway as a powerful
tool to win World War I. But the doomed project wasn't completed
until 1940. The railway debacle provides a colorful backdrop for
historian McMeekin's look at the Great War from the German-Turk
perspective; as a cast of ruthless characters illustrate Germany's
attempt to topple what was then the largest Middle East power: the
British Empire.
*New York Post*
Sean McMeekin shows how the ambitious plan to build a railroad from
Central Europe to Mesopotamia was the key to some of the most
crucial episodes in the First World War, including the Armenian
genocide and the Arab Revolt.
*Barnes and Noble Review*
The Berlin Baghdad Express is a refreshing kind of military history
that approaches World War I from a truly fresh angle. The Ottoman
focus certainly makes this a singular and highly original book but,
more significant is McMeekin's interest in the workings of empire
during the war. As he demonstrates here, the imperial concerns of
all of the European powers played a bigger part in the war than is
often acknowledged.
*popmatters.com*
All the more brilliant is Sean McMeekin's telling of this complex
tale in The Berlin-Baghdad Express. He recounts the convolutions
and involutions of detail, the ambiguities and equivocalities of
intention, the necessities and urgencies of dangerous international
entanglements, with remarkable clarity. His ostensible subject is
the building of a railway from Berlin to Baghdad in the years
before and during the First World War, a railway conceived by
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany as an artery along which the lifeblood of
a new and mighty German empire would flow. Instead, one of its
immediate consequences was the copious shedding of the more
ordinary sort of blood. As if the faltering line of that railway
were a thread, McMeekin strings along it a tale of intrigue,
callous calculation, human misery, skullduggery, cheating,
revolution, murder and war. The result is not only wondrously
fascinating in itself, but, alas for the mess that the world is in
today, painfully educative. Because of this angle of approach
McMeekin brings a fresh perspective to the history of the Eastern
Question, the Young Turk revolution, and Britain's demolition of
the Ottoman Empire...The story is so complex and so richly told by
McMeekin that no summary can do it justice: it needs to be read,
and readers will mutter and shake their heads with wonder at every
page...This is one of the essential books about the Middle East's
labyrinthine recent history, perhaps the most telling case of how a
knowledge of history is necessary to an understanding of the
present. And that fact makes one wish that McMeekin had written his
book a decade or more earlier.
*Barnes & Noble Review*
In a fascinating, must-read for anyone interested--or more
importantly, engaged--in Western policy-making in the Middle East,
Sean McMeekin's new book, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman
Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, takes us on a tour of one
of modernity's grand follies: the attempt by Imperial Germany to
establish an "anti-Orientalist" empire in the Middle East through
an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. The goal was to create a
strategic, economic and military force that could challenge if not
destroy the British Empire, then its main rival for global
dominance...The parallels between Imperial Germany and Imperial
America--both in overextending wars to enhance their position
versus powerful rivals--are as informative as they are troubling.
Americans would do well to consider how Germany came out of its
first world war: bitter, battered and primed for fascism.
*Huffington Post*
Sean McMeekin's account possesses the large merit that it tells a
story little known to Western readers, drawing extensively upon
German sources. It depicts a splendid cast of characters heroic in
their endeavors if absurd in their lack of accomplishments.
*New York Review of Books*
This is the story of Germany's plans to bring the Ottomans into
World War I and then to play the jihad card against the Allies,
which held most of the Muslim world in colonial thrall. It is good,
old-fashioned history as biography. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the
mercurial archaeologist Max von Oppenheim, and "the Three Pashas,"
Cemal, Enver, and Talat, loom large. But many others--friends,
foes, and would-be Muslim recruits to jihad--are also well
delineated. In telling the story of the Central Powers'
less-than-successful recruitment of locals, from Libya to Arabia to
Afghanistan, McMeekin demonstrates the fragility of this jihadist
dream. And his accounts of the victory over the Allies at Gallipoli
and the failure to complete the Berlin-Baghdad rail line nail down
the greater importance of military skill and geopolitical givens in
determining outcomes.
*Foreign Affairs*
Sean McMeekin is a professional historian with a deft popular
touch...[This is an] engrossing and enlightening narrative.
*The Atlantic*
[McMeekin] does a stellar job framing newer issues of both
diplomatic and intellectual history that are important to
Europeanists and Ottomanists alike. The subject matter is fresh,
and the style is engaging--a worthwhile read.
*Choice*
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