Sykes' ideas about the region bore a remarkable resemblance to those of T. Cautioning the reactionaries in the British Cabinet against treating the Middle East as another India, he warned: ''If you work from India you have all the old traditions of black and white, and you can not run the Arabs on black and white lines.
Fromkin does not do justice, in my opinion, to Lawrence's quirky brilliance, yet he does reduce the legend of ''Lawrence of Arabia'' to historical reality. Fromkin takes a jaundiced view of the romantic interpretation of Lawrence as the liberator of the Arabs, describing him as ''a teller of fantastic tales whom the American showman Lowell Thomas transformed into 'Lawrence of Arabia.
One part of the jigsaw does not quite fit, Mr. Fromkin's insistence on Winston Churchill's central role in his story.
He writes in the introduction, ''Churchill, above all, presides over the pages of this book: a dominating figure whose genius animated events and whose larger-than-life personality colored and enlivened them. In , Mr. Fromkin points out, the consistently pro-Zionist Churchill warned an Arab delegation: ''The British Government mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. I have told you so again and again. I told you so at Jerusalem. I told you so at the House of Commons the other day.
I tell you so now. They mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. They do. Yet the theme of Churchill's centrality during the war cannot be sustained. He makes a major appearance at the beginning of the book, shortly before the war, and at the time of the Dardanelles campaign in , but does not reappear in the Middle Eastern context until he becomes Colonial Secretary in Though committed to the Zionist cause, he was not a member of the War Cabinet in , and though certainly on the fringes of Middle Eastern issues during the time of the British intervention in the Russian civil war following World War I, he did not participate in the decisions being made about the Middle East itself.
In fact, Churchill himself once observed that Curzon was ''as responsible as any man alive for the promises that were given to the Jews and to the Arabs.
It is important to get Churchill right, not only in the Middle East but also in the spirit of the time. In my own view, he was a throwback to an earlier age. He formed his attitudes toward Indians and other dependent peoples in the British Empire during the Victorian era and he never abandoned his early ideas, once writing in characteristic vein that the Egyptians were no more than degraded savages. He did not believe that the Arabs even in a thousand years could bring modern technology to Palestine.
He imposed a Victorian sense of administrative parsimony at the Colonial Office, cutting costs by trying to rule the Middle East with armored cars, airplanes and machine guns. In the act for which he will probably always be remembered in the Middle East, he decided not to encourage the building of a Jewish national home on both sides of the Jordan River, and established instead the separate state to the east known today as Jordan.
What is particularly noteworthy about Churchill's role in these events is that he always participated in them with memorable ebullience and conviction. It is therefore curious that Mr. Fromkin writes, emphasizing the point with italics, that ''British policy-makers imposed a settlement upon the Middle East in in which, for the most part, they themselves no longer believed.
Churchill's own words indicate the contrary. As Colonial Secretary in , he stated to a group of Palestinian Arabs that a national home for the Jews in Palestine ''will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire. To read pessimism or defeat in the ideas of the British at this time is the flaw of this book. This book written by David Fromkin and published by Vintage which was released on 18 December with total pages We cannot guarantee that Europe s Last Summer book is available in the library, click Get Book button to download or read online books.
Join over When war broke out in Europe in , it surprised a European population enjoying the most beautiful summer in memory. For nearly a century since, historians have debated the causes of the war. Some have cited the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; others have concluded it was unavoidable.
In a riveting re-creation of the run-up to war, Fromkin shows how German generals, seeing war as inevitable, manipulated events to precipitate a conflict waged on their own terms. Moving deftly between diplomats, generals, and rulers across Europe, he makes the complex diplomatic negotiations accessible and immediate.
Examining the actions of individuals amid larger historical forces, this is a gripping historical narrative and a dramatic reassessment of a key moment in the twentieth-century. As he tells their stories, Fromkin, author of A Peace. An intimate look at two extraordinary figures and their secret collaboration? Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh?
The term 'Fertile Crescent' is commonly used as shorthand for the group of territories extending around the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Much has been written on the history of these countries which were taken from the Ottoman.
In the Ottoman Empire was depleted of men and resources after years of war against Balkan nationalist and Italian forces. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url.
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