For the sake of tradition and to preserve common currency, I continue to reference it in this book as the PRO. * Although it has been several years now since the Public Record Office was renamed the National Archives of the United Kingdom, I do not know of a single researcher who refers to it by the new name. & Cie KGaA, Cologne, Germany National Archives of the United States (NA), US Embassy, Ankara, Turkey Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin, Germany National Archives of the United Kingdom (formerly Public Record Office), Kew Gardens, London, United Kingdom* List of Maps List of Abbreviations A Note on Names and Translations Prologue: The View from Haydarpasha I Berlin to Baghdadġ The Kaiser, the Baron and the Dragoman 2Ĥ A Gift from Mars: German Holy War FeverĦ The First Global Jihad: Death to Infidels Everywhere! (Unless they be Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Americans or – possibly – Italians)Įpilogue: The Strange Death of German Zionism and the Nazi-Muslim Connectionġ ‘Mitteleuropa’: from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf, 1912Ĥ The Baghdad railway in 1914, with gaps and projected developmentīrest-Litovsk and the German vision of empire, 1918Īrkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii (Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire), Moscow, Russia Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivleri (Ottoman Government Archive), Sultanahmet, Istanbul, Turkey Deutsches Bundesarchiv Berlin, Lichterfelde, Berlin, Germany Ernst Jäckh Papers, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut Geheimes Preussisches Staatsarchiv, Berlin, Germany Haus-, Hof-und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, Austria Kriegsarchiv Wien, Vienna, Austria Max von Oppenheim Stiftung, Sal. ![]() Some day, when the full history is written – sober history with ample documents – the poor romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage. 2010 Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-9-5 (cloth : alk. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 2010Ĭopyright © 2010 by Sean McMeekin All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books Ltd. S e an mc me e k in The Berlin–Baghdad Express The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I-Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution-are illuminated as never before. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. ![]() ![]() The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. ![]() As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends. The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region.
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