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What the British Did: Two Centuries in the Middle East

To try to encapsulate more than 200 years of modern history into a single volume of 300 pages requires either naïveté or great talent. To choose to do so on as complicated a region as the Middle East demands courage as well. It should be stated from the outset that unlike many other works of this genre, Peter Mangold’s book is eminently readable. It also presents the sequence of events in a skillful manner. What began at the end of the eighteenth century as an operation to defend the land routes to India against Napoleonic and Russian ambitions turned in the nineteenth century into a struggle to maintain the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe.” The opening of the Suez Canal in the middle of the century shifted attention again to the security of the maritime route to India, compelling Britain to take de facto control of Egypt. The impasse of the trench war in Flanders made the Middle East the only arena in which the balance could be shifted in favor of Britain and its allies.