My encounter with young refugees and former political prisoners from Turkey in Basel in the early 1980s decisively oriented me as a future historian toward the Middle East. My studies led me to discover the end of the Ottoman Empire and the post-1918 efforts to bring peace and a new order, both globally and nationally, as a highly under-researched, but essential topic.
I wrote
When Democracy Died: The Middle East's Enduring Peace of Lausanne
This volume makes clear that without knowing the Lausanne Conference we cannot understand how the Middle East became the crisis-ridden hotspot it is today.
Carefully prepared, this is a reader-friendly history book with an excellent introduction. Its main theme is the challenge of world peace after the First World War which was followed by wars in Anatolian Turkey.
In Lausanne, diplomacy endorsed victorious ultranationalism and dictatorship. It gave factually up the League of Nations’ project of international peace by law, not force.
Twenty experts develop a rich variety of perspectives on the pivotal moment that was the 1922-3 Lausanne Conference for Europe and the Middle East.
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne may have been the last of the post-World War One peace settlements, but it was very different from Versailles. Like its German and Austro-Hungarian allies, the defeated Ottoman Empire had initially been presented with a dictated peace in 1920. In just two years, however, the Kemalist insurgency turned defeat into victory, enabling Turkey to claim its place as the first sovereign state in the Middle East. Meanwhile those communities who had lived side-by-side with Turks inside the Ottoman Empire struggled to assert their own sovereignty, jostled between the Soviet Union and the resurgence of empire…
Although partisan and perspectival (pro-British), this book offers invaluable insights into the “Lausanne moment.”
Its author was an insider of the post-Great War Paris conferences and the final Conference of Lausanne. Based on contemporary notes of the author and further material, this book is a main source for the research on the Lausanne Near East Peace Conference.
In Harold Nicolson's own words 'This study of Lord Curzon represents the third volume of a trilogy on British diplomacy covering the years from 1870 to 1924. The first volume of that trilogy was a biography entitled Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy. The second volume was a critical survey of the Paris conference called Peacemaking, 1919.' All three volumes are reissued in Faber Finds. Curzon himself, not a modest man it must be admitted, rated highly the work of his final years. In his 'Literary Testament' dictated only a few hours before his death he said, 'As…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in…
I highly appreciate this book. Based on meticulous historical research, it has contributed to rethinking and reappraising the long widely disqualified League of Nations.
The failure of the League of Nations’ peace project had been sealed at the Lausanne Conference a hundred years ago, and the League’s Covenant did no longer figure in the Lausanne Treaty. But the need of a convincing global and democratic peace project is today no less topical than it was after the Great War, before the rise of the Nazis.
At the end of the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference saw a battle over the future of empire. The victorious allied powers wanted to annex the Ottoman territories and German colonies they had occupied; Woodrow Wilson and a groundswell of anti-imperialist activism stood in their way. France, Belgium, Japan and the British dominions reluctantly agreed to an Anglo-American proposal to hold and administer those allied conquests under "mandate" from the new League of Nations. In the end, fourteen mandated territories were set up across the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. Against all odds, these disparate and far-flung…
This is a personal account from the decade preceding the Lausanne Treaty.
Jakob Künzler and his wife were stationed in the Swiss Hospital in Urfa, Mesopotamia, and witnessed the destruction of the Armenians at close hand. As disturbing as is Künzler’s sober report, at the same time it is a declaration of love for a turbulent land of different languages, religions, and the people who live there.
Presents information regarding the Armenian massacres in Urfa, Ottoman Turkey during the World War (1914-1918). the fate of the Armenian widows and orphans as well as author's description of his work in the German Orient Mission hospital, deportations of the Armenians as well as the Kurds, requisitions of the Armenian property by the Turkish government officials and citizens.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The first in a charming, joyful crime series set in 1920s Bangalore, featuring sari-wearing detective Kaveri and her husband Ramu.
When clever, headstrong Kaveri moves to Bangalore to marry handsome young doctor Ramu, she's resigned herself to a quiet life. But…
This very impressive documentary novel tells the true story of a Kurdish mother and child surviving famine after the massacre of Kurdish Alevis in Dersim, Turkey.
Most scholars today consider the 1937-8 military campaign in that region in Northeastern Anatolia a genocide. It was the last one in a series that accompanied the making of the post-Ottoman Turkish nation-state, whose birth the Lausanne Treaty had certified in 1923.
Haydar Karataş, the author, of Gece Kelebeği - Perperık-a Söe (Butterfly of the Night) now lives in exile in Zurich. The book's child-narrator, his mother, was swept up in a series of tragic historical event in the mountainous region of Dersim in Northeastern Anatolia. Dersim (renamed Tunceli in 1935). The area was 90 km east-west and 70 km north-south and, in the 1930s, it had a population of nearly 80,000 people, most of them involved agriculture.
Dersim was at odds with the politico-cultural landscape of 1930s Turkey, whose leaders wanted "a country with one language, one mentality, and unity of…
When Democracy Died recounts how the eight dramatic months of the Lausanne Conference concluded more than ten years of war and genocide in late Ottoman Turkey. The resulting treaty in 1923 was not a peace in which no one lost out, but a deal between Western national empires and Turkish ultranationalists regrouped in Ankara. Not only did this treaty liquidate the Ottoman Empire, but it marked also the end of the League of Nations' project of democratic self-determination and security for small peoples, notably Armenians and Kurds. The Lausanne Treaty was crucial in shaping the modern Middle East, and modern dictatorships in Turkey and Interwar Europe, namely Germany.
Captain James Heron First Into the Fray
by
Patrick G. Cox,
Captain Heron finds himself embroiled in a conflict that threatens to bring down the world order he is sworn to defend when a secretive Consortium seeks to undermine the World Treaty Organisation and the democracies it represents as he oversees the building and commissioning of a new starship.
Zach, a young veteran, contemplates suicide after a horrific tour in Afghanistan when Ernest Hemingway appears and stops him. He enrolls in college, where he falls in love with Jessica, a young woman from a wealthy family. Her love stabilizes him, and Hemingway’s appearances become less frequent until she doesn’t…
