The best books to change discussions about the modern Middle East

Like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to which this compares in the breadth of scope and depth of knowledge, this is a huge, rich feast of a book and one of the best you can read on World War I as well as on the formative geopolitics of the modern Middle East. Like the greatest of the imperial geographers, David’s scholarship was omnivorous but his original discipline was law: his discussion of the rashly-drawn boundaries that are at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace is without peer.

Full disclosure: David was also a friend who, like his book, was incredibly generous. I owe my book to a particularly compendious footnote in A Peace to End All Peace. It caught my eye and I became obsessed with why I didn’t know more about such an enormous presence, eventually traveling to Britain, France, Israel, and the Isle of Man to dig up everything I could about Aaron Aaronsohn. After the book was published, David asked to be introduced through a mutual friend. On meeting me, he stuck out his lower lip and said, “But I was going to write a book about Aaron Aaronsohn!” When I rejoined, “Then you shouldn’t have written such a wonderful footnote, “he laughed and I knew I had nothing to fear.   

Even more than the oil curse, the location curse is key to understanding the Middle East. Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is one of the best explorations of what imperial geographers identified as Eurasia, the ancient, much-fought-over land bridge between west and east running from the eastern Mediterranean to the Himalayas of which the modern construct of the “Middle East” is only one, sadly reduced part. Frankopan looks away from today’s association with regimes that are unstable, violent threats to international security and/or human rights, and popularly perceived as somehow peripheral to the interests of the West—to its historic center at the crossroads of civilization.

By tracing the evolution of the vitally interconnected trade routes known as the “Silk Roads", from conveying Chinese luxury goods and Turkic slaves to gold and silver, Iranian oil and Ukrainian wheat, Mongolian rare earths, and transcontinental telecommunications links, he shows how the region has functioned for eons as the world’s central nervous system, carrying not only vital commodities but ideas and faiths as well as violence, disease, and world cataclysm, as Frankopan’s chapters on the Eurasian vector in two world wars demonstrate. There’s an oddly beautiful justice in the notion that the empires of the West could destroy themselves over the prosperity that the Silk Roads brought them. Like Halford Mackinder a century before him, today 3 Frankopan concludes that the geopolitics of Eurasia move the West, not vice-versa, and that the Western powers will use any means possible to maintain pole position on the newest incarnation of the Silk Roads.

Ferguson shows us a neural network of another sort: the web of offshore finance and international co-investment that culminated in the First World War—not at Sarajevo but in the Middle East, where Great Britain and Germany faced off over railroad access to Britain’s prize possession, India. Wrapped in the thoroughly engaging family history of the far-flung Rothschilds and how they knit themselves together in an empire of their own, Ferguson embeds an equally enthralling history of what he calls “Globalization I,” the 19th-century race to connect the empires established in the preceding age of exploration with their European centers of power by commercial rather than military means, with railway and telecommunications lines as their primary instruments. I am indebted to him for inspiring insights into how, in the years preceding World War I, the great European railway race came down to the finish line, the last and crucial link connecting Constantinople, the gateway to Europe, with Basra in what is now Iraq, the gateway to India; and how “gentile Zionists” in the British Parliament came up with the idea of a national homeland for the Jews not so much out of love for Zionism, but to have friendly Europeans settled along their railroad tracks in the transport hub of Palestine.

It’s hard to understand why much, if not most, Middle East foreign policy in the previous two world wars was driven by Britain’s need to protect access to India without reading William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy. Dalrymple goes back four centuries to explain, in a stunning portrait of the first public-private partnership between a government and a multinational corporation, the East India Company that fractured the enormously wealthy Mughal empire and then the British Parliament when it was discovered to be using its own shares to buy politicians willing to subvert the law in its favor. Parliament’s willingness to unleash The Company to pillage countries it wished to subjugate did not go unnoticed in America, where patriots dumped its tea into Boston Harbor and triggered the American War of Independence in order to prevent “America being devoured by rats”: this, however, did not prevent 20th-century American monopolies from insinuating themselves into the marrow of a putatively democratic state. Dalrymple’s 400-year history is an invaluable template for understanding how 4 corporate power has corrupted, magnified, and transcended national power to become a new imperium on its own.

I’m going to be sneaky here and wedge two books in for the price of one. Kim Ghattas’ Black Wave is a beautifully written and reported, intimate history of the destructive ideological rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, a rivalry fuelled by the “tilt” policy of the Ronald Reagan administration that pitted the former allies against each other in an effort to keep them both weak (and unlikely to lead OPEC to attack the West again as they did in 1973). Ghattas, a Beiruti journalist who was friends with Jamal Khashoggi, grounds her history of the devastating cultural and geopolitical upheaval that followed in the personal and highly emotional stories of public intellectuals and other progressive thinkers who fought the Dark Age descending on the Middle East.

She finds her creation moment in the 1979 Iranian revolution, which occurred in the same year as the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Her superb book should be read in conjunction with Dilip Hero’s Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy, which predates the Saudi/Iran rivalry to the 1908 discovery of oil in Iran and subsequent jockeying between British and American oil companies, based in Iran and Saudi Arabia respectively. Hero’s style is less accessible than Ghattas’ but compelling in its own way. The depth of his knowledge is worth the slog and the books make excellent companion pieces.