100 books like Butterfly of the Night

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. 

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.

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.

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.

I bought Jeremy Bowen’s book by chance as I searched for books about the Middle East. I wanted something different from the traditional (and sometimes a bit difficult to read) academic nonfiction book. This book appealed to me because it was written in a journalistic style and because it was as much a book about recent history as one about Bowen’s own travels and encounters in the Middle East. Well, I was not disappointed.

I really enjoyed reading Bowen’s recollections of his time in the Middle East and critical reflections on great powers’ involvement there. That is a book I felt gave a good sense of how the West has mismanaged its policies in the region during the past fifty years. 

Hot off the press, and building on the success of Aksan's earlier volume on the later Ottoman empire, this book charts the transformation of this once-formidable state into a colonial client of Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. It traces the lives of friends and foes of the Ottomans who witnessed the rise and fall of a constitutional experiment in an era of shrinking borders, global consciousness, ethno-religious nationalism, and revolutionary fervour. The narrative's primary focus is on those who negotiated with, fought for, defended, and finally challenged the sultan and the system in its final days just prior to WWI, resulting in a legacy of international relations and communal violence that continues into the present.   

For all the interest in the British experience of the Great War in the Middle East, there are precious few books that captured the other side of the trenches in the immediate aftermath of the war. Liman von Sanders was one of the few. His book first appeared in German in 1919, but was published in English eight years later and gave American and British readers their first real sense of the Ottoman and German experience of the war. Liman began service in Ottoman domains as the head of a German military mission to rebuild the Turkish Army after the catastrophic Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. Given all he knew about the low level of Ottoman war preparedness, he was outspoken against concluding an alliance to draw Turkey into the Central Alliance. But once the die was cast, Liman threw himself into the Ottoman war effort with all he had. The… show more.

It may seem odd to recommend a book focused on a fifteen-year period, in the midst of a region that boasts many thousands of years of history. However, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire echoed across the Middle East in ways we are just beginning to understand. Having traveled to Turkey and many nations in this region, I’ve encountered historic sites, political quandaries, border conflicts, and ethnic troubles that can only be understood with the end of the Ottomans in mind. McMeekin does an exemplary job of viewing the Ottoman ending in the context of local challenges, global warfare, rising nationalism, and economic pressures in all directions. I had many “so that’s why that is the way it is” moments, and also enjoyed the gripping read.

Jones was a Welshman who served in the Indian Army in Mesopotamia. He was among the 13,000+ officers and men who surrendered at Kut al-Amara in April 1916. However, he has nothing to say of the horrors of the siege of Kut, or the fate that befell common soldiers, many of whom were marched to death in the Syrian desert. As an officer, Jones was dispatched to the relative comfort of a prisoner of war camp in Yozgat, in central Turkey, and his story begins there in 1917. It is a madcap story of how the British prisoners conspired to persuade their Turkish captors that they were mediums and were able to communicate with spirits through a Ouija board. Jones and one of his fellow officers then feigned madness to secure their repatriation to Britain. While there is something of the tone of a public school adventure to it all,… show more.

Reading this book you will come to understand the extent of the suffering brought on by World War I to Ottoman society.

I particularly like Akin’s retelling of the experience of ordinary people who lived through the ordeal. Accounts of the war by soldiers and survivors of the nearly decade-long conflict that engulfed Ottoman lands add texture and shape to the military narrative that began in 1914 and only came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.