“I am Bismarck,” top Ottoman official Talaat Pasha declared to Armen Garo two days after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Garo, an Armenian and former colleague and friend of Talaat, recorded his shock in hearing this embrace of German imperium in a private meeting at the Ottoman Interior Ministry.1 He had come to Constantinople to protest the forced resettlement of Muslim refugees on Armenian lands but quickly realized that the vision of empire embraced by leaders like Talaat had no room for Christian minorities like himself.2 The murder of the Archduke in the Balkans sparked a global war that had roots in two recent regional conflicts. The Balkan Wars had raged between 1912 and 1913 and cost the Ottoman Empire most of its territory in Europe while creating a massive refugee crisis.3
The ensuing war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire brought the struggles of the Balkans home to the empires of Europe. Demographic pressure resulting from the Balkan Wars met Talaat’s own imperial ambition in a world-shattering moment. On the eve of war in June 1914, Talaat saw a chance to invent a homogeneous ethno-religious empire based on exclusionary nationalism.4 Bismarck famously created Germany from “iron and blood” by rejecting the boundaries of the Congress of Vienna and liberal pluralism of 1848.5 Talaat helped forge modern Turkey out of the wartime ruins of the Ottoman Empire by thwarting Allied attempts to partition Asia Minor and enforce minority protection.6 His “radical nationalism” transformed Asia Minor into a Turkish national homeland under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk).7 This process culminated with the end of the war and the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne on July 24, 1923.
The First World War was a war of empires that started in the Balkans and ended in the Middle East.8 The Last Treaty reassesses how and why the Great War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire.9 This focuses importance on the Middle Eastern Front, a term I deploy to describe the war in Ottoman territory in the eastern Mediterranean that included the struggle for what was then called Mesopotamia, as well as North Africa and Anatolia. It paralleled the war fought in Europe between the Central Powers led by the German and the Austro-Hungarian empires and the Allies led by the British, French, Russian and American empires. The long war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire had devastating consequences for civilian populations caught in its wake. To write the history of the First World War from the rear-view mirror of Lausanne requires reassessing military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
This book integrates the Ottoman Empire into the war’s grand narrative through the study of the Middle Eastern Front from 1914 to 1923. The Ottoman Empire readied itself for war like the whole of Europe after the Archduke’s assassination. On August 2, 1914, the Ottoman government signed a secret alliance with Germany that ultimately committed it to a war that lasted nine years and ended in Lausanne.10 The First World War on the Middle Eastern Front changed the relationship between civilians and combatants; states and international institutions; and humanitarian and military operations that, in turn, transformed modern war making.
That peace did not come with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 has broad implications for understanding the history of the First World War as a global war. Peacemaking entailed a protracted and separate set of processes where treaties were negotiated while combat operations continued between belligerent powers.11 The fallout from the 1915 Armenian Genocide, which resulted in sustained interethnic violence and a massive refugee crisis, further complicated attempts to forge a stable and lasting peace. Greece, though it officially entered the war only in the summer of 1917, played an important role in the final settlement because of the so-called minority question. This came to the fore at the Lausanne negotiations after the burning of the city of Smyrna (Izmir) and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey which made the question of what to do with stateless Christian minority refugees a core issue during the peace process.12
The First World War when viewed from the vantage of the last treaty sheds light on violence in the Ottoman Empire after 1918. Conflicts in this period, when discussed at all, are considered part of a separate set of processes that happened in the Caucasus, Cilicia, the Dardanelles Strait and around Smyrna. These battles are variously referred to as part of the Greek-Turkish War or the War of Turkish Independence connecting them to distinct histories linked only to national stories.13 Clashes between Kemalist-led Ottoman and Allied armies on these battle fronts, however, came out of the larger action of the war and fell in line with Ottoman war aims, namely the protection of the empire and elimination of minorities. The First World War created the axiom that genocide occurs due to the inevitable escalation of violence against civilian populations in total war.14 This happened in both the First and the Second World Wars and made state-sponsored violence against those marked as enemies from within a reality of the civilian war experience.15 The destruction of Ottoman Christian minorities continued after the signing of the armistice in late October 1918, despite and sometimes because of military and diplomatic maneuvering between belligerent actors. War-related violence and peacemaking converged around the Armenian Genocide.16 For the Allied powers – led by Britain, France, Russia and later the United States – ending the war with the Ottoman Empire meant coming to terms with genocide. This required navigating the space between the nation-state and an emergent international system where humanitarianism, international justice and refugee policy found new and uneasy articulation.
War and peacemaking developed as an overlapping set of processes that made continued interethnic and political violence a defining characteristic of the years leading up to the 1923 moment. Rethinking the end of the war in this way represents a descriptive and conceptual problem as much as a chronological one. Simply put, when the war ended depended on where you were. This book focuses on how the First World War ended rather than argues for a new definitive end date to the war. The last treaty marked the end of a set of military and diplomatic actions set in motion by the war. The era after the war remains indelibly marked by its relationship to the war itself, entangling the war and postwar periods. This might explain why historians use the awkward term “interwar” to describe the 1920s and 1930s. The term inscribes the relationality of the period to the experience of the war itself. To understand the significance of the Great War in the Middle East to European history requires studying the blurry borders of the end of the war that gave the “Interwar Years” its seemingly transitional character to yet another world war in 1939.
The Long War
The Last Treaty employs this wide geographic and chronological lens in order to place the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against an unrelenting war with the Ottoman Empire. On the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe’s dominance within the nascent international system. Britain played an outsized role on the Middle Eastern Front starting in 1915 and brokered the failed 1920 Treaty of Sèvres that was revised in 1923 at Lausanne. It successfully marginalized its French and Italian allies after the invasion of Baghdad while the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution eventually limited Russian influence. By 1917, Britain used its dominant position on the Middle Eastern Front to guide both military and humanitarian activity.
The resurgence of interest in the aftermath of the First World War has yielded important research on violence in the Middle East, Asia and Africa as part of the “greater war.”17 Historians now understand the war’s geographic scope in new ways: a conflict that started in Europe became a truly global war that left a lasting legacy far beyond the West.18 The long war in the Middle East had its own defining characteristics and meaning just as it did in Europe, Africa and Asia. At the same time, its history remained entwined with and left a lasting legacy on both Europe and the Middle East. The premature war victory celebrations in 1918 in Europe led to disillusionment and the First World War began to be seen as a needless sacrifice that resulted in few permanent gains.19 In the Middle East, the settlement with Turkey led to continued violence and uncertainty for religious minorities in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. At the Lausanne Conference, the narrative of an imperfect peace that ended a futile war took full shape.
This book integrates the long and sustained Allied battle against the Ottoman Empire into European historiography on the First World War.20 European historians typically read fighting in the Middle East after 1918 as an addendum to the war. Their focus instead has been on the mandate system, territories carved out of former Ottoman territory and overseen by the British and the French with the sanction of the League of Nations.21 This casts the 1920s as a formative period in the making of the modern Middle East through the rise of postwar successor states including modern Turkey. Relegating these developments wholly to the “interwar years,” however, has obscured how the ongoing war helped shaped their final form.22 The First World War operated within its own set of historical contingencies in the Middle East that had consequences including, but not exclusive to, the rise of European-sanctioned successor states.
Far from a neglected subject, studies of civilian sacrifice and military action reveal the complexities and long-term consequences of the war for the Middle East and Europe. Battles in Ottoman territory beyond the story of the Gallipoli campaign, wartime alliances and events including the Armenian Genocide have become part of the narrative of the war and its aftermath.23 This research provides a deeper understanding of the Ottomans’ decision to side with Germany.24 It also reveals the political, social and economic challenges inherent to fighting a war against the Allies in a massive swath of territory encompassing deserts, mountains and sea.
This work, however, largely has remained the purview of specialists in Ottoman history rather than historians of Europe.25 With some notable exceptions, this has led to relegating the war in the Middle East to the periphery in European historiography on the war.26 When telling the story of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War, European historians focus on specific campaigns like Gallipoli, individuals such as T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, the making of the mandate system and the peace settlement’s role in redrawing the regional map and forging imperial alliances.27 Many of these discussions, especially those related to the Middle East mandates, overlook that war continued as the mandate system came into force.
The periodization of the First World War in the Middle East thus does not make room for the post-1918 Armistice period when the war was far from settled between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. European historiography on the First World War contributes to neglecting this long war by refusing to give the warfront a name, preserving “Eastern Front” for the battles fought along the Russian and Central European borderlands.28 This belies the significance of the war in the Ottoman Empire where fighting took place for more than a decade, if we count the Balkan Wars, on lands that extended from the Balkans to the Caucasus to the Arabian Peninsula. The Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Arabian Peninsula extended the war by requiring the further dedication of soldiers and resources in Ottoman lands. These Middle Eastern Fronts, I argue, remain essential sites for understanding the human costs of military conflict and diplomacy in a war incompletely won.
By reorienting the current focus on the outcomes of the Versailles Treaty such as the mandate system and the origins of the Second World War, this book shows how the Middle Eastern Front shaped the military and civilian experience of the war. This approach puts Ottoman and European historiographies in dialogue with official documents and correspondence between state and non-state actors, media and film, and institutional records and diaries of aid workers, refugees and other non-combatants from British, US and French archives. Historians have shown the war’s importance to the birth of modern Turkey.29 Others have focused on the Ottoman home front or the Armenian Genocide.30 My own previous research analyzes the extent and limits of humanitarian intervention. Since the First World War centenary, these strands have converged to broaden the narrative of the war beyond the trenches of the Western Front to include the consequences of wartime alliances and civilian sacrifices. The next step toward moving the Middle Eastern Front from a peripheral to core consideration involves recasting the period after the signing of the first armistices as the war’s final chapter. The period between 1918 and 1923 shaped home and battlefront as well as the contours of the Interwar period. It merits center stage.
Humanitarianism and War
Integrating war making and diplomacy between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire into this story reveals the centrality of violence against civilians and genocide to the narrative arc of the First World War. Here on the Middle Eastern Front, the intertwined relationship between military conquest and humanitarianism had its improbable beginnings.31 The need to control population movements on the battlefront led the military to fund and support aid to civilians living in a war zone. At the same time, humanitarian missions led and funded mostly by Britain and the United States – though the latter never declared war against the Ottoman Empire – maintained a massive footprint in the region. Together, military and civilian-led humanitarian aid efforts indelibly shaped the conduct of the war.32
Britain helped establish new standards for civilian treatment in wartime along racial and ethno-religious lines through the invention of the refugee camp. Ultimately, organized relief work expanded the West’s humanitarian presence in the Middle East and supervision of minority populations.33 Such actions protected and expanded the British Empire while managing US, French and Russian interests beyond the war. The Last Treaty reveals the relationship between military and humanitarian operations in the space of the concentration camp set up to manage civilian populations in wartime. The memoirs, reports and diplomatic correspondence read in the following chapters alongside maps of refugee camps and military campaigns render visible the human geography of total war in Mesopotamia during the height of the British-led campaigns there.
The enormous scale of the conflict necessitated a new kind of response on the Middle Eastern Front. Humanitarianism’s institutional development relied both on this wartime context and on colonial agendas. Historians agree that the war created new exigencies and institutional frameworks that changed the way humanitarianism operated.34 The scholarship, however, remains mired in debates over how much this moment represented an actual shift in the practice of humanitarianism. Historians rightly see institutionalization as important for the future of humanitarian practice. Where they disagree is on its aims and effectiveness: did humanitarianism promote human rights and help populations in need or did it simply push colonial agendas?35 These are important questions that reveal how the institutionalization of humanitarianism contributed to the reconfiguration of geopolitical and imperial alignments.
Reading humanitarianism’s development as embedded in wartime Allied agendas, as this book does, further raises the stakes. To fully understand the rise of humanitarianism and its institutionalization, we need to interrogate more deeply its connection to the First World War in the Middle East. Here humanitarianism developed in concert with military and diplomatic concerns. These forces – humanitarian and wartime exigency – did not operate on parallel tracks but rather grew up together. However, this was an uneven process that relied on contemporary conceptions of gender and race that further complicated how aid was delivered. Sometimes humanitarian agendas coincided with war aims, while at other times they resisted the dictates of the military.36 War, diplomacy and humanitarianism made strange bedfellows, but it was in this moment that they found their modern articulation and took the form that set the script for later developments that extended well beyond the Second World War.
Because of the central role of the British and, to a lesser extent, the French, I have mined diplomatic and humanitarian institutional archives. Scholarship on the Ottoman, Armenian, Jewish, Greek, Assyrian and Arab perspective of the war has made this book possible. It bears underscoring that this book interrogates Europe’s understanding of the war in the Middle East. While exploring the inner workings of the official mind that prosecuted the war in the Middle East from London and Paris, it differs from other political histories by uncovering the voices of the people and non-European-based institutions involved in the war: refugees, aid-workers and soldiers.37
This act of recovery requires reading the archive differently and paying attention to the moments when diplomatic, humanitarian and military actors met those who told them how this war changed their lives. This is not a story populated by heroes and villains but rather people forced to act in extraordinary circumstances. The impossible conditions of the war for civilians and, in particular, victims of the Armenian Genocide make it imperative to see why and how those who offered aid did it and in whose name. In the end, the aid itself mattered to those who needed and received it; those stories are embedded in the archive. Historians just have to listen.
The Middle Eastern Front
I use the term “Middle Eastern Front” rather than “Ottoman Front” to better incorporate this site into the lexicon of the First World War. “Ottoman Front,” the term often used by Ottoman historians, denotes the belligerent rather than the geography of a war that was defined as much by location as anything else. Designating fighting that took place among the Allies, Germany and the Ottoman Empire as the “Middle Eastern Front” parallels the use of “Western Front” and “Eastern Front” that, admittedly, are problematic as well. As Map 1 shows, the Western Front refers to fighting in Belgium and France, but the actual area shifted over the course of the war. The same goes for the Eastern Front in relation to fighting along the Russian border. The Balkan Front and the Alpine Front equally lack precise definition. While there are clear geographic problems in seeing the war in accordance with these borderless fronts, such regional designations offer a way of spatially mapping the war that coincides with the political geography as imagined by belligerents at the time. Western Front and Eastern Front continue to be especially meaningful designations that orient the work of war historians. Finally, analyzing multiple fronts – Western, Eastern, Middle Eastern and others – bounded by rough geographical designations further reinforces understandings of the First World War as a war of alliances. The Ottomans fought with the Germans on the same front together as allies. To call this the “Ottoman Front” obscures this important relationship.
The use of Middle Eastern Front also draws attention to colonial relationships embedded in the deployment of the term Middle East in the early twentieth century. Not naming this front in European historical accounts of the war has contributed to an act of erasure by using clumsy nomenclature to designate fighting here as a separate set of actions.38 Denying a geography for this front, however hard to clearly define in terms of territory, renders it less visible to the larger action of the war than the “Western” and “Eastern” fronts that suffer from a not dissimilar lack of precise physical boundaries. Maps, correspondence, film and photography – the representational apparatus used by Europe’s generals, strategists, soldiers and diplomats engaged in this theater of war – lend form to this space of engagement.39 For the British, the idea of the “middle” and “near” East were relational colonial terms that denoted Britain’s distance from its empire in India. As I have shown elsewhere, a similar process of imagined geographical definition was at work in the nineteenth century when the British first deployed the term Near East to designate Christian-occupied lands on the borders of Europe as a way of mapping their empire.40
I started this project, in part, to understand why there has been comparatively little attention paid to the Ottoman role in the First World War in war historiography. This is particularly surprising since the Middle Eastern and Western Fronts were mirrors of one another in many ways. Trench warfare happened on both fronts at the beginning but, by 1917, gave way to a war of movement in Mesopotamia where quick decisive victories led to the signing of the first armistice with the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Both fronts also saw the blurring of the relationship between home and battlefront. Civilians helped determine how the war was fought and won on the Middle Eastern Front just as they did on the Western Front.41 Belligerents mobilized their economies to produce weapons, food and resources to fight the war due to the demands of industrial warfare. This resulted in new ways of seeing civilians in wartime.42 On the Middle Eastern Front, Ottoman paranoia about enemies from within divided inhabitants into loyal and disloyal camps. Minority Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Ottoman subjects were increasingly viewed with suspicion and subjected, at first, to discriminatory treatment. By spring 1915, they had been targeted for annihilation by their own government.43
On the Middle Eastern and Western Fronts, news of the brutal treatment of civilians justified war in Europe. The call to defend civilians targeted by the Armenian Genocide in spring 1915 echoed the Belgian atrocities used by Britain to validate its entry in the war in August 1914.44 In both cases – the treatment of Christian minorities by their own government in the case of the Ottoman Empire and the treatment of Belgian civilians by the invading German forces – the defense of the rights of others gave the war a just cause. Genocide created a new kind of war victim who solicited a distinct humanitarian response that focused on aid work and, eventually, attempts at resettlement for survivors. This question of the responsibility of warring parties to the security of non-combatants, which had found articulation in the turn-of-the-century Geneva and later Hague conventions, had its first test on the Middle Eastern Front when Ottoman civilians came under the jurisdiction of Allied occupation after 1917. Eventually, humanitarian aid for non-combatants dominated discussions of how to deal with wartime destruction. Private aid organizations coordinated with the Allies to provide care for civilian war victims.45
Despite such parallel features, fighting in the Ottoman Empire stubbornly has remained fixed in the language of time: a “sideshow.” Politicians, soldiers and even ardent advocates of the importance of this front use this term to describe the Ottoman theater of war. Today, historians debate whether or not it was a sideshow to highlight the sacrifices of the men who fought there.46 This approach has focused new attention on this front. But why and how the idea of war here as sideshow captured the imagination of the West at the time and historians today needs explanation. The response to the war in the Middle East, in both Europe and the United States, reveals a deep and complicated engagement with the people and history of this region. It is possible to track this response through humanitarian institutions, private donations and volunteer work as well as cultural forms including film, novels and media commentary. These sources both reveal the centrality of the Middle East in Allied thinking about the war and offer new ways of remembering and understanding this front today.
Other factors have contributed to the marginalization of the Middle Eastern Front. The distance between home and battlefront where the fighting happened mattered. The Western Front, a train ride away from home for some of its soldiers, had a geographic nearness that could never be replicated on the Middle Eastern Front, even in the case of the most important and dramatic battles. As David Lloyd George ruefully remarked about Jerusalem: “the capture by British troops of the most famous city in the world” largely was ignored at home.47 News of victory came more slowly from foreign news correspondents and communications lagged.48 During the Gallipoli campaign, a letter took approximately three weeks to travel from the front to Britain with packages taking around five to six weeks.49
Who fought in this war also is important. The Middle Eastern Front truly was a global theater.50 By 1917, the British relied on the Mesopotamian and Indian Expeditionary Forces almost exclusively to fight here. This meant that the majority of soldiers serving here came from the British Empire – Australia, New Zealand and India primarily. The French also relied on soldiers from the empire, mainly North Africa, to fight in the Middle East. Memoirs of those who fought on this front often complain of their forgotten role in the war. Until recently, scholars largely ignored their contribution as fighters and as heads of auxiliary services and their role in humanitarian work in the areas of occupation.51 While no longer hidden from history, the contribution of colonial soldiers still remains overshadowed by those from Europe and its white settler colonies. Their marginalization as secondary fighters on a forgotten front is evidenced by the separate characterization of non-British troops in the casuality and fighting figures and in commentary by those who led their units. At the same time, precise numbers of colonial soldiers are not as carefully charted in the archives.52
New work on colonial soldiers reveals how central the Middle Eastern Front was to the war by tracing the experience of soldiers who served there. Drawn disproportionately from British and French colonies, these men occupied what Anna Maguire calls “contact zones,” where colonialism was tested and challenged on the battle front, in the camp and then back at home. In these spaces, colonial relations came under strain and created new ways of understanding empire and imperialism.53 Here on the Middle Eastern Front, the British and French empires were reimagined by those called up to defend it. In this way and others, as this book shows, race mattered as a factor in how the Middle Eastern Front has been studied and understood.
War of Empires
The signing of the Treaty of Lausanne ended the war of empires. Britain and its imperial military force had led the fight in Mesopotamia. It guarded its imperial and economic interests in Egypt with a special eye to protecting the Suez Canal, while France shored up its empire in North Africa and control of Syria. The Russian Empire had led the war in the Caucasus until the Brest-Litovsk Treaty signed with Germany in 1918 took it out of the war.54 The United States never declared war on the Ottoman Empire, though it contributed vast amounts of money and resources to the war’s humanitarian infrastructure here.
This war of empires was fought to uphold imperialism. Ultimately, wartime alliances contributed to an internationalism that emerged in the name of preserving old European-led colonial relationships.55 The British Empire’s focus on the Middle Eastern Front escalated after Lloyd George took over as Prime Minister in 1916. This expanded the imperial scope of the war. Britain both relied more heavily on colonial troops and stepped up its competition with France and Russia for dominance in the region. While historians now recognize colonial soldiers’ contributions, they have shown less interest in how the First World War on the Middle Eastern Front mattered as a war between empires. Part of the reason has to do with the focus on particular battles rather than on shifting strategies. In 1915, British war planners understood war with the Ottomans as an extension of the war with Germany. This was certainly true in the early years, but this changed after 1916.
The Ottomans had their own war aims: to expand and strengthen their empire, a goal that came into increasing focus as the war dragged on. Leaders did not merely follow what the Germans said or serve as fodder in battles, as some writing about Gallipoli has suggested.56 European historiography still often portrays the Ottoman Empire as a pawn of Germany lacking its own clearly defined war aims.57 This approach risks uncritically reproducing perceptions of some Allied military leaders of the Ottoman Empire as an appendage of Germany.
Lloyd George, an unapologetic liberal imperialist, clearly understood the war as a battle for the preservation of the British Empire. His version of history defended his own failures to fully realize this aim and his frustration with being thrown out of office in fall 1922. The war as strange defeat makes sense from the vantage of the Lausanne Treaty. President Wilson’s rhetoric, sacralized in the “Fourteen Points,” that the war was fought to uphold democracy haunts history books that continue to interrogate the ultimate failure of First World War peacemaking.
Like Lloyd George who used nationalist aspirations outside of his own empire to support British imperial aims, Wilson had his own priorities that included weakening European empires in order to increase US power and influence.58 We know now that the reality of the wartime settlement would serve whichever power emerged as the leading player in the conquered territories, including but not limited to the Middle East. Looking backward from Lausanne shows how the narrative arc of the First World War as a good war gone bad was wrong from the beginning.
***
The Last Treaty begins with the Allied defeats at Gallipoli and Kut-al-Amara and a discussion of how diplomatic agreements, regional alliances and the Armenian Genocide made the Middle East central to the Allied war effort. Chapter 1: “How the First World War Came to the Middle East” explains why failure at Gallipoli in spring 1915 focused attention on fighting the Ottoman Empire. The secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement, understood by historians as emblematic of broader British and French imperial ambitions, also provided a blueprint for the prosecution of the war. In this multifront war, what happened on one battlefront had consequences on others and for Allied military and domestic agendas back in Europe.
Chapter 2: “The Middle Eastern Front” analyzes the military progress of the war in Ottoman territory and the diplomatic response. The tide turned with the British capture of Baghdad in March 1917 and the Allied entry into Jerusalem. It resulted in a war strategy that shored up control over the region’s natural resources and its peoples using soldiers and personnel largely from the British Empire. Chapter 3: “Civilians at War” argues that the successful prosecution of the war relied on civilians living under Allied occupation. In 1917, refugee camps and social services emerged as tools of humanitarian aid and administration to help secure Allied authority. This chapter analyzes the administration of the camps and auxiliary services alongside the writings of refugees, eyewitnesses and aid workers who learned to live with a war that wreaked havoc on the local economy, social services and regional governance.
Chapter 4: “How War Didn’t End” focuses on peacemaking between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire after the signing of the armistice in 1918 and how it relied on the idea of minority protection and humanitarian intervention that dated back to nineteenth-century treaty agreements and diplomatic dealings. Chapter 5: “The Treaty of Sèvres” tells the story of how the Ottoman Empire and the Allies negotiated the blurred line between war and peace that existed from the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres to the Lausanne Peace Conference. Chapter 6: “Humanitarian Crusades” focuses on Europe’s response to the ongoing wartime crisis by exploring media-driven humanitarian campaigns. New media fundraising utilized documentary film, memoir, print media and celebrity endorsements to represent this aid as transformative and successfully bolstered interest in the plight of refugees. As a consequence, refugees became a new kind of moral weapon used to bolster support for continued Allied presence in the Ottoman Empire.
Chapter 7: “The Treaty of Lausanne” assesses how extending the war’s chronology to include the story of a now little remembered peace treaty broadens our understanding of the global reach and human cost of the First World War. Peacemaking and war making inevitably overlapped as diplomats and humanitarian organizations responded to a conflict that exacerbated already existing ethno-religious tensions. The book’s Epilogue explores what it means to read the Allied victory on the Middle Eastern Front as strange defeat. The peace process ultimately reimagined an old imperial system while forging a peace that came at a heavy price for the now former subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
The inglorious end of the war on the Middle Eastern Front exposed notions of unchecked imperial expansion as a chimera. The First World War achieved less than victory. This interpretation has long guided understanding of the interwar years, most especially in the service of seeing the war settlement as responsible for the Second World War. The Last Treaty shows the cracks in the war settlement as stemming from the moment of the final peace. By 1923, the Allies had lost the war that they thought they had won in 1918. Lloyd George recognized this in his war memoirs. He called the final two volumes, published in 1938, The Truth about the Peace Treaties and dedicated most of the second volume to the settlement with the Ottoman Empire. As he concluded about Lausanne: “No one claims that this Treaty was peace with honour. It is not even peace.”59
