A review essay, based on the book, Cairo 1921: Ten Days that Made the Middle East, by C. Brad Faught[1]
- by Jamie Arbuckle for Peacehawks.
There is a tide in the affairs of men …
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 4/3, 218-224
INTRODUCTION
The First World War might be called the War to End All Empires: The German, the Hapsburg, the Czarist and the Ottoman Empires were all utterly in ruins; the tattered British and French Empires were to stagger on through (but not far beyond) the next World War. Those two remaining empires thought to see to the re-ordering of the world left by those expired empires, principally in Europe and the Middle East. The former had been the focus of the Versailles Treaties; the latter was to be undertaken by the British and the French. We have now lived over a century with the failures of both.