Cairo

THE CAIRO CONFERENCE 1921: THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST GETS BORN

 

 

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.

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