Scott Anderson

A narrative chronicle of World War I's Arab Revolt explores the pivotal roles of a small group of adventurers and low-level officers who orchestrated a secret effort to control the Middle East, demonstrating how they instigated jihad against British forces, built an elaborate intelligence ring and forged ties to gain valuable oil concessions.

War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Lawrence in Arabia

Finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography One of the Best Books of the Year: The Christian Science Monitor NPR The Seattle Times St. Louis Post-Dispatch Chicago Tribune A New York Times Notable Book The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War I was, in the words of T. E. Lawrence, "a sideshow of a sideshow." As a result, the conflict was shaped to a remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers far removed from the corridors of power. At the center of it all was Lawrence himself. In early 1914 he was an archaeologist excavating ruins in Syria; by 1917 he was riding into legend at the head of an Arab army as he fought a rearguard action against his own government and its imperial ambitions. Based on four years of intensive primary document research, Lawrence in Arabia definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed.

Gigi V

Learned more about history and World War in this book than my history books in high school...but I went to a crappy high school. Perhaps world leaders, especially those of prosperous nations, should be made to read this book to make them realize their decisions have dire consequences.

Bryan Alexander

This is a splendid book on WWI, and also about Middle Eastern history, and also about the history of espionage. It sheds a great deal of light on the subsequent century.
(REVIEW IN PROCESS)

Its putative subject is T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), but in revisiting his story, Scott Anderson turns up plot after plot, scheme upon scheme around him. The result enriches our understanding of the period and region, while being a fine read.

Other protagonists anchor the book, giving Lawrence in Arabia more depth. We follow Curt Prüfer, a German espionage agent in Egypt as he works, largely in vain, to raise jihad against the British empire. There's Aaron Aaronsohn, a Romanian Jewish scientist working in Syria, who worked with British intelligence to undermine the Ottoman empire. One American plays a key role, William Yale, an oil company agent busy buying up Middle Eastern lands and talking himself into positions of influence. Mark Sykes, of Sykes-Picot(-Sazanov!) fame (or notoreity) receives more attention (largely critical, until the end) than histories usually allow.

Some details struck me in particular, starting with Anderson's bitter portrayal of the fumbling confusion of British policy. This includes terrible defeats in 1915 (the failed Gallipoli campaign, no progress on the western from, and losing an army as the siege of Kut), embarrassing moves (trying to bribe a Turkish general (168ff)), and dangerously incoherent planning:it seemed a very dangerous game to encourage native revolt with promises of autonomy or independence in one part of the Muslim world [Arabia] while ruthlessly quashing any hint of Muslim rebellion both of those same desires in another - as British India had been doing for decades. (161) Indeed, Anderson does a good job of showing intra-imperial tensions.

Anderson, like many biographers, is fascinated by the sheer strangeness of Lawrence, such as his utter coldness towards his brothers' deaths (brutally restrained even for the time), and his contempt of rank (very unusual for the times, before WWI sapped that respect). Not to mention his odd observations, like this one in a note to his bereaved mother: You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come. (130)
The book offers several fascinating alternate history possibilities, like that of an Entente attack on the Ottomans not in Gallipoli, but in northern Syria, where local defenses were scanty, and much strategic advantage to be had (96ff).

Anderson's ability to expand context beyond Lawrence's biographical details pays rich dividends, as the way the Arab revolt appears as a religiously conservative movement, opposed to the secularist Young Turks, and not far removed (geographically or ideologically) from Saudi Arabia's hardcore Wahhabi branch of Islam.

A novelist's eye lets Anderson bring forth characters with unusual roles and connections in history, like Minna Weizmann, a Russian-Jewish woman who spied for the Germans... and whose brother, Chaim, would go on to become Israel's first president. There's a fine portrait of Mark Sykes, co-designer of the Sykes-Picot Treaty, who appears as a privileged, well-trained, and ultimately disastrous man (153ff).

I'm enjoying Anderson's style, which manages to alternate between biographical attentiveness, geopolitical consideration, damning criticism, and some acidic attitude:two German agents provocateurs didn't limit their ministrations to the Cairene mewling class. (38)
The remarkable utility of that first sentence - its ability in a mere twelve words to denigrate one of the world's most fabled cities, three major religions, and to offend the Christian sensibilities of every high-ranking British diplomat or general who might read it - was purely the source of considerable pride to Lawrence. (88)
In just thirteen months, Britain had suffered some 350,000 casualties at the hands of the "sick man of Europe" [the Ottomans], had failed - and failed totally - where a ragtag collection of Balkan militias and armed peasants had repeatedly succeeded just three years earlier [the Gallipoli campaign and the First Balkan War (1911) respectively].



There are some weaknesses so far. Like most English-language books about WWI, Lawrence in Arabia understates the roles of nations other than America and empires other than the British. The French don't appear very much, beyond as spoilers for some of Lawrence's early plans and as a junior, weaker party to the Sykes-Picot Treaty. The Russians barely appear at all, which saps the narrative's ability to say anything about Ottoman plans. I'm sympathetic to McMeekin's argument that we should rename the treaty Sykes-Picot-Sazanov, but Anderson doesn't allow for any Russian role in that divvying-up at all.

Lawrence in Arabia War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Reviews