The Last Sultan's War

The war that ended an empire. The decisions that created a century of conflict. In 1914, the Ottoman Empire had ruled the Middle East for six centuries. By 1923, it had been erased from the map—carved up by victorious powers in Paris and London who drew borders that would spark conflicts for the next hundred years. Last Sultan's War tells the epic story of World War I's forgotten front: from the disastrous Allied invasion at Gallipoli to Lawrence of Arabia's desert revolt, from secret treaties that promised the same land to different peoples, to the final collapse of the last great Islamic empire. This is the history of how competing British promises to Arabs, Jews, and the French created modern Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Mandate. How battlefield defeats and diplomatic betrayals destroyed the Ottoman sultans. How the Great War didn't just reshape Europe—it remade an entire civilization and planted the seeds of conflicts that define our world today. For readers of Lawrence in Arabia and A Peace to End All Peace, Last Sultan's War reveals the crucial WWI campaigns that textbooks skip and explains why the modern Middle East looks the way it does.