Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Any account of the origins of World War I will include a reference to the Berlin to Baghdad railway and to German strategic and economic interest in the Ottoman Empire. At the very least since Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht, historians have known about wartime German covert operations aimed at inciting Moslem subjects of the British Empire to rebellion. In view of this research one might wonder whether Sean McMeekin's work breaks new scholarly ground or just dramatically portrays well-known material. A vivid--occasionally florid--style, complete with comments such as "the real lingua franca of the Orient: superior force" (p. 19), might lead readers to conclude the latter, or even to whack the book with their copies of Said's Orientalism. Such a response would be shortsighted. Thoroughly researched in German, Turkish, and Russian archives, ably building on existing scholarship, the work is an intriguing investigation of World War I as a global struggle and a contribution to the study of relations between European and Islamic civilizations in the modern era. One does not have to agree with the author's conclusions or with his more episodic than analytical approach to draw intellectual profit--and a good deal of reading pleasure--from The Berlin-Baghdad Express.
McMeekin begins with the growing pre-1914 German interest in the Ottoman Empire, showcasing Wilhelm II's celebrated state visit of 1889. He considers at some length the journeys of Max von Oppenheim. Scion of the prominent Cologne banking family, Oppenheim traveled throughout the Middle East, dressing in indigenous clothing and purchasing slave concubines, drawing British suspicions that he was a spy--which he was, in a sense....