text: David Fromkin's "Peace to End All Peace" is simultaneously a comprehensive and very flawed work. Many of the reasons for it being one can be found in the other.
  
  Fromkin attempts to examine how the modern Middle East (extending as far as Afghanistan and some sections of Central Asia) was created during and after the First World War. Obviously, in order to do this, the fall of the Ottoman Empire in that war must be considered.
  This is where Fromkin's unusual methodology comes into play. Focusing on the European political machinations to resolve the "Eastern Question" in their favour, the sorry tale becomes one more of Churchill and TE Lawrence than of the Arabs and Turks who were also involved in the process. Admittedly, it was the Europeans who wielded the whip hand in deciding just where the borders were to be drawn, but reducing key figures such as the CUP Triumvirate in the dying Ottoman Empire (and Kemal Ataturk in Turkey immediately thereafter) to the status of supporting players ultimately skews the focus of the book too much.
  
  Never let it be said that this is a simple story to retell. A complex web of national and personal political interests in both Europe and the Middle East combined to make the region what it is today, and any study of all of these will be faced with the need for convoluted explanations. The problem that Fromkin has, however, is that he does not make these very well at all.
  The story is told in a roughly chronological manner, which means that we jump from place to place and meet a bewildering array of characters. Ultimately, the only real result is confusion on the part of the reader, who is constantly flipping backwards to see who the latest figure to make an appearance actually is.
  
  Additionally, Fromkin frequently confuses his readers with references to geographical features which are not well-shown on the maps provided. Indeed, one map (showing Enver Pasha's advance on Baku and his campaigns in Central Asia) is laughable in the extreme. The legend explains that the direction of the arrows is the direction of the various advances - which would be significantly more useful were the arrows in fact arrows, and not equilateral triagles.
  
  Where Fromkin does well, however, is in his use of purely European sources. It is perhaps unusual to say this of a book intending to tell the story of the modern Middle East, but I have considerable doubts about the depth of his research into the Middle Eastern aspects of the events in question. In terms of Europe, however, his research seems to cover the major bases of exactly what the key figures believed and did.
  
  Ultimately, "A Peace to End All Peace" is a difficult and not particularly rewarding work. A diplomatic history of Europe during the Great War can be written much better than this, and a history of the development of the Middle East following that conflict already has been (the chapters in Margaret Attwood's "The Peacemakers" or William Cleveland's "Modern Middle East" both easily outshine this)
  