Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East.

• Author: Sagban, Sirma Feyza

By Jonathan Parry

Princeton University Press, 2022, 448 pages, $45, ISBN: 9780691231457

A scholar of British politics and political ideas in the 19th century with a well-established reputation among modern British historians, Jonathan Parry was drawn to the Ottoman Empire while investigating the governing strategies of British liberalism and Victorian conservatism, especially as articulated by the conservative politician who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Benjamin Disraeli. In contrast, the liberal leader who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for 12 years, William Gladstone's High Anglicanism and Disraeli's Jewish pedigree saw 'the East' from different mindsets. These clashes of policy and personality came to a head over the eastern question, the ambiguous fate of the Ottoman Empire.

The book charts the responses of the British Empire to secure the two routes to India, through Egypt and the Red Sea, and through Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, lands that were subjected to the Ottoman Empire from the European powers. This was especially important after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, which showed the vulnerability of India to attacks, and the Crimean War. Considerable attention is devoted to the variety of strategies adopted by then policy-makers in London and their satellite officials locally, seeking influence in the region. Inciting Arab revolts against Ottomans, sharpening local factional disputes, deploying the Muslims into action on behalf of British interests, and using the classical and biblical story of these, once fertile and holy lands, which were claimed would become the center of prosperousness again with British vision against alleged misgovernment of Ottoman Sultanate, were on the major plots. Specifically, along the fault lines with Egypt, Iraq, Kurdistan, Persia, the Gulf, and Aden. Caustic relations with regional Arabs, Mamluks, Kurds, Christians, and Jews are not overlooked. Alongside tireless strategies to increase the influence of local agents in the field, the British Embassy's efforts to strengthen Ottoman central power, consequently increasing the British ambassy's power in Constantinople, by supporting Tanzimat reforms to modernize the social and political foundations of the Ottoman Empire, was another key element to Britain's Middle East policy. However, it is strongly argued that those policies were not the results of an imperial journey but can be read as chronicles of British...