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Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
A groundbreaking account of the Nazi-Islamist alliance that changed the course of World War II and influences the Arab world to this day
The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World
How do historians make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past? Cyrus Schayegh argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature is not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization, but rather the fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits.
Communal Christianity
David Mayes proposes a new religious paradigm in early modern rural Germany. “Communal Christianity,” the religious practice prevalent among peasants in mid-sixteenth-century rural Upper Hesse is juxtaposed with the more formally organized “Confessional” sects (e.g. Lutheran, Calvinist). The author describes Communal Christianity’s characteristics and persistence in the face of attempts at confessionalization during the period of 1576-1648 and links its success in part to the decree of the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg that only one confessionalized Christian sect be officially recognized in a territory. Confessional sects became marginalized, and more locally well-established peasant communes retained power. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia encouraged reconciliation of confessionalized Christian sects, paradoxically spurring the decline of Communal Christianity in certain locales.
The Purpose of the First World War
Nearly fourteen million people died during the First World War. But why, and for what reason? Already many contemporaries saw the Great War as a "pointless carnage" (Pope Benedict XV, 1917). Was there a point, at least in the eyes of the political and military decision makers? How did they justify the losses, and why did they not try to end the war earlier? In this volume twelve international specialists analyses and compares the hopes and expectations of the political and military leaders of the main belligerent countries and of their respective societies. It shows that the war aims adopted during the First World War were not, for the most part, the cause of the conflict, but a reaction to it, an attempt to give the tragedy a purpose - even if the consequence was to oblige the belligerents to go on fighting until victory. The volume tries to explain why - and for what - the contemporaries thought that they had to fight the Great War.
Coalition Warfare
The essays that comprise this volume clearly demonstrate that coalitions have dramatically altered the shape of war. Paul Kennedy's overview of coalitions over the past century shows that, with coalitions firmly established as viable in the minds of strategists, wars have become markedly lengthier, bloodier, and much more expensive. Three of the essays focus on explicitly military aspects of the two world wars: Norman Stone's on the Austro-German Alliance, 1914-18; Ulrich Trumpener's on the German-Ottoman Coalition, 1914-18; and Ian Nish's on the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. J. L. Granatstein pursues a contrasting, though equally enlightening, course, focussing on Hume Wrong, the...
The "German Spirit" in the Ottoman and Turkish Army, 1908-1938
The study focuses on the mutual transfer of military knowledge between the German and the Ottoman/ Turkish army between the 1908 Young Turk revolution and the death of Atatürk in 1938. Whereas the Ottoman and later the Turkish army were the main beneficiaries of this selective appropriation, the German armed forces evaluated their (prospective) ally’s military experiences to a lesser extent. Through the analysis of archival and published sources and memoir literature the study provides evidence for the impact of this exchange on the armies of both countries and on the Turkish civil society. Indeed, the officer corps in both countries was a small but influential group of the society for the further development of their nations.
Expeditionary Forces in the First World War
When war engulfed Europe in 1914, the conflict quickly took on global dimensions. Although fighting erupted in Africa and Asia, the Great War primarily pulled troops from around the world into Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Amid the fighting were large numbers of expeditionary forces—and yet they have remained largely unstudied as a collective phenomenon, along with the term “expeditionary force” itself. This collection examines the expeditionary experience through a wide range of case studies. They cover major themes such as the recruitment, transport, and supply of far-flung troops; the cultural and linguistic dissonance, as well as gender relations, navigated by soldiers in foreign lands; the political challenge of providing a rationale to justify their dislocation and sacrifice; and the role of memory and memorialization. Together, these essays open up new avenues for understanding the experiences of soldiers who fought the First World War far from home.
German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence
Some historians have traced a line from Germany’s atrocities in its colonial wars to those committed by the Nazis during WWII. Susanne Kuss dismantles these claims, rejecting the notion that a distinctive military ethos or policy of genocide guided Germany’s conduct of operations in Africa and China, despite acts of unquestionable brutality.
