A brilliant narrative history tracing today’s troubles back to grandiose imperial overreach of Great Britain and the United States. Kingmakers is the story of how the modern Middle East came to be, told through the lives of the Britons and Americans who shaped it. Some are famous (Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell); others infamous (Harry St. John Philby, father of Kim); some forgotten (Sir Mark Sykes, Israel’s godfather, and A. T. Wilson, the territorial creator of Iraq); some controversial (the CIA’s Miles Copeland and the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz). All helped enthrone rulers in a region whose very name is an Anglo-American invention. As a bonus, we meet the British Empire’s power couple, Lord and Lady Lugard (Flora Shaw): she named Nigeria, he ruled it; she used the power of the London Times to attempt a regime change in the gold-rich Transvaal. The narrative is character-driven, and the aim is to restore to life the colorful figures who for good or ill gave us the Middle East in which Americans are enmeshed today.
About the Author :
Shareen Blair Brysac, formerly a prize-winning documentary producer at CBS News, is the author of Resisting Hitler and co-author of Tournament of Shadows and Kingmakers with Karl E. Meyer. The couple lives in New York and Weston, Connecticut. Karl E. Meyer has written extensively on foreign affairs as a staff member of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Review :
In 1921 an Arab prince and two Englismen convened in Cairo to soothe the Arab's bruised pride. The prince, Abdullah, was a scion of the Hashemite clan; the Englishmen were the archaeologist-warrior T.E. Lawrence and the Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill. Abdullah needed a country to reign over, so the British invented one. As Churchill later recalled, he "created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon." If that had been the only caprice the British ever allowed themselves in the Arab world, Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac would have had sufficient reason to write their fine new Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East--for Abdullah got Jordan because the Brits had already granted his brother Faisal an arbitrary patch of desert called Iraq.
In fact, the history of British misadventure in the Middle East (with a late-innings appearance by some prominent American ringers) could have enabled Meyer and Brysac to fill a shelf stretching from Cairo to Tehran. But Kingmakers (W.W. Norton) manages to encapsulate a century's worth of misjudgment, overreach, and catastrophe in the most accessible of containers: a series of biographical portraits of true believers, artful game players, and a few heedless twits, all in feverish pursuit of glory, trade routes, and land (not to mention the ocean of viscous black stuff bubbling beneath it).
For instance: Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, who earned the nickname "Over-Baring" even before he presided over Egypt so memorably that 80 years after his death, Egyptians in Britain sought out his grave so they could spit on it. Or Frederick Lugard, the colonialist who promulgated the theory of "indirect rule," aspotless euphemism for a massive bribery scheme that was "described as a 'rent a sheik, buy an emir' strategy." Or Glubb Pasha, a.k.a. Sir John Bagot Glubb, one of the Arabs' most devoted friends, who incidentally perfected the art of aerial bombing as a means of squeezing tax payments out of reluctant colonials.
Of course, thanks to Peter O'Toole, director David Lean, and his own promotional abilities, the best known of the kingmakers is Lawrence--"the Achilles of the Great War," write Meyer and Brysac, "the supporting actor who steals the show." But I'll salute him here for something the authors have exhumed for its contemporary resonance: "The people of England have been led into a trap in Mesopotamia from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour," Lawrence wrote in 1920. "They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information."
Mesopotamia, of course was the Arabist name for that piece of land where so much blood, treasure, and honor have been misspent in our own time. and this the authors acknowledge with a superb final biography--about this interesting fellow named Wolfowitz....
-- Daniel Okrent "Desert Sons" (08/18/2008)
