The Wider War

In the third and final volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Nick Lloyd tells the story of the brutal but oft-forgotten struggles in Africa and the Middle East. As the Ottomans threw in their lot with the Germans in one of the most consequential gambles of the twentieth-century, the European war was transformed into a vast global conflict fought from the sands of Egypt and Mesopotamia to the dramatic mountain ranges of the Caucasus.

Reconstructing some of the most important campaigns of modern history, including the catastrophic British defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz and the capture of Jerusalem in December 1917, this volume also explores the so-called ‘side shows’ in the colonial world as fighting spread across Africa. Perhaps more than any other front, ‘the wider war’ with its endless sand dunes and blistering heat required huge amounts of resources and manpower, fatally unbalancing the structures of European imperial rule.

It follows the major figures of the war, from Germany’s ‘lion of Africa’ Colonel Lettow-Vorbeck to the legendary T.E. Lawrence. Based on hundreds of previously untranslated sources, it describes how the Ottoman empire joined the war, only to collapse in 1918, with the Allied powers redrawing the map of the Middle East, setting the terms for a troubled century ahead.