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Lawrence in Arabia
War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
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- Contains 16 key ideas
Synopsis
Lawrence in Arabia (2013) reveals how a small cast of characters forever changed the Middle East during World War I and the Arab Revolt. At its center was T. E. Lawrence, a brash and untrained young military officer who was torn between two nations and experienced firsthand the broken promises of politics and the horrors of war.
Key idea 1 of 16
Thomas Edward Lawrence’s deep fascination with history led him to the Middle East.
There’s a chance you may know of T. E. Lawrence, the man made famous in the classic movie Lawrence of Arabia. But you probably know less about the formative years of this man who played such a crucial role in the Middle East during World War I.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888. As a middle-class teenager in Oxford, England, he developed an early curiosity in European and Egyptian history, spending most of his free time at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.
In 1909, while working on his senior thesis at Oxford, he embarked on a wildly ambitious project: Lawrence walked throughout Syria, studying every castle built during the Crusades to determine whether the Christians learned about architecture from the Muslims or vice versa.
During this trip, Lawrence was met with great hospitality and quickly fell in love with the Middle East.
The staff at Oxford were so impressed by his thesis that he was invited to stay in the Middle East to help out at an archeological dig for his beloved Ashmolean Museum.
By 1911, he was working in Carchemish, an ancient city located on the border of Turkey and Syria.
He got to know Middle Eastern culture very well and, as one of the heads of the excavation site, he proved himself to be a natural leader.
He frequently wrote home to his family, telling them how he felt right at home in Carchemish: he was earning the respect of the locals through his impressive understanding of their history as well as his ability to work long hours under the blistering desert sun.
Lawrence spent the next three years working in Carchemish, during which time Europe and the Middle East wound up on the brink of World War I.
Key ideas in this title
- Thomas Edward Lawrence’s deep fascination with history led him to the Middle East.
- Three other men from different walks of life were also hard at work in the Middle East prior to WWI.
- “History is often the tale of small moments – chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence …”
- The horrors of war quickly escalated once the Ottoman Empire chose a side.
- Lawrence and Yale both cringed at incompetence and deceit they saw around them.
- The Arab Uprising began with negotiations that were rooted in deception.
- The Jewish population of the Middle East also played an influential role in the war.
- Lawrence and Prüfer found themselves on opposing paths in the thick of the war.
- Lawrence led a raid on Aqaba that changed the course of the war.
- As the war continued, Lawrence’s experiences became more troubling.
- Aaronsohn and Yale discovered that the United States had limited interest in the Middle East.
- As the war continued into 1918, the outcome wasn’t clear for either side.
- Fifteen months of war came to a climactic end in Damascus.
- Despite their best efforts, Yale and Lawrence couldn’t prevent the mistakes of the Paris Peace Conference.
- Lawrence spent the rest of his life trying to cope with the betrayals and horrors of WWI.
- Final summary