Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923,

This survey of the demise of the Ottoman Empire reeks of academic turf wars. In assessing the last 130-odd years of the Turkish empire, the authors assault the prevailing wisdom that the decline of the ""Sick Man of Europe"" was inevitable; they claim, rather, that it resulted from a series of poor choices made by its leaders. This approach is both provocative and productive, as the authors, relying on an impressive array of archival and secondary sources, demonstrate how the Ottoman leaders sealed their own fate--their decision to play cat-and-mouse with both sides during WWI was only the final error in a series of blunders. The two London-based scholars also debunk the myth of early Arab nationalism and show that, as the empire was being divvied up after the war, Arab leaders grabbed whatever land they could get in search of personal gain. But the authors' relentlessly negative depictions of the motivations of Turkish and Arab leaders--""Greed rather than necessity drove the Ottoman Empire into the First World War,"" for example--in contrast to the nonjudgmental ways in which they describe Western leaders seem to derive from an anti-Eastern animus. Indeed, this apparent bias undermines their plausible argument that ""there has been no `clash of civilizations' between the Middle East and the West in the past two centuries, but rather a pattern of pragmatic cooperation and conflict,"" and prevents this otherwise comprehensive text from being a much more useful source. (Dec.)