Michelle Tusan

Today the West tends to understand the Middle East primarily in terms of geopolitics: Islam, oil, and nuclear weapons. But in the nineteenth century, it was imagined differently. The interplay of geography and politics found definition in a broader set of concerns that understood the region in terms of the moral, humanitarian, and religious commitments of the British Empire. Smyrna's...

In The Last Treaty, Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe's war with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the...