The book concludes by analyzing what it means to say that the First World War ended in less than victory for the Allies. The peace process amounted to little more than reimaging an old imperial system that forged a peace that came at a heavy price.

This chapter explains how failure at Gallipoli in spring 1915 focused attention on fighting the Ottoman Empire. The secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, understood by historians as emblematic of broader British and French imperial ambitions, also provided a blueprint for the prosecution of the war. In this multifront war, what happened on one battlefront had consequences on others and for Allied military and domestic agendas back in Europe.

This chapter focuses on Europe’s response to the ongoing wartime crisis by exploring media driven humanitarian campaigns. New media fundraising utilized documentary film, memoir, print media and celebrity endorsements to represent this aid as transformative and successfully bolstered interest in the plight of refugees. As a consequence, refugees became a new kind of moral weapon used to bolster support for continued Allied presence in the Ottoman Empire.

Chapter 3 argues that the successful prosecution of the war relied on civilians living under Allied occupation. In 1917, refugee camps and social services emerged as tools of humanitarian aid and administration to help secure Allied authority. It analyzes the administration of the camps and auxiliary services alongside writings of refugees, eye-witnesses and aid workers who learned to live with a war that wreaked havoc on the local economy, social services and regional governance.

This chapter assesses how extending the war’s chronology to include the story of a now little remembered peace treaty broadens our understanding of the global reach and human cost of World War I. Peacemaking and war-making inevitably overlapped as diplomats and humanitarian organizations responded to a conflict which exacerbated already existing ethno-religious tensions. The book concludes by analyzing what it means to say that the First World War ended in less than victory for the Allies. The peace process amounted to little more than reimaging an old imperial system that forged a peace that came at a heavy price.

analyzes the military progress of the war in Ottoman territory and the diplomatic response. The tide turned with the British capture of Baghdad in March 1917 and the Allied entry into Jerusalem. It resulted in a war strategy that shored up control over the region’s natural resources and its peoples using soldiers and personnel largely from the British Empire.

“I am Bismarck,” top Ottoman official Talaat Pasha declared to Armen Garo two days after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Garo, an Armenian and former colleague and friend of Talaat, recorded his shock in hearing this embrace of German imperium in a private meeting at the Ottoman Interior Ministry.1 He had come to Constantinople to protest the forced resettlement of Muslim refugees on Armenian lands but quickly realized that the vision of empire embraced by leaders like Talaat had no room for Christian minorities like himself.2 The murder of the Archduke in the Balkans sparked a global war that had roots in two recent regional conflicts. The Balkan Wars had raged between 1912 and 1913 and cost the Ottoman Empire most of its territory in Europe while creating a massive refugee crisis.3

This chapter focuses on peacemaking between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire after the signing of the armistice in 1918 and how it relied on the idea of minority protection and humanitarian intervention that dated back to nineteenth-century treaty agreements and diplomatic dealings.

This chapter tells the story of the how the Ottoman Empire and the Allies negotiated the blurred line between war and peace that existed from the signing of Sèvres to the Lausanne peace conference.