What Happens When Empires Die?

ABSTRACT This review article looks at two books, Jonathan Wrytzen’s Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East and Hans-Lukas Kieser’s When Democracy Died: The Middle East’s Enduring Peace of Lausanne, and places them in the broader literature on the First World War and the end of the Ottoman Empire. It considers not only how the two books discuss the political formation of the post-Ottoman Middle East but also how they challenge the conventional timeline of the “long Great War,” how and why they include new regions in their discussions about the post-Ottoman Middle East, and how both authors find important lessons in the ways that the post-Ottoman Middle East took shape that are relevant to the present and future of the region.