Any account of the origins of World War I will include a reference to the Berlin to Baghdad railway and to German strategic and economic interest in the Ottoman Empire. At the very least since Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht, historians have known about wartime German covert operations aimed at inciting Moslem subjects of the British Empire to rebellion. In view of this research one might wonder whether Sean McMeekin's work breaks new scholarly ground or just dramatically portrays well-known material. A vivid—occasionally florid—style, complete with comments such as “the real lingua franca of the Orient: superior force” (p. 19), might lead readers to conclude the latter, or even to whack the book with their copies of Said's Orientalism. Such a response would be shortsighted. Thoroughly researched in German, Turkish, and Russian archives, ably building on existing scholarship, the work is an intriguing investigation of World War I as a global struggle and a contribution to the study of relations between European and Islamic civilizations in the modern era. One does not have to agree with the author's conclusions or with his more episodic than analytical approach to draw intellectual profit—and a good deal of reading pleasure—from The Berlin-Baghdad Express.

McMeekin begins with the growing pre-1914 German interest in the Ottoman Empire, showcasing Wilhelm II's celebrated state visit of 1889. He considers at some length the journeys of Max von Oppenheim. Scion of the prominent Cologne banking family, Oppenheim traveled throughout the Middle East, dressing in indigenous clothing and purchasing slave concubines, drawing British suspicions that he was a spy—which he was, in a sense. With the personal patronage of Wilhelm II, he sent back endless volumes of reports to the Auswärtiges Amt. Chief practical exemplar of German interest in the Ottomans' realm was the Berlin to Baghdad railway, actually beginning in Constantinople as an extension of existing Balkan railways, then running through Anatolia, across the Taurus and Amanus mountains, through Mesopotamia, to terminate at Basra, on the Persian Gulf. Building the railroad would open up the region's mineral wealth to economic development, but the mountain stretches posed considerable engineering challenges and required more funds than the German capital market could easily provide, so that construction only proceeded in fits and starts before 1914.

All these initiatives, McMeekin argues, came to fruition at the war's outbreak. Oppenheim was set up in Berlin to run a covert operations bureau. He devised an appeal for a jihad against the British and French Empires, promptly proclaimed by the Sultan in his role as defender of the faith. German agents fanned out from Sudan to Afghanistan, bearing the proclamation and large bundles of cash. A call to an Islamic holy war, penned by a German of Catholic and Jewish background, proclaimed by an Ottoman government run by the secular nationalist Young Turks, was very much a postmodernist spectacle. Interest in such a war proved to be modest at best. (Following along the lines of Suzanne Marchand's recent history of German Orientalism, the author shows that the scholarly Orientalists in German service were far more skeptical of the whole business than amateur enthusiasts such as Oppenheim.) The only adherents of jihad, the Wahabbi tribesmen of central Arabia, were opponents of the secularist Ottoman government and generally aligned with British imperial interests. Even had there been greater enthusiasm for this cause, there was no way to get war materiel to potential anti-British insurgents, since the railroad was not finished. Work on the difficult mountain stretches continued at an accelerated pace during the war, but the tracks were not completed until the war's end.

Conventional military operations were more significant than clandestine enterprises. McMeekin discusses both familiar efforts, such as the failed Ottoman attempt to seize the Suez Canal and the failed Franco-British assault on the Straits, as well as the less well-known Russian offensives in Anatolia, which, the author argues, were a serious threat to the Ottomans' realm, terminated only by the Bolshevik Revolution. McMeekin's account of the deportation and murder of the Armenians follows from his portrayal of Russian military operations. In line with Turkish scholarship, he argues that counterinsurgency measures against a Russian-sponsored Armenian insurrection got out of hand. His connection of Turkish suspicions of Armenian subversion to perceived vulnerabilities of the Baghdad railway is less than convincing, since the massacres and deportations of the Armenians of eastern Anatolia occurred hundreds of kilometers away from the rail line.

A number of questions arise about the work's basic propositions. One concerns the author's assertion of persistent German perception of the Ottoman Empire as the key to a bid for world power. Wilhelm II was incapable of sustained concentration on anything, and McMeekin shows very well that pre-1914 proponents of a close German connection to the Ottoman Empire, such as Oppenheim, were eccentric outsiders, denied regular positions in the diplomatic service. German interest in and influence over the Ottomans before 1914 were erratic and variable; one of the strengths of the book is the author's analysis of the way that the Ottoman government played off the European Great Powers against each other. The strategic significance of Middle Eastern oil is self-evident today; it is much less clear if this was the case before 1914, when oil production in Austrian Galicia far exceeded that in the region.

Although the author's account of bumbling German covert operations makes for delightful reading, he does not consider these operations' strategic virtues. With a small use of manpower and modest expenditure of funds (at least by the standards of a total war), Germany diverted a significant number of Allied soldiers from the crucial battlefields of northern Europe. Even if plans to win World War I by an Islamic uprising destroying the British Empire were fantasies, the diversionary effects of peripheral operations in the Middle East may have been quite useful to the Central Powers.

Finally, one does have to wonder about the author's linkage of German plans for a Moslem uprising with contemporary Islamicism, particularly noticeable in the neo-conservative polemics of the book's epilogue. If the incitement to holy war was roundly ignored between 1914 and 1918, as the author shows in convincing and comic detail, why should it have had any long-lasting effects after World War I was over? The cautions about making connections between German military propaganda and Islamicism that Jeffrey Herf notes in his book on this topic during World War II are absent from McMeekin's account. In all these respects, The Berlin-Baghdad Express is enjoyable, thought provoking, and illuminating, but perhaps raises more questions than it provides answers.