C. Brad Faught declares Allenby: Making the Modern Middle East to be a study of the shaping of history by great men. Faught maintains that the eight years that General Edmund Allenby (1861–1936) served in the region, first as commander of the British forces fighting the Ottoman Empire (1917–1919) and then as the high commissioner in Egypt “were of great impact both then and long afterwards” (ix). He then adds another purpose. In “probing his [Allenby's] life an especially revealing window can be found through which to observe closely and understand more fully the history that has resulted in the terminal roil [sic] afflicting the Middle East and international affairs today” (ix). Allenby is described as combining “a pronounced quality of command with considerable skill as a government administrator and diplomat,” and it is the avowed purpose of the book “to show that Allenby's impact on Palestine and Egypt was both decisive and positive” (x). On the other hand, according to the Faught, Allenby's influence on future developments proved short-lived: “Had his legacy been acted upon by a subsequent generation of British administrators in a wise and timely manner, it could have . . . helped to prevent much of the political violence and dysfunction that continue to disfigure the region today” (x). And yet the reader is told that Allenby was a figure of “vital importance in helping to create the modern Middle East” (xi). On a different tack, Faught describes the study as a biography of Allenby that “aims to be modern, nuanced and concerned with capturing the totality of the man” with the intention of bringing “maximum clarity to Allenby's deep impact on British imperial policy” (xi).It is none of the above.

The first half of the book deals with Allenby's military record. Faught is not entirely up to date on the modern scholarship on the development of British tactics on the Western Front. He makes much of Allenby's disagreements with his commander, General Douglas Haig, on the battle of Arras. Allenby, we are told, produced a “clear plan for a war of movement and a potential breakthrough,” whereas Haig remained “devoted” to attrition “as constituting the road to ultimate victory” (36). But it was the reality of the Somme that forced Haig, the cavalryman, to adopt General Henry Rawlinson's grab-and-hold tactics—using small territorial gains that inevitably resulted in immediate and costly German counterattacks to wear down the German army until such time as a breakthrough would once again become feasible. The problem in Arras was that the British operation was a diversion to the main Allied effort—Nivelle's offensive, which resulted in failure. During the offensive, the British forces in France were ordered by the Prime Minister Lloyd George to submit to the authority of the French high command thus Haig's insistence on curtailing the goals of Allenby's third army was in accordance with his directives. The same tactic was successfully employed later the same year by General Henry Plumer with the second army, which was to secure the flank of the main offensive—Passchendaele—which resulted with the occupation of the Passchendaele ridge at a terrible cost. The tactic of grab and hold was certainly not Haig's preferred tactic, as evinced by the events of 1918, when the breakdown of the German offensive allowed a return to cavalry tactics. Hence the poor relations between Allenby and Haig cannot be simply reduced to a professional disagreement between a military innovator and his conservative superior.

The limited resources of the Ottoman army in Palestine and its inability to take up positions along a continuous line from the Mediterranean Sea to the ridge overlooking the Dead Sea allowed Allenby to outflank it in Beer Sheeba with mounted troops, an uncomfortable distance from its water supply. The Ottoman army was forced to abandon the Gaza line but managed to establish a new line further north, which Allenby failed twice to outflank east of the Jordan River with inadequate troops that included the not always dependable fighters of the Arab Rebellion. The Ottoman line was eventually breached during the battle of Megiddo in September 1918, with the cavalry breaking through a gap created by the artillery and the infantry—a combined operation similar to the preferred mode of British operations in the final battles on the Western Front. In this respect Allenby cannot be considered a great military innovator.

The Allied victory resulted in a new political order in the Middle East in the form of British and French Mandates and Saudi rule in Arabia with Ibn Saud recognized as king in 1927. Allenby's victory had removed the Turks from the region but the new political map was drawn by politicians and statesmen with Allenby in a minor advisory role. His appointment in November 1919 as high commissioner of Egypt further reduced whatever influence he had on events east of the Sinai desert. Events in the divided Middle East took courses different from the united Arab kingdom under Hashemite rule hoped for by Allenby's Arab allies and romanticized by T. E. Lawrence. Meanwhile Allenby was preoccupied with stabilizing internal Egyptian politics and ensure political progression toward greater self-rule. As Faught explains, his efforts culminated in the 1922 Allenby Declaration, which abolished the British Protectorate, “a singular moment in modern Egyptian history marking the move from an overly colonial past to the first steps towards an independent future” (150). In April 1923 a constitution was adopted, a “major achievement,” according to Faught, which would prove “to be a sturdy document” (157) lasting until 1952. Allenby is thus lauded for having “shown a clear instinct to facilitate constitutional maturation in Egypt . . . Allenby had bequeathed to the country the necessary constitutional tools required to work towards a greater realization of independence” (170), a somewhat anachronistic view of the course of modern Egyptian history.

Unfortunately, the book is riddled with factual mistakes and inaccuracies and patches of purple prose and convoluted passages. It is only toward his conclusion that Faught states his ultimate message, albeit not explicitly, that the “constitutional gradualist model that had long defined the British Empire's approach to colonial independence,” allowed “political independence without the ineluctable violence and human hardships inherent in a continuous cycle [of] mass civil disorder” (184). By ignoring other causes and instances of civil violence—ethnic, economic, historical feuds, and the like, Faught is able to proclaim Allenby a true historic hero: “Allenby's insistence on Arab independence, even if it meant initially a supervised form of it by the British and then the French, marked him out as something other than simply a military conqueror . . . [His] form of heroism was timeless and therefore stretched well beyond Britain to resonate with other nations and peoples” (182).

To this point in the book, there is little to recommend it either as a biography or for insights on the development of the modern Middle East. But as an afterthought (“Afterword Allenby and the Middle East Today”), Faught makes another argument that places the book within the current debate on the morality of the British Empire. Faught rejects the critics of the empire (specifically Peter Mangold and Christopher Catherwood) who have condemned its historic “heroes” as “meddlesome,” and “and their impact baleful and their legacy shameful” (189). In defense of the main agents of British and French Middle Eastern imperialism Faught argues that they were all products of particular unprecedented circumstances. They had acted in good faith in their attempts to improve the lives of the local population for whom they were temporarily responsible. Allenby “departed Egypt having moved it from a place of dependency as a British protectorate to one of independent status, complete with a relatively liberal constitution and an elected parliament” (190). In this, Faught retains his version of Egypt's progress by constitutional means but by emphasizing the good intentions, even if retrospectively misguided, of post–First World War imperialists, he has contributed a pertinent argument to the ongoing debate on the morality of the empire, which unfortunately is not best served by this book.