The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How Globalized Trade Led Britain to Its Worst Defeat of the First World War

by Nicholas A. Lambert

Overview

An eye-opening interpretation of the infamous Gallipoli campaign that sets it in the context of global trade. In early 1915, the British government ordered the Royal Navy to force a passage of the Dardanelles Straits-the most heavily defended waterway in the world. After the Navy failed to breach Turkish defenses, British and allied ground forces stormed the Gallipoli peninsula but were unable to move off the beaches. Over the course of the year, the Allied landed hundreds of thousands of reinforcements but all to no avail. The Gallipoli campaign has gone down as one of the great disasters in the history of warfare. Previous works have focused on the battles and sought to explain the reasons for the British failure, typically focusing on First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. In this bold new account, Nicholas Lambert offers the first fully researched explanation of why Prime Minister Henry Asquith and all of his senior advisers--the War Lords--ordered the attacks in the first place, in defiance of most professional military opinion. Peeling back the manipulation of the historical record by those involved with the campaign's inception, Lambert shows that the original goals were political-economic rather than military: not to relieve pressure on the Western Front but to respond to the fall-out from the massive disruption of the international grain trade caused by the war. By the beginning of 1915, the price of wheat was rising so fast that Britain, the greatest importer of wheat in the world, feared bread riots. Meanwhile Russia, the greatest exporter of wheat in the world and Britain's ally in the east, faced financial collapse. Lambert demonstrates that the War Lords authorized the attacks at the Dardanelles to open the straits to the flow of Russian wheat, seeking to lower the price of grain on the global market and simultaneously to eliminate the need for huge British loans to support Russia's war effort. Carefully reconstructing the perspectives of the individual War Lords, this book offers an eye-opening case study of strategic policy making under pressure in a globalized world economy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197545225
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/05/2021
Series:	Oxford Studies in International History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nicholas A. Lambert is the prize-winning author of Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution and Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War. Between 2016 and 2018, he held the Class of 1957 Chair at the United States Naval Academy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Dramatis Personae Introduction Chapter 1: Britannia's Achilles Heel Chapter 2: War in a Globalized World Chapter 3: The Turkish Irritant Chapter 4: The Beggar Giant Chapter 5: The Military and Diplomatic Strands Chapter 6: The Political and Economic Strands Chapter 7: Two Problems, One Solution Chapter 8: Seven Days in January Chapter 9: Not Such a Bargain Chapter 10: The Fortunes of War Chapter 11: This Wicked Gamble Conclusion Notes Select Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

"Essential reading for anyone interested in the political economy of the Great War....Lambert is to be congratulated for re-framing the historiography of the political decisions that led to the Gallipoli campaign ... The War Lords offers a more sophisticated interpretation of how Prime Minister Asquith and the War Cabinet decided on the military option to solve Britain's grain supply problem ... Asquith deserves as much (if not more) of the responsibility for deciding to go ahead with the operation than Churchill." — M. Stephen Salmon, The Prospectus

"Lambert [is] the most rounded and able historian of British maritime strategy in the First World War. His sophisticated, holistic, and archival-dominant approach clearly re-creates and analyses the complex and multi-faceted reality that was the British strategy-making process....The book could also be seen as a sterling example of the best of what is now known as international history: multidisciplinary, multinational, multi-archival, and multi-lingual.... Lambert weaves economic, military, and foreign policy threads into the richest tapestry yet created to give irrefutable evidence and analysis of 'why' Gallipoli occurred: the need to secure the movement of Russian wheat back into the global marketplace.... This book comes at an opportune time as Western nations and navies once again consider the ideas of blockade, sanctions, choke points, supply chains,...and fighting modern industrial warfare." — Greg Kennedy, Diplomacy & Statecraft

"Essential reading for anyone interested in the political economy of the Great War....Lambert is to be congratulated for re-framing the historiography of the political decisions that led to the Gallipoli campaign.... The War Lords offers a more sophisticated interpretation of how Prime Minister Asquith and the War Cabinet decided on the military option to solve Britain's grain supply problem....Asquith deserves as much (if not more) of the responsibility for deciding to go ahead with the operation than Churchill." — M. Stephen Salmon, The Prospectus

"A vivid and unwelcome demonstration of enduring strategic considerations...lie at the heart of Nicholas Lambert's excellent new book. It situates British decision-making in the First World War in the context not simply of the shifting obligations of alliances and the calculation of how best to deploy military and naval assets, but also the dangers arising from financial entanglements with Russia and the risk of social unrest from price inflation....Looking beyond the purely military and naval considerations, Lambert draws on economic and financial data to piece together the shifting picture....Lambert explains his book 'is an attempt at intent-based, rather than outcome-based history', and in recreating the breadth of concerns that the War Lords had to contend with, sometimes hour by hour, he has made a superb and original contribution to the field." — Jenny Macleod, English Historical Review

"A new, compelling and insightful interpretation of one of history's most famous ill-fated expeditions....Lambert argues compellingly that the primary driving rationale behind the operation was the need to address pressing social and economic perils weighing on the British War Council.... Lambert's cautionary tale of Britain's war lords can be read with great profit by senior U.S. policymakers today as they struggle with the challenges of waging war during the second great age of economic globalization. Over a century ago, a complex combination of factors found the British government conducting a military operation widely viewed as a forlorn hope out of economic and social necessity....Like policymakers in the fall of 1914, today's American war lords may find themselves facing a choice between greater involvement in a war they hope to avoid or incurring unacceptable economic and social discontent at home." — Andrew Krepinevich, American Purpose

"One of our finest naval historians...Lambert shows how economic and social factors rooted in Britain's global trade network shaped the decision by the British War Council (the "War Lords" of the title) to order British (joining with French) naval and land forces to capture the Dardanelles in 1915. Lambert has read the military histories of the Gallipoli campaign, but his research shows that comprehending why that campaign occurred—and occurred the way it did—requires an understanding of the role of wheat in Britain's war strategy.... For Lambert, the failure at Gallipoli—especially the thinking and discussions that preceded the actual military assault—illustrates the dilemma facing the builders of any global economic system in wartime." — Thomas C. Hone, Naval War College Review

"Rooted in the study of a wealth of primary material, Lambert's work attempts to understand not why Winston Churchill pushed for the attack, but why the War Cabinet agreed to it....Lambert convincingly shows that wheat prices did play a role in decision-making, but so did innumerable other factors—and he outlines them in enlightening detail....What makes this book so valuable is that the author emphasizes that the only certainty in politics and war—as in life itself—is uncertainty. He has the skill of clearly explaining complex ideas, while leavening the narrative with fresh insights into familiar events and dramatic personae." — John Spencer, Stand To!: The Journal of the Western Front Association

"Lambert's book ... is a remarkable piece of historical scholarship, one that finds an important new perspective about a subject seemingly explored to exhaustion. ... It is a book that nobody concerned with the Dardanelles campaign, the First World War more generally, or the complex history of globalization can afford to ignore." — Mark Klobas, The Northern Mariner

"The author is well-placed to throw out all the usual Gallipoli analyses. They often begin, he says, with a fixed idea of Winston Churchill, seen through a triumphal lens of 1939-45, projected backwards to his disastrous handling of Britain's attempt to open up the Dardanelles Straits against formidable Turkish defence in 1915. That's wrong in the final sense because Churchill wasn't the person who decided to proceed, it was the Prime Minister and his War Lords. Secondly, Lambert shows with enormous elegance how the whole matter was changing in complexion daily. [...]The subtitle of this fine work of history is, 'How Globalized Trade Led Britain to Its Worst Defeat of the First World War.'" — Richard Lofthouse, QUAD

"The detail that is assembled in this book is compelling; it immerses the reader in the chaos of British strategic thinking. [...] What Lambert shows convincingly is why wheat mattered so much to the Asquith government. Britain's Achilles heel in time of war was its dependence on food imports." — Joan Beaumont, Australian Book Review

"To understand the strategic and tactical decisions whereby governments commit large numbers of troops and resources to deter or defend far from their own shores requires a deep dive into the details that can take a considerable amount of time and patience. Nicholas Lambert does just that in his wonderful account, The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster....This book accomplishes its objective by demonstrating how politicians, operating on incorrect assumptions, lack of intelligence, or incomplete information, can blindly rush to failure, exacerbating an already difficult crisis. With all the tension and crisis in the world today, it would behoove U.S. military leaders to hit 'pause,' read this book, and consider their actions carefully in the High North, western Pacific, or Middle East." — Admiral James Foggo III, Proceedings

"Lambert...has done a remarkable job linking the 19th-century transformations in shipping, finance, and agriculture to the bloody detritus left in Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay....What's fascinating about The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster are the echoes today of what Lambert characterized as the trade-offs that had resulted from the first big era of globalization in the late 19th century.... For any serious student of history, and especially the Great War, it's a great read—and a timely reminder that politics and economics always color military decisions, then and now." — Keith Johnson, Foreign Policy

"Nick Lambert has long had a reputation among historians as being scholarly, controversial, and highly readable, but now he has surpassed himself. We have had expert studies of the First World War by economic and financial experts to supplement the usual political and military narratives, but Lambert displays a familiarity with all these fields as well as a mastery of sources and a vivacity of style that makes this book almost compulsively readable. He not only examines the Dardanelles controversy in considerable detail but also explains what the British government, and its various components, thought the war was all about—or should be about. Anyone who thought that the Dardanelles question had been settled for good needs to think again." — Sir Michael Howard

"Nicholas Lambert's exemplary scholarship and original thinking are displayed at their best in this formidable re-evaluation of the strategic determinants of the Gallipoli campaign. A meticulously documented, analytically provocative, and compelling narrative." — Cameron Hazlehurst, Australian National University

"In The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster, Nick Lambert guides us through the labyrinths of economic globalization to unpack the making of one of history's most famous military debacles. This compelling book, ambitious, engagingly written, and methodologically innovative, shows how economic history can illuminate the history of war." — Marc Flandreau, University of Pennsylvania

"The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster is a masterful work of uncanny contemporary relevance—one that resonates with the very human art of strategic decision making. Nick Lambert's innate understanding of national power, in all its dimensions, brilliantly illuminates the competing considerations and grave consequences in the creation of national-security and naval policy. Any current or aspiring practitioner of global security, civilian and uniformed alike, will be educated and enlightened by this fascinating case study." — Adm. Bill Moran, USN (Ret.)

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