Today the West tends to understand the Middle East primarily in terms of geopolitics: Islam, oil, and nuclear weapons. But in the nineteenth century it was imagined differently. The interplay of geography and politics found definition in a broader set of concerns that understood the region in terms of the moral, humanitarian, and religious commitments of the British empire. Smyrna's Ashes re-evaluates how this story of the "Eastern Question" shaped the cultural politics of geography, war, and genocide in the mapping of a larger Middle East after World War I.
