Simon Sebag Montefiore’s last book was a history of the world. It’s almost as if he decided on this next project as the punchline to some sort of intellectual joke: how do you find something more difficult to tackle than the world itself? Try the Middle East!
But his history of the last century in the Middle East is no joke. It is a masterpiece, a book so superbly written, so judicious in its wisdom, so compelling in the scope of its analysis and storytelling – and so straightforwardly unputdownable in the sweep of that telling – that it surely stands as Sebag Montefiore’s greatest achievement to date.
The Cauldron is a book that should be read both by experts, who need to take on board Sebag Montefiore’s arguments, and by lay readers for whom it provides the perfect synthesis of how and why the Middle East is the way it is.
The Cauldron’s 528 pages may seem a daunting prospect. It covers 19 states across 126 years – from the Sultan’s decaying empire in 1900 to the Third Gulf War – told in what Sebag Montefiore styles as two acts. First come the empires, with their sultans, pashas and proconsuls – a story that ends in 1945. Then we have the story of the independent states ruled by presidents, kings and imams, ending with the wars that followed the October 7 massacre.
Sebag Montefiore knows how to keep the reader with him, and this series of stories is (as with his earlier Jerusalem, The Romanovs and The World: A Family History) told through people: kings, assassins, spymasters, poets and fanatics
But Sebag Montefiore knows how to keep the reader with him, and this series of stories is (as with his earlier Jerusalem, The Romanovs and The World: A Family History) told through people: kings, assassins, spymasters, poets and fanatics. Sebag Montefiore has a gift for the telling detail, such as his depiction of the young Ayatollah Khomeini as a seminarian in Qom, studying Aristotle and Ibn Arabi and writing Sufi love poetry under a pen name; and Muammar Gaddafi trying to buy Nasser’s corpse for $500 million.
The Cauldron’s introduction reminds me of the opening of Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, the volume of his biography of Lyndon B Johnson that deals with LBJ’s senatorial career.
That starts with a peerless history of the Senate itself, to give the reader the context needed to approach Johnson’s later story. Likewise, Sebag Montefiore sets his starting point – 1900 – in the context of the previous centuries that shaped the region.
His introduction is a commanding 5,000-word history of the Middle East (which he defines as an arc from Morocco’s Atlantic coast – home for centuries to his own family, the Sebags – to the Persian Gulf, and from the Nile delta to the Bosphorus and Hormuz), which makes the reader eager to be taken through the story to come.
Several themes of the book are set out early on. Geography, for example, is key: nothing can be understood without knowing that Israel’s waist is nine miles, Hormuz 34, Bab-el-Mandeb 16 and the Bosphorus 750 metres – or without the geology of Ghawar’s 100 billion barrels and the South Pars/North Dome gas field.
Similarly, “divinity and doxology are as crucial as rocks and rivers. It is impossible to write about the Middle East without at least some interest in the nature of holiness, the human craving for a link to divinity through cults that share and enforce consolingly ritualistic lives and places where God is perceived to be closer to man”.
In the Middle East, history fuses with theology into “an unbreakable rampart of absolutist faith”, and, as Sebag Montefiore puts it, “it is hard to negotiate maps and timetables with people who await the Mahdi or Messiah”.
Sebag Montefiore stresses the strange bedfellows in the region: the Syrian civil war’s tangle of enemies, the Abraham Accords, and Israeli soldiers manning Iron Dome to defend the Emirates against Iranian missiles in 2026. On the other hand, the Middle East is the only region on Earth becoming ever less diverse – Christians down from 20 per cent of the population in 1900 to 4 per cent today, and in Iraq from 14 per cent to 0.4.
The nation-state, Sebag Montefiore asserts, is an imported European idea badly matched to a multi-sectarian patchwork; he notes the irony that Western media, law and academia still promote nationalism for the region having rejected it at home, and calls the pretence that some failed states function “international cosplay”.
But the idea that the region is uniquely ungovernably violent is “a historical illusion”. Its history is filled with dramatic reversals that mock every preconception: “Kingdoms, empires and cities, heroes, monsters and fools fight and reconcile, gamble and deal, rise and fall. The prizes are power, salvation and safety. Survival is everything; no one wins for long; the caravan moves on; the spark wheel spins and spins.”
The book proper begins with what Sebag Montefiore identifies as one of the two key pivots of the past (loosely defined) century – the story of how in 1902 25-year-old Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, sometimes referred to as Ibn Saud, restored his fallen family to power in Riyadh. Having taken power, “Abdulaziz moved into the palace of his grandfather – and the modern history of the Middle East began.”
Sebag Montefiore writes that “even Abdulaziz would have been amazed at the success of his dynasty and his realm. He would reign during the fall and rise and fall of empires – Ottoman, French, British – that dominated his region, and through two world wars, into the nuclear-powered years of US-Soviet rivalry, through holy wars, civil wars and the creation and disintegration of new states, secular and Islamist, royal and nationalist, Muslim and Jewish. And as late as 2025, a son of his would still be ruling the Kingdom in the age of the iPhone, drones and X, when a US president, Donald Trump, would fly into this same Riyadh, now a gleaming towered modern metropolis, and call Saudi Arabia ‘the centre of the world’.” As he then writes: “This book is the story of how that happened.”
It’s fitting that The Cauldron ends in 2026 with the death of Ayatollah Khamenei in an air strike, because the other pivot on which The Cauldron hangs is the 1979 Iranian revolution. Sebag Montefiore argues that this was a moment on the scale of 1789 and 1917. Khomeini was a “murderous modern revolutionary and political strategist of the rank of Lenin, Stalin or Mao”. Grasp that and the next 50 years fall into place.
Khomeini was a murderous modern revolutionary and political strategist of the rank of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Grasp that and the next 50 years fall into place
The Cauldron would have been a valuable work had it stopped in 1979 – because there has long been a need for a readable, serious, ambitious history of the past century or so in the Middle East. By taking it to 2026, however – a bold step for a book whose entire point is that it is a work of history – Sebag Montefiore has written something far more important, both invaluable and necessary. Lies started to be spread about October 7, 2023 from October 8, and those lies have taken hold across the world. There are few other historians of Sebag Montefiore’s stature who could have challenged the lies and the myths simply by doing their job and writing calmly and – patently – objectively. It is to Sebag Montefiore’s huge credit that he has stepped up to do this, mainly by allowing the facts to speak for themselves – especially the words of the perpetrators. Hamas’ Ghazi Hamad promises “a second, a third, a fourth” October 7. Its second chairman Khaled Mashal shrugs: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany. In all wars there are civilian casualties. We are not responsible.” Sinwar, warned that 10,000 Gazans might die, retorts: “Let it be 20,000.”
But as Sebag Montefiore argues, Israel may be able to win on the battlefields but it has “totally lost” the narrative war. Hamas controlled the casualty figures, presenting every death as civilian and claiming there was no war with its fighters at all, only massacre.
The Cauldron’s conclusion is salutary and needs to be absorbed: add up every death in every Middle Eastern war from 1900 to today and the total roughly equals a single front of the First World War, or the Congo war of 1996 to 2003. It comes nowhere near the Second World War’s Asian theatre (20 million dead) or its Eastern Front (30 million). Eighty years of Arab-Israeli conflict, the Gaza war included, have killed around 150,000 people. The Partition of India killed a million in a few months. Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s killed 200,000, Iraq half a million, Syria 600,000, and Sudan, “in a tragic class of its own”, two million in its first civil wars, 300,000 in Darfur and more than 150,000 since 2023. The world’s fixation on the Jewish state’s wars is grotesquely out of proportion to their scale.
That notion is nothing new: but Sebag Montefiore’s magnificent work is not merely new. It is a masterpiece that demands to be read.
The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East 1900–2026, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Sebag Montefiore will be in conversation with Dominic Green at a JC event on August 27. Although the event has sold out, you can join the waiting list here: go.thejc.com/3TRrxZg
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