The Ottoman Reconquest of Arabia, 1871-73
Robert Gavin outlines how, just as it was about to become the “Sick Man of Europe”, the Turkish Empire showed surprising vigour in re-imposing its grasp upon Arabia to the dismay of Egypt.
A great deal is known about the British Abyssinian Expedition of 1868. At the time, Disraeli’s Government issued weighty Bluebooks that told all about the Expedition except why it was sent. The captives whom it was designed to release, the envoys sent to release them and the Officers of the Expedition, all wrote their accounts of the episode from their different standpoints. And since then, historians have given correct and incorrect accounts of what was involved.
Much less is known of another expedition, this time a Turkish one, launched barely two years later in an equally forbidding country on the other side of the Red Sea. Yet, as a military exploit, the Turkish conquest of Yemen in 1871-2 yields nothing to the Abyssinian campaign either in point of rapidity of execution—which was the latter’s main claim to fame—or in the success of its result.
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