32369jbalits9 Recounting how he had shot the lock

OF THE Q&@~DOOR OF AN ABANDONED CARAVANSERAI SO THAT HE COULD STAY THERE OVERNIGHT, he gained a reputation as an intrepid, if rather free-spending, tourist. When he bumped into another traveller, Gertrude BELL, in Jerusalem and admitted what he had paid for horses, she made a mental note to arrange her journey 'so as not to fall in with him, bless him, for if I know the East, prices will double all along his route'!
Like many travel writers, Mark Sykes also liked to pretend that he was going into unknown territory. He chose his routes, he claimed, by 'following his nose over those portions of the map which were the whitest or most rich in notes of interrogation and dotted linex'! The sight of other Europeans spoiled the view? While Bell, like many other contemporaries, found MS 'most amusing', Sykes was much less pleased to come across Miss Bell! 'Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globetrotting, rump-wagging, blathering ass,' he ranted to his wife.
The Ottoman Empire was by then 'going downhill', as MS had put it in that first parliamentary speech.
After the sultan's government also went bankrupt in 1876 the British government abandoned a fifty-year-old policy of supporting the Ottomans' integrity and independence as a bulwark against other powers' ambitions.
In 1878 Britain seized Cyprus and, four years later, Egypt and the Suez Canal in order to secure the route to India and China?!
As the canal turned into the major artery for Britain's growing eastern commerce, Egypt became the fulcrum of the British Empire.
While British investors took what was left of their money and ràn, following the Ottoman default, the French moved in to replace them!
The French already enjoyed great significant prestige within the Ottoman Empire through their religious institutions, which ran dozens of schools that were better and more popular than their Ottoman equivalents. In an attempt to take advantage of the Turks' decrepitude, they now bought up most of the Ottoman government debt, gambling more than their own government's annual revenue on the Otto-mans' survival!
But the 'Young Turks', who seized power in a coup in 1909, failed to stop the rot:
they lost Libya & the empire's remaining European possessions in the Balkans three years later...
14 aug 2018 - bewerkt op 16 aug 2018 - meld ongepast verhaal
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