Winner of 2021 John Lyman Book Award Shortlisted for 2021 Gilder-Lehrman Military History Book Prize 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. Nicholas Lambert's excellent new book ... 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. ... [He] 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 With his latest major contribution to the understanding of the link between maritime power and British strategy in the First World War, Nicholas Lambert consolidates a number of things. The first is his standing as the leading historian in that field ... setting the gold standard for others to follow or better if they are to move the field forward intellectually and methodologically. ... This is not a book about how Gallipoli was fought. Rather it clarifies in minute and exacting detail why it occurred at all. More importantly, it is also a book about what the other options were for providing food security and market stability for Britain, its allies and associated nations, and how the quest to maintain morale and cohesion amongst Britain's populace was the strategic center of gravity. --Greg Kennedy, Diplomacy and Statecraft 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 F. Krepinevich, American Purpose This thoroughly researched and very well written book ... 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 cap