The First World War in the Middle East is a subject of enduring political salience and increasing scholarly interest, but public responses to it in Britain and, more especially, New Zealand are underexplored. This thesis fills that gap by examining a vast array of published material, supplemented by archival sources, and exploring the breadth of imperial issues it raised. This includes not only the campaigns in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Gallipoli, but broader issues of jihad, genocide, nationalism, ‘liberation’ and imperial aggrandisement. These were issues at the heart of the war in the Middle East and, it was believed, the wider war with Germany. By examining them collectively, a conception of the war emerges that is decidedly imperial. It therefore contributes not only to scholarship of the First World War, empire and the Middle East, but ongoing debates about what, if anything, empire meant to ordinary people.