London and the Invention of the Middle East

London and the Invention of the Middle East

Author: Roger Adelson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780300060942

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In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the British Government, the banks, and leading individuals in London reached historic decisions that determined the name, shape, nature, and future of the region known as the Middle East. In this fascinating and readable book, Roger Adelson examines who made policy, on what grounds, with what information, and with what results. The setting for the narrative is London, then the world's greatest metropolis and its financial and political center. Adelson evokes the atmosphere of Whitehall, Fleet Street, the City of London, and Westminster, and paints a vivid portrait of the individuals (Churchill, Lloyd George, Curzon, Cromer, and others) who established the international agenda. Using an extensive range of public and private archives, he identifies issues of money, power, and territorial ambition at the heart of policy, and he describes decisions made in ignorance of and often wholly without reference to local interests. The book explores and explains British diplomacy both before and after the 1914-1918 War: the protection of the Suez Canal and Persian Gulf; the fear of a German drive to the East and subjugation of the Turks; the discovery of oil; the post-war suppression of nationalist aspirations and the establishment of collaborative regimes more in tune with London than with the Middle East itself. More clearly than any previous work, it identifies the virtual invention of the modern Middle East and the roots of the ethnic and nationalist antagonisms that characterize the region today.


Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East

Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East

Author: Shareen Blair Brysac

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2009-10-12

Total Pages: 768

ISBN-13: 0393342433

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A brilliant narrative history tracing today’s troubles back to the grandiose imperial overreach of Great Britain and the United States. Kingmakers is the gripping story of how the modern Middle East came to be, as told through the lives of the Britons and Americans who shaped it. Some are famous (Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell); others infamous (Harry St. John Philby, father of Kim); some forgotten (Sir Mark Sykes, Israel’s godfather, and A. T. Wilson, the territorial creator of Iraq). All helped enthrone rulers in a region whose very name is an Anglo-American invention. The aim of this engrossing character-driven narrative is to restore to life the colorful figures who gave us the Middle East in which Americans are enmeshed today.


A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century

A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century

Author: Roger Owen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780674398306

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This text offers an examination of the economic history of the principal Arab countries, Turkey and Israel since 1918. Using the state as its major economic analysis, it charts the growth of national income and issues of welfare and distribution over two periods, 1918-1945 and 1945-1990. Important trends are explored, including the patterns of colonial economic management, import substitution, the impact of the 1970s oil boom, and the current process of liberalization and structural adjustment


A History of the Middle East

A History of the Middle East

Author: Peter Mansfield

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0141989556

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The definitive history of the Middle East, now updated in its fifth edition 'The best overall survey of the politics, regional rivalries and economics of the contemporary Arab world' Washington Post Over the centuries the Middle East has confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike. This now-classic book follows the historic struggles of the region over the last two hundred years, from Napoleon's assault on Egypt, through the slow decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the painful emergence of modern nations. It is now fully updated with extensive new material examining recent developments including the aftermaths of the 'Arab Spring', the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict and the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars. 'An excellent political overview' Guardian


The Middle East

The Middle East

Author: Bernard Lewis

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 0684807122

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A 2000-year history of a region stretching from Libya to Central Asia ; concludes with the effects of the Gulf War.


The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World

The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World

Author: Cyrus Schayegh

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-08-28

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0674981103

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In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization. To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.


Imperial Mecca

Imperial Mecca

Author: Michael Christopher Low

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 0231549091

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With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.


Promised Lands

Promised Lands

Author: Jonathan Parry

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-12-10

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0691231443

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A major history of the British Empire’s early involvement in the Middle East Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 showed how vulnerable India was to attack by France and Russia. It forced the British Empire to try to secure the two routes that a European might use to reach the subcontinent—through Egypt and the Red Sea, and through Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. Promised Lands is a panoramic history of this vibrant and explosive age. Charting the development of Britain’s political interest in the Middle East from the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War in the 1850s, Jonathan Parry examines the various strategies employed by British and Indian officials, describing how they sought influence with local Arabs, Mamluks, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. He tells a story of commercial and naval power—boosted by the arrival of steamships in the 1830s—and discusses how classical and biblical history fed into British visions of what these lands might become. The region was subject to the Ottoman Empire, yet the sultan’s grip on it appeared weak. Should Ottoman claims to sovereignty be recognised and exploited, or ignored and opposed? Could the Sultan’s government be made to support British objectives, or would it always favour France or Russia? Promised Lands shows how what started as a geopolitical contest became a drama about diplomatic competition, religion, race, and the unforeseen consequences of history.


The Poisoned Well

The Poisoned Well

Author: Roger Hardy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1849049548

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Almost fifty years after Britain and France left the Middle East, the toxic legacies of their rule continue to fester. To make sense of today's conflicts and crises, we need to grasp how Western imperialism shaped the region and its destiny in the half-century between 1917 and 1967. Roger Hardy unearths an imperial history stretching from North Africa to southern Arabia that sowed the seeds of future conflict and poisoned relations between the Middle East and the West. Drawing on a rich cast of eye-witnesses - ranging from nationalists and colonial administrators to soldiers, spies, and courtesans - The Poisoned Well brings to life the making of the modern Middle East, highlighting the great dramas of decolonisation such as the end of the Palestine mandate, the Suez crisis, the Algerian war of independence, and the retreat from Aden. Concise and beautifully written, The Poisoned Well offers a thought-provoking and insightful story of the colonial legacy in the Middle East.