by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
The common attitude of European scholarship of the time was to look for patterns and universals instead of nuances and peculiarities. As a result, writing about Near Eastern character required much less competence than writing, say, on Persian poetry. Two British observers writing in 1866 on the Eastern Question noted that Bulgaria was then less known in Britain than was Timbuktu.104 Urquhart’s observation that “the European goes into the East convinced that he is a professor of political economy, that he is in possession of the science of government, and that in every respect he is a free man of an understanding mind” could easily be substantiated by simply perusing what these Europeans wrote on the East.105 Ottoman authors too, in refuting the common European views on the East, were often struck by how little their opponents knew about any particulars.106 It was perhaps this simplicity of European knowledge about the East that dissuaded local intellectuals from seriously engaging with the Eastern Question debate until it became a matter of life and death. Even then, most respondents were rank-and-file intellectuals with no significant scholarly background.
The Occident-versus-the-Orient contrast had initially created a dualistic but hierarchical vision of the world. Reconceptualizing the Orient as the Near/Middle East and Far East vis-à-vis Europe reaffirmed the central position of Europe in this imagery and further peripheralized the East, Europe being the metropolis. Despite this implied degradation, institutions and businesses from universities to newspapers continue to internalize the Middle East and, at the expense of a drastic drop in the uses of “East” as impersonal names since World War I, they use the term in their names as part of their contemporary appeal. Nevertheless, the Middle East as imagined never created a shared identity among its inhabitants as Middle Easterners, and there is still no regionwide organization with any considerable representative status. The Middle East today still remains a region with few claimants from within.
2
BRITISH AND U.S. USE AND MISUSE OF THE TERM “MIDDLE EAST”
Roger Adelson
THE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER puts “Middle East” in quotation marks because the term has been defined in a number of different ways over the past hundred years. Nevertheless, this term, with its imprecise definition and history, continues in use and importance. This essay examines the history of this neologism of fairly recent vintage, and more generally, this discussion seeks to shed light on the ways that political and bureaucratic contexts have determined how the Middle East has been defined since the beginning of the twentieth century. The term “Middle East” particularly gained currency during and after World War II, although more recently this term connotes many negative images associated with oil, Islam, and terrorism. We can trace much of the current American understanding of the Middle East back to the oil and terrorism crises of the 1970s, which were amplified of course by the events of September 2001, when al-Qaida terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, D.C. As terrorism crossed the Atlantic to Madrid, London, and other European cities, the U.S., British, and other governments declared a global war against terrorism and intervened militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, and subsequently the Middle East has been seen as an even more troubled but most important region.
In the preceding chapter, Huseyin Yilmaz showed how the term “Middle East” evolved into the twentieth century. But why did “the Middle East” gain more currency during and after World War II, when the term was widely adopted by both government officials and the media? And then during the Cold War, North Africa came to be understood as part of the Middle East, whereas in the 1990s government officials and commentators spoke of the Central Asian “stans” as part of the Middle East.1 The geographical extension of the term has gained global currency and has added layers of confusion over what is and where is the Middle East. Indeed, very few in the media who write for general audiences ever attempt to delineate the region with any precision. Even specialists disagree about the scope of the term and about what commonality exists across such a geographically, ethnically, and historically diverse region. Even those who point to Islam as a common denominator in the region admit that Muslims practice their religion very differently from one place to another (beside the fact that most Muslims live outside this region—however it is defined).
DIVIDING UP THE EAST
By way of speaking to these issues, I propose to provide some brief historical background. First, we have to start with what was called the “Eastern Question” by European imperial powers in the late eighteenth century, which also has been dealt with in the previous chapter. The so-called Eastern Question was a phrase coined by the Europeans who began to ask what the Great Powers would do in the event of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt and the Levant (which is an even older French term that refers to the countries of the eastern Mediterranean) first alerted Britain to the dangers France could pose to supply routes to British India. However, over the course of the nineteenth century, the rise of Russia and its imperial ambitions refocused British concerns on the czars as a greater potential rival to British overseas dominance. Because the subcontinent of India was the foundation of its Afro-Asian empire, Britain saw czarist Russia as a threat not only to the Indian subcontinent but also to its other interests in Asia as well. With this strategic picture in mind, during the Crimean War in the 1850s, the British allied with the French and the Turks to defeat Russia. Partly as a result of the Crimean War, British and French investments grew in the Ottoman and Persian Empires. Then in the 1890s, after Japan’s defeat of China, the British concluded an alliance with Japan against Russia. These ties became stronger in the wake of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.2
Familiar to diplomatic historians, these events and the strategic planning underlying them led the British to begin to refer to the regions north of India as “Central Asia” and to divide the rest of Asia between the “Far East” and “Near East” (see Chapter 1). At the same time advances in the technologies of transportation, communication, and warfare since the middle of the nineteenth century made English-speaking peoples more conscious of Asia. Indeed, new technology partly explains some of the distinctions English speakers made between India, the Near East, and the Far East.3
Figure 2.1. The Nearer East. Hogarth, Nearer East, 1902.
In 1902, a book titled The Nearer East appeared in Britain and was soon republished in the United States with the title, The Near East. The author, David George Hogarth, was a noted Oxford archaeologist and geographer who launched T. E. Lawrence on his legendary career with the Arabs during World War I. Hogarth’s detailed book defined the Nearer East as the Balkans, West Asia, Southwest Asia, and Northeast Africa (Figure 2.1).4
Also in 1902, an article appeared in the National Review, an influential monthly journal published in London.5 The author, Alfred T. Mahan, was a U.S. naval officer and lecturer well known in London since the 1890s for his two books on the impact that British sea power had on history.6 In light of the Russian advances into Central Asia and northern Persia, as well as the new Siberian railroad, Mahan believed the British must secure the Persian Gulf to defend India and its sea routes. Backing British control of the Suez Canal and Egypt, Mahan saw moving into southern Persia as the logical next step for Britain to control the Persian Gulf, which had become a British lake. Mahan coined (what he thought) was a new term for this region: “The middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen, will someday need its Malta, as well as its Gibraltar; it does not follow that either will be in the Gulf.”7 Referring to the deployment of naval power, Mahan observed: “The British Navy should have the facility to concentrate in force if occasion arise, about Aden, India, and the Gulf.” Mahan did not reject the term “Central Asia,” although Britain’s so-called Great Game there with Russia did not trouble those, like Mahan, who were primarily concerned with naval strategies. Nor did Mahan reject the term “Near East.”8 To the latter he simply added “Middle East,” which he centered in the Persian Gulf, owing to his
preoccupation with securing British maritime links to India. When Mahan wrote his article, oil had not yet been discovered in southwest Iran (which occurred in 1908).
In addition, Mahan saw the German proposal to build a railway to Baghdad as a way to further strengthen British resistance to Russian expansion. The Germans were viewed less favorably by Valentine Chirol, a prominent British journalist in London. His outspoken criticism of Germany led that country’s officials to ban Chirol from the country in the early 1890s. This did not deter Chirol, who became the head of the foreign department of the Times in the late 1890s.9 Warning of the new Japanese threat as well as the old Russian threat, particularly for the oil wealth centered on Baku, Chirol published a number of articles that he turned into a book in 1896 titled The Far Eastern Question.10 Stimulated by Mahan’s article, Chirol wrote nineteen more articles for the Times that he then turned into another book in 1903 titled The Middle East Question.11 To Chirol, the Middle East covered not just the Persian Gulf area but also all the overland approaches to India, including Afghanistan and Tibet, or as he explained, “those regions of Asia which extend to the borders of India or command the approaches to India, and which are consequently bound up with the problems of Indian political as well as military defense.”12
Another prominent figure who concerned himself with India’s defense was Halford Mackinder. An Oxford don engaged in the new field of geopolitics, Mackinder argued that the inner core of Eurasia remained the most pivotal region of the world since the Mongols had burst forth to plunder the empires of China, Russia, and Islam. Those British who followed the Great Game agreed with Mackinder’s view that the Central Asian hinterland, where the Russian Empire had gained territory at the expense of the Persian and Turkish Empires, posed the greatest Asian threat to the British Empire. In an article he published in London’s Geographical Journal, Mackinder felt constrained to remind Mahan that most of Asia was beyond the reach of sea power.13
This geopolitical debate over the Middle East stirred little interest in Edwardian London, even among those who made, conducted, and influenced British policy in Downing Street, Whitehall, Westminster, Fleet Street, and the City. Whitehall officials took note of Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905 and the growth of the German navy, but few paid attention to the Persian Revolution of 1905, the Turkish Revolution of 1908, and the economic downturn and nationalistic protests in Egypt that began in 1907. The Foreign Office gave more time to the two Franco-German crises over Morocco in 1905 and 1911, the Italian-Turkish War, and two Balkan wars before 1914, which were more important to the Great Powers of Europe than to Persia, Turkey, and Egypt.
Most of London’s governing establishment remained confident about the British navy’s ability to overwhelm the German navy and about Britain’s ability to keep a balance of power in Europe while it defended India effectively. The latter was vital because the British could send the Indian army, then one of the world’s largest standing forces (and maintained at India’s expense), wherever London’s leaders thought necessary.14
The Suez Canal was another source of British concern, particularly in the city of London, the financial center of world capitalism. The Suez Canal Company was based in Paris, but almost half the company’s stock was owned by the British government. The canal, completed in 1869 and used mostly by British ships, had to be kept open and its fees kept as low as possible. Benjamin Disraeli’s purchase of the Suez Canal stock for the British government in 1875 set a precedent in 1914 for Winston Churchill to arrange for the British government to buy the majority of the stock in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, a highly profitable company that became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1935 and then British Petroleum Company in 1954. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill advocated government ownership of the oil company because the navy, then shifting away from coal, imported most of its oil from the United States and Mexico. To Churchill, the British navy mattered more than profits mattered.15
Although the British attached strategic and financial importance to the Middle East, the term itself was not employed by the Committee of Imperial Defense. Formed in 1904 to coordinate Whitehall departments and intelligence, that committee became the model for the many interdepartmental committees set up during and after the World War I. The Admiralty, War Office, Foreign Office, India Office, and Colonial Office, along with the Board of Trade and Treasury, each had its own concerns about the seas and lands lying between Europe and India. But the British government reckoned its policies in terms of empires and individual countries rather than with regions.16 The same was true of the British Chamber of Commerce and various financiers and industrialists who backed British investments and trade routes to India. Even though they sometimes referred to the region as the “Near East” (and not the “Middle East”), they too referred to specific countries rather than the region as a whole. Likewise, religious and political activists who favored the Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Jews against the Turks continued to think in terms of political entities rather than in terms of regional formations.
There were a few exceptions to this way of thinking, such as Edward G. Browne, the Cambridge professor who taught Persian, Turkish, and Arabic. He was outspoken in his opposition to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which partitioned influence in Persia between Britain and Russia. London ignored the professor.17
FROM THE NEAR EAST TO THE MIDDLE EAST AT WAR
Despite the naval, military, and financial investments the British made in the war against the Turks from 1914 to 1918 and afterward, the term “Middle East” gained little currency by the British both inside and outside the government. The British were heavily involved in the region during World War I as they closed the Turkish Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; declared war against the Ottoman Empire; occupied the head of the Persian Gulf; annexed Egypt and Cyprus; and fought in several fronts to take Baghdad, Mosul, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Beirut from the Ottomans. They then occupied Istanbul, and so they established a presence on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula, and with the collapse of the Russian Empire, in all of northern Persia and its capital, Tehran. To the British, the tens of thousands of British injured or buried in cemeteries between Gallipoli, Suez, and the Gulf seemed to justify their occupation of so much of that region. An interdepartmental committee tied to the Foreign Office was called the Middle East Committee, but it met only a few times in 1917 before it was absorbed into the Eastern Committee, which in 1918 coordinated various campaigns waged by Whitehall and its officers in the Trans-Caucasus and Trans-Caspian regions after the czar’s abdication during the Russian Revolution.18
The press and politicians only reacted to this vast British occupation when wartime censorship came to an end, and as postwar Britain’s economic situation worsened, unemployment rose, civil war erupted in Ireland, and the Allies abandoned their expeditions against the Bolsheviks. Few British took much notice of their country’s deep involvement in the region until about1920, when controversy developed over the British occupation of Iraq (Great Britain was awarded the mandates of Iraq and Palestine at the San Remo Conference in April 1920). At issue was the fact that sending more troops there to put down a rebellion would add to the already heavy war burden for British taxpayers. With an estimated cost of over 400 million pounds annually, Fleet Street’s most powerful Conservative newspapers opposed the high costs the British faced in Iraq.19
Winston Churchill, the politician most identified with the massive British losses at the Dardanelles Campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula, owed his political comeback to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. The latter dumped Palestine and Iraq into Churchill’s lap early in 1921, when Churchill took over the Colonial Office. He set up the Middle East Department and convened a conference in Cairo to meet with leading British military and civilian personnel posted throughout the region. His main task was to cut costs by reducing British troops in Iraq and Palestine.
Churchill’s strategy was to re
vert to a practice the British had adopted toward India’s princes, especially after the mutiny of the 1850s. As long as the princes took their cues in external affairs from the British, the princes were left to rule internally as they wished. The British goal was to upset as few locals as possible by keeping British advisers behind the scenes and behind the thrones of cooperative leaders. The wealthiest of these leaders were expected to pay their own way whereas the poor were subsidized and armed with as little cost as possible to the British treasury. The British Raj had learned that it was much cheaper and easier for the British to pay a collaborative prince and his family than it was to meet the demands of the masses.
At the March 1921 Cairo Conference, Churchill planned an Iraqi state that cobbled together the Kurds in the north, the Shia in the south, and the Sunnis in the center. Because the Ottoman Turks had relied for centuries on the Arab Sunni minority in and around Baghdad, the British chose a Sunni leader from the Hashemite family of the Hejaz in western Arabia who had collaborated with the British against the Ottomans in the recent Arab Revolt. Having been thrown out of Syria by the French, Faisal was installed by the British as king of Iraq (and his brother, Abdullah, was soon made king of Transjordan, newly created from the Palestine Mandate). The British used air power, which, from their two bases outside Baghdad, bombed uncooperative tribes and other troublemakers. Parliament and the British press praised Churchill for cutting costs in Iraq, including his move to absorb his Middle East Department into the Colonial Office when he left in 1922.20
