The modern Middle East is one of the most controversial areas on the planet. Dominated by a stream of seemingly endless crises, the region has become synonymous with bloodshed, displacement, and injustice. In order to understand why the Middle East is how it is today, we need to look not just to recent histories of violence and control, but to processes set in action more than a century ago.
The First World War saw the end of an empire in the Middle East, with four centuries of Ottoman rule brought to an end. New empires came to replace it, although they already had a foothold in the region. Throughout the 19th century, Britain and France had asserted influence and direct control across North Africa, the Gulf region, and at times in the heartlands of the Middle East itself. The end of the Ottomans brought the opportunity to remake the Middle East in a new image under the tutelage of the European imperial powers or charismatic leaders, with new nation states carved out across the region. Questions of identity and self-determination, so much a part of late Ottoman discourse, became the defining feature of this new Middle East.
Using recent scholarship and a range of primary sources, from photographs to newspapers to music, we will explore the various plans to shape the Middle East before, during, and after the First World War, before turning to case-studies based on specific areas. From the homogenous identity pressed by the new Turkish Republic to the quagmire of Palestine, to competing national and pan-national ideologies in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, we will encounter the origins of many of the debates and conflicts that still rage in the Middle East.
