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discoursesof diplomacy, geopolitics and
security, and in a more diffuse cultural regis-
ter asimaginative geographiesof a largely
Arab ‘Orient’. The two cross-cut in complex
ways, but they have their origins in Napoleon’s
military occupation of Egypt in 1798 (see
occupation, military), in some measure
part of a plan to cut Britain’s lines of commu-
nication with India, and the bloody campaigns
that he fought through the Levant. In invading
Egypt, Cole (2007, p. 247) argues, ‘Bonaparte
was inventing what we now call ‘‘the modern
Middle East’’’, and ‘the similarities of the
Corsican general’s rhetoric and tactics to
those of later North Atlantic incursions into
the region tell us about the persistent patholo-
gies ofenlightenmentrepublics’. Said (2003
[1978]) locates the formation of a distinctly
modernorientalismin the textual and visual
appropriations of Egypt made for a European
audience by the scientists, scholars and artists
who accompanied the French troops.
French politicians and diplomats had
described the Ottoman Empire asla Proche-
Orient(‘the Near East’) from the end of the
eighteenth century, and for most of the nine-
teenth century the ‘Eastern Question’ that
concerned high politics ineuropewas invari-
ably an Ottoman one. But in the course of the
nineteenth century civil servants in Britain’s
India Office started to describe what was
then Persia and its surrounding regions as
‘the Middle East’, and it was the geo-strategic
relation to Britain’s Empire in India that gave
the term its eventual currency. In 1902 an
American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan
(1840–1914), in what proved to be an extra-
ordinarily influential essay on ‘The Persian
Gulf and International Relations’ (Mahan,
1902), argued that Britain’s control over its
approaches to India via Suez and the Gulf
(which is how he loosely defined ‘the Middle
East’) was threatened by Russian advances in
Central Asia and by the proposed construction
of a rail link between Berlin and Baghdad; not
surprisingly, he championed the importance of
sea power, and recommended that the Middle
East would ‘some day need its Malta as well as
its Gibraltar’. The term was popularized by
Valentine Chirol, who published a major series
of articles in theTimes, followed by a book
under the titleThe Middle Eastern question, or
some political problems of Indian defence(1903).
The ‘Middle East’ was envisioned as a security
belt running from Persia through Mesopotamia
and Afghanistan to Kashmir, Nepal and Tibet:
as Scheffler (2003, p. 265) notes, an abstract
space whose common denominator was astrategic location across the northern and
western approaches to India.
The region was redefined after the First
World War, the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire and the attempt by the Great Powers
to divide most of the spoils between them, but
it retained its strategic inflection and gained
new geo-economic significance as the import-
ance ofoilcame to be recognized (at first, as
the basis for naval supremacy). The European
powers drew new lines on themapto create
new states. In 1921, Churchill created a
Middle East Department in the Colonial
Office, whose area of responsibility was Iraq,
Palestine, Transjordan and Aden; and during
the Second World War Britain established a
Middle East Command, whose area of respon-
sibility spiralled out from Iran, Iraq, Palestine,
Syria, Transjordan and the Arabian Peninsula
to include Greece and Malta in the Mediter-
ranean and Egypt, the Sudan and swathes of
East Africa. After the war, theregionwas
plunged back into conflict by thepartition
of Palestine, the foundation of the state of
Israel in 1948 and the dispossession of hun-
dreds of thousands of Palestinians. By then,
Britain’s star was fading – a fact dramatically
confirmed by the Suez Crisis of 1956 – and
growing American geopolitical and geo-eco-
nomic interest in the region, partly in response
to the expanding Soviet sphere of influence
during thecold war, was signalled by the US
State Department’s focus on a Middle East that
it now delimited as Egypt, Syria, Israel, Leba-
non, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bah-
rain and Qatar. This new regionalization was
underwritten by financial support for
area studiesand Centers for Middle Eastern
Studies at major American universities.
Europe and America continued to be exer-
cised by the region throughout the second half
of the twentieth century and on into the
twenty-first, and its geopolitical construction
as what Sidaway (1998) called an ‘arc of crisis’
spanned successivewarsbetween Arab states
and Israel, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and
the WestBank after 1967, the unresolved
Palestinian question and theintifada, chronic
crises and civil wars in Lebanon, the Iraq–Iran
War (1980–8), the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
and the first Gulf War (1990–1). A key US
response to these crises was the formation of
a unified combatant command in 1983, US
Central Command (CENTCOM), to cover
‘the ‘‘central’’ area of the globe between the
European and Pacific Commands’ and which
(in significant part) retraced the outlines of
the former British Middle East Command.Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_M Final Proof page 460 1.4.2009 3:19pmMIDDLE EAST, IDEA OF