The Emergence of the "Middle East”
A Genealogy
Where exactly are we referring to when we talk about the Middle East?
Although the term is widely used in everyday discourse, we rarely stop to think about what we mean when we invoke it. It is one of those phrases that seem so natural that we assume that it has always been there, in our language, since time immemorial.
This, as you may have guessed, is not the case. The “Middle East” as a geopolitical marker is a product of European imperial imagination. It emerged in the early 20th century, shaped by European colonial ambitions and shifting geopolitical interests. From the outset, its boundaries were fluid, and the meaning of the term shifted according to the context within which it was deployed.
In this article, the first of a two-part series, I delve into the history of the “Middle East,” tracing its genealogy, how it evolved over the years, and how it has been used (and misused) by different people in different contexts. I argue that understanding the history of the term will help us grasp why its everyday use can be problematic and why we might search for better alternatives, which is a theme I will explore more fully in part two.
The Genealogy of the “Middle East”
The genealogy of the term “Middle East,” specifically in the English language, is closely related to two interrelated strategic issues that dominated the minds of European, and especially British, imperial policymakers throughout the 19th century: the Eastern Question and Britain’s efforts to secure India from any possible encroachments from other imperial powers.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, European states expanded their colonial ambitions towards the lands controlled by the Ottomans. Especially since the post-Napoleonic settlement that took shape with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the future of the territories under Ottoman rule became a growing concern for the European nations. Over time, this interest in the fate of the Ottoman Empire, which was generally seen as the Sick Man of Europe, acquired a name of its own and came to be known as “the Eastern Question.”
This terminology was in line with the general European imagination, which had already codified the territories that lay between Europe and China as a unified region called the “Orient” or the “East.” For the British, however, who, in addition to having a major stake in the Ottoman Empire’s future, also controlled India and had dealings with China, the label “Eastern Question” was simply too broad. To remedy this situation, the 19th-century British policymakers felt the need to make a distinction between the “Far East,” corresponding roughly to China and its environs, and the “Near East,” which was used to define the territories controlled by the Ottoman Empire.1 As a result, the British increasingly came to define the problem of what would happen in case the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist as the “Near Eastern Question.”2 In a sense, as Huseyin Yılmaz aptly puts it, “the very geographical scope of the Eastern Question created its own regional paradigm.”3
As if this were not complicated enough, yet another distinction was made at the beginning of the 20th century. In a book published in 1902, David Hogarth, a British archaeologist and geographer, introduced the idea of “Nearer East” into the geopolitical discourse. According to the definition that Hogarth suggested, the Nearer East contained “the Balkans, West Asia, Southwest Asia, and Northeast Africa.”4 Operating within the framework of the Eastern Question, Hogarth marked the region of Sind (located in modern-day Pakistan) as the line that divided the Nearer East from the Far East.5 Even though the term enjoyed a brief popularity between 1900 and 1914, especially regarding the events in the Balkans (the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 are a prime example), it later fell out of use, leaving its place once again to the more common Near East.6
The British Need to Secure India and the Emergence of the “Middle East”
While the use of “Near East” gained currency among British imperial policymakers in relation to the Eastern Question, the term “Middle East” as a geopolitical and strategic marker made its first appearance within the context of Britain’s strategic need to secure India against any possible encroachment from other European powers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
In a National Review article published in 1902 with the title “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” Alfred T. Mahan, a captain in the American navy, argued that it was imperative for the British to secure the Persian Gulf in order to protect their interests in India. Mahan was especially advocating for taking countermeasures against a possible Russian encroachment from Central Asia and Iran. In doing so, he coined the area—“situated between South and West Asia and centered around the Gulf”—as the “middle East [sic],” arguing that it was “a term which I have not seen.”7
Even though he is usually cited as the first person to use the term, Mahan’s claim may actually have been an exaggeration. For a start, “Middle East” as a linguistic and geographical construct had already been in circulation among European intellectuals in different contexts. In 1819, for instance, the renowned German author Goethe wrote of “Mittler Orient,” referring to Persia and its environs. Towards the end of the 19th century, French scholars used the term “l’Orient moyen” while writing about ancient civilizations that were found around the Fertile Crescent (itself an early 20th-century construct,8). Meanwhile, in English, phrases such as “Middle Orient” were being used from the mid-19th century onwards to denote territories that encompassed what is today Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the Caucasus.9
Moreover, in March 1900, Thomas Gordon, an ex-British Army officer, had published an article titled “The Problems of the Middle East” in the Nineteenth Century journal. Like what Mahan would do two years later, Gordon also emphasized the importance of securing India’s western flank against any external threats, loosely defining the region as “the Middle East.” Unlike Mahan, however, he did not claim that he had come up with the term. As Guillemette Crouzet narrates in his book on the origins of the Middle East, Gordon argued that it “had been in use for several years in administrative circles in British India, as well as in Persia at the British legation in Tehran.”10
Finally, around the time Mahan was writing, a series of articles appeared in The Times in 1902 with the title “The Middle Eastern Question.” Written by the British journalist Valentine Chirol, the articles were later compiled together and published as a book in 1903 under the name The Middle Eastern Question; or, Some Political Problems of Indian Defence. Chirol defined the Middle East as “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 defence.”11 According to this definition, the area would include the Persian Gulf, as well as Egypt and Afghanistan, creating a fusion between the “Indian Question” and the “Eastern Question.”12
Gaining Traction
Leaving aside the question of who first used it, it is safe to say that, by the early 20th century, the “Middle East” entered imperial political discourse in relation to Britain’s need to secure India’s western flank.13 In spite of its later ubiquity, however, the term actually took a long time to gain currency within political and intellectual circles. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, it was seldom used, despite the clarification made by the Royal Geographical Society that “Near East” should only be used to denominate the Balkans, while the “Middle East” would be a better fit in defining the territories between Istanbul and India.14 After World War I, Winston Churchill set up the “Middle East Department” in the Colonial Office to deal with the administration of Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, and Egypt, but the term did not stick. Meanwhile, journalists and intellectuals also continued to give preference to the term “Near East” until the 1940s.15
This began to change gradually on the eve of World War II. The discovery of oil in the region in the early 20th century led to an increase in its strategic importance for the European powers. Leading up to World War II, for instance, the British Army established “the Middle East Command,” which encompassed a vast territory spanning from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Once World War II was in full swing, the term “Middle East” started to be used much more frequently and acquired a greater coherence, especially in government circles of both the Allied and Axis forces. The media outlets in the United States and Britain also caught on to the term and used it more frequently in their coverage of the war. As Adelson points out, “The term met journalistic needs to cover North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean in ways that made sense to the public at home.”16 Once the war was over, “Middle East” had replaced “Near East” in popular usage.
Uses and Misuses of the Term: The Specialists vs. the Generalists17
As the term became more common, however, a discrepancy emerged. On the one hand, there were the specialists, especially in academia, who used the term “Middle East” in specific ways. During the Cold War, the United States replaced Britain as the most powerful actor in the region. As a result, the idea of “Middle East” increasingly came to dominate the American geopolitical discourse,18 creating the need for a new generation of experts. In the 1950s and 60s, while the American government was funding area studies programs in higher education institutions across the U.S. and U.K. as part of its efforts to combat communism in the “Third World,” several Middle Eastern Studies departments were also established. The graduates of these institutions, much like the Orientalists of the 19th century, knew the regional languages and produced research based on primary sources. They had a grasp of the historical, social, and political complexity of the region, which led them to take a more critical approach to how the term “Middle East” was used.19
On the opposite corner, facing the specialists, were the generalists, who wrote (or talked) about the Middle East in a rather nonchalant way, to say the least. Usually found among the journalists and politicians, these generalists simply ignored the different cultural, historical, and social underpinnings of the countries that together made up the Middle East and assumed the region to be a unified whole. This reductionist tendency gained strength in the 1970s, when oil-rich nations in the region emerged as influential players in world politics due to a huge increase in the oil prices. As a result, the Middle East started to be associated more and more simply with the word oil. Meanwhile, oil-rich countries of the Gulf also became very profitable markets for manufacturers and suppliers of arms, who developed a special interest in the region, especially from the 1980s onwards.20
Despite the proliferation of Middle East Studies programs around the world, the gap between the specialists and the generalists has continued to grow, with the reductionist approach of generalists seeming to have the upper hand. The al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centers in 2001 and the emergence of ISIS in 2014 sparked fresh interest in the region within the popular discourse, as a result of which the Middle East came to be labeled as a hotbed of radical Islamism. Writing about the 1970s, Adelson had argued that “Little of what specialists have learned about different parts of the Middle East has had much influence on the generalists, who view the region as a battleground over oil against Muslim militants.”21 Unfortunately, we can safely say that the situation hasn’t changed much today.
Conclusion
Specialists, however, continue to fight back. Since the 1960s, they have been questioning the use and scope of the term, arguing for the need to develop better alternatives to approach and understand the ”Middle East” in its full diversity and complexity. Many, for instance, advocate for discarding the framework imposed by European colonial powers altogether and adopting local ideas that reflect the way people in the region understand themselves. In part two, I will examine these critiques and the alternative frameworks that have emerged from them more closely.
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Until next time!
Hüseyin Yılmaz, “The Eastern Question and the Ottoman Empire: The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century" in Is There a Middle East: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, eds. Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 20.
Ibid., 27-28.
Ibid., 28.
Roger Adelson, “British and U.S Use and Misuse of the Term ‘Middle East’” in Is There a Middle East: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, eds. Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 38.
Yılmaz, “The Eastern Question,” 22.
Guillemette Crouzet, Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 10.
Alfred T. Mahan, “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” National Review 40 (September 1902), 39; Adelson, “British and U.S Use and Misuse,” 39.
Thomas Scheffler, “‘Fertile Crescent’ , ‘Orient’, ‘Middle East’: The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’historie 10:2, (2003), 253-254.
Yılmaz, “The Eastern Question,” 24.
Crouzet, Inventing the Middle East, 5.
Valentine Chirol, The Middle Eastern Question; or, Some Political Problems of Indian Defence (London: John Murray, 1903), 5; Crouzet, Inventing the Middle East, 5.
Yılmaz, “The Eastern Question,” 24.
Karen Culcasi, “Constructing and Naturalizing the Middle East,” Geographical Review 100:4 (October 2010), 585; Crouzet, Inventing the Middle East, 4-6.
Adelson, “British and U.S Use and Misuse,” 43.
Culcasi, “Constructing and Naturalizing,” 586; Adelson, “British and U.S Use and Misuse,” 41-43.
Adelson, “British and U.S Use and Misuse,” 47.
I’m borrowing this framework from Adelson.
Culcasi, “Constructing and Naturalizing,” 587.
Adelson, “British and U.S Use and Misuse,” 49.
Ibid., 49-51.
Ibid., 52.
Interesting read. In german, the term 'near est' survived and makes for Interesting translations. Beware AI!
This was a coruscating piece of research with surgical references. Bravo! I used this as essential reading for my students on the modern Middle East.