Download or read book Promised Lands written by Jonathan Parry and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The British Empire in the Middle East 1945 1951 written by William Roger Louis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With intellectual rigor and careful attention to recently released papers, Wm. Roger Louis's study asks: Why did Britain's colonial empire begin to collapse in 1945 and how did the post-war Labour government attempt to sustain a vision of the old Empire through imperialism in the Middle East?
Download or read book Britain and the Arab Middle East written by Robert H. Lieshout and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The profound effects of the British Empire's actions in the Arab World during the First World War can be seen echoing through the history of the 20th century. The uprising sparked by the Husayn-McMahon correspondence and led by 'Lawrence of Arabia'; the Sykes-Picot agreement which undermined that rebellion; and memoranda such as the Balfour Declaration all have shaped the Middle East into forms which would have been unrecognizable to the diplomats of the 19th century. Undertaken during the First 'World' War, these actions were not part of a coordinated British strategy, but in fact directed by several overlapping and competing departments, some imperfectly referred to as the 'Arab Bureau'. The British and the Middle East is unique in its comprehensive treatment of how and why the British generals and diplomats acted as they did. By taking as his starting point the voluminous, contradictory and revealing records of the policy-makers in the British government, Robert H. Lieshout shows convincingly that many concerned with foreign policy making were quite oblivious to the history and complexities of the Islamic World.Covering the full sweep of British involvement in Arabia, Lieshout makes a lasting contribution to our understanding of the period in which the British Empire changed the world, and shows how shallow and confused the understanding of those that shaped the future of the Middle East really was.
Download or read book Lords of the Desert written by James Barr and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A path-breaking history of how the United States superseded Great Britain as the preeminent power in the Middle East, with urgent lessons for the present day We usually assume that Arab nationalism brought about the end of the British Empire in the Middle East -- that Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab leaders led popular uprisings against colonial rule that forced the overstretched British from the region. In Lords of the Desert, historian James Barr draws on newly declassified archives to argue instead that the US was the driving force behind the British exit. Though the two nations were allies, they found themselves at odds over just about every question, from who owned Saudi Arabia's oil to who should control the Suez Canal. Encouraging and exploiting widespread opposition to the British, the US intrigued its way to power -- ultimately becoming as resented as the British had been. As Barr shows, it is impossible to understand the region today without first grappling with this little-known prehistory.
Download or read book Dislocating the Orient written by Daniel Foliard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era. Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.
Download or read book Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East 1917 1919 written by Matthew Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines British military, political and imperial strategy in the Middle East during and immediately after the First World War, in relation to General Allenby's command of the Egypt Expeditionary Force from June 1917 to November 1919.
Download or read book Learning from the History of British Interventions in the Middle East written by Louise Kettle and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wealth of previously unseen documents, sourced by Freedom of Information requests, together with interviews with government and intelligence agency officials, Louise Kettle questions whether the British government has learned anything from its military interventions in the Middle East, from the 1950s to the 2016 Iraq Inquiry report.
Download or read book Demise of the British Empire in the Middle East written by Michael Joseph Cohen and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with the gradual eclipse of British power in the Middle East, a process that began during World War Two and reached its dénouement with the British agreement to evacuate the Suez Base in 1954.
Download or read book British and French Colonialism in Africa Asia and the Middle East written by James R. Fichter and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the connections between the British Empire and French colonialism in war, peace and the various stages of competitive cooperation between, in which the two empires were often frères ennemis. It argues that in crucial ways the British and French colonial empires influenced each other. Chapters in the volume consider the two empires' connections in North, West and Central Africa, as well as their entanglement at sea in the Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf and South China Sea. Also analysed are their mutual engagement with Islam in both the Hajj and various religiously inflected colonial revolts, their mutually-informed systems of administration in the New Hebrides and generally, and the interconnected ways the two empires fought World War II and decolonization. By uniting historians of France and her colonies with historians of Britain and her colonies, this volume speaks to a broad international and imperial history audience.
Download or read book The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East 1914 22 written by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-14 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how the logistical demands of the British military campaigns in Palestine and Mesopotamia led to a more intrusive and authoritarian form of imperial control in 1917-18. This early example of Western military intervention in the Middle East provoked a localized backlash in 1919-20 whose effects continue to be felt today.
Download or read book British Imperialism in Qajar Iran written by H. Lyman Stebbins and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-18 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1888, there were just four British consulates in the country; by 1921 there were twenty-three. H. Lyman Stebbins investigates the development and consequences of British imperialism in Iran in a time of international rivalry, revolution and world war. While previous narratives of Anglo-Iranian relations have focused on the highest diplomatic circles in Tehran, London, Calcutta and St. Petersburg, this book argues that British consuls and political agents made the vast southern borderlands of Iran the real centre of British power and influence during this period. Based on British consular archives from Bushihr, Shiraz, Sistan and Muhammarah, this book reveals that Britain, India and Iran were linked together by discourses of colonial knowledge and patterns of political, military and economic control. It also contextualizes the emergence of Iranian nationalism as well as the failure and collapse of the Qajar state during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the First World War.
Download or read book Britain s Pacification of Palestine written by Matthew Hughes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British Army's devastating effectiveness against colonial rebellion is exposed in this military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine.
Download or read book A Line in the Sand The Anglo French Struggle for the Middle East 1914 1948 written by James Barr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses recently declassified French and British government documents to describe how the two countries secretly divided the Middle East during World War I and the effect these mandates had on local Arabs and Jews.
Download or read book Egypt s Occupation written by Aaron G. Jakes and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. From this perspective, the British occupation of 1882 merely sealed the country's fate as a vast plantation for European textile mills. All but obscured in such accounts, however, is Egypt's emergence as a colonial laboratory for financial investment and experimentation. Egypt's Occupation tells for the first time the story of that financial expansion and the devastating crises that followed. Aaron Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. He traces the complex ramifications and the contested legacy of colonial economism, the animating theory of British imperial rule that held Egyptians to be capable of only a recognition of their own bare economic interests. Even as British officials claimed that "economic development" and the multiplication of new financial institutions would be crucial to the political legitimacy of the occupation, Egypt's early nationalists elaborated their own critical accounts of boom and bust. As Jakes shows, these Egyptian thinkers offered a set of sophisticated and troubling meditations on the deeper contradictions of capitalism and the very meaning of freedom in a capitalist world.
Download or read book The First World War in the Middle East written by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen and published by Hurst & Company Limited. This book was released on 2014 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First World War in the Middle East is an accessibly written military and social history of the clash of world empires in the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus. Coates Ulrichsen demonstrates how wartime exigencies shaped the parameters of the modern Middle East, and describes and assesses the major campaigns against the Ottoman Empire and Germany involving British and imperial troops from the French and Russian Empires, as well as their Arab and Armenian allies. Also documented are the enormous logistical demands placed on host societies by the Great Powers' conduct of industrialised warfare in hostile terrain. The resulting deepening of imperial penetration, and the extension of state controls across a heterogeneous sprawl of territories, generated a powerful backlash both during and immediately after the war, which played a pivotal role in shaping national identities as the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. This is a multidimensional account of the many seemingly discrete yet interlinked campaigns that resulted in one to one and a half million casualties. It details not just their military outcome but relates them to intelligence-gathering, industrial organisation, authoritarianism and the political economy of empires at war.
Download or read book Lords of the Desert written by James Barr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Beautifully written and deeply researched' The Observer Upon victory in 1945, Britain still dominated the Middle East. But her motives for wanting to dominate this crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa were changing. Where ‘imperial security’ – control of the route to India – had once been paramount, now oil was an increasingly important factor. So, too, was prestige. Ironically, the very end of empire made control of the Middle East precious in itself: on it hung Britain’s claim to be a great power. Unable to withstand Arab and Jewish nationalism, within a generation the British were gone. But that is not the full story. What ultimately sped Britain on her way was the uncompromising attitude of the United States, which was determined to displace the British in the Middle East. Using newly declassified records and long-forgotten memoirs, including the diaries of a key British spy, James Barr tears up the conventional interpretation of this era in the Middle East, vividly portraying the tensions between London and Washington, and shedding an uncompromising light on the murkier activities of a generation of American and British diehards in the region, from the battle of El Alamein in 1942 to Britain’s abandonment of Aden in 1967. Reminding us that the Middle East has always served as the arena for great power conflict, this is the tale of an internecine struggle in which Britain would discover that her most formidable rival was the ally she had assumed would be her closest friend. 'Bustles impressively with detail and anecdote' Sunday Times ‘Consistently fascinating’ The Spectator 'Barr draws on a rich and varied trove of sources to knit a sequence of dramatic episodes into an elegant whole. Great events march through these pages' Wall Street Journal
Download or read book Spies in Arabia written by Priya Satia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-02 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the dawn of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, a region of crucial geopolitical importance spanning present-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They were drawn by the twin objectives of securing the land route to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in a mysterious and ancient land. But these competing desires created a dilemma: how were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and by the promise of fame and escape from Britain? In this groundbreaking book, Priya Satia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this problem and the myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences of their methodological choices during and after the Great War. She tells the story of how an imperial state in thrall to the cultural notions of equivocal agents and beset by an equally captivated and increasingly assertive mass democracy invented a wholly new style of "covert empire" centered on the world's first brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources--from the fictional to the recently declassified--this book explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire. As it vividly demonstrates how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and anti-imperial world, what emerges is a new interpretation of the military, cultural, and political legacies of the Great War and of the British Empire in the twentieth century. Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a stark tale of poetic ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption--and the prehistory of our present discontents.
