In everyday usage, the “Middle East” is generally taken to mean the region that runs more or less from Egypt to Syria to Iraq and the Gulf. It has, especially in recent decades, come to overlay the issues of oil, the Arab-Israeli conflict and terrorism (Islamic or political). Conventional wisdom has it that the word came into use with the fall of the Ottoman Empire as, among other things, a replacement for the less precise and less useful “Near East”. In other words, the general perception is that the expression is either self-evident or that it emerged thanks to a sort of natural evolution in terminology.
In Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism, however, Guillemette Crouzet traces the origins of the concept, if not the term itself, to a century earlier, arising from the geopolitics of Britain’s desire to safeguard India from such other powers as France, Germany, Russia, as well as local threats, such as “pirates” operating in the Gulf region. Integral to her formulation is her placing British (ie colonial) India as a player with its own interests and exigencies in what came to define this as a region.
“The Middle East”, as Crouzet has it, is not a mere term of art or a geographical convenience; rather, it was, and remains, part of a conceptual structure—the terminological manifestation of a sub-imperial project—defining and supporting British interests and politics in the region between India and the Mediterranean. Among the specific strategies and policies, Crouzet lists acts of aggression to rid the region of piracy, treaties and alliances with local powers, patrolling projects, cartography surveys, and an influence over the political economy of the region. Some of these strategies, it is fair to say, are little known except perhaps to those that have made an explicit study of the regional history; the role played by India is as interesting as it is unexpected.
The British government in India, for example, ordered attacks on the Ras Al-Khaimah region, on the Gulf coast in what is now the UAE,while claiming to curb piracy in the region. However, the real motive behind the aggression was a perceived threat to the British Indian Empire from other European powers. The possibility that Tipu Sultan of Mysore might join hands with Napoleon Buonaparte scared the British out of their wits.
Not only did they attack Ras Al-Khaimah but a few years later also made themselves in charge of peace-keeping there through patrols and treaties by setting up a “watch and cruise system” patrolling the region in the name of combating piracy. In conjunction with arrangements for a British Resident in such other places as Baghdad, the warring Shaykhs of Ras Al-Khaimah and Abu Dhabi were induced to sign a truce that banned maritime warfare in the region between May to October, the pearling season.
Finally, , they exercised control—directly or indirectly—over the market for pearls, dates and even the slave trade for decades—with Bombay established as the center for re-export of pearls.
Military, political and economic control was consolidated through cartography and geographical survey projects to exert soft power. Three survey programs between 1820 and 1914 produced fifteen maps and charts with the aim of reviving Mesopotamian history and correcting the errors in the older maps. Analyzing the survey campaigns, Crouzet suggests that these were “instruments of British efforts to classify the world and thereby control it.” In the process, the surveyors christened a lot of places after the British: “Clarence Strait” near Iran and “Elphinstone Inlet” near Oman. The Persian Gulf thus was beginning to become the British Gulf.
The British didn’t always have a clear run, however. The US was also a major player in the date market and the British in fact pulled out of the pearl market as cheaper, cultured pearls shrank the worldwide market for authentic pearls. The slave trade was problematical, of course, nor could they control the arms trade that supplied ammunition to the Northwest Frontier region of their British Empire.
Inventing the Middle East puts what came to be known as the Middle East in a wider historical context and emphasises the role of India in defining the region, a role which India is trying to reprise today.
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