Greater middle east countries6/19/2023 ![]() What is an example of a local effort to remake the region that failed but still resonates? Some efforts, like in Saudi Arabia, were successful. The book centers the agency of local groups in shaping the modern Middle East. In fact, they succeeded in large respects against the wishes of the colonial powers. They remain regional powers to the present day, and the British and French did not create them by any stretch of the imagination. The two victorious cases that fall outside the popular narrative are the Republic of Turkey and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This extended conflict produces a Middle East with winners and losers among the colonial powers and the local communities. He myth that all conflict in the region originates with these boundary lines endures, and I think that comes at a cost.Īfter the war in Europe ended, warfare in the former Ottoman Empire continued over these contending visions put forward by the colonial powers and local communities into the early 1930s, which is the period I refer to as “The Long Great War” in the book’s title. ![]() World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire made these visions thinkable: The colonial powers were thinking about how to maximize their power and influence in the region, and the communities in the region began mobilizing to fill the void left by the empire’s collapse. Jonathan Wyrtzen: The modern Middle East developed as the result of interaction and conflict among multiple visions of the future pursued by both the colonial powers and locally on the ground. ![]() You argue that the notion that much of what happens in the modern Middle East is solely the result of colonial powers imposing borders on the region is a myth. Wyrtzen, an associate professor of sociology and history in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recently spoke to Yale News about his book and how events of a century ago continue to shape the Middle East. In his latest book, “ Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East” (Columbia University Press), Yale sociologist and historian Jonathan Wyrtzen offers a new and nuanced version of events that centers the actions of people in the region who resisted the colonial powers and attempted to establish a political order of their own. As the standard narrative goes, the tensions and conflicts that have afflicted the Middle East over the past century originate with the arbitrary redrawing of the region’s map by the British and French after the Ottoman Empire collapsed during World War I. ![]()
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