Middle East, Africa, and island states [individual assignment]
NATIONALISM AND MODERNIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA and ISLAND STATES
MIDDLE EAST
The Ottoman Empire
The Ottomans entered World War I and shared in the Central Powers’ defeat in 1918. Disgraced by military failure and having lost its imperial possessions to revolt or to the Paris Peace Conference, the Ottoman Empire was threatened after the war with the seizure of even more territory by Greece.
Mustafa Kemal, a heroic WW I commander, repelled the Greeks and formed a new government. In 1923, the last Ottoman sultan vacated the throne, and Kemal proclaimed the Turkish Republic – appointing himself president and taking the name Ataturk, or “father of all Turks.” From 1923 to his death in 1938, Ataturk governed as a secularizing modernizer, promoting industrialization, Western dress, Western education, and the use of the Roman alphabet for written Turkish, Church and state were separated. A European law code replaced Islamic Sharia. Women, no longer required to wear the veil, received the right to vote in 1934 and were encouraged to get education and jobs. Although he wrote a constitution, Ataturk tolerated little opposition and began a long tradition of authoritarian rule in Turkey.
Persia (Iran)
Persia became the modern state of Iran in the 1920s. Rule in theory by the Qajar dynasty since 1794, Persia had in fact been divided into British and Russian spheres of influence during the 1800s. Nationalist elites, allied with the Islamic clergy, had been engaged in a revolution against the dynastic Shahs since 1906. Drawn by Persia’s oil reserves, Britain increased its presence there after WW I. It caused a nationalist backlash.
In 1921, an officer Reza Khan mutinied against the Qajar and expelled the British by 1925. The country was renamed Iran. Taking the name Reza Shah Pahlavi, he established a new royal dynasty and became an authoritarian Westernizer like Ataturk, his neighbour. He was anti-Communist and secular. The new shah industrialized Iran, boosted education, and did away with the veil for women. After he chose to back Nazi Germany in the Second World War, Pahlavi was replaced in 1941 by his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
The Arab states
Egypt and North Africa remained in British, French, and Italian hands, although nationalist sentiment was growing. The Ottoman retained the Arabian Peninsula, but their other Arab lands were now placed into the mandate system and administered by France and Britain under the League of Nations’ supervision. This arrangement angered the Arabs, who had believed during the WWI that the Allies would grant them complete freedom as a reward for their anti-Ottoman revolt.
They were further enraged by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This pledged British support for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, which was 90 percent Arab before sustainable Jewish immigration – faster and larger than the British had intended – began in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government supported a homeland for Jews in Palestine, in line with the European Zionist movement for Jewish nationalism. However, Arab Palestinians saw both British rule and Jewish settlements as forms of western and non-Islamic imperial control, and the British tried to control the violence between communities as the Jewish minority slowly grew in numbers and wealth.
The one Arab state to achieve full independence was Saudi Arabia, formed in 1932 by the prince Ibn Saud, who spent the 1920s driving the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula and uniting its many tribes. An authoritarian monarchy attracted to Wahhabism, a strictly fundamentalist form of Islam, the Saudi state modernized little – except to industrialize its huge oil reserves, whose discovery in 1938 made it wealthy and strategically vital.
AFRICA
Most Africa remained under European colonial control. Only South Africa, which formed a union of British and Boer provinces in 1910 and gained dominion status within the British Empire in 1931. Liberia, founded in the 1800s by the Americans and populated with freed slaves from the United States, remained independent. Ethiopia remained independent till the mid-1930s when she was conquered by Fascist Italy. National liberationist impulses started to awaken in Africa.
ISLAND STATES
Islands have been important for expanding European empires since the Age of Exploration, either as plantation colonies or for their strategic position on the sea lanes. In the twentieth century a large number of island colonies achieved independence as national movements confronted weakened or restructured empires. The first was Cuba, which rebelled from Spain in 1898, only to come under effective political domination by the United States.
Ireland, long dominated by nearby Great Britain, waged a guerrilla war after World War I to achieve home rule as the Irish Free State, a Dominion like Canada and Australia. Complete independence as the Irish Republic followed soon after in 1937. Britain’s rule in Protestant Northern Ireland remained a source of conflict and terrorist violence for decades to come.
Questions for experts
1. What were the most significant events in the region? Why have you chosen them?
2. What factors influenced on the development of the given regions and countries?
3. What distinguishes Europe from other regions and countries considered in this topic? (Before answering read about other region in the topic 12).