Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Author:Tim Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781783961429
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

Although not a recognised state, there is an identifiable ‘Kurdistan’ region. Crossing borders as it does, this is an area of potential trouble should the Kurdish regions attempt to establish an independent country.

The Hashemite Kingdom, as Jordan is also known, is another place that was carved out of the desert by the British, who in 1918 had one large piece of territory to administer and several problems to solve.

Various Arabian tribes had helped the British against the Ottomans during the First World War, but there were two in particular which London promised to reward at the war’s end. Unfortunately both were promised the same thing – control of the Arabian Peninsula. Given that the Saud and Hashemite tribes frequently fought each other, this was a little awkward. So London dusted down the maps, drew some lines and said the head of the Saud family could rule over one region, and the head of the Hashemites could rule the other, although each would ‘need’ a British diplomat to keep an eye on things. The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia – the rough equivalent would be calling the UK ‘Windsorland’.

The British, sticklers for administration, named the other area ‘Transjordan’, which was shorthand for ‘the other side of the Jordan River’. A dusty little town called Amman became the capital of Transjordan, and when the British went home in 1948 the country’s name changed to Jordan. But the Hashemites were not from the Amman area: they were originally part of the powerful Qureshi tribe from the Mecca region, and the original inhabitants were mostly Bedouin. The majority of the population is now Palestinian: when the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967 many Palestinians fled to Jordan, which was the only Arab state to grant them citizenship. We now have a situation where the majority of Jordan’s 6.7 million citizens are Palestinian, many of whom do not regard themselves as loyal subjects of the current Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah. Added to this problem are the one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees the country has also taken in who are putting a huge strain on its extremely limited resources.

Such changes to a country’s demographics can cause serious problems, and nowhere more so than in Lebanon.

Until the twentieth century, the Arabs in the region saw the area between the Lebanese mountains and the sea as simply a province of the region of Syria. The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.

The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the

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