Travel Journalism and Travel Media by Ben Cocking

Author:Ben Cocking
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137599087
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Travellers’ Tales

There is a long history of British travel to the Middle East—it is ‘Westerners’ oldest destination of travel, seasonal migration, and colonisation’ (Melman, 2002, p. 105). Part of this history, specifically the geo-politics of British colonialism and the expansion of its empire is also attributed with helping to produce the term itself. Captain Alfred Mahan of the US Navy is widely credited with having first used the term as a reference to British imperialist involvement in the area in an article titled ‘The Persian Gulf and International Relations’ published in the National Review in 1902 (ibid, see also; Davison, 1960; Koppes, 1976; Adelson, 1995, p. 1 Held, 2005, p. 8). However, as Culcasi notes, 2 years prior to this the term featured in the title of an article—‘The Problem of the Middle East’ written by British General Thomas Edward Gordon and published in the journal The Nineteenth Century (1900) (2010, p. 585). Though the precise origins of the phrase are unclear and disputed, what is certain is that the term was popularized further by a British journalist, Valentine Chirol, chief of the foreign department at The Times (Koppes, 1976, p. 96). Travelling through Persia (Iran) in 1902-1903 en-route to India, Chirol filed a series of 20 articles for The Times under the heading ‘The Middle East Question’. This was followed some months later by a book titled The Middle East Question Or Some Political Problems of Indian Defence (1903).

Foreshadowing the emergence of the term the ‘Middle East’, the region had, like many other regions where the British were engaged in long established colonial and imperial activities, become a locus for travel and exploration. Indeed, the colonial presence of other European countries, such as France, Italy and Germany, throughout the Middle East no doubt contributed to the region becoming ‘a favourite place for Europeans to travel in and write about’ (Said, 1991, p. 157; see also Aune, 2005; Bryce, Maclaren & O’Gorman, 2013). For Said (and many other postcolonial writers and critics, see, e.g., Kabbani, 1986 and Behdad, 1994) European presence in the Middle East was always characterized by a ‘consciousness set apart from, and unequal with, its surrounding’ (Said, 1991, p. 157). The inequality of this cross cultural interaction provides the basis on which Said conceives of ‘orientalism’ as a mode of cultural discourse—in effect a body of knowledge foundational in establishing and perpetuating a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (p. 3). Further Said identifies orientalist discourse as being produced by and located in ‘not only scholarly works but also works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philosophical studies’ (p. 23).

Of particular interest and significance to British (and indeed other European) travellers to the region was the Arabian Peninsula. Its harsh desert environs—known as the Rub’ al Khali or Empty Quarter—were of lacking in ‘direct Western military and strategic interests…[which] left the peninsula peripheral from both touristic and imperial viewpoints’ (Melman, 2002, p. 112). British interest in the regions

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