3 - The modern Middle East: state formation and world war

Summary

Perhaps no process has affected, through manifold and intricate mediate causes, the life of Iraqis more enduringly than the gradual tying up of their country in the course of the nineteenth and present centuries to a world market anchored on big industry and their involvement in the web forces or the consequences of forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. To this process is related, in one way or another, a series of large facts: among others, the advance in Iraq of England's power and capital, the turning to Europe's advantage of the system of Capitulations, the appearance of steam-propelled transports, the incipient imitation of modern techniques, the English conquest, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the severance of Iraq's northern Arab provinces from their natural trading regions in Syria, the setting up of a dependent monarchy with a new standing army and a new administrative machine, the exploitation of Iraq's oil resources, and the diffusion of elements of European culture.

The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: a Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba'thists, and Free Officers

The Middle East and the formation of Europe

For all its upheavals, the Middle East is a region of stable state entities. Its boundaries and constituent states have been relatively constant in modern times, far more so than, for example, twentieth-century Europe or East Asia.