The West and Conflicting Promises in the Middle East - Christopher Rose

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:23:09
James Taub
All right. Well, welcome back, everyone, to the National WWI Museum and Memorial. My name is James Taub. I'm the public program specialist and it is my pleasure to introduce you again to a speaker we've had repeatedly. Again, thank you so much for all of our attendees, as well as all of our partners and sponsors who have helped us with this program,

00:00:23:09 - 00:00:44:04
James Taub
World War I in the Middle East, our teacher seminar that's been here for the past week and a half. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, who is the proud sponsor, as well as our partners at the University of Arizona and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.

00:00:44:06 - 00:01:05:18
James Taub
Now, without further ado, I'm going to reintroduce the speaker we've had already, and we are so pleased to welcome again back in our stage during the seminar, Dr. Christopher Rose. Dr. Christopher Rose, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, is an assistant professor of history at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

00:01:05:20 - 00:01:29:03
James Taub
He has also taught courses in Global studies history and Middle Eastern studies at Saint Edwards University and the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the social history of health and disease in early 20th century Egypt. His most recent article in the Journal of World History discusses the implications of the Spanish flu outbreak for Egyptian history. An active public historian,

00:01:29:07 - 00:01:42:01
James Taub
he was a founding co-host of the podcast 15 Minute History and is currently a co-host of new books in Middle Eastern Studies. Without further ado, I'd like to welcome back to the stage Dr. Christopher S. Rose.

00:01:42:04 - 00:02:03:26
Dr. Christopher Rose
I know they're doing it for the videotape. It seems kind of redundant because I know everybody, or me at least all of you, and I know we still have some discussions we have to continue from yesterday. At least one person said, I still have questions from your talk yesterday. So I once again, I'll be here all day because I'm curious to see what the next two speakers have to say.

00:02:03:28 - 00:02:32:04
Dr. Christopher Rose
So since we were talking, since you all were speaking this morning about how complicated things are becoming, let me complicate it a little more with my talk this morning, which is about the conflicting promises that Western powers made regarding, but usually not in consultation with the powers in the Middle East, before, during and and a little bit after the First World War.

00:02:32:04 - 00:03:00:10
Dr. Christopher Rose
But since the question of how to approach these topics came up, let me assure you that one of mine is that, especially when I'm teaching the modern Middle East History seminar, one of the things I will tell students on the first day is that just keep in mind that nothing was inevitable until it actually happened. So it's easy to look at some of the things I'm about to tell you and say, see, that's it, that's it, that's it,

00:03:00:10 - 00:03:25:20
Dr. Christopher Rose
Hertzel Or, or or Lawrence or McMahan or Sykes or Picot. They're the ones who are responsible for the condition that the Middle East is in today. And my argument is they may have laid the groundwork, but there have been a lot of conscious decisions made over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries since that have made the situation what it is today.

00:03:25:23 - 00:03:50:03
Dr. Christopher Rose
And in fact, that's usually a final exam question; Is it fair to blame the situation of the Middle East today on, solely on European imperialism? And usually my question well, I won't ruin it, especially because if any of my students decide to pull this up on YouTube, I don't want to give the answer away. So so there there are three sections, three conflicting ideals that we want to talk about.

00:03:50:03 - 00:04:19:11
Dr. Christopher Rose
And the first thing I want to just sort of wrap up and I know that Dr. Yanikdag covered some of this in his talk yesterday, and you've probably gotten your crash course on late Ottoman history and you've been reading Provence's book on the last Ottoman generation. But one of the comments I heard this morning about where the division between Ottoman and Turk is, that is a wonderfully prescient question for this period in history, because, quite frankly, it was a question that had not yet been answered.

00:04:19:13 - 00:04:42:04
Dr. Christopher Rose
In fact, the question of what an Arab was was also a question that was still up in the air. This was a period, as we saw in the discussion from group six, I believe it was yesterday, discussing to the Diary of Sam Turgeman that his identity changes over the course of his own diary that was kept during World War One.

00:04:42:05 - 00:05:09:06
Dr. Christopher Rose
He first is sort of an Ottoman subject and then he becomes more Arab and then he becomes more specifically Palestinian. And this is a process that was going on throughout the eastern Mediterranean as the Ottoman Empire broke down. The Ottoman Empire, of course, was one of the two big multi-national empires that participated in World War tTwo. World War One.

00:05:09:06 - 00:05:40:09
Dr. Christopher Rose
I keep saying World War Two. World War One as one of the central powers, the other being the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both of which were dissolved at the end of the war, both of which, in fact went through sort of the same process of splintering into littler states based on ethnic, which was usually defined linguistically, identity. So Austria-Hungary breaks down into Austria-Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia.

00:05:40:12 - 00:06:13:02
Dr. Christopher Rose
I actually think it was Czechoslovakia at the time. The states of what would then become Yugoslavia and then split up again based on those sorts of identities, while the Ottoman Empire experienced the same thing over the course of the 19th century, particularly as its Balkan provinces began to break off. One of the issues with that disillusion of territory over the course of the 19th century, as the Ottomans are concerned, was that a good chunk of the population of the Ottoman Empire was Orthodox Christian.

00:06:13:02 - 00:06:44:06
Dr. Christopher Rose
In fact, prior to the loss of the Balkan territories, the territories in Europe, the Ottoman population was almost split 50/50. It was very close because the Balkans were much more densely populated than Anatolia and the Syria and Iraq, the Ottoman era Arab territories. So the, so the population of the empire, the Ottoman Empire is, let me just start that can that that horrible sentence all over again.

00:06:44:08 - 00:07:12:18
Dr. Christopher Rose
So the population was actually much more evenly split because the Ottoman Empire is frequently described as this Islamic empire, because its head was the sultan and bore the title of Caliph of Islam. However, until the those territories in Europe that were predominantly Christian began breaking off, and we're really talking somewhere usually under 6040 Muslim Christians split on the population.

00:07:12:18 - 00:07:46:06
Dr. Christopher Rose
So it was not an overwhelmingly Muslim empire ruling over a Christian minority. It was almost a plurality. Now, within those populations of Christians, there were lots of divisions. The reason why it was important that the population of the Empire was largely Orthodox Christian during this period is that over the course of the 19th century, European powers had begun to assert what they would have called caretaking or responsibility for Christian citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

00:07:46:06 - 00:08:14:28
Dr. Christopher Rose
The Ottomans had different names for it, usually unfair treatment. This was all part of what became known as the Capitulations, wherein certain citizens of the empire could receive extraterritorial privileges. For example, in Mount Lebanon, a Catholic could could seek the assistance of a French consular official if they were charged with a crime, which was a privilege that was not available to a Muslim or an Orthodox Christian.

00:08:15:01 - 00:09:06:03
Dr. Christopher Rose
So over the course of the 19th century, the be the power that begins to express an interest in protecting the Empire's Orthodox citizens was Russia. Russia, of course, was a threat to the Ottomans because in the Crimean War they ate away at the northern side of the Black Sea. All that area that is now Ukrainian was actually under Ottoman territory. Where I say Ukrainian, Russia now also claims it. Russia was making inroads down into the Caucasus, including its first repeated and lengthy engagement in Chechnya and was very interested in, for example, bringing the Greek speaking Orthodox Christians and the Bulgarians and the Romanians and those of the Ottoman lands under the heading of the metropolitan of

00:09:06:03 - 00:09:48:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
Moscow. Alarmed by this grab for territory comes what is known as the eastern question. So in 1826, Greece, which at that time is a very small portion of the current republic, the current Hellenic Republic, gets its independence shortly thereafter, so does Serbia, and Russia plants flags of interest in both places. This alarms Britain and France and Britain and France have between them what I would refer to as a gentlemen's agreement, meaning it's not written down, but it is understood between Whitehall and the Quai d'Orsay in Paris.

00:09:48:25 - 00:10:38:09
Dr. Christopher Rose
Basically the two governments, that they're basic foreign policy toward the Ottoman Balkans is to maintain the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire and to support the Ottoman Empire in maintaining its territorial integrity as a bulwark against Russian expansion. Because everybody knows that the Russians in the 19th century had the same goal that they do right now in 2022, which is that they would like to have access to the ocean that does not pass through the Bosphorus, or better that the Bosphorus would be under Russian control because Russia does not have a port that does not freeze up in the winter, except for Vladivostok, which is over on the Pacific Ocean by Japan

00:10:38:09 - 00:11:19:10
Dr. Christopher Rose
and it's a heck of a long way from anywhere. Okay, so Russian military ambition is being held in check by the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. And in order to prevent Russian expansion and in order to prevent direct aggression between England, France and Russia, the English and French have to support the Ottomans. Whether that means providing them with loans, eventually taking over their debt administration, as they did in Egypt, as they did in Tunisia, as they did in Morocco or what have you.

00:11:19:17 - 00:11:49:23
Dr. Christopher Rose
But this is the so-called eastern question that plagues Europe in the 18th century. So at the same time, the Ottoman Empire is itself trying to figure out how to deal with the hazards of a modern system, because the 19th century, as you know, if you teach history, which I believe most of you do, this is the era of nationalism.

00:11:49:26 - 00:12:33:24
Dr. Christopher Rose
What is nationalism? Nationalism is, of course, this idea that the people who inhabit a certain set of boundaries share certain characteristics. And one of the reasons why the Ottomans are slow to be able to adapt to nationalism or to come up with the philosophy of nationalism that matches Ottoman identity, and the Austro-Hungarians are having the same problem, is that they are an empire made up of multiple nationalities, which is going against the trend in Europe.

00:12:33:26 - 00:12:59:17
Dr. Christopher Rose
In fact, the Ottoman ideal in many ways is the counterpart to nationalism, because one of the things and again, here's something you can talk about with students, I think very easily, is that one of the ways that nationalism very frequently, is the way that national identities are frequently defined, is that it sometimes it's very, it's much easier to define who you are not than to define who you are.

00:12:59:20 - 00:13:42:12
Dr. Christopher Rose
So, for example, as Turkish nationalism begins to become an idea in the background of some Ottoman thinkers, it's really forming in reaction to the fact that everyone else seems to want their own nation state. The Serbs are breaking off, the Greeks are breaking off, the Albanians are breaking off, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Kurds. Well, who's left?

00:13:42:14 - 00:14:16:16
Dr. Christopher Rose
And so this is where the idea of a Turkish identity comes from. Now, did the Ottomans consider themselves Turks? Maybe? Kind of, but not really. And one of the reasons for that is that at the beginning of the 19th century, Turk and Arab both had a negative connotation. In both language, Arabs to somebody who was a city dweller in Cairo, an Arab was a homeless nomad who lived in the desert.

00:14:16:19 - 00:14:48:11
Dr. Christopher Rose
I am a Cairian, I'm an Alexandrian, I'm Jerusalem, I'm from Jerusalem, I'm from Jaffa, I'm from Beirut, I'm from Damascus. They would identify most strongly with the city they were from possibly the region, But as an Arab? No, nobody. And it was the same thing with the Turks. The Turks were the people who lived in yurts on the Central Asian steppe.

00:14:48:13 - 00:15:43:19
Dr. Christopher Rose
We are Ottomans. We built this empire. We consolidated all of these identities. We consolidated all of this, these these cultural and and social elements, and we created this society that is larger than the sum of its parts. So, yes, our language may be Turkish in origin, but to call themselves a Turk was weird. So if you flash forward to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, one of the phrases that gets repeated a lot in Turkey that you'll see from Mustafa Kemal who later gets the title Ataturk, is I'm so proud to call myself a Turk.

00:15:43:21 - 00:16:17:21
Dr. Christopher Rose
This is why. He's literally reclaiming the word Turk and repurposing it. It's not just I'm proud of my nationality, but no, I am proud to call myself this thing, which under the Ottomans we never would have dared to do. So the Ottomans create a parliament. As you'll see, it was a rip roaring success. It lasted a whole two years.

00:16:17:24 - 00:16:42:05
Dr. Christopher Rose
And one of the issues that they had been having since the period of the Tanzimat Reforms in the early 19th century, there will not, this will not be on the exam, was the question of when and how minority populations should be represented in the parliament. One of the things that had been done in the early, under the Tanzimat Reforms, was the Gülhane decree, which I believe was 1837,

00:16:42:05 - 00:17:19:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
but I could be wrong on that, which was the decree that made all subjects of the Empire equal in status, regardless of religion. Now, one of the reasons why this was horribly controversial is that the law of the Ottoman Empire was, nominally at this point, Islamic law, and under Islamic law, non-Christian subjects are not equal. Thank you. Non-Muslim subjects are not equal.

00:17:19:22 - 00:17:56:02
Dr. Christopher Rose
That's what I said right. Non-Muslim. Non-Muslim subjects are not equal to Muslims under Islamic law. And part of this, now and I just have to take a moment here, this is frequently described as a situation called second, as something called second class citizenship, which is the status of Zimmi in Turkish, with a Z, and Arabic, Dhimmi with the D, Dhimmi, which is actually a status by treaty under which a non-Muslim population agrees to the suzerainty of a muslim leader over them.

00:17:56:04 - 00:18:19:23
Dr. Christopher Rose
It usually involves, as most such pre-modern agreements did, the acknowledgment of a, of a subservient status and giving up some sort of right. Now frequently it was rights that they didn't want anyway, such as you will not dress like the invaders, well we don't dress like you anyway, so who cares? In some cases they were much more extreme.

00:18:19:23 - 00:18:43:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
It is very hard to generalize what Dhimmi meant over the course of 1500 years because in many cases it not only differed from empire to empire, it literally would change sometimes based on the will of the ruler. Okay, so that's a much more complicated conversation than we have time for today, because I'm talking specifically about World War One, which we haven't gotten to yet.

00:18:43:10 - 00:19:18:02
Dr. Christopher Rose
But just be aware that when the Ottomans made everybody equal, it caused controversy among the hard liners who were like, especially among the clerics, who were particularly alarmed because, and remember, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire is also the Caliph of Islam. So the Caliph of Islam is doing something that is specifically prose scripted in Islamic legal code by making non-Muslim minorities equal citizens of the empire.

00:19:18:04 - 00:19:38:29
Dr. Christopher Rose
One of the reasons, by the way, why they did that was because they wanted to be able to conscript them, to bring them into forced, into forced labor. They needed the economic benefit of having these people be equal and to tax everybody at the same rate and do all of these other things. So I would love to say it was because the Sultan was magnanimous and looking forward to human rights,

00:19:38:29 - 00:19:58:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
but the Ottoman Empire was in an economic crunch and its military had fallen behind the rest of Europe and they needed soldiers fast, and there was a lot of people out there in their empire who were actually exempt from military service by event of being Zimmies, and so this was an easy way to fix that. So we get to the Parliament and of course they meet

00:19:58:25 - 00:20:38:18
Dr. Christopher Rose
and the question of all of these rights and responsibilities and what the empire should look like are raised. And within two years, the whole the whole system is shut down. This is the period under Sultan Abdul-Hamid the second. Very little happens until 1908 when the young Turks, the original young Turks, not the ones, because ever since then, when a group of young idealists take over anything or exhibit their control, it's called the Young Turks Rebellion, and it's based on this one, seize control of the Empire.

00:20:38:20 - 00:21:20:06
Dr. Christopher Rose
Now, this behind me, interestingly enough, is a Greek lithograph from 1908 from the Greek Ottoman community celebrating the Young Turks revolts, because one of the things that these men wanted to do was to restore the constitution that had been written, to restore the status of the minorities. And there was great hope among many of these minority populations that in so doing this would sort of fix some of the corruption.

00:21:20:06 - 00:22:03:23
Dr. Christopher Rose
Abdul-Hamid had a reputation as being kind of a despot. He was not interested in rule by committee, he was not interested in parliaments. He wasn't even particularly interested much in the Constitution. And it was hoped that this would sort of bring the empire into the modern era. And the young Turks actually kind of meant it and probably would have kept it going on had, well, as you could see, they tried it again and as you'll see, it's just it, the parliamentary process kept devolving into chaos.

00:22:03:26 - 00:22:35:23
Dr. Christopher Rose
And then come the Balkan wars, which changed everything. And these have probably been discussed, so at some length, so I will simply say this about the Balkan wars. This is when the Ottomans lose almost all of their European territories, save for the little corner of Thrace that they still possess. There are two wars, one with the Ottomans and then a second one that actually, in which Bulgaria expands at the cost of others.

00:22:35:25 - 00:23:05:26
Dr. Christopher Rose
It is a shock to the Ottoman psyche. As Dr. Yanikdag explained last night, this causes a huge refugee crisis. One of the things that I just want to put out there is that at this time, and I think this might explain one of the things that he said last night, Turk sorry, Muslim and Christian were too far, sorry.

00:23:05:29 - 00:23:31:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
Let me let me let me rephrase this. Turks were expelled or felt in danger and had to leave the territory, but you have to understand that this was defined, who was a Turk and who was a Christian. Turk and Muslim were used interchangeably. Christian, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. were used interchangeably. These things were defined based on your religion.

00:23:31:22 - 00:24:04:28
Dr. Christopher Rose
So if you're a muslim living in these territories, you are called a Turk and you were frequently forced to flee. You are either expelled or you are forced out. This would actually be codified at part of the resolution of the Greco Turkish War, the Turkish War of Independence in 1923, where Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange populations as part of the territorial dispute that they had, that they'd had, in which everybody who was in mainland Turkey, who was Christian, was labeled a Greek and sent home to Greece

00:24:04:28 - 00:24:26:24
Dr. Christopher Rose
and the same thing happened on the Greek end with anybody who was Muslim. This was regardless of whether you had family connections, whether you were in fact a Greek who had family connections from Greece going back thousands of years, who had converted to Islam sometime in the 18th century in order to raise the standard, social standing of your family.

00:24:27:01 - 00:24:53:26
Dr. Christopher Rose
Now, you were a Turk. Get out. And this is how these population exchanges worked. So the one with Bulgaria primarily was prior to World War One and this is where you get 400,000 refugees streaming frequently into the capital, Istanbul, because it's the first major city they encountered.

00:24:53:28 - 00:25:25:17
Dr. Christopher Rose
So, again, we've seen these maps before. What this does is that it also hardens the young Turks. There is a coup d'etat in 1913 in which a triumvirate, Three Pashas take over. You've heard their names before, Cemal, Talaat and Enver. They take over the government. At this point, the Ottoman Empire is essentially a military dictatorship. There's a sultan.

00:25:25:17 - 00:26:09:18
Dr. Christopher Rose
He doesn't really do much except sign things that are put in front of him. And these three in particular are paranoid about what is going to happen next. It is at this point that the European powers begin making plans for what is going to happen when the Ottoman Empire falls apart. As you can see, this is a map published in 1914, the area in black, which constitutes northern Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, this is called,

00:26:09:20 - 00:26:38:19
Dr. Christopher Rose
that was the province of Rumeliya and the map is called revenge "Intikam". When the war begins and the Ottomans join the war on the side of the Germans, there are officers in Istanbul openly talking about how they're going to reverse Greek independence by Christmas. Greece stays out of the war until 1917, when it's clear the Ottomans are not going to win.

00:26:38:21 - 00:27:05:29
Dr. Christopher Rose
Bulgaria, seeing the writing on the wall, joins the central powers on the side of the Ottomans because they can't invade you if you're allies. Okay. But this is also one of the reasons why these politics play out the way that they do. However, this notion that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was imminent was one of the reasons why it was referred to as the sick man of Europe.

00:27:05:29 - 00:27:32:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
Now I have a question. Trivia question. Does anybody know who actually called? Yeah, Yeah, it was Czar Nicholas the second, is the one who, at the conference of Berlin, the same one where they divided up Africa, called, referred to the Ottoman Empire as the sick man of Europe, and of course, Nicholas the second, by the time the Ottomans had lost the war, had already been executed in a basement in Yekaterinburg.

00:27:32:10 - 00:27:56:14
Dr. Christopher Rose
So karma, there's a word, there's something in here about karma. Don't call it another empire the sick man if yours is teetering. Okay, so I am, you know, if I'd been a little more motivated, I would have put the Christina Aguilera song behind this. What a lot of what the West wants, but, but you don't need to see me dance or hear me sing,

00:27:56:14 - 00:28:27:03
Dr. Christopher Rose
but there you go. So what does that mean? Post 1914, when it becomes clear that the Ottomans are going to be on the other side and we abandon all pretense. One, we are going to defeat the Ottoman Empire. Two, we are going to create a pro-British block in the Arab world for the purpose of maintain our lifeline to India,

00:28:27:03 - 00:29:08:18
Dr. Christopher Rose
read profit, and protect strategic British interests. Also, profit. The imperial, it has been said before, and for somebody who resisted economic history for a very long time, I will state for the record that this is an absolutely accurate fact. Imperialism is capitalism on steroids. Okay? Basically what they have done is to take the manufacturing process and take the production of raw materials and the and the selling of finished goods out as far as they possibly can.

00:29:08:20 - 00:29:30:18
Dr. Christopher Rose
Much of the Ottoman Empire had been peripheralized, which is a fancy way for saying the informal version of Empire into the French and the English economies already. So for example, the mills and the granaries of Mount Lebanon when when Dr. Yanikdag last night was talking about that the Lebanon was not growing its own food,

00:29:30:18 - 00:29:50:14
Dr. Christopher Rose
this is when we still have the "the" in there, because they were growing cash crops. This is why they were doing it as French ships were coming to Beirut and taking them off to France, turning them into manufacturing goods and bringing them back. And people were making money hand over fist, importing and exporting these goods. Egypt was in much the same situation.

00:29:50:14 - 00:30:14:18
Dr. Christopher Rose
It was the disruption to this system presented by the war and the inability to rapidly shift production to meet local consumption needs that caused much of the problem, i.e. again, what's happening in Ukraine. I know a couple of you were asking me, is this similar? Well, yes. Ukraine was not preparing to be self-sufficient because of Russia. of a Russian invasion.

00:30:14:18 - 00:30:57:12
Dr. Christopher Rose
Right. Okay. And third was this one, which was accomplished, number one and number two, while not upsetting the French or the Russians, i.e., our allies in this war endeavor. So let me introduce you to the contender, Sherif Hussein bin Ali, who was the Emir of Mecca. Sherif Hussein bin Ali was of the Hashemite clan. You may recognize the name Hashemite, if you're familiar with Jordan.

00:30:57:14 - 00:31:26:01
Dr. Christopher Rose
He was, he is the. Okay. I'm now at this point lost track which monarch I'm on. I believe it's the great great grandfather of the current Jordanian monarch. He was from the clan of Hashim, which is also the clan that the Prophet Muhammad was from. They claimed ascendancy from the Prophet Muhammad. And he, his family had ruled Mecca since, I believe, the 14th century.

00:31:26:04 - 00:31:59:23
Dr. Christopher Rose
He wanted to be king of all the Arabs. He was the recognized Ottoman governor of the province of the Hejaz, which is the region in the west coast of Arabia, along the Red Sea, where Medina and Mecca and the city of Jeddah are, the center of the peninsula. The Nejd, which is where the capital Riyadh is, was territory traditionally held by the family of of the al-Saud who came to control the peninsula.

00:31:59:23 - 00:32:36:27
Dr. Christopher Rose
That's a story for another idea. Now, Hussein bin Ali lobbied the British when he saw the writing on the wall for the Ottomans. For starters, there were a number of people in the Arab world, and again who had spent much of the 19th century coming to terms with what it meant to be an Arab, much the same way that the people in Turkey were or in the Ottoman Empire were coming to grips with what it meant to be a Turk, who had always been a bit bothered by the fact that non-Arab speakers had taken the caliphate away from what had traditionally been a post held by an Arab.

00:32:37:04 - 00:32:57:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
Now, if we're being pragmatic here, there is absolutely nothing in Islamic law that says that, first off, the caliphate was a position invented after the death of the Muhammad, of the Prophet Muhammad. But there is nothing in Islamic law that actually stipulates that the the leader of the faithful needs to be an Arab. It was just sort of traditional because it had always been that way.

00:32:57:24 - 00:33:37:11
Dr. Christopher Rose
And Hussein bin Ali thought to himself, you know what, I would like this position, if it's, the Ottoman Empire, is going to collapse. Now, the British, and I'm really hoping I have the next slide timed properly because if there's another one in the way, this isn't going to work, but the the with the British, but the British having gotten their hands bitten very badly when they attempted to interfere in religious matters in India in 1857, knew that nobody was going to take them seriously or Hussein bin Ali's claim seriously

00:33:37:18 - 00:34:23:02
Dr. Christopher Rose
if the British attempted to name him Caliph of Islam. In other words, that, as Liz Lemon would say, is a deal breaker. Okay, So it was going to have to be organic. So what they suggested was we will support your claim to the Arab peninsula, seeking the caliphate will be yours to deal with as you see fit. So there's very so, in fact, this is the only this is the only military operation in British Egypt, which was the raid on the Suez Canal, which happened in January 1915.

00:34:23:02 - 00:34:56:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
It was rebuffed rather quickly. After that, there were no combat operations in Egypt proper. The Sinai under Egyptian military administration for the duration, sorry, it was under British military administration for the duration of World War One, so it doesn't count, so to speak. Now, so, Hussein, I'm sorry there. I had it on a slide. His family ruled Mecca since 1201, begins promoting himself as the rightful leader of all the Arabs.

00:34:56:25 - 00:35:42:18
Dr. Christopher Rose
This is an illustration of him. Literally. It's a map of the Arabian Peninsula with his head on it. So you got Damascus, Jerusalem, Aqaba, Mecca, Medina. Really wants the title of caliph. Now he corresponds with someone in the British Foreign Office named Mcmahon and this is the Mcmahon Hussein correspondence. They come up with brilliantly descriptive names for these things.

00:35:42:21 - 00:36:38:28
Dr. Christopher Rose
Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sharif of Mecca. Memorize this. In the Arab world, when they speak of broken promises, this is what they're talking about because this never happened. Now, part of the reason for this is that in the years shortly after the war, the Hejaz was conquered by the al-Saud and becomes incorporated into a new kingdom that hadn't even existed, called the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

00:36:39:00 - 00:37:20:21
Dr. Christopher Rose
So Hussein is no longer Sharif of Mecca. He, in fact has no territory that he is ruling. He spends his last years on Cyprus, still insisting he is the rightful king of all the Arabs and the Caliph of Islam. Nobody else is buying this story. However, you see, Hussein has sons and it is to him that T.E. Lawrence is sent by British intelligence to assist with the great Arab revolts, which is basically one of the,

00:37:20:27 - 00:38:00:13
Dr. Christopher Rose
so it's not on this map. Somehow I have only mentioned it in passing. Britain's number one priority in the Eastern Mediterranean is here, the Suez Canal. It is the aorta of the British Empire. Without it controlling India is difficult. It takes six weeks longer to get to India by going around Africa. There are now telegraph lines running through the canal.

00:38:00:15 - 00:38:43:16
Dr. Christopher Rose
Everything is about the Suez Canal. That is the number one thing that Britain is in Egypt for, is to protect the canal. As we heard last night, one of the British objectives, one of the allied objectives in, not only blockading the coastline of the Levant, but in fomenting the great Arab revolts, was to divide up the Ottoman Army onto multiple, multiple fronts.

00:38:43:19 - 00:39:24:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
Lawrence had the task of working with Hussein and his sons, Faisal and Abdullah, who are combined into one character played by Omar Sharif in the movie. But he is a composite, and Alec Guinness is supposed to be Hussein, but is first off to try to make it possible or to get the Ottoman ability to control this area, to cancel it out by destroying the railway, moving along, moving north along the railway station.

00:39:24:07 - 00:39:56:11
Dr. Christopher Rose
I can talk. I really can. And distracting the Ottoman army in this area. While a second prong will come into Mesopotamia from the other side, the Russians are coming in from the northeast and you have the English and the Italian and the Anglo-Indian troops who are at Gallipoli. And then later after 1917, when Greece enters the war and allows the use of its territory to directly go for the for Istanbul through Thrace.

00:39:56:14 - 00:40:34:16
Dr. Christopher Rose
So the Ottoman Army is divided horribly. Now here is the map that Lawrence had intended to see implemented. It's a little hard to read, but what you have is Iraq, which will be under the the providence of Hussein's son, Abdullah, which will have some French guidance. You have Syria this northern section of Syria, which is going to be under the son,

00:40:34:16 - 00:41:12:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
Zaid. You have this section, Faisal, which is the rest of greater Syria. I'm not actually sure what this was even supposed to be called. You have a French mandate over Mt. Lebanon because there were a large number of Catholics there. The French considered themselves the protectors of the Catholics in the region. This interestingly enough, here's a story of, of what could have been, was going to be an Armenian mandate under the protection of, wait for it, the United States of America.

00:41:12:09 - 00:41:42:26
Dr. Christopher Rose
The U.S. was supposed to get a mandate in the Middle East. We then didn't join the League of Nations because the Senate refused to ratify Wilson's agreement. But it was supposed to actually come to us. So speaking of which, we could have it in the direct empire game and we missed our chance. And then you'll see over here there's this little yellow area labeled Palestine.

00:41:42:28 - 00:42:16:01
Dr. Christopher Rose
So working on the Iraqi side was this lovely lady who did not get a movie. Yeah, we don't talk about it. Okay. There was one that Nicole Kidman starred in. It's terrible. Don't watch it. Sorry, Nicole, love ya, but baby. Is she, she was quite the intrepid agent for British intelligence. She literally crossed the marshes of southern Iraq.

00:42:16:03 - 00:43:03:00
Dr. Christopher Rose
She was an archeologist, a writer, a master spy. A number of the princes living in Southern Mesopotamia actually told her that she should be the queen of Iraq because she was the only one that they would all listen to. Foreshadowing. Okay. But like, and I mean this don't cross her seriously, just don't like she was the ultimate spymaster and she was basically able to rally locals across tribal divisions to be in a position to support the British and Anglo Indian forces, when they when they beached at Basra, which they did in the fall of 1917.

00:43:03:02 - 00:43:40:19
Dr. Christopher Rose
The Mesopotamian campaign, for the record, is even within the history of the war in the Middle East, overlooked. And one of the reasons for this, if I can be perfectly honest, is that in academia there is this weird Cold War era division between the Middle East and South Asia. And because most of the troops were Indian who participated in this campaign, a lot of the historians who work on this are historians who work on India.

00:43:40:22 - 00:44:12:26
Dr. Christopher Rose
And so there's not a lot of back and forth. So there is a guy in Massachusetts who just wrote a book about the Indian soldiers in Iraq named Andrew Jarboe. And somebody remind me, I'll give you guys the reference. I sent some books last night. I can do it again. But basically about the fact that these guys were just sent in with absolutely horrible resources, but they were still better prepared than the Ottoman Army.

00:44:12:28 - 00:44:44:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
But the campaign here took a very long time. So basically the idea was so, they make their beachhead, they, it takes them three weeks to get to Basra. They move north and they, it takes almost, it takes three years to get to Baghdad. It's not trench warfare. It's swamp warfare. But people are dying of malaria. People are dying of this,

00:44:44:07 - 00:45:17:00
Dr. Christopher Rose
people are dying of that. Speaking of requisitioning food resources, they're getting a lot of it from Iran, which is this side of this line, which is technically neutral in the war, except for one thing. This is Abadan Island, which is the center of the Anglo Iranian oil industry. In fact, this is their their refinery is at Abadan, which is literally on the other side of the river.

00:45:17:02 - 00:45:48:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
West sides, Iraq, east sides, Iran. Okay. So they were able to gather food resources, but they also inadvertently caused a famine in Persia by trying to feed the Anglo troops in Iraq who were fighting in the war. So again and again, this is one of those things you don't see a lot of in the history just because quite frankly, at this point the Iranian government is super duper weak.

00:45:48:22 - 00:46:26:12
Dr. Christopher Rose
This is about a decade before the Pahlavi Revolution, when the Last Dynasty takes over the country is a very, very decentralized. The Shah's who are ruling in Tehran basically have control over Tehran and so there's just not a lot of records on this. Gertrude Bell is aided, this is just a little bit of trivia by Saint John Philby, a master spy who assists with the preparation of Iraq for the campaign. His son,

00:46:26:14 - 00:47:08:17
Dr. Christopher Rose
Kim, goes on to become the most famous west to east cold war defector working for the British Civil Service. And he is it turns out he's been a spy for the KGB and flees. Okay, so what happens at the end of the war? Here we have Faisal, who is expecting to become king of Syria with Lawrence, at Versailles. Okay, so let me just add on one little thing.

00:47:08:20 - 00:47:35:09
Dr. Christopher Rose
So the conference was held at Versailles, but then you have a bunch of treaties. The treaties are all named for the palace in Paris where they were signed. So in theory the Treaty of Versailles applied only to Germany. All of the central powers signed different ones. Sèvres happens to be the name of the palace where the Ottoman Surrender Treaty was, was signed, with the not capitulations, basically the punishment.

00:47:35:12 - 00:47:54:11
Dr. Christopher Rose
Here's what we're going to do to you, to your territory. But it's all part of the same process. So when we talk about the Treaty of Sèvres, that's why it's the Treaty of Sèvres, not the Treaty of Versailles. So there was the Versailles conference and then five separate treaties signed with each of the central powers that had been defeated.

00:47:54:13 - 00:48:53:06
Dr. Christopher Rose
So he shows up expecting to take control of Syria, except what it turned out, is expecting that this is what's going to happen. Okay? That he's going to get this pistol shaped thing, but it doesn't happen because as it turns out, the British and the French foreign ministries had conducted a second set of negotiations in private. So secret that Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and their handlers in the intelligence didn't even know about it. That divided the region up into spheres of influence, one English, one French, and that France was going to get all of Syria.

00:48:53:08 - 00:49:31:26
Dr. Christopher Rose
And so France gets Area A, Britain gets area B, So this is Lebanon. Syria, actually, this would have gone all the way to the Iranian border. That didn't happen. Iraq, what becomes Jordan and of course, the problematic yellow bubble I'll get to here in a minute. And this is the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This is the betrayal. We were promised this, but we're not going to get most of this territory.

00:49:31:28 - 00:50:23:21
Dr. Christopher Rose
Faisal is, instead, he he tries to rule. Syria is a mess for about three years while the French move in and try to military conquer the territory. Faisal is ultimately given Iraq. His brother Abdullah, while Faisal is in Syria battling it out, rides north with his forces to support his brother. He is stopped by a British delegation when he reaches the railway head at a place called Maʿān, and thanks to the quick thinking of a chap in the Foreign Ministry by the name of Winston Churchill, who literally made a little square on a on a cocktail napkin. They're like, surprise,

00:50:23:21 - 00:51:02:12
Dr. Christopher Rose
we created a new state just for you. It's called Jordan. Here's your new capital. And that ladies and gentlemen, is why Jordan exists. At that time was called Transjordan, but literally Jordan was birthed because they had a prince that they had promised a country to, and they didn't have a country to give him. Now, I've resisted talking about the yellow blob.

00:51:02:14 - 00:51:53:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
So the other coalition in the mix is the World Zionist Congress. Now, Zionism was not technically the brainchild of Theodor Herzl. Other people had had the idea he was probably the most prominent one to articulate it. He was a Swiss, German speaking Jew. But here is the thing to understand about the background of Zionism, is that Zionism was a 19th century European National Movement, just like every other one. The two different nationalist movements that took place in in the Middle East, were the Zionist Movement and the Armenian Nationalist Movement.

00:51:53:09 - 00:52:15:27
Dr. Christopher Rose
And the reason why they were different is that they were both aspirational. In other words, they didn't have territory. There were people, but there was no area, that this is one of the reasons why the Young Turks were paranoid and and to some degree afraid of the Armenians, was that there was no area that they just lifted out of.

00:52:15:27 - 00:52:45:08
Dr. Christopher Rose
The Armenians were very well mixed in among the Turkish population and so if Russia decided to get them to rise up, then it was an existential threat for Turkey. Now this is by the way, I should just add here, there's no proof that there was ever a chance of this happening. I'm explaining the paranoid thinking, okay, I'm not trying to apologize for the genocide here, but that was the mindset that they were in, is that the, are so,

00:52:45:08 - 00:53:08:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
okay, so we will we will move you out into the desert and and get rid of you first. I was actually for a long time on the fence about whether to use the word genocide until I was in Geneva about eight years ago doing dissertation research and I ran across a memo from a British diplomat in Istanbul during the war who said that Enver Pasha had been going around at a cocktail party bragging about how he finally got rid of the Armenians

00:53:08:07 - 00:53:48:04
Dr. Christopher Rose
and that was like, okay, so he did know what he was doing. All right. So that genocide, I mean, it was just one of the most callous things I've ever read. He actually got drunk and started bragging about it. There you go. But the Zionist Movement was a European movement, because anti-Semitism was still rife in Europe. And one of the, and I'll be perfectly frank with you, the reason it was a European movement, it did not get a lot of traction in the Middle East.

00:53:48:06 - 00:54:10:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
A friend of mine who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, no he teaches at Penn State, Lior Sternfeld just wrote a book about Iranian Jews and their memory of the whole thing and the early part of the book, he explores when the Zionist Movement really got going in the twenties and thirties, and they would send representatives to Iraq and Iran to meet with the Jewish communities there

00:54:11:00 - 00:54:55:14
Dr. Christopher Rose
and the response was really kind of tepid because Jews, as a religion that did not proselytize, who had a community ruled by religious law, actually integrated very well into the Islamic world. And so throughout history, until the troubles in Palestine began in the twenties, one could arguably say that Jews usually tended to fare better than Christians in the Middle East and the Islamic world in particular, because they were a minority that couldn't grow and their well-being depended on good relationships with the leaders.

00:54:55:17 - 00:55:38:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
And so literally the Iranian reaction was, we think Zionism is a great idea for the Europeans. You guys, you're screwed, you need help. You're not safe. We're fine. And I mean, the idea really got sort of a shot in the arm after the Dreyfus Affair, which happened in France, where a high ranking French military intelligence officer was accused of espionage and transported to Devil's Island for imprisonment, primarily for the crime of being a high ranking Jew in the French military.

00:55:38:24 - 00:56:20:24
Dr. Christopher Rose
And so Herzl and other prominent Jewish leaders, you know, he writes this book, there are Congresses to discuss the idea were of the opinion that as long as the fate Jewish security in Europe in particular, depended on the state, and especially after Dreyfus, that the state could not be relied upon to protect its Jewish citizens. The only way for Jewish security to be achieved was for Jews to be the majority in their own states.

00:56:20:26 - 00:56:43:14
Dr. Christopher Rose
After all, it was the Arab nationalism, everybody was doing it. I feel like Oprah here. You get a state and you get a state and you get a state, right? But that's kind of how it sort of seemed in the 19th century, especially in former Ottoman territory. Now, let me put it to you this way. Herzl was also right about something very important.

00:56:43:16 - 00:57:15:24
Dr. Christopher Rose
Herzl says in his writings, and articulated this a number of times, we have to legitimately acquire the territory that we are going to build our state on, either buying it, being given it by the ruler. We cannot do a system but wherein we start clandestinely moving into a geographical area and making ourselves the majority population slowly, basically through subterfuge because it will cause problems with the local population.

00:57:15:24 - 00:57:48:08
Dr. Christopher Rose
We have to. Guess what? He was absolutely right about that. And so this is one of the reasons why there were a number of ideas thrown around as potential destinations for, thank you, for the the potential locations, for the, for the location of the of the Jewish homeland, one of which was Patagonia in Argentina. The idea of asking the French if they would give them Madagascar, easy borders to defend. Uganda

00:57:48:08 - 00:58:12:12
Dr. Christopher Rose
was floated at one point, although as I tell my students, you know, I mean, really the only one that basically anybody was excited about was the idea of Palestine, because it was the the the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people, or as I put it, because I'm in Texas, it's like asking somebody if they want to go to Lake Charles, Louisiana, for their bachelor party or to go to Vegas. I mean, come on.

00:58:12:15 - 00:58:58:07
Dr. Christopher Rose
Okay. So behind me on the screen is quite, are quite possibly two of the most pored over sentences in human history. And one of the reasons why, so there are two versions of it. Here on the left is the version that was proposed by the British Zionist Federation to the Foreign Office. And on the right is the version that the Foreign Office actually issued.

00:58:58:09 - 00:59:50:21
Dr. Christopher Rose
Now, let me give you a little bit of context for the Balfour Declaration. It comes out in November 1917. Why? I'll tell you why. There'd been a shift in cabinets and some of the people in the cabinet are anti-Semites, and they were mouthing off a lot. And the Rothschilds, you will see Lord Rothschild. Here is Rothschild. Here is the one representing the Zionist Federation. One of the families, one of the Jewish families, banking families, bankrolling Britain's war industry who were grumbling to the governments, if y'all don't like Jews, we'll take our money and go home.

00:59:50:24 - 01:00:11:12
Dr. Christopher Rose
We don't have to fund this war effort if the military brass is going to be making anti-Semitic comments. And so there was a lot of tension that had been building throughout 1917 and there was back and forth, okay, how can we fix this? How can we make it right? And the Rothschild said, well, you can come out in favor of the Zionist project.

01:00:11:14 - 01:00:53:19
Dr. Christopher Rose
So the Zionists came up with, His Majesty's Government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the home of the Jewish people. His Majesty's Government will use its best endeavors to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist organization. What they actually got, His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.

01:00:53:22 - 01:01:21:09
Dr. Christopher Rose
It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political statute enjoyed by Jews in any other country. So it is quite different than what was asked for. Now, for the record, the Zionist had asked the Ottoman Sultan if they could have Palestine. The Sultan knew what they were doing.

01:01:21:09 - 01:01:43:26
Dr. Christopher Rose
The Sultan was tired of losing territory to Europe, to groups of Europeans, and he said this, No, you are welcome to settle in any other part of our empire. We will welcome you with open arms. But you cannot have Palestine and you cannot settle in Palestine. The Ottomans, however, had very poor checks on internal movement, so a lot of them went to cities that were considered,

01:01:43:29 - 01:02:36:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
a lot of the initial groups went to cities that were considered Jewish cities, one of which was Salonika in northern Greece, Istanbul, Izmir, in what, at the time it was Smyrna, which was a Greek city in western Turkey, and would stay there for a year and then migrate on to Palestine. Another interesting thing, which I did actually not include in this presentation, is that Chaim Weizmann, who was the head of the World Zionist Congress, was in touch with Amir Faisal, who had agreed in principle to allow a Jewish province in his Kingdom of Syria that the Zionists could use in settling.

01:02:36:25 - 01:03:04:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
This never came to fruition, obviously, because Faisal didn't get Syria. And that's one of those what if moments that I just dangle out there. By the way, that correspondence is online. The Weizmann Faisal correspondence is I think a good portion of it's on Wikipedia actually and it's just one of those I mean, again, Faisal didn't actually own Palestine either, you know, so he's still promising territory that wasn't his,

01:03:04:25 - 01:03:27:08
Dr. Christopher Rose
but you do have that moment of I wonder how the 20th century might have evolved differently had that actually happened. So what we had at the end of World War One was a lot of promises, broken promises. From the Arab perspective, the great betrayal was that they did not get their independence and they did not get their states.

01:03:27:11 - 01:03:51:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
The Zionists were not happy because they did not get the unconditional control over Palestine they were looking for. And basically when it comes down to it, nobody was happy. I mean, you could say this is World War One as a whole. That's why there was a second war less than two decades later, because there were so many unresolved issues all over the world.

01:03:51:28 - 01:04:00:24
Dr. Christopher Rose
Okay. Are there questions?

01:04:00:27 - 01:04:08:29
James Taub
Alright. If you're interested in asking a question of Dr. Rose, please feel free to step up to either mic provided at the end of each.

01:04:08:29 - 01:04:14:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
See, I told you I'd do a better job of staying on time today.

01:04:14:25 - 01:04:19:21
Speaker 3
Since Chris clearly prefers to have the mics brough to people from yesterday.

01:04:19:23 - 01:04:25:09
Dr. Christopher Rose
I was just offering.

01:04:25:11 - 01:04:40:21
Speaker 3
I actually have one question regarding Albania. Yes, because I think most of most of the area Islam is still very predominant in the area. So where, was, were they not forced to to get out?

01:04:40:23 - 01:05:08:24
Dr. Christopher Rose
No. So Albania got its independence fairly quickly. So the two territories that had been Ottoman Balkan that remained majority Muslim were Bosnia and Albania. Now in, and of course, if you listen to the conspiracy theories, this is why neither one of them have been given candidacy for EU membership. But I, I in large part had to do with the fact that the leaders were also Muslim.

01:05:08:27 - 01:05:27:27
Dr. Christopher Rose
But, but yeah, it was, it was, they were sort of the exceptions to the rule. But in many of these other nations, which also then established a national church, they considered Islam to have been imposed upon them by the oppressor and so that was one of the reasons why. Okay, now this is our country. Now get out.

01:05:27:29 - 01:06:01:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
But I but we're from here. It doesn't matter. Get out. I mean, it was, it was, it was, it's been described as a catastrophic success, but there are still communities in Greece that consider themselves refugees from Anatolia. It's been a century. And in fact, in 2004, when Athens came out in support of Ankara's bid to join the EU, they were people in Turkey who are like, well, you know, the reason they're doing it is because, you know, in Europe, EU citizens can live in any other EU country,

01:06:02:02 - 01:06:16:05
Dr. Christopher Rose
so they can get all their property back that they abandoned. I mean, literally people are saying this it was, I was, I was like, you've been wanting to get into the EU for 20 years now you're looking a gift horse in the mouth? Anyway, go ahead.

01:06:16:07 - 01:06:27:20
Speaker 4
Good morning, Chris. Does the Balfour Declaration give England cover in 1948 when the state of Israel is created?

01:06:27:22 - 01:06:51:22
Dr. Christopher Rose
No. In fact, at 48, the British throw up their hands and walk out. Part of the problem was that World War Two bankrupted them, and that's one of the reasons why they left India. And that's one of the reasons why they left Palestine. And it was chaotic in both situations, is that they were bankrupt and that empires are expensive to run and they wanted out.

01:06:51:24 - 01:07:07:14
Dr. Christopher Rose
So in the case of Palestine, they turned everything over to the United Nations who basically was like, okay, here we go, we're going to take a vote. But yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was a bad scene all around. But no, I mean, you saw it. It's two sentences and it's not even a law.

01:07:07:20 - 01:07:23:19
Dr. Christopher Rose
It's an official opinion drafted by the cabinet. Like legally it's almost meaningless, but it's symbolic importance was phenomenal.

01:07:23:22 - 01:07:30:29
Speaker 5
So some terminology at the beginning, like when you talk about this term, multi-ethnic empire. Yes. Multiplenational empires.

01:07:32:22 - 01:07:41:10
Speaker 5
An earlier, an earlier presenter called, refer to them as like peasant empires. And I'm curious as to like, why does

01:07:41:10 - 01:07:42:29
Speaker 5
Russia, which has probably a lot

01:07:42:29 - 01:07:44:16
Speaker 5
of ethnicities as well, not get grouped

01:07:44:16 - 01:07:53:10
Speaker 5
up because its story is so similar to Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire during World War One, or if it is grouped up historigraphically.

01:07:53:12 - 01:08:32:29
Dr. Christopher Rose
It is, but it isn't. Russia was sort of strengthening its own Russian identity at the expense of those others. Even though once the communist revolution happens, technically we're all partners in the same blah blah. Yeah, no, Russian was was dominant. So Russia's trajectory is actually kind of going in the other direction. Russia was increasing its control over those other ethnicities, whereas in Austria-Hungary and in the Ottoman lands, those other ethnicities are becoming more aware of their individuality and becoming less and less interested in being part of this multinational empire, multinational states.

01:08:33:01 - 01:08:41:09
Dr. Christopher Rose
And here, of course, I'm using that term nation to refer to the group of people and state or empire to refer to the political entity that spans that.

01:08:41:11 - 01:08:50:25
James Taub
And we have time for one more question here in person. But we, I know that Dr. Rose will be around to answer other questions later.

01:08:53:08 - 01:08:56:24
Speaker 6
You mentioned Hussein trying to become king of the Arabs

01:08:56:24 - 01:08:57:09
Speaker 6
And I recognize this is supposition,

01:08:59:20 - 01:09:32:25
Speaker 6
but how likely would he be able to have sustained a kingdom if, in fact, it had played out as the Mcmahan-Hussein agreement had promised? [Dr. Christopher Rose] You know, it's sort of the same reason yesterday why when the group was presenting those quotes about how Palestine is going to be joined to Egypt, I was going, they speak different dialects of Arabic in Palestine and Egypt.

01:09:32:28 - 01:10:11:20
Dr. Christopher Rose
They can kind of understand each other, but like there is a distinct cultural difference and I was just like, yeah, that wouldn't have worked. I have a feeling Hussein would have had the same issue. He was from Mecca. He was from a very old family. I mean, that's all great and well, but you have to understand that like Syria, before pre-war, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, you know, greater Syria was really kind of, you know, moving in a more urbane Western intellectual secularizing direction and was very religiously mixed.

01:10:11:20 - 01:10:43:05
Dr. Christopher Rose
And I have some serious questions about how successful that would have been. To be perfectly honest, going back to my earlier comment, the reasons that still exists have been studied heavily by political scientists, and it's really because Abdullah and then his grandson, Hussein, had, there was a Hussein's father was sick and, so he was only king for nine months

01:10:43:05 - 01:11:14:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
and then Hussein got the throne at 17. But we're super savvy about working those connections with the locals, making personal connections, getting them on board and such. And if they hadn't done that, like the whole, the whole thing would have died. I don't know if Hussein would have had, Hussein the elder, Sharif Hussein would have had the ability practically to do that with such a vast region because it's just a exponentially greater number of people.

01:11:14:25 - 01:11:24:25
Dr. Christopher Rose
So yeah, I really do question what to what degree Arabia was just a pipe dream. I, I think it probably was really.

01:11:24:28 - 01:11:29:19
James Taub
Ladies and gentlemen, if you could join me one more time and thanking Dr. Christopher Rose.

01:11:29:22 - 01:11:30:01
Dr. Christopher Rose
Thank you.