Introduction to A New Middle East: The End of Empire
By the end of the war, most of the former Ottoman territory was in allied hand, and most was controlled by the British. The meetings in Paris in 1919 would do much to create a new order in the Middle East and the Levant. A system of small Middle Eastern states was born. I hope you keep in mind as we work through the materials in this chapter how the state-creation process in the former Ottoman zone and in Persia relates or compares to the emergence of nation-states in Europe, Japan, and China. Part of studying history with a global scope is to see the world as both a set of localized phenomena and as part of a unified whole.