Suchergebnisse

A review essay on a book by Efraim Karsh & Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1798-1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 1999) contends that the book discounts Western imperialism & the clash of civilizations, as articulated by Samuel Huntington, as the most significant factors in determining the fate of the Middle East. The Karshes insist that, from 1798 to 1923, the region's destiny remained in the hands of local actors, who played their parts in accordance with indigenous trends & patterns of behavior as they attempted to withstand the pressures of external forces by using time-honored wiles & stratagems. The authors rely heavily on original documents that record in minute detail the twists & turns of political events. These documents refute many traditional assumptions about the Eastern Question & European diplomacy. In addition, they shed light on what has been called "Britain's moment" in the Middle East. Although Empires in the Sand is sometimes carping & astringent in tone, it is a bold & imaginative reinterpretation of a controversial stretch of Middle Eastern history. 2 References. A. Funderburg

All aspects of the life of an age are interrelated, even when the interrelations express themselves in cross purposes and intellectual dissolution. Whether or not they embody forms and ideas worthy to be dignified by the name of architecture, the buildings of any period are an expression of it. They reflect, in varying degrees, its economic and social development, the enactments of its legislative bodies, the acts of its administrative officials, the decisions of its law courts, the character and course of its wars. They also express, again in varying degrees, its methods of education, its religious life, its natural science, its thought and its art. They are, to some extent, the expression of past traditions and works of the mind which have retained a hold on the life of the period or have been revived by its thinkers and artists, as classical antiquity has been revived again and again in Western European history since the eleventh century.