Near East

• 1. Introduction

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  Near East is a phrase that once governed the foreign policy of empires, shaped the careers of diplomats, and defined a region stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Yet today, few people could say with confidence what countries it includes or where it ends. The term was coined by Western geographers in the 19th century, applied originally to the Ottoman Empire, and has been shifting in meaning ever since. By 2024, politicians and journalists use Near East and Middle East interchangeably, as though the distinction never mattered. But for roughly a century, that distinction was load-bearing for empires, armies, and archaeologists alike. How a geographical label rises, falls, and transforms tells a larger story about power, religion, and the maps that powerful nations draw for themselves.

• 2. Three Easts

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  Before the Crimean War, the phrase Near East did not refer to any fixed region on a map. The Romans had a habit of dividing territories into near and far versions, referring to near Gaul, far Gaul, near Spain, and far Spain. The Greeks did the same, and the habit appears even in Linear B, the oldest known script of Europe, in references to the near province and far province of the kingdom of Pylos. Ptolemy's Geography organized Asia on a similar logic, separating Scythia and India into regions this side of or beyond major geographical barriers like the Ganges and the Himalayas.

  By 1670, John Seller's Atlas Maritima had turned 'India Beyond the Ganges' into 'the East Indies,' covering China, Korea, southeast Asia, and islands of the Pacific. The word 'east' in all these phrases derived from the Latin Oriens, meaning the land of the rising sun, and the world map of Jodocus Hondius in 1590 labeled all of Asia from the Caspian to the Pacific as India Orientalis. The language was always relative to the speaker's home territory. Elizabeth I of England chartered the Company of Merchants of the Levant in 1581, and the ship The Great Susan transported the first ambassador, William Harebone, to the Ottoman government at Constantinople in 1582. The East India Company, originally chartered as 'the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies,' received its charter in 1600. These companies organized trade through labels that pointed outward from London, not from any neutral geography.

  The term Near East as a specific regional designation crystallized during and after the Crimean War of 1853-1856. The British government decided that both the Ottoman Empire and the East Indies were necessary for the balance of power against Russia, and began using Near East to mean the Ottoman Empire and Far East to mean the East Indies as compound nouns, often hyphenated. In 1855, a letter in Littell's Living Age, written by Thomas Taylor Meadows, an official Chinese interpreter of ten years' active service and a member of the Oriental Club founded by the Duke of Wellington, used the phrase in print in a way that reached the general public. Meadows wrote that supporting the sick man in the Near East was an arduous and costly affair, and warned that if Turkey was a European necessity, China was a world necessity. His phrasing immediately became popular, supplanting Levant and East Indies as the dominant vocabulary.

• 3. The Sick Man and His Territories

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  At the start of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire controlled all of the Balkans north to the southern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain. By 1914, the empire had lost nearly every European territory except Constantinople and Eastern Thrace, surrendering them to a wave of nationalist Balkan states. The Kingdom of Greece, the Kingdom of Serbia, the Danubian Principalities, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria all won independence during this period. The Ottomans held onto Albania, Macedonia, and the Adrianople Vilayet until the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13 stripped them away as well. European observers described the empire as the sick man of Europe.

  The violence inside the empire's remaining territory gave the label Near East a dark reputation. Starting in 1894, the Ottomans struck at Armenian and Assyrian populations on the grounds that they were non-Muslim peoples and therefore a potential threat. The Hamidian Massacres, the Adana Massacres, and the Massacres of Badr Khan aroused, as contemporaries wrote, the indignation of the entire Christian world. In the United States, Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, joined the public response by allying herself with the Red Cross. The relationship between minority populations and the Ottoman state, and the question of what would happen to the empire's territories once it collapsed, became known collectively as the Eastern Question.

  The journalist Sir Henry Norman, 1st Baronet, traveled to the Balkans in 1896 after publishing a successful book on the Far East the previous year. He was working on a sequel, The People and Politics of the Near East, planned by Scribners for 1897. His wife wrote letters describing the wife of a Turkish cabinet minister as a cultivated woman. But the Hamidian Massacres, ongoing during their travels, transformed Norman's account. In an article published in Scribner's Magazine in June 1896, he described the Ottoman Empire as having descended from enlightened civilization to something far worse, and concluded his piece with the sentence: In the Balkans, one learns to hate the Turk. Prince Nicolas of Montenegro wrote to thank him. Norman used Near East throughout to mean the Balkans specifically, not the broader Ottoman domain.

• 4. Scholars, Spades, and Scripture

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  Separate from diplomats and journalists, a community of biblical archaeologists developed their own version of the Near East, and they called it the Nearer East. The London Review of 1861 reviewed several works by Rawlinson and Layard, describing them as producing an imperfect conspectus of the arrow-headed writings of the nearer east, by which they meant cuneiform texts. The nations they placed in this region were Assyria, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Ancient Israel, Ethiopia, Caucasus, Libya, Anatolia, and Abyssinia. India was explicitly excluded, and the Balkans received no mention at all.

  British archaeologist D. G. Hogarth published The Nearer East in 1902. Hogarth wrote that the Nearer East was a term of current fashion for a region which earlier generations were content to call simply the East. His map drew the Nearer East with regular boundary lines as though surveyed, including Iran and the Balkans but not the Danube lands, and Egypt but not the rest of North Africa. Unlike the diplomats' Near East, Hogarth's version included Greece and Iran but differed from the Ottoman Empire in those same additions. He showed no familiarity with the contemporaneous concept of the Middle East, which was developing independently in diplomatic circles at roughly the same moment.

  The ancient Near East survived as a stabilized scholarly term even as the political Near East dissolved. James Bennett Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, first published in 1950, stood as a high point for biblical scholars working in this framework. Leonard Woolley, British archaeologist and excavator of ancient Ur who had worked alongside T. E. Lawrence and Arthur Evans, completed his final book, The Art of the Middle East, Including Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine, two weeks before his death in 1960. It was published in 1961. Woolley's geographical range was identical to Pritchard's, despite the different name on the cover, illustrating how completely the two labels had merged in practice even while scholars debated terminology.

• 5. Middle East Overtakes the Map

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  In 1900, Thomas Edward Gordon published an article titled The Problem of the Middle East, arguing that the most sensitive part of British external policy in the region was preserving the independence of Persia and Afghanistan from Russian expansion. Gordon was a diplomat and military officer, and his concern was specifically the threat of a Russian railway reaching the Persian Gulf. Two years later, Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval strategist, independently used the phrase Middle East in 1902 to describe the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean trade routes, writing that the middle East, if he might adopt a term he had not seen, would some day need its Malta as well as its Gibraltar. Mahan believed he was coining the phrase.

  The two terms coexisted uneasily for years. Bertram Lenox Simpson, a journalist who served as an officer for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, wrote in his 1910 book The Conflict of Colour of the Near and Middle East as a single combined region comprising India, Afghanistan, Persia, Arabistan, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Simpson argued that what united these territories was colonial rule and skin color, and he included a color chart dividing the world into races. He framed the Eastern Question as the Problem of the Nearer East, redefining it around the future of European colonialism rather than the fate of the Ottoman Empire.

  By 1916, Captain T. C. Fowle of the 40th Pathans wrote about a trip from Karachi to Syria without using the phrase Near East a single time. The entire region appeared as the Middle East in his account, and formerly Ottoman sections were described as Turkish rather than Near Eastern. William Miller, journalist and Balkans expert who published Travel and Politics in the Near East in 1898 and claimed four separate trips to the region, had earlier used Near East to mean primarily the Balkans. His blunt verdict on Ottoman administration, writing that it was synonymous with corruption, inefficiency, and sloth, was, as the source notes, fighting words for a country that had once shed blood defending Turkey's existence. Miller's suggestion that no final solution of the difficulty had yet been found carried weight with both British and Ottoman governments. The alignments he helped shift fed directly into the formations of the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, the latter already formed in 1882, which contributed to World War I.

• 6. Who Uses It Now

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  After the Ottoman Empire's collapse, the term Near East did not die; it was absorbed into bureaucratic structures that preserved it for institutional reasons. The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the United States Department of State remains one of the most influential agencies still using the term. It implements official American diplomacy across the region and handles all Middle Eastern affairs despite the name. The Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, an educational institution of the US Department of Defense, teaches courses and holds workshops for government officials and military officers, though its territory includes Mauritania, a country the State Department classifies under Africa.

  The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a non-profit research organization that regards its target countries as the Middle East but uses Near East in its name to align with State Department conventions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defined the Near East in 1997 to include Afghanistan alongside the more expected countries; by 2012 it had redefined the Near East as a subregion of the Middle East, with Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey inside it, and the Arabian Peninsula, the Caucasus, and Iran in the broader Middle East outside it.

  Other international bodies avoid the phrase entirely. UNESCO does not recognize a Near East or Middle East, dividing the region instead among Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa, a division that, by its own admission, does not forcibly reflect geography but refers to the execution of regional activities. The United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office uses Middle East and North Africa but not Near East. Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses Middle East and the Balkans as distinct categories without Near East appearing at all. The National Geographic Society and the FAO in 1997 both placed the same set of countries in the Near East and Middle East: the Arabian Peninsula, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Turkey. Arnold Toynbee, writing in 1916, described the Near East as a spiritual being of Janus-character connected to both east and west, with limits he found genuinely difficult to define. His view that there was something pathological about the history of the Near Eastern world, that it had lain for centuries between east and west belonging to neither, anticipates the terminological confusion that has never been fully resolved.