Courses

This course will examine various answers to these questions, as well as the continuities and disjunctures between these different periods. Specifically, we will look at great power policies in the Middle East until 1917, and attempt to see which constants carried over to the Soviet period and the Cold War. We will also examine the degree to which the United States simply stepped into the shoes of Britain in the Middle East, beginning in 1947. Much of the course will concentrate on the strategic weight attached to the Middle East by great power rivals, and the nature of their interaction with each other and with internal regional dynamics -- nationalism, religion, reform and revolution -- in the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods. We will conclude by examining how the collapse of the Soviet Union has changed the situation in the Middle East.