A History of Mapping the Middle East from the 11th Century

FAIN: FB-58033-15

Zayde Antrim
Trinity College (Hartford, CT 06106-3100)

Mapping the Middle East is a history of the mapping of the region now referred to as the Middle East, broadly defined. By analyzing maps of this region produced from the eleventh to the twenty-first centuries, the book illuminates peoples’ feelings of belonging in different territories and the ways power has been understood and asserted geographically. Mapping the Middle East is not a technical history of cartography, but rather an exploration of a variety of imaginings of Middle Eastern land over the past millennium. Maps have become so ubiquitous today that we are not used to thinking critically about them; likewise, the Middle East has dominated headlines to the extent that its equation with conflict and fragmentation seems self-evident. Mapping the Middle East challenges these assumptions by using maps to show the many perspectives from which people have visualized and claimed ownership of this shifting territorial entity over the centuries.

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Mapping the Middle East (Book)
Title: Mapping the Middle East
Author: Zayde Antrim
Abstract: Mapping the Middle East explores the many ways people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus River Valleys over the past millennium. By analyzing maps produced from the eleventh century on, Zayde Antrim emphasizes the deep roots of mapping in a region too often considered unexamined and unchanging before the modern period. As Antrim argues, better-known maps from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a period coinciding with European colonialism and the rise of the nation-state—not only obscure this rich past, but also constrain visions for the region’s future. Organized chronologically, Mapping the Middle East addresses the medieval “Realm of Islam;” the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire; French and British colonialism through World War I; nationalism in modern Turkey, Iran, and Israel/Palestine; and alternative geographies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Vivid color illustrations throughout allow readers to compare the maps themselves with Antrim’s analysis. Much more than a conventional history of cartography, Mapping the Middle East is an incisive critique of the changing relationship between maps and belonging in a dynamic world region over the past thousand years.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781780238500
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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