What were the Western mental representations of the Middle East at the turn of the XXe century? By studying the restricted field of cartography, Daniel Foliard sets out to draw a “mental map” of British imperial thought.
Daniel Foliard returns in Dislocating the Orient on the origins of the Middle East, both in terms and in Western mental representations of the region. In eight chapters following the chronology of the evolution of European investments between Egypt and India, the author traces, through the history of the development of modern cartography, the transformations that occurred during the slow decline of the Ottoman Empire between the end of the Crimean War and the peace negotiations of 1918-1921.
This work is part of a rich historiography whose last important act dates from 2011, with the resounding A Line in the Sand by James Barr (London: Simon and Schuster, 2011). But Daniel Foliard’s book ends almost where James Barr’s begins, namely with the inter-allied negotiations of the First World War. One had to go back to 2000 to see a very comprehensive publication on themes similar to those of Dislocating the Orientwith the work of John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (London: Leicester) UP2000). Other older monographs (let us cite the very solid work ofAL Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, 1800-1901: A Study of Religious and Educational EnterpriseLondon, Oxford UP1961) explored themes common to Daniel Foliard’s work, but without attempting to offer an intellectual analysis of the significance of British cartography for the Empire. This is one of the strengths of Dislocating the Orient than to propose an almost literary reading of the General Staff maps, and to attempt to detach oneself from a strictly geopolitical vision.
Across three major historical periods (from the Crimean War to 1869, from 1869 to the occupation of Egypt in 1882, and from the 1890s to the First World War), Daniel Foliard raises many fascinating questions about the impact of military and journalistic cartography on the imperial positions of the British between Suez and Bombay, focusing attention on Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Egypt and Persia. The author manages to go beyond the ease of placing his work in current events by studying instead the cultural impact of the production of maps for the general public or for the more restricted one of diplomats and military personnel. It is thus the role of amateur explorers and adventurers, during the years of the Great Anglo-Russian Game, which is first studied, the emphasis being placed on the artisanal aspect of the beginnings of interest in Middle Eastern cartography. Daniel Foliard then rightly notes that the amateurism and the fragmentary aspect of this first, very incomplete, mapping of the region by certain British people only served, in the end, to reinforce the mythical dimension that Westerners attributed to the lands which had seen the birth of Judeo-Christian civilization.
The influence of the biblical past
The author arrives at a conclusion that is unfortunately still relevant today: the Middle East cannot escape its biblical past. During the First World War, he notes, for example, the absence of reliable maps during the Mesopotamian campaign, with its share of anonymous places, villages and roads, led the military to refer to names taken from the Old Testament to identify certain key places: thus, Sodom and Gomorrah, Dan and the borders of the 12 tribes of Israel reappeared on maps at the very moment when, paradoxically, science was about to allow cartography to make its great revolution thanks to aviation. At the same time, however, the maps produced from the end of the Victorian era onwards tended to show the future rather than the past: they then relied on biblical terms to project the geopolitical future of the region onto the maps. However, all these blanks left on the maps also reveal, according to Daniel Foliard, a real fragility of the British Empire linked to a glaring lack of knowledge of the territories located on the route to India. If psychologically these absences could reinforce the attraction of the Victorians for a fantasized biblical Orient, the disappearance of the gaps on the maps was just as necessary as the need to bring the region fully into the present at the turn of the century. XXe century.
A Mind Map of British Imperialism
This cultural aspect is probably one of the most interesting in the book: by relying on a technical knowledge of publication methods and topographical landmarks, the author shows with a certain finesse that the maps only represent a European mental space rather than the reality of the territories evoked. There are indeed several shadows that hover over Daniel Foliard’s book: that of John Mackenzie first, when Dislocating the Orient shows the way in which cartography reveals a British vision of colonial “others”, then that of Benedict Anderson, whose “imagined communities” find here a perfectly adequate testing ground, finally that of Edward Said, even if one cannot fail to perceive a desire to take certain distances from the work of the author ofOrientalism by going beyond an essentially literary reading grid.
The small story to the detriment of the big one?
This strength of Daniel Foliard’s work could, however, at the same time constitute its weakness, because by borrowing from the essay but adopting a resolutely historical methodology, based essentially on primary sources from different French, British and American archival funds, the reader will sometimes lose sight of the big story in favor of the small one, sometimes even of the historical anecdote to which a universal value will be given. The bibliographic organization also reflects the main shortcoming of the work, namely a theoretical critical apparatus that is too little present: two and a half pages are thus devoted to the list of the numerous primary sources mobilized, against two pages of published primary sources (memoirs, autobiographies, travel stories) and only half a page for theoretical secondary sources. If the primary archival sources are omnipresent and regularly called upon – which constitutes the salient point of this work -, we find numerous historical and theoretical references distilled throughout the work but not listed in the bibliography. However, this weak mobilization of the theoretical critical apparatus is sometimes felt, mainly at the end of the work, by the absence of a broader vision of the events studied. The reader who is not a specialist in British imperial history will regret a certain lack of anchoring of the small story in the broader one of the ideological and political developments of Great Britain from the 1850s to the 1920s: the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are not, for example, mentioned to deal with the major orientations and major reversals of the policies of the Empire between the birth of institutionalized free trade and the recognition of American ascendancy and its anti-imperialist corollary during the years 1914-1920.
However, let us recognize that the avowed aim of Daniel Foliard’s work is to draw a “mental map” of British imperial thought concerning the Middle East, and not a history of the region or the Empire. The fate of the Middle East appears here to be conditioned by Western biblical culture, no less than by a more or less advanced form of millenarianism at the turn of the previous century, which locked the region into an anti-modern tropism. It is thus with great humility that the author recognizes not having constantly inscribed his analysis in a broader history in order to concentrate on the cultural aspect of the cartographic grid of the region. Let us also acknowledge the solidity of the analyses and the originality of the work, which at no point errs on the side of simplicity and allows itself to explore numerous avenues along the way, among which we note in particular the role of women in British exploration and in the publication of maps, the emergence of military intelligence and the increasingly noticeable inclusion of statistics and topography among Foreign Office officials and, finally, the sometimes astonishing absence of consultation between the Foreign Office, War Office and Admiralty. Thus, to conclude, is another shadow, that of John Seeley and his idea of ” fit of absence of mind ” in the construction of the Empire, which hovers over this work. By studying the restricted field of cartography, Daniel Foliard thus highlights certain characteristic traits of British imperialism, oscillating between amateurism, jingoism and belief in a particular imperial destiny.