Introduction

The years surrounding the First World War were a watershed. The dynastic, Islamic states of the region foundered, or were completely transformed, and the outlines of a new states system emerged. The shape and dynamics of the political field, and the forces contending within it, changed in far-reaching ways. Between 1911 and the early 1920s, five European powers (Britain, France, Russia, Italy and Spain) tried to rule directly or partition the great majority of the region's territory. This twentieth-century assault dwarfed the scale of nineteenth-century colonialism. Italy invaded the Ottoman provinces that became Libya in 1911. Britain and Russia invaded Iran in 1911. France took official control of Morocco in 1912, bringing about the submission of the sultan-caliph. Spain started to impose a military dominion over the Rif mountains in the north of Morocco during the 1910s. Britain declared Egypt a protectorate in 1914, terminating the fiction of Ottoman sovereignty and imposing heavy burdens through war-time mobilization. The victorious powers in the First World War, which involved many privations including famine in its own right, tried to carve up the Ottoman empire (which surrendered in 1918) and its Arab provinces in the Mashriq between 1918 and 1922. In 1917, the British promised Mandate Palestine to a third party, the European Zionist movement. This move directly implied the mass dispossession of the existing Arab-Palestinian population. Yet, the British also made contradictory promises of national self-determination to their Arab allies in the Mashriq during the First World War. In the early 1920s, Fascist Italy ripped up the autonomy agreements it had struck with Cyrenaica and turned towards an exterminatory settler colonialism. The Ottoman surrender and the rise of Turkish nationalism defying the colonial settlement turned much of the region into the scene of a rush to seize territory, draw boundaries, and opened the possibilities for new forms of political community and mobilization. It was these opportunities, extraordinary provocations, crises of authority and the desperate need for re-thinking occasioned by the collapse of the Ottoman sultanate and the capitulation of the Moroccan sultan-caliph that served as the immediate context for contentious mobilization surrounding the First World War and the new states and boundaries that emerged from it. It soon became apparent that the long crisis of the Islamic states of the region was finally over.