This is not to suggest that the Ottoman sultan's Asian Arab and adjacent northeast African provinces were available earlier for easy European plucking. In retrospect, if the port of Aden (even including its insular appendages, it encompasses little more than 100 square miles ) is set aside, the rise and fall of Great Britain's regional preeminence lasted less than a century (1878 –1971). Later, in the crisis of its global imperial mobilization in World War II, Britain was the region's unifier, after 1941 in close harmony with the United States. In the first half of the twentieth century, to confirm its regional primacy, Britain served in effect as Europe's imperial coordinator in the Ottoman succession.
The anxiety dated from Napol éon's dramatic appearance in the self-governing Ottoman province of Egypt in 1798, through the opening in 1869 of the French-built Suez Canal, to the long-lived yet contested British presence that began in 1882. In the southern Mediterranean, France's tenacious pursuit of influence in Egypt made both Britain and India, as guardians of the imperial routes to the subcontinent, nervous. On India's north ( Afghanistan) and northwest ( Persia - Iran after 1935 -and the Ottoman Black Sea coastline and its interior), Russia's southward thrust stirred anxiety among Britain's empire builders. Before the ratification in 1924 of the peace settlement with the Turkish Republic, the Ottoman Empire's lineal successor, the inspiration and rationale for adding each politically identifiable unit, with the arguable exception of Sudan in 1899, had come from the perceived need to defend British India. Most of the territory that composed its Middle East empire from the end of World War I to the end of World War II had once been under Ottoman rule. In a review of Britain's relations with the region before then, and how it rose to the top, this must be kept in mind. The political-geographical concept of the Middle East was coined early in the twentieth century, several decades after Britain entered the region. In the Middle East, Great Britain is remembered most for its interlude of paramountcy. Britain's engagement in middle east affairs has a long and troubled history.
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