Near East
Quigley's term for the south-west Asian / eastern Mediterranean zone
Also known as: Near East
Quigley's standing term for the south-west Asian / eastern Mediterranean zone — the geographic envelope that hosted the original civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant (T&H 22).
Quigley's Framing
Quigley uses 'Near East' in the older American academic sense — roughly the Arab world plus Iran and Turkey — rather than the British 'Middle East' coinage. The zone is treated as the original civilizational hearth: the region in which agriculture, urban life, writing, organized religion, and state forms first emerged, and from which they radiated outward to the Mediterranean, India, and (eventually) Europe.
Strategic Role
In the twentieth-century chapters the Near East is the contested ground of the post-Ottoman settlement and, after 1945, the southern flank of the Cold War. Quigley tracks the British and French mandates, the founding of Israel, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Iranian oil nationalization and the 1953 coup, and the slow displacement of Anglo-French influence by American. He reads the resulting state system as structurally fragile — boundaries drawn against the civilizational grain — and as a permanent source of instability in the Atlantic system's southern arc.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 22 Quigley
The Near East is the original civilizational hearth — the zone from which agriculture, urban life, and state forms first radiated outward.