ABSTRACT
In The Middle East (Fisher 1978), there was no section devoted specifically to states. The geography of the Middle Eastern countries was woven into regional geography, Part III of his book. The broadly based regions were effectively formal regions in that they were defined essentially by macro-landforms. This pattern accorded with the thinking within geography of which regions were taken to be characteristic. In the same way that history deals with periods of time which can be built up into a total chronology, so geography is concerned with areas of space which can be aggregated to produce a world picture.
