ABSTRACT
The Near East is a term which serves the historian well until the end of the First World War. Coined in the late nineteenth century it was employed as a convenient shorthand for the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. The Near East was therefore the region west of the Iranian frontier and could be distinguished from the Far East, composed of China and Japan, and the Middle East, comprising the area which intervened between the Near and the Far Easts. After the First World War the Near East became gradually engulfed in the Middle East as the latter term began to be used to include the Arab states which emerged from the Ottoman Empire. During the Second World War the triumphant Middle East marched yet further westwards into North Africa and subsequently began to send feelers into Pakistan. More recently the term has been used especially to describe Israel and its Arab neighbours. The name “Near East” survived principally as an expression used to delineate the region of Western Asia in the period before the arrival of Islam; one speaks of the ancient Near East but not usually of the ancient Middle East. “Near East” is not now applied to the states of south-eastern Europe, for which the term had been especially coined; and Turkey itself has been left to inhabit a sort of geographical limbo, uneasily poised between Europe and the Middle East and commonly neglected by specialists dealing with each of them.
