The idea in the title The Tail Wags the Dog – that weaker, Middle Eastern states have often sculpted their own destiny and on occasion even been able to manipulate the superpowers – is not a new one, and it is correct. While this is probably overstating the case, it contains some truth.

As the opening quotation suggests, his central argument is that the consensus view of the region as having been moulded, to its detriment, by external forces, especially the Great Powers, is false: contrary to the common perception of the region's affairs as an offshoot of global power politics, modern Middle Eastern history has been the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions and patterns of behaviour contrary to their treatment as hapless objects lacking an internal, autonomous dynamic of their own, Middle Easterners have been enterprising free agents doggedly pursuing their national interests and swaying the region pretty much in their desired direction, often in disregard of Great-Power wishes. Karsh's primary concern is agency, ie who is making things happen, and his answer is that it is the Middle East states themselves. From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the contemporary crisis over Iran's nuclear programme, the book covers many of the region's climacteric events. Thus do politicians use the work of historians (like Karsh) to discredit Palestinian claims of expulsion in 1948, while last year the terror group Isis pointedly bulldozed the border between Iraq and Syria to 'destroy' the legacy of the 1916 Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement, which it claims created artificial borders all over the modern Middle East.Īs a result, the book conducts a broad study of modern Middle Eastern history.

Conflicting accounts of everything from the foundation of Israel to the imperial powers' creation of the modern Middle East justify atrocity and form the ideological underpinnings of policy. In the Middle East, perhaps like no other region, history is politics. And in this – the skewering of academic and popular orthodoxy through historical analysis – lies the book's overarching goal. 'Contrary to the conventional wisdom,' Efraim Karsh tells us early on in his new book on the Middle East, 'Britain's 'original sin', if such was indeed committed, lay not in the breaking up of Middle Eastern unity but in its attempted over-unification.' If Karsh wanted to cause outrage in Middle East Studies departments across the globe it is hard to think of a sentence that would do the job better.

Beware of Small States by David Hirst