The past beats inside me like a second heart
John Banville, The Sea
Why is this blog called In That Howling Infinite? It refers to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a magnificent study in mania and obsession:
“But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” Moby–Dick, Chapter 23
In a figurative sense, it speaks of the themes and schemes that are addressed in the thoughts, ideas, songs, poems and stories that feature in this blog. We are, as Bob Dylan sang, “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting”. And we like to hope that, as the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho said, “someone will remember us, I say, even in another time”
Here are the most recent articles in In That Howling Infinite.
Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame. The expulsion of the millennia long Greek presence in Anatolia was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
Beside Strange Waters. The dark side of former Pink Floyd front man and currently, controversial political activist
Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs. To admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies, a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within Russia’s last royal dynasty.
The featured picture at the head of this page is the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map, discussed in Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints
Sydney Sweeney has good jeans
Ten favourites:
A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West. In one of the first essays published in In That Howling Infinite, we walked down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, beginning with the usual suspects: power and pride, greed, and aggrandisement, and as accessories after the fact, dolour, devastation, and death.
Blood and Brick … a world of walls. Hadrian’s Wall, the Theodosian Wall, the Berlin Wall, Northerm Ireland’s Peace Wall, Israel’s Separation Wall, George RR Martin’s Ice Wall, the wall you can see from space, and walls that most people have never heard of. If walls could talk, what take they woukd tell. While walls are destined to fall one day, people like them. They project a language of security – but they stem from a sense of insecurity, a fear of losing what you have.
One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. The history of Israel and Palestine does not yield to forensic neatness. This land holds layered attachment; Jewish longing and Palestinian dispossession; British imperial design and Arab nationalist pride; secular aspiration and religious revival; survival strategy and ideological fervour. None alone explains the whole. Together they form the sediment of a century.
The Twilight of the Equine Gods. An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride and revelation. The horse, as German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.
The Sport of Kings. CE Morgan’s “great American novel” is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”.
Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment. “Nostalgia”, literally the pain associated with the thought of home, or homesickness, is derived from the Greek “nostos” – a theme used in Ancient Greek literature most notably in the recently reimagined Odyssey, involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away. Nostalgia reveals the deep longing for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever. But it isn’t all it’s cracked out to be, and, indeed, can bring out the worst in us, becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.
A cowboy key – how the west was sung. My riding days are over, but I have been into westerns all my life, and the songs inspired by them – in films, musicals and popular song, from ghostly herds to outlaw chic, Frankie Laing to Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift. And, as a onetime musician myself, I have, back in days gone by, penned songs in a cowboy key.
McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain. How an eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series made an indelible impression on an impressionable twenty year old who remains mightily impressed with this song by Britain’s high priest of angst.
The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. “Fast forwaranother century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more” attending the wedding of an old pal held in an old pub in the heart of Ireland. Getting there, we’d done a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Inis Córthaid (my mother’s hometown), Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion … I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee, the song-lines of my Celtic twilight.
About the creator of this blog
Paul Hemphill is a British-born Australian songwriter, poet, and blogger.
Once upon a time, he was an accountant by profession, a manager, mentor and mediator. A long-time resident of Sydney, he is now living in the middle of the forest on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he spends much of his time in the great outdoors.
His interests include music, poetry, politics and history. He has had a lifelong passion for the history, politics and people of the Middle East. Over the years, through study and travel, he has acquired a working knowledge of standard and colloquial Arabic.
Listen to some of Paul’s songs on SoundCloud and YouTube. Search under Paul Hemphill or HuldreFolk (but ignore the Flemish death metal band of the same name). He has assembled seven volumes of poetry and verse, and these can be read on this blog.
History is rarely as tidy as the stories we tell about it. Places acquire names long before they acquire nations; peoples inherit memories they did not themselves create; languages, religions and identities change without ever quite erasing what came before. Palestine may be one of the world’s most conspicuous examples of this historical palimpsest, a place where ancient geography, successive civilisations and modern national identities have become so entangled that disentangling them can itself seem political.
That is partly why I have always valued William Dalrymple. He is a historian who understands that the past is inhabited by people, not merely populated by dates and events. His recent conversation about Palestine prompted me to revisit not only what he said, but what he left unsaid: the complicated process by which a population became a people, a geographical name acquired a modern national meaning, and history became memory – and memory, in turn, became identity.
It also led me back to a broader fascination of mine: the relationship between history, travel and place, and to writers who understand that landscapes are not backdrops to history but repositories of it.
The featured image at the head of this post? When last In Ramallah, de facto administrative “capital” of that part of the West Bank governed by the Palestinian Authority – Area A of the Oslo dispensation – we visited the cultural centre of Dar Zahran, a beautifully restored Ottoman house just south of the city. By fortunate serendipity, Dar Zahran was hosting a small exhibition of paintings by the late Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout. This large painting pictures the skyline of Jerusalem – Al Quds with its mosques and churches and the infinite variety of the Palestinian people, was front and centre. [In In That Howling Infinite, see Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]
Talking about Palestine and Palestinians
There are some historians whose books I buy almost automatically. British historian William Dalrymple is one of them. I have read many of his works over the years, from his debut, In Xanadu, through From the Holy Mountain, The Last Mughal, Return of a King and The Anarchy (see, in In That Howling Infinite, Bad company – how Britain conquered India, the story of the rise and fall of the notoriously rapacious British East India Company).
Dalrymple is well-educated, well-read, and well-travelled, having had his boots on the ground and its dust on those boots. He is what we call a “popular” historian and not an academic in the narrow sense, writing with enthusiasm, empathy, and the authority of someone who has visited the places he describes. And, to borrow from Bob Dylan, he knows his song well before he starts singing. His aim, refreshingly, is to educate, not to inculcate.
What has always appealed to me is not simply the depth of his scholarship but his refusal to become anyone’s court historian. His admirers come from different directions, and his critics do too. The old Empire loyalists dislike him because he writes unflinchingly about the violence and arrogance of imperialism. Progressives often embrace him for precisely that reason, yet they, too, sometimes seem disappointed when he refuses to enlist in their causes. Dalrymple has always struck me as someone who hoes his own row. He follows the evidence where it leads rather than where his audience might wish it to go.
That quality was on full display in his recent interview with Palestinian journalist and British resident Ahmed Alnaouq on the chat show Palestine Deep Dive, discussing his forthcoming, and as yet unfinished, book on the Palestinians. I encourage reader to take the time to watch the video below before reading the detailed appraisal that follows; but the time poor may nevertheless find it of interest.
To anyone familiar with the history of the region, little of the story itself is unfamiliar. Nor, contrary to some popular assumptions, has this history been ignored by Israeli historians. Ilan Pappé’s A History of Modern Palestine remains one of the best examples of a history that restores Palestinians to the centre of their own story, particularly those who rarely appear in conventional political histories: the villagers who cultivated the land, often on estates owned by absentee urban families or tribal elites who harvested much of the wealth.
That, perhaps, is the real significance of Dalrymple’s project. It belongs not simply to Middle Eastern history but to the much broader revolution that historians call social history. For centuries history was largely the story of rulers, wars, dynasties and diplomacy. Ordinary people appeared only fleetingly. Their lives belonged, if anywhere, to anthropology or sociology. Only relatively recently have historians begun asking what history looked like from the fields rather than the palaces.
Yet there is another trap which Dalrymple carefully avoids.
It has become fashionable to speak of the inhabitants of Palestine as though they constituted an unchanged people stretching seamlessly from biblical times until today. That is no more convincing than similar claims made by almost any nation.
Palestine has always been one of the great crossroads of civilisation. Long before the Philistines and the Hebrews there were other peoples. Afterwards came Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and countless others, accompanied not merely by armies but by settlers, merchants, pilgrims, labourers and refugees. Even in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, economic opportunity attracted migrants from throughout the Levant. The Suez Canal, the expansion of Haifa, the Hauran railway, and later British infrastructure projects all drew workers from neighbouring lands. Family names such as al-Misri, al-Shami, Homsi and Halabi quietly preserve those journeys.
And yet Dalrymple is equally correct when he points to the growing body of genetic evidence demonstrating profound continuities across the centuries. Human populations do not simply replace one another like changing tenants. They absorb, intermingle and endure. DNA reveals not racial purity but remarkable persistence.
One aspect of the interview that particularly caught my attention was Dalrymple’s discussion of religion – not as an immutable badge of identity but as another thread in the long weaving of Palestinian society. Conversion, he observed, was rarely a single dramatic event. More often it was gradual, pragmatic and deeply human. Families embraced Christianity under Byzantine rule, Islam under the Caliphates and the Ottomans, sometimes from conviction, sometimes because new rulers brought new opportunities, and often because children simply inherited the world into which they were born. Nor was the movement one way. Jews became Christians; Christians became Muslims; communities adapted over centuries rather than changing overnight.
Language followed much the same path. Arabic became not merely the language of religion but of administration, commerce, literature and everyday life. It gradually supplanted earlier tongues without erasing the peoples who spoke them. Identity, like language itself, accumulated layer upon layer.
His brief reference to Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab particularly caught my attention because I suspect it offers an important clue to the intellectual architecture of the book he is writing Rapoport’s central thesis is that peoples are not born fully formed; they become. It exercised a profound influence on my own essay One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. See also, Becoming Arab … the myth of fingerprints
There is a quiet subversiveness in Becoming Arab because it quietly removes the ladder that every competing nationalism insists upon climbing. By demonstrating that Arab identity in medieval Palestine emerged through a long process of linguistic, cultural and social transformation rather than existing unchanged since antiquity, Rapoport undermines the comforting assumption that any modern national identity is primordial and immutable. The implication extends well beyond Palestinians. Jews, too, have continually reinvented themselves through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. Israelis and Palestinians alike remain peoples in the making.
Belonging, then, rests less upon ancient blood than upon lived continuity, accumulated memory and attachment to place. Rapoport gently redirects us away from the sterile question, “Who was here first?”, towards the infinitely richer question, “How do people come to belong?” It is an insight I have found equally illuminating when thinking about the British, the Americans, and even the tangled histories of Russians and Ukrainians. It also underpins what I have elsewhere called the “myth of fingerprints”: the mistaken belief that nations possess fixed and immutable identities when, in truth, every people is a palimpsest, written and rewritten over centuries without ever completely erasing what came before.
Dalrymple also highlighted the remarkable role of churches and monasteries across successive eras – Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and British. They were far more than places of worship. They were centres of learning, repositories of manuscripts, guardians of memory and, eventually, pioneers of modern education. During the Mandate years, Christian schools became among the first institutions to embrace European models of education. It is therefore hardly surprising that Christian Arabs were disproportionately represented among the intellectual architects of both Arab nationalism and the emerging Palestinian national movement. This, too, complicates the modern tendency to reduce the story to a simple contest between Jews and Muslims. The reality, as always, is richer and more textured.
Dalrymple’s passing reference to George Antonius was equally telling. Antonius remains one of the most poignant figures of the Mandate years. Urbane, multilingual and deeply cultivated, he believed there remained a path towards accommodation between Arab and Jewish aspirations. Alongside moderates such as Musa Alami, he searched for political middle ground as extremism steadily crowded out compromise. Increasingly isolated, distrusted by radicals on both sides and ultimately ignored by the great powers, he watched the possibility of reconciliation slip away. He died in Jerusalem in 1942, disappointed and politically alone. There is something profoundly melancholy about his story. Men such as Antonius devoted their lives to preventing the catastrophe that would later be remembered as the Nakba. History tends to remember the militants, the revolutionaries and the generals; it is far less generous to the moderates who failed. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it is often those failed moderates who seem to have understood the coming tragedy most clearly. [See The first Intifada … Palestine 1936]
There is, however, a significant historical link missing from Dalrymple’s account.
To speak of Palestinians as a people with a distinctive heritage, history and culture is entirely legitimate, but it also raises the prior question of when and how that collective identity emerged. The people we now call Palestinians did not arrive in Palestine as a discrete nation from elsewhere; they emerged over centuries from the settled populations of the region, predominantly Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians alongside smaller Jewish and other communities, whose identities under Ottoman rule were more likely to be local, familial, religious, Ottoman or broadly Arab than specifically Palestinian. A modern Palestinian national consciousness crystallised only in the late nineteenth and, more decisively, the first half of the twentieth century, amid the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, British rule, Zionist immigration and the intensifying struggle over the land.
Nor should “Palestine” itself be confused with a Palestinian nation: the name is far older, deriving ultimately from Greek and Roman Palaestina and subsequently used in various forms by Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and European writers; under the Ottomans, the territory was not a sovereign province or nation-state called Palestine but was divided among administrative districts. None of this makes Palestinian identity artificial. Like most modern national identities, it is both modern and genuine, rooted in an older population and a deeply layered attachment to place.
Perhaps Dalrymple simply takes this history as read. More likely, it is unmentioned because the interviewer did not ask about it. He does write about it in a piece published in The Guardian in August 2025 (republished below). But his readers and particularly an audience hearing a relatively compressed interview – may not. When the process by which a people acquired a modern national identity is left unstated, audiences tend to fill the gap with their own assumptions: some hearing an ancient, continuous Palestinian nation, others an identity recently invented from nothing. Both are historical distortions. The point is not to diminish Palestinian peoplehood but to locate it accurately: between the much older history of the land and the modern political history that transformed its inhabitants into distinct national communities.
As with Israeli identity, Palestinian identity belongs to the modern age while drawing upon memories, attachments, communities and histories that are considerably older. That distinction is essential if the Palestinian story is to be understood rather than simply enlisted in one of the competing narratives of the conflict.
It was telling that, despite repeated invitations from his interviewer, Dalrymple steadfastly refused to enter the contemporary ideological battlefield. He would not be drawn into pronouncements about settler colonialism, the legitimacy of Israel or competing national claims. He remained a historian.
Dalrymple displayed the same intellectual discipline when discussion turned towards the future. His interviewer clearly hoped he would venture predictions. He declined. Historians, he observed, can tell us what happened; they are far less qualified to say what will happen. The future delights in making fools of prophets.
Anthony Eden supposedly reduced politics to three words: “Events, dear boy, events.” Orwell supplied the darker warning through the Ministry of Truth: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That remains one of the great cautions against allowing history to become merely another instrument of political mobilisation. Less bleakly, Robert Fisk – another writer I greatly admired – offered the wisest answer of all: “My crystal ball is broken.” Those who confidently predict the future almost invariably discover that history has other ideas. [See The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue ]
One curiosity remained with me after the interview. Dalrymple remarked upon young Israeli soldiers carrying rifles almost everywhere, yet the obvious question went unexplored: why? I have wondered about this myself ever since my first visit to Israel. I can still picture my late friend Avi’s rifle standing against the hallway wall in his parents’ home in Ramat Gan after he returned from reserve duty during the 1973 war. On my most recent visit I asked Israelis directly. Unless a weapon can be securely stored, soldiers are required to keep it with them. Our friend Shmuel’s son, serving as an army medic, once absent-mindedly left his rifle on a military bus after an exhausting exercise. His reward was several weeks in military prison. What appears to outsiders as a symbol of militarisation is, to many Israelis, simply one more expression of a society shaped by permanent insecurity.
Dalrymple also refers to the annual Jerusalem Day march, an event that commemorates the IDF’s capture of the Old City in June 1967 and the “unification” of the city. We happened to witness similar scenes ourselves near the Western Wall only days beforehand. They were ugly, confronting and impossible to dismiss as merely social media caricature.
I look forward to reading the finished book. Not because I expect it to settle the argument—history almost never does—but because the best historians enlarge rather than narrow our understanding. They remind us that identities are not fossils buried in the earth waiting to be excavated, but living things, fashioned over centuries by conquest and coexistence, faith and language, migration and memory. They leave us with fewer slogans and more questions; fewer certainties and greater humility. In an age increasingly addicted to binaries, that may be the most subversive act of all.
Travelers’ tales
There is a thread that runs through much of my writing, though I did not always recognise it at the time. It is a thread woven from history, travel, memory and place, and it connects figures as seemingly disparate as Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They are very different writers, with different perspectives and different temperaments, but they share a quality that I have always valued: they do not simply describe places; they allow places to speak.
During my early encounters with the history and culture of the Middle East at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – the “Madrasat al-Jawāsīs”, the “School of Spies”, as Arab friends would jokingly call it – I became fascinated by a trio of British writers whose books transported me into the worlds they described.described. Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Jan Morris each approached the region differently, yet all possessed that rare ability to convey not merely information but atmosphere: the smells of markets, the rhythms of streets, the weight of history embedded in landscapes.
Jan Morris was perhaps the greatest exponent of this art. Her genius was not merely as a chronicler of empire, nor simply as a travel writer, but as someone who understood that places possess personalities. She once wrote, “All my life I have felt in places, in landscapes as in cities, an allure that seems to me actually sexual, purer but no less exciting than the sexuality of the body.” It is a remarkable observation because it captures something that many travellers experience but few can articulate: that certain landscapes exert a pull beyond geography, that cities and countries can possess a kind of emotional and even sensual presence.
Bell, the archaeologist, traveller and administrator sometimes called the “Queen of the Desert”, was present at the creation of the modern Middle East after the First World War. Stark travelled through the region in the middle decades of the twentieth century, recording a world already beginning to disappear. James Morris, later Jan Morris, chronicled the rise and decline of British imperial confidence and the uncertain transition into a post-imperial age.
What makes Jan Morris such a fascinating figure is that her personal transformation occurred alongside the transformation of Britain itself. The end of Empire and the discovery of a new identity unfolded in parallel. The writer who chronicled the fading grandeur of British power was also undergoing a profound reimagining of self. Her Pax Britannica trilogy remains an extraordinary work, though it is also deeply complicated. Morris’s relationship with empire was neither a simple condemnation nor an uncomplicated celebration. She recognised its violence and arrogance, yet she was also fascinated by its energy, ambition and sense of adventure. Empire, in her telling, was a vast human drama: magnificent, destructive, creative and cruel.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 represented the moment when that imperial illusion finally collapsed. Morris described it as a kind of tombstone for British power and a crisis of British masculinity. The old confidence had disappeared. The imperial actor who had once imagined himself striding across the world stage was suddenly confronted with his own limitations. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging,” she wrote. “Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.” That insight resonates far beyond Britain. History repeatedly teaches us that identities and institutions which appear permanent are often temporary arrangements. Empires, nations and cultures are not fixed monuments but living things, constantly being reshaped by events.
This is why William Dalrymple’s work has always appealed to me. Like Morris, he understands that history is not simply about dates, battles and rulers. It is about people in places. His great strength is that he belongs to no faction. He follows the evidence, and he makes his own judgments. He resists the temptation to reduce history to contemporary political arguments. Instead, he explored the deeper processes by which societies and identities emerge.
As we have noted above, his observations intersect with Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab, a work that has greatly influenced my own thinking. Rapoport challenges the assumption that national identities are ancient, fixed and immutable. Arab identity in Palestine, he argues, emerged through centuries of linguistic, cultural and social development. This does not diminish Palestinian identity; rather, it explains how all identities are formed.
The same applies elsewhere. Jewish identity has also evolved through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. British identity, American identity, Russian identity and Ukrainian identity are all products of history rather than timeless inheritances. Peoples are not fingerprints stamped permanently into existence. They are palimpsests, written and rewritten across generations, retaining traces of what came before while continually becoming something new.
This is also why Dalrymple’s observations about religion are significant. Faith, like language, is not simply inherited unchanged through the centuries. Communities converted, adapted and transformed. Jews became Christians, Christians became Muslims, and Arabic gradually became the dominant language of administration, commerce and culture. Churches and monasteries served not only as places of worship but as centres of learning and memory. During the British Mandate, as we have noted above, Christian schools were among the pioneers of modern education, and Christian Arabs played a disproportionately important role in the development of Arab nationalism and Palestinian political consciousness.
Again, the lesson is one of complexity. The history of Palestine cannot be reduced to simple categories. It is a story of migration and continuity, faith and adaptation, conflict and coexistence.
A personal coda
I make no comparison between my own experiences and those of writers such as Morris or Dalrymple, who devoted years of their lives to the places they studied. My own travels have been measured in days and weeks rather than prolonged residence, and I possess neither their linguistic gifts nor their local knowledge. Yet they have taught me some of the same lessons.
Over the years I have wandered through mosques and basilicas, monasteries and synagogues, castles and catacombs, museums and markets. I have traced the layers of history in weathered stones, walked streets that have changed little for centuries, and watched successive civilisations leave their marks upon the same landscape. Everywhere, the faces, languages and faiths have reminded me that history is one of mixture rather than purity, continuity rather than replacement. it is this extraordinary diversity that makes these lands so compelling.
Israel and Palestine affected me more deeply than almost anywhere else. I have read widely, but books can only take one so far. I have stood at checkpoints, seen the separation barrier close up and, witnessed the daily inconveniences, restrictions and humiliations that accompany life under occupation. Equally, I have spoken with Israelis and Palestinians whose lives have been shaped by generations of fear and insecurity, and come to understand, even if not always to agree with, the fears that underpin so many aspects of everyday life. By design, good fortune or simple caution, I have never witnessed the violence itself. But I have seen enough to understand that both peoples live with histories that cannot simply be dismissed.
Travel has not made me an idealist, nor has it turned me into a partisan. If anything, it has left me increasingly suspicious of certainties. The longer one spends amidst places where history is layered one civilisation upon another, the harder it becomes to accept simple stories about pure origins, immutable identities, uniquely righteous causes, and uncomplicated heroes and villains. Reality is almost always more complicated – and more human – than that.
Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of writers like Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They remind us that landscapes have longer memories than nations, that stones often preserve truths that politics attempts to conceal, and that history is rarely a straight line. It is a conversation across centuries, written by countless hands.
In the forward to East – an Arab anthology, republished below, I wrote: “these are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude”. Their histories are “carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone”. And perhaps that is why they continue to draw us back: because beneath every empire, every ideology and every argument lie the enduring traces of ordinary human beings who lived, loved, fought, worshipped and dreamed in the same places we walk today.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
In these troubled times, I look back on a part of the world that has captivated much of my intellectual life. I was drawn to the Middle East in another age, when it was the land of myth and magic, of dreamers and adventurers, of quixotic tilters at windmills, of pioneers who would make the deserts bloom, of dissemblers and deceivers bearing false promises. The ancient lands of the Bible, the fabled realm of A Thousand and One Nights, the restless quests of Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, and TE Lawrence; the pulp-fiction fantasies of Frank Herbert, James Michener, and Leon Uris; the celluloid myths of Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Paul Newman.
These are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here since time immemorial. We still see the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We can chart their decline and fall in monuments and mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs,” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines.” Histories carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone, as “canyons and castles pass ageless and ageing and captive in time.”
I first travelled through these lands when the gaze of our Western world was directed elsewhere. The big stories then were the Vietnam quagmire and the Cold War, words made flesh when Brezhnev’s Red Army euthanised the Prague Spring – much as Nikita Kruschev crushed Hungary’s short lived revolution a decade earlier. Then plucky little Israel – that’s how the world viewed the Jewish state back in the day – made its pre-emptive blitzkrieg against the braggadocio of Egypt, and the dubious martial prowess of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and put the Middle East back in the news again.
And there it has stayed, with hijackings, hostages, terrorism, the Oil Crisis and OPEC, civil war and invasion in Lebanon, Gulf Wars One, Two, and Three, the Twin Towers, the Wars of American Vengeance. And so to the present day, the brief Arab Spring giving way to a long and bloody Arab Winter, and the demolition of the Sykes-Picot dispensation with Daish’s redrawing of the map of the Middle East, the Abraham Accords with their promise of Arab-Israeli “normalisation” – an opaque and controversial word in this box canyon of false hopes – the fall of the Assad regime and the prospect of a revived Syria, and, in the endgame of many Israeli incursions into Hamas’ Gaza autocracy, the pogrom of October 7 and Israel’s biblical vengeance.
There is a place for dissertations on the state of the world and the tectonic movements that continue to reverberate and ricochet through these most antique of lands. And this is not one. But they have been the inspiration for much of my writing, and this volume is an anthology of those pieces. And unavoidably, they reflect and comment upon ideas and incidents, actions and accidents, memories and monuments.
I wear the weave of history like a second skin, as though each stone, each ruin, each sun-baked wadi, each vibrant soul has pressed itself into my being. As the Irish novelist John Banville wrote, “the past beats inside me like a second heart,” and in these lands, it beats with a particular resonance – ancient and immediate, mythic and human. The Middle East is not merely a subject of study or a theatre for politics; it is a history and geography I have walked through, a landscape I have viewed, a culture I have carried with me in the dust of its deserts, in the sounds and scents of its streets, in the quiet of its mosques, churches and synagogues, and its ruins.
My poems and songs have mirrored what I have carried in memory, and carry still. The cadence of markets and mosques, the call to prayer, the silence of the canyons. the desert wind, remind me that these lands live not only in history books but in lived, sung, remembered experience of all who have passed through They recall centuries of triumph and loss. The past is not distant; it rises in waves, song lines across stone and sand, linking the footsteps of pilgrims, soldiers, merchants, and wanderers with my own.
I know the Old Cities of Jerusalem and Damascus like my own neighbourhood. I’ve promenaded down the Street Called Straight and the Suq Al Hammadiyeh many times; shopped in the ancient Aleppo Souk – before it was destroyed; walked though the deserted Dead Cities of the North – which became later refuge for the homeless; climbed the Masada massif twice, once in the full heat of high summer, and again one time in predawn darkness to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea and Moab; traveled overland through the Judean Desert to the old monastery of Mar Saba Stood; stood atop the battlements of Krak de Chevaliers; slept a ledge overlooking Petra, the Rose City and walked the Siq both ways three times; rode in a jeep through the canyons of Wadi Rum; traveled on the famous Nairn Express from Damascus to Baghdad, and an old bus through the Khyber Pass; stood by the Euphrates at Babylon, the Nile at Karnak, and the Ganges at burning ghat of Varenesi; visited Palmyra and watched the sunset atop Qala’at Fakhe al Din al Ma’ani.
All of these, now memories, carry the stories of centuries: the echo of prophets, conquerors, poets, and common folk whose lives have risen and fallen in patterns invisible yet inscribed in every wall, every minaret, every crumbling mosaic. The present weighs upon them as heavily as the past: geopolitics, ideology, oil, invasion, and resistance all leave their marks, mingling with the dust of empires long gone. Yet amid it all, the pulse of life persists—bright, stubborn, and singin – reminding me that beauty and despair coexist in ways the mind alone can scarcely contain.
These lands, as I first knew them, were the lands of story, legend, and lore; of pilgrims and explorers; of warriors and sages. And now, reading, writing and singing their echoes through books, prose and verse, I understand that memory, imagination, and presence are inseparable. One cannot approach the Middle East without the awareness that history is embodied, tactile, insistent: in the sun upon skin, the dust on boots, the voices of markets, mosques, and alleys, and in the pull of ruins that hold the ghosts of kings and commoners alike.
Writing about the Middle East, I am reminded that story, song, and memory intertwine. The poems and songs I carry are part of this landscape, as much as the stones and winds themselves, shaping how I see, feel, and reflect. Their cadence is my compass, their imagery my guide, the echoes, the pulse of lands that refuse abstraction. Here, history and the present are inseparable; the past is alive in the dust, the stone, the sun, and the song.
I wear its dust, I carry its past, I feel its presence. In prose and in song, in memory and in presence, I am tethered to these lands. And in this tethering, I find the resonance that drives the writing in this anthology: an awareness of the Middle East not as a distant object but as a living, breathing interlocutor, shaping thought, reflection, and imagination with the weight, warmth, and insistence of centuries.
“I’d like to think that perhaps it is something intrinsically part of my software – an ability to adapt, accept, empathize, and, as far as it is indeed possible for a stranger, to become one with the scenery and slip into the machinery, and, to put it bluntly, take it all at face value. As a “stranger in a strange land”, I accepted what I saw, observed, heard and learned, moved on – to quote American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti – like “a mirror walking down a strange street’. For this is how I traveled in those roving years, leaving very little by way of words and pictures of my travelling. All I saw, heard, observed, felt and learned was mostly stashed away on my own, internal hard-drive to be accessed in latter years – waiting, perhaps, for the advent of social media, blogs and highly portable electronic devices”.
In October 2025, William Dalrymple wrote this fine piece on the long, entangled history of Gaza in The Guardian, publicizing a forthcoming multi-episode series on his excellent Empire podcast. He wrote of how the territory’s ancient heritage has too often been ignored. As we mourn incalculable human losses, learning about its past can help us better understand the present
As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.
Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.
Gaza was first referenced as a strategic prize in an Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE, where it is referred to as Ghazzati. It is also one of the most fought-over and contested spaces: for more than 4,000 years this area has been an ethnically mixed crossroads, linking Africa with Asia, and the desert with the Mediterranean. It has also been a crucial strategic and economic hub: an often incredibly rich and prosperous port from which the spices, incense, perfumes and wines of western Asia were exported to Greece and Rome, the end of the caravan route from Arabia via Petra. As well as a fortress guarding the strategically crucial route leading from the eastern Mediterranean coastline to Egypt.
Travellers who visited Gaza over the centuries have often remarked on the fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture, both of which are the products of its underground waters and theMediterranean climate. It is this that enabled Gaza to grow the excellent grapes that for many centuries were made into a much celebrated sweet wine, the Château d’Yquem of the classical world. An exhibition of the salvaged antiquities of Gaza currently showing at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris opens with a fabulous display of the distinctive “torpedo jars” in which the Gazans exported their wine. As late as the sixth century AD, these amphorae were reaching both Merovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England.
Each successive power in the Middle East has always wanted to own Gaza, and to conquer it, and over the centuries we hear of a succession of empires – first the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and later the Umayyads, Mamluks, Turks and the British – coming through and fighting to seize it. More difficult to see in the chronicles of conquests and sieges are the locals who have always lived hereabouts, century after century, whose faith has slowly evolved from paganism to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, and whose dominant language has moved from Aramaic to Greek then from Greek to Arabic.
Archaeology shows that the DNA of the different peoples who lived here has remained fairly consistent throughout the centuries: the modern inhabitants of this land, both Jewish and Palestinian, share much the same mix of DNA groups as the peoples who lived here in the bronze age, and whose skeletons have been tested in contemporary labs. The small Samaritan and Palestinian Christian minorities, the latter descendants of the first Christians, exhibit genetic patterns that are especially close to those extracted from ancient skeletons.
Although the town remained a robust centre of paganism long after many other cities in the region, its beachfront was also the home to the earliest monasteries of Palestine, as followers of St Antony of Egypt migrated there bringing the monastic movement to the Levant; soon “the desert became a city” as monasteries sprang up across the region. In 406 the Empress Eudoxia provided the funds for a cathedral for Gaza, and by the end of the sixth century, the celebrated church of St Sergius was built.
The Arab conquest used to be considered a major turning point in the region’s history, but according to many historians and archaeologists who specialise in this period, the conquest is almost invisible archaeologically. Surviving documents from the period indicate that for many years after, Gaza continued as an administrative centre of the region, and Greek-speaking Christians continued to run the bureaucracy. The son and grandson of two of the early chancellors of the Ummayad Caliphs, St John of Damascus, ended his life in the monastery of Mar Saba not very far from Gaza in the Judean desert. In time, the inhabitants of Palestine accepted the language, government and religion of their new masters; but it was a gradual process of transition, over many centuries, not a sudden catastrophic end of civilisation. The Arab conquerors were a small military elite; the local people remained much the same.
The site of Saint Hilarion monastery, Deir al-Balah, June 8, 2022. Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty
Gaza continued to flourish through the Crusader period, when it was given over to the Knights Templar to guard the frontier with Egypt; and even more so after the Mamluks expelled the Crusaders and filled Gaza with fine mosques and caravanserais. During the Ottoman period, Jaffa and Acre took over from Gaza as the most prosperous ports of the region, out of which Galilee cotton and Jaffa oranges were exported; but Gaza remained an important regional centre.
Gaza was the place where the Ottoman army made its stand against the British in the first world war. Here many of the same Ottoman troops who had defeated the British at Gallipoli again held their trenches against a mixed British, Indian and Anzac force, heading north from Egypt, armed with shells tipped with poison gas and the Middle East’s first tanks, shipped over from the Western Front in the hope of a breakthrough. It was only thanks to the flanking movement of the Anzac and Bikaner camel cavalry under General Allenby that Ottoman lines finally fell, at the third battle of Gaza at the beginning of November 1917. On 2 November, the Balfour Declaration was issued in London, changing the future of the territory for ever. By the end of 1948 Gaza was home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the Nakba.
Though Gaza now dominates news bulletins for the worst reasons, it is a place about which we have traditionally learned remarkably little; we are not taught its story in movies or TV documentaries, let alone as part of formal education. Yet it is something we obviously badly need to know in order to grasp current events.
This month sees the publication of several new books addressing that absence. As well as the catalogue of the brilliant Paris exhibition, Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5,000 ans d’histoire (Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History) historian Anne Irfan has just produced an excellent primer, A Short History of the Gaza Strip, while Jean-Pierre Filiu has published a supplement to his wonderfulGaza: A History, called A Historian in Gaza. In it, he writes: “The Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.”All three count as essential reading for those hungry to know more about this ancient territory so as to better understand the current, desperate chapter in its history.
A Short History of the Gaza Strip by Anne Irfan (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
A Historian in Gaza by Jean-Pierre Filiu (C Hurst & Co Publishers, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
History has a habit of turning up unexpectedly in everyday life.
Some fifteen years ago, a muso friend of ours told us about his family’s Greek origins in Ottoman Smyrna. We were in the Black Sheep wine bar in King Street, Newtown, sitting down with a Greek Australian who’d just finished a great set of blues and soul standards talking about events that occurred almost a century earlier. Nationality, language, religion and ancestry did not always fit the neat boxes into which the twentieth century subsequently tried to place them.
We visited Smyrna – now modern İzmir – in May 2014. We walked along the harbourside promenade, looked across the Aegean Sea, and took photographs that we sent them to our friend. They were ordinary holiday snaps, in one sense: the waterfront, the sea, the city behind us. But they carried something else with them. We were standing in a place from which his Greek forebears, had once looked towards the same water in circumstances unimaginably different from ours.
It is one of the peculiarities of history that the past can sometimes feel closer through a family anecdote or a photograph than through a library full of books. The old cliché about history leaving fingerprints is, perhaps, not entirely a cliché. Places retain traces of people who have gone, even when almost nothing visible remains of the communities that once inhabited them.
Smyrna is an especially powerful example.
It was once an Ancient Greek city located at a strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and was actually two successive settlements: Old Smyrna, founded around the 11th century BC as an Aeolian settlement before being taken over and developed by the Ionians during the Archaic Period, and Smyrna proper, the new city founded from the 4th century BC onward, whose establishment is associated with Alexander the Great. Due to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence, and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence, reaching metropolitan proportions under the Roman Empire, with most of its surviving remains dating from that era, largely following reconstruction after a 2nd-century AD earthquake. Since 1930, the city’s official name has been İzmir.
Modern Izmir, May 2014
In September 1922, the city’s waterfront became the final refuge of tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian civilians as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and violence and fire engulfed its Christian quarters. Within a few years, the overwhelmingly Greek character of one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean had largely disappeared. But Smyrna was not the beginning of this story. It was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
The story reaches backwards through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman-Russian conflicts, the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s, the First World War and the destruction of Armenian and Assyrian communities, and forwards through the Greek Turkish and War, the Treaty of Lausanne and the compulsory exchange of populations. It is a story of imperial collapse and national self-determination, but also of refugees, massacres, deportations, competing territorial claims and the brutal desire of emerging nation-states to make populations conform to political borders.
It is therefore tempting to reduce it to a morality tale. There is certainly no shortage of moral horror in the record. But moral judgement and historical explanation are not alternatives. The challenge is to understand how a multi-ethnic empire that had survived for centuries gave way, through war and revolution, to a collection of more nationally defined states — and why that transformation was accompanied by such extraordinary human suffering.
That is the longer story of Smyrna, and of the Ottoman endgame.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
Smyrna and the Ottoman Endgame
In September 1922, the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna became the final, terrible act in a drama that had been unfolding for more than a decade. The city’s waterfront filled with Greek and Armenian refugees as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and Christian neighbourhoods were engulfed by fire. Behind them lay the ruins of communities that had existed in Anatolia for centuries; ahead was the Aegean and, for many, an uncertain escape to Greece.
The familiar account of Smyrna begins here, with the fire, the refugees and the ships of the Allied powers lying offshore, apparently unable or unwilling to intervene in one of the final acts in a war that they had effectively lost. But history did not begin in Smyrna. Nor did the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities begin with Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement. To understand what happened in 1922, one has to go back through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman defeat in the First World War and, before that, the increasingly violent crisis of the Ottoman state’s relations with its subject peoples.
This is the broader story told, with considerable geographical and archival range, by Sean McMeekin in The Ottoman Endgame. It is also the story exploredin In That Howling Infinite’s The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye : the dissolution of an empire was not a single event but a succession of wars, revolutions, occupations, expulsions and attempts at national reconstruction. The First World War was the central episode, but it was also part of a much longer Ottoman endgame.
The wars before the war
It is convenient to imagine Europe as peaceful until August 1914. It was not. The Ottoman Empire had already been fighting for its survival.
Italy went to war with the Ottomans in 1911, seizing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the territories that became Libya. Then came the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, in which the Ottoman Empire lost almost all its remaining European territories. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro expanded at Ottoman expense, while Albania emerged as an independent state. Romania, often included rather casually in this account, was already an independent kingdom, although it acquired territory from Bulgaria after the Second Balkan War.
The Balkan Wars were particularly important because they demonstrated what the disintegration of a multinational empire could mean in an age of nationalism. Armies advanced, borders changed and populations moved. Christians were expelled from territories conquered by Muslim powers and Muslims were expelled from territories conquered by Christian states. Villages were destroyed, civilians massacred and refugees displaced on a large scale. The demographic transformation of the Balkans was already underway before the First World War began.
This matters because the later violence in Anatolia did not occur in a political vacuum. Ottoman Muslims, many of them themselves refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, had seen their homes and communities disappear. The Ottoman state increasingly came to regard the survival of its Muslim population as a matter of national security. At the same time, Christian minorities – particularly Armenians and Greeks – increasingly looked beyond the empire towards their own national movements and, in some cases, to foreign powers.
The result was a vicious feedback loop. Nationalism encouraged separatism; separatism encouraged repression; repression encouraged further separatism. War made the whole process considerably worse.
Armenians and the First World War
The Armenian catastrophe has to be treated separately from what happened to the Greeks and Assyrians, although there were connections between them.
The massacres of Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1894–96 were already a warning of what could happen when imperial authority, Muslim majoritarian sentiment and fears of territorial disintegration collided. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in massacres and associated violence. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 initially raised hopes of a more constitutional and inclusive Ottoman order, but those hopes deteriorated rapidly as the empire suffered military defeat, territorial losses and political crisis.
When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914 on the side of Germany and the other Central Powers, the Armenian question acquired an altogether more dangerous dimension. Ottoman forces were fighting Russia in the Caucasus, and some Armenian organisations and volunteers did indeed cooperate with the Russians. Armenian soldiers fought in Russian formations, while armed Armenian groups operated behind Ottoman lines. Ottoman fears of an Armenian fifth column were therefore not entirely invented.
But this context does not explain what followed, still less justify it.
In 1915 the Committee of Union and Progress government – what we know as The Young Turks (now a common term to describe ambitious young upstarts) – began the systematic deportation of Ottoman Armenians. Armenian political and community leaders were arrested and killed. Men were separated from their families and frequently murdered. Women, children and the elderly were deported southwards, many towards the Syrian desert. Deportation became a mechanism of destruction.
The death toll remains debated in detail, as such figures inevitably are, but the broad historical conclusion is not seriously in doubt: hundreds of thousands, probably well over a million Armenians, died through massacre, deportation, starvation, disease, exposure and deliberate deprivation. Many women and children were forcibly converted or absorbed into Muslim households. Sexual assault was commonplace. Armenian property was confiscated. An ancient community was not merely displaced; its institutional, demographic and economic foundations were systematically dismantled.
The Ottoman government and its successors have contested the term genocide and have emphasised the extraordinary circumstances of wartime collapse, Armenian collaboration with Russia and the deaths of Muslim civilians. Those Muslim deaths were real and often horrific. But they do not negate the evidence for the organised deportation and destruction of the Armenians. Nor does acknowledging Armenian collaboration with Russia turn an entire ethnic population into a legitimate military target.
The same period brought massacres and deportations of Assyrian Christians in southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. The historical record is less comprehensive than for the Armenians, but the destruction of Assyrian communities belongs to the same wider story of wartime demographic violence.
The Greek catastrophe was different – and connected
The fate of the Ottoman Greeks followed a somewhat different chronology.
Greeks had lived throughout the Ottoman domains for centuries. In Anatolia they were concentrated particularly along the Aegean and Black Sea “Pontic” coasts, but Greek communities were also found in the interior. They were not simply recent immigrants or colonial settlers. They were part of the social and economic fabric of the late Ottoman Empire.
During the First World War, some Greek communities were deported or otherwise subjected to coercion and violence. In the Pontic region of the Black Sea, Greek nationalists and armed groups also became involved in conflict with Ottoman authorities and later with Turkish nationalists. The question of Greek communities in Anatolia consequently became entangled with the wider struggle over what would replace the Ottoman Empire.
The decisive change came after the Ottoman defeat.
The Armistice of Mudros in October 1918 effectively ended Ottoman participation in the war. Allied forces occupied strategic parts of the empire, including Constantinople. The victorious powers then contemplated a drastic settlement of Ottoman territory. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 proposed a severely truncated Ottoman state and envisaged Greek control or influence over substantial parts of western Anatolia.
The Greek military landing at Smyrna in May 1919 was therefore not an isolated act of Greek aggression. It occurred within the post-war Allied occupation and with Allied approval. Greece, was encouraged by its wartime territorial ambitions and by the vision of the Megali (great) Idea, – a Greek nationalist and irredentist vision that emerged after Greek independence (1821–1829) that called for the revival of the Byzantine Empire by uniting all regions with significant Greek populations – including parts of the southern Balkans, Anatolia, and Cyprus – still under Ottoman rule into a single Greek state.
Greece believed that it had an opportunity to incorporate territories containing substantial Greek populations and places of enormous symbolic importance to Greek history. But the settlement soon collided with another nationalism: Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish counter-revolution
Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Ottoman commander who had become famous at Gallipoli, emerged as the principal leader of the Turkish nationalist movement. The movement rejected the partition of Anatolia contemplated at Sèvres and sought to establish national sovereignty over the Turkish heartland.
Mustafa Kemal and other Ottoman officers at Gallipoli
This was not simply an Ottoman army fighting a foreign invader. The Ottoman government in Constantinople accepted the Allied settlement; the nationalist movement centred in Anatolia rejected it. Turkey therefore experienced something approaching a war of national liberation combined with civil conflict.
The Greek army advanced deep into Anatolia. For a time, it appeared that Greece might achieve a substantial territorial settlement. But Turkish resistance stiffened. The nationalists defeated the Greek advance and, in August–September 1922, launched the offensive that drove the Greek army back towards the Aegean.
The Greek retreat was accompanied by atrocities and destruction on both sides. Turkish nationalist forces and irregulars committed massacres and expulsions against Christian civilians; Greek forces and retreating troops were themselves responsible for atrocities against Muslim civilians during their occupation and withdrawal. None of this is usefully understood through a simple morality tale in which one side was innocent and the other intrinsically barbarous.
There was, however, an important asymmetry in the final outcome: the Turkish nationalist victory made possible the consolidation of a Turkish nation-state in Anatolia, while the Greek population of much of the region was about to disappear.
Smyrna, September 1922
The events at Smyrna remain among the most contested episodes of the war, particularly regarding responsibility for the city’s fire and the precise number of people killed. The broad outlines are clearer.
Turkish nationalist forces entered Smyrna on 9 September 1922. The Greek Orthodox metropolitan, Chrysostomos, was murdered. There followed widespread looting, violence and attacks on the city’s Christian population. On 13 September a fire began in the Armenian quarter and subsequently consumed large parts of the Greek and Armenian districts.
The city contained a large Muslim population as well as substantial Greek and Armenian communities, and the precise course of the fire remains disputed. What is not disputed is the appalling predicament of the refugees trapped along the waterfront. Tens of thousands, probably far more, sought escape by sea. Allied warships were present. Their crews could see the fire. Their governments were reluctant to intervene militarily in what had become a Turkish nationalist victory and were constrained by the political circumstances of the time. Some Allied personnel and ships did rescue refugees; the larger failure was that the international presence did not prevent the catastrophe.
Smyrna was therefore both an atrocity and a symbol. It marked the end of a substantial Greek and Armenian presence in one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
But it was not, strictly speaking, the moment when that population vanished. Much of the Greek population had already fled or been displaced during the preceding years, and the final settlement was still to come.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
The population exchange
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced Sèvres and internationally recognised the sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic over Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Mustafa Kemal, now Atatürk, had won the war.
Lausanne also gave international legitimacy to the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Approximately 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were transferred from Turkey to Greece, while roughly 400,000 Muslims were transferred from Greece to Turkey, subject to various exemptions, including the Greek population of Constantinople and the Muslim population of western Thrace.
The exchange was presented as a solution to the problem of minorities. In reality, it was the formalisation of a demographic revolution already substantially achieved through war, massacre, deportation and flight.
It is important not to describe this simply as the expulsion of Christians from Anatolia. Muslims had also been expelled from territories lost by the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, and the compulsory exchange itself displaced Muslim as well as Christian populations. Nor was the exchange an exclusively Turkish initiative: Greece and Turkey agreed to it, and the victorious European powers incorporated it into the Lausanne settlement.
It was nevertheless an extraordinary admission of failure. The ideal of a multi-ethnic Ottoman political order had effectively given way to the principle that stability could be achieved by separating populations according to religion and, increasingly, nationality.
The irony was profound. The Ottoman Empire had survived for centuries precisely because it did not require everyone within its borders to be Turkish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, Serbian or Bulgarian. Its subjects belonged to overlapping religious, linguistic and local communities. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressively replaced that imperial pluralism with nationalism. By the 1920s, population transfer had become one of the instruments by which the new states sought to make their populations conform to their national boundaries.
The longer Ottoman endgame
This is why I find McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame such a useful corrective to the conventional Western story of the First World War.
The war in the Ottoman world was not merely a sideshow to the trenches of France and Belgium. It stretched from Gallipoli to Gaza, Baghdad to Baku, the Caucasus to the Arabian Peninsula. Its consequences extended from the Balkans through Anatolia and the Levant to Mesopotamia. And it was intimately connected with the Russian war, the Russian revolutions and the subsequent Russian Civil War.
The Ottoman collapse also cannot be reduced to the familiar caricature of Britain and France simply carving up an otherwise coherent Middle East according to the lines of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Sykes–Picot was real and consequential, but it was one of several competing wartime schemes for the disposition of Ottoman territory. Russia, too, had imperial ambitions. Constantinople had long been an object of Russian strategic and religious aspiration. France had its own ambitions in the Levant. Britain was concerned with India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and the routes linking them.
And the Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Turks and other peoples of the empire were not merely passive pieces on a European chessboard. They had their own political ambitions, national movements and armed organisations.
The same complexity applies to Gallipoli. The campaign was certainly a military disaster, and Churchill was one of its principal advocates. But it was not simply Churchill’s personal folly, as the mythology subsequently suggested. It emerged from a much wider strategic debate about how best to defeat the Ottoman Empire and assist Russia. Its failure helped establish Mustafa Kemal as a military leader of consequence.
That matters because the man who became the founder of modern Türkiye was not an outsider who suddenly appeared after the Ottoman collapse. He was an Ottoman officer, a product of the imperial military system and a veteran of the Balkan Wars, Libya and Gallipoli. The Turkish Republic was born not from a clean break with the Ottoman past but from its ruins.
A demographic revolution
There is a tendency, particularly in polemical accounts of this period, to describe the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities as a single uninterrupted campaign stretching from the Hamidian massacres through the Armenian genocide to Smyrna. The chronology is more complicated than that.
There were massacres under Abdulhamid II. There were the catastrophic deportation and destruction of the Armenians under the wartime Committee of Union and Progress. There were attacks on Assyrian communities. There were violence and displacement affecting Ottoman Greeks during and after the First World War. There were massacres of Muslims during the Balkan Wars and the Greek occupation and retreat in Anatolia. There was the Turkish nationalist war against Greece. There was Smyrna. Finally, there was the compulsory population exchange.
These events were not identical. Their perpetrators, political circumstances and immediate objectives differed. Nor should the existence of Muslim suffering be invoked to dilute the particular historical responsibility for the Armenian genocide.
But they belong to the same larger transformation: the violent passage from empire to nation-state.
What disappeared was not literally a civilisation that had remained unchanged for two thousand years. Anatolian Christianity itself had changed enormously over those centuries. Byzantine Christianity, Armenian Christianity, Syriac Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy had their own histories and communities. Ottoman society was neither a paradise of tolerance nor a permanent state of persecution. It was a hierarchical imperial order in which religious communities possessed considerable autonomy while remaining unequal before the state.
What disappeared in the early twentieth century was that plural Ottoman world.
By the middle of the 1920s, the Armenian presence in Anatolia had been largely destroyed; the great majority of Anatolian Greeks had gone; Assyrian communities had been devastated and dispersed; and millions of Muslims displaced from the Balkans and Caucasus had been absorbed into the Turkish heartland. The new Republic of Türkiye inherited an Anatolia that was considerably more homogeneous than the Ottoman Empire had been.
The transformation was accompanied by enormous human suffering and the appropriation of property on a vast scale. It also produced the demographic foundations of the modern Turkish state.
The wars of Ottoman succession
Seen from this distance, the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence can be understood as parts of a longer sequence: the wars of Ottoman succession.
The Ottoman Empire had once encompassed much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its disappearance created a succession problem of extraordinary dimensions. Who would inherit its territories? Russia, Britain, France, Greece, Italy and the emerging Arab states all had answers. So did the Turks. The Balkan peoples had already answered the question in their own way before 1914.
The wars did not end neatly in 1918. The Ottoman defeat was followed by the Greek-Turkish war; the Russian Revolution and Civil War transformed the Caucasus; Britain and France established mandates in former Arab Ottoman territories; the Turkish Republic emerged from the nationalist victory; population exchanges attempted to impose demographic order upon territories in which communities had been intermingled for centuries.
That is one reason the consequences remain visible today.
The modern Middle East was not simply invented at a European conference after the First World War. Nor was it simply the inevitable product of ancient ethnic and religious hatreds. It emerged from the interaction of imperial collapse, nationalism, local political movements, European intervention, Russian expansion, war, revolution and demographic engineering.
Smyrna was therefore not the beginning of the story, and neither was it quite the end. It was one of the last great convulsions of the Ottoman endgame.
The ships in the harbour in September 1922 were looking at more than a burning city. They were looking at the consequences of a political order that had been collapsing for generations. Behind the flames lay the Balkan Wars, the deportations of 1915, the battles between Greeks and Turks, the Russian-Ottoman struggle in the Caucasus, the Allied occupation, Sèvres and the nationalist revolt led by Mustafa Kemal. Ahead lay Lausanne, the population exchange and the Republic of Türkiye.
The Ottoman Empire had gone. The Greek presence in Anatolia had largely gone with it. So too had the Armenian communities that had survived there for centuries.
But the story was not one of an ancient world simply disappearing beneath the flames. It was the much messier story of modern nationalism being born from the wreckage of empire.
And that is perhaps the more uncomfortable historical lesson. Empires can suppress national conflict without resolving it. When they collapse, the suppressed conflicts do not necessarily disappear. They can return in a more radical form, as competing peoples attempt to turn mixed imperial territories into national homelands. Borders are drawn; populations move; minorities become suspect; refugees become instruments of politics; and, in the worst circumstances, demographic homogenisation becomes a military objective.
The Ottoman Empire was not the only empire to discover this. The Habsburg, Romanov and German empires would suffer their own violent disintegration. Timothy Snyder’s later description of the lands between Germany and Russia as the “Bloodlands” has a broader resonance here. The territories left behind by the collapse of Europe’s great empires became some of the most violent political spaces of the twentieth century.
The Ottoman endgame was one of them. And it is still playing its echoes.
Izmir, May 2014
When we stood on the Izmir waterfront in 2014, there was little to suggest what had happened there ninety-two years earlier. The promenade was busy; the Aegean glittered beyond the harbour and modern İzmir was very much a Turkish city looking confidently towards its future. There was no visible boundary between the city that had been and the city that is.
Yet somewhere in the photographs I sent to our friend back home in Australia was a connection between those two worlds. His family’s roots lay in a city whose Greek population had once been large enough to constitute one of its defining communities. The people themselves had gone, their neighbourhoods transformed, their institutions dispersed, their descendants scattered across Greece and the wider diaspora. But the sea remained.
That is the strange persistence of history. People disappear; places survive. Names change, buildings are demolished, languages fall silent and populations are exchanged. Yet descendants carry fragments of the vanished world with them. Sometimes it is a family story, sometimes a photograph, sometimes a surname whose meaning has travelled further than its bearers ever imagined.
A Greek family descended from Smyrna and living in Sydney is itself a reminder of the untidy human geography of the Ottoman world. It tells us something that maps coloured in the clean shades of modern nation-states cannot: people moved, intermarried, converted, fled, were expelled and reinvented themselves. Their identities were rarely as tidy as the borders that eventually enclosed them.
The history of Smyrna is therefore not simply the story of one massacre or one burning city, terrible though those events were. It belongs to the much larger history of the collapse of empires and the rise of nationalism. The Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian genocide, the destruction and displacement of Assyrian and Greek communities, the Greek advance into Anatolia, the Turkish nationalist victory and the compulsory population exchange were different episodes, with different actors and circumstances. Together, however, they transformed the demographic and political landscape of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ottoman Empire had not been a harmonious multicultural paradise, and its dissolution did not produce violence from nowhere. But its disappearance removed an imperial framework within which different communities had lived, however unequally, alongside one another. The national states that replaced it promised sovereignty and security. Too often they sought both by making their populations more homogeneous.
That is the uncomfortable lesson of the Ottoman endgame. The twentieth century did not simply replace old empires with neat national democracies. It also produced refugees, minorities without homelands, homelands without their former minorities, and borders drawn through landscapes inhabited for generations by people who had never imagined themselves foreigners.
And yet history is not entirely erased by political transformation.
The harbour is still there.
In 1922, people crowded along that waterfront desperate to escape across the same Aegean. In 2014, an Australian friend of Greek Smyrna ancestry received photographs of that same waterfront from another traveller, standing there in very different circumstances. Between those two moments lies a century of catastrophe, migration and memory.
Perhaps that is what the old phrase about history leaving fingerprints really means. The fingerprints are not always found in monuments or memorials. Sometimes they survive in a surname, a family story, a photograph sent from a distant city — or in the simple recognition that, although the people have gone, you are standing where they once stood.
Roots and fruits.
The empire is gone. The city has changed. The people have dispersed.
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guildsu struck a Map of the Empire which size was that of the Empire, and coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science (1946)
Forward: the limits of cartography
I have always had a weakness for maps. Occupying and inordinate amount of space on my bookshelf are Collins historical atlases* – heavy in both the literal and figurative sense. They are magnificent volumes, and over the years I have spent many hours tracing their pages, following the movement of armies, adventurers and archeologists, the rise and fall of empires, the migration of peoples and the shifting frontiers that have so often redrawn the world. They offer a visual way of understanding history: not simply what happened, but where it happened, how territories expanded and contracted, and how the political landscape changed beneath the feet of successive generations.
Yet maps have their limitations, and perhaps that is particularly worth remembering when maps become arguments. They can show movement and geography with remarkable clarity, but they cannot tell us everything about the people represented upon them. My Collins atlases cannot tell me a person’s ethnicity or DNA, their beliefs or ideology, their loyalties or aspirations, or what motivated them to move, conquer, settle, flee or remain. They show the where, and often the when, but not necessarily the why. A boundary drawn in ink may look definitive on a map while being porous, contested or meaningless to the people who lived on either side of it. That tension – between the map and the territory, between geography and human experience – lies behind what follows.
It is particularly relevant when looking at Palestine, a landscape whose names, boundaries and meanings have accumulated over centuries and whose maps are now routinely recruited into arguments about history, identity and belonging. We must be mindful that maps are historical artefacts before they are political weapons. They tell us how successive generations imagined and described a landscape, but they are not, by themselves, title deeds to it.
The temptation with historical cartography is to look backwards with twenty-first-century eyes and ask a map to settle questions that its maker never intended it to answer. Maps preserve layers of memory and geography. They can reveal what people called places, how they understood their surroundings and how their conception of territory changed. But they require interpretation, context and, above all, a little humility.
Perhaps that is why I remain fascinated by them. Those Collins atlases taught me to look at history spatially, to see events not as isolated episodes but as movements across landscapes. The older I become, however, the more conscious I am that the map is only the beginning of the story. Behind every line, colour, border and place name are human beings, with memories, identities, ambitions, fears and attachments that no cartographer can fully capture. To understand the history of a place, we must therefore learn to read both the map and the people who inhabit it.
Old maps are not title deeds – a contemplation of cartography
What we take from a book, a review or an opinion piece often tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the author. That is no criticism; it is simply the way reading works. Every reader arrives carrying luggage: political commitments, cultural assumptions, emotional investments, historical knowledge, blind spots and aspirations. Reviewers are no different. Nor, for that matter, am I. The aspiration to complete objectivity is a noble fiction. We are all interpreters before we are judges.
That was my instinctive reaction to British activist Tony Greenstein’s review in the leftwing ezine Mondoweiss, republished below, of British-based American author and researcher Thomas Suárez’s Palestine Mapped.
Even before reaching the conclusion, I suspected where the review was heading. Greenstein is an experienced anti-Zionist campaigner whose intellectual commitments are well established, and they inevitably shape what he finds most valuable in the book. The giveaway comes in the closing paragraphs. He praises what he calls the book’s “apolitical” opening almost as a tactical device, admires the middle section for preparing the reader culturally, but clearly regards the final political chapter as the destination towards which everything else has been travelling. The cartography becomes, in effect, a prelude to contemporary advocacy. That may well be Suárez’s intention too, but Greenstein’s enthusiasm reveals his own priorities every bit as much as the author’s – as is apparent when he describes Suarez’ previous publications about Israel and Palestine.
Yet I suspect the book itself may be richer than the review allows.
Suárez appears to be asking an intriguing question that extends well beyond Israel and Palestine: maps are not merely representations of territory; they are representations of thought. They encode assumptions about power, religion, legitimacy and belonging. Medieval Christian maps centred Jerusalem not because it was geographically central but because it occupied the spiritual centre of Christian cosmology. Islamic geographers such as al-Idrisi organised space differently because they inhabited a different intellectual universe. Renaissance maps reflected the explosion of European exploration, while Protestant biblical scholarship encouraged increasingly detailed attempts to reconcile scripture with physical geography. None of these maps simply described reality. Each reflected the worldview of its makers.
That, it seems to me, is the genuinely fascinating proposition. Cartography becomes a history of imagination as much as a history of measurement. Where I become more cautious is when historical maps are enlisted as political witnesses in twenty-first century arguments. Which is what Greenstein does.
One of Suárez’s most interesting observations, as reported by Greenstein, is actually directed against a habit found on both sides of the contemporary conflict. Zionists produce archaeological sites, biblical kingdoms and ancient place names as evidence of enduring Jewish sovereignty. Pro-Palestinian activists respond with Ottoman maps, Roman maps, medieval maps or British Mandate maps labelled “Palestine”. Suárez apparently argues that both are trapped within the same conceptual framework. They assume that an ancient geographical label somehow validates or invalidates modern political rights.
I would take it one step further.
For a long while, I have contemplated what I call the “myth of fingerprints”, the belief that if only we can place our finger on precisely the right point in history, identify the first inhabitants, recover the original map, establish the authentic name, isolate the pure ancestry or locate the primordial kingdom, then modern political legitimacy somehow reveals itself in a neat, straight line stretching from antiquity to today.
History almost never behaves so obligingly.
Old maps certainly tell us something important about the land. I treasure my own Collins historical atlases, those magnificent, oversized volumes that chart the migrations of peoples, the campaigns of armies, the rise and fall of empires, the routes of explorers and the shifting frontiers of kingdoms. They are among the finest visual tools historians possess. But they tell us remarkably little about the people themselves.
A coloured arrow sweeping westward across Europe labelled “Goths” tells us almost nothing about the genetic diversity within those groups, their languages, their changing identities or the beliefs they carried with them. A shaded region marked “Canaan”, “Judaea”, “Palestina”, “Syria”, “Ottoman Syria” or “Mandatory Palestine” identifies an administrative or geographical concept, not a homogeneous nation. Maps can identify where events occurred. They cannot fully explain who the participants were and what compelled them to remain or wander.
Ethnicity itself is a moving target. DNA reveals endless mixing rather than purity. Languages evolve, religions spread, populations intermarry, conquerors assimilate, migrants settle, identities are invented, forgotten and reinvented. The very categories with which we argue today would have puzzled many of the people who supposedly embodied them centuries ago.
This is one reason why I remain sceptical whenever someone reaches triumphantly for an ancient map as though it were a title deed.
The Romans renamed Judaea as Syria Palaestina. Does that settle anything? Of course not. The Byzantine Madaba mosaic depicts Palestine. Does that settle anything? Again, no. Medieval Christian maps centred on Jerusalem in sacred geography. Ottoman maps organised provinces differently. British Mandate surveys imposed modern administrative precision. Each map tells us something true about the intellectual world in which it was created. None provides a final moral verdict on contemporary sovereignty.
Indeed, Suárez’s own broader argument may unintentionally reinforce precisely this conclusion. If maps embody cultural assumptions, then every historical map deserves to be interpreted rather than worshipped.
Greenstein continually circles back to Zionism, Christian Zionism and Israel’s contemporary use of historical imagery. Those are undoubtedly important subjects, and Suárez appears to have assembled considerable evidence for the influence of biblical geography on Western understandings of Palestine. Certainly, Christian millenarianism, evangelical theology and nineteenth-century imperial romanticism all played significant roles in preparing Western audiences to view Palestine through biblical rather than contemporary political lenses. Theodore Herzl himself undoubtedly benefited from Christian Restorationist sympathies.
But there is a wider lesson here that transcends this particular conflict.
Every nation engages in historical cartography. Vladimir Putin’s Russia speaks of Novorossiya and Russkiy Mir not simply as geographical expressions but as historical claims carrying contemporary political force. Chinese maps in the South China Sea Chinese maps invoke imperial precedents, the Nine-Dash Line and ancient tributary systems. Serbian nationalism continually remembers Kosovo Polje – “the Field of Blackbirds”. Irish nationalists remember King James I’s plantations and the partition of 1922 as Irish republicanism and unionism each produce their own historical maps of belonging. America’s has exceptionalism long rested upon maps of westward expansion under Manifest Destiny, as though the movement of a frontier line itself conferred legitimacy, whilst Confederate memory endures still. Australian history has increasingly become a contest between colonial cadastral maps and Indigenous maps of Country, each representing profoundly different understandings of what land means.
Historical geography is always political because memory itself is political. The danger comes when maps cease to illuminate history and begin adjudicating morality.
Ultimately, maps are magnificent servants but poor judges. They reveal where rivers flowed, roads were built, towns and cities grew, frontiers shifted and kingdoms expanded. They help us visualise change across centuries. They expose forgotten worlds and vanished assumptions. But they cannot tell us who possesses superior historical virtue, nor can they determine which descendants inherit exclusive political rights today.
Perhaps that is the deepest weakness of that “myth of fingerprints”. It mistakes continuity for purity, geography for identity and nomenclature for legitimacy. Human history is untidy, layered and recursive. It resembles less a straight line than a palimpsest, where each generation writes over earlier inscriptions without entirely erasing them. The old text remains faintly visible beneath the new. Maps help us read those layers. They do not resolve them.
In that sense, whether one approaches Palestine Mapped as a work of cartographic history, a study of religious imagination or an intervention in the politics of Zionism, its greatest contribution may not lie in proving who was “there first”. Rather, it reminds us that every map is itself an historical artefact, reflecting the assumptions of those who drew it. The irony is that this applies not only to the maps reproduced in Suárez’s book, but also to the intellectual maps brought by its readers and reviewers. We all chart the landscape according to our own compass bearings. The challenge is not to pretend otherwise, but to remain aware that our own map, however detailed, is never quite the same thing as the territory itself.
Coda: maps cannot be manifestos
One of the limitations of reading about maps is that like maps themselves. they flatten experience.
I’ve visited the church of St. George at Madaba in Jordan and stood next to the sixth-century mosaic of the Holy Land (pictured at the head of this post). It is a thing of beauty, of history, and of humanity. One is struck not only by its artistry but by its humanity. It is not a political manifesto disguised as a map. It is an act of devotion. The craftsmen who laid those tesserae were not anticipating twenty-first century debates over sovereignty. They were trying to depict the sacred geography through which they understood God’s world. Their “facts on the ground”, to use a phrase now freighted with controversy, were the footprints of Jesus and his Apostles.
Our Jordanian guide is part of that story. A Palestinian Christian, proud of a Byzantine mosaic in modern Jordan, her job is to guide visitors through a landscape that has been Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and Hashemite. She herself embodies the layered history that the “myth of fingertips” tends to erase. Human beings are often palimpsests long before maps are.
As we have noted, there is habit of turning historical geography into moral geography. And yet, none of these are really arguments about geography – they are arguments about memory the stories nations and peoples tell themselves.
To borrow and invert the English poet John Donne, “no man (or map) is an island”. Maps are relational documents. They acquire meaning only through the people who draw them, use them and argue over them. Detached from those human stories, they become little more than coloured parchment. Attached to them, they become objects of extraordinary emotional power.
There is another irony lurking here – that prefigured in the quotation that opened this essay. In a short story, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges imagined an empire whose cartographers became so obsessed with accuracy that they eventually produced a map at the scale of one-to-one, covering the entire empire itself. The map became indistinguishable from the territory and therefore useless. Political history sometimes commits the opposite error: we mistake the map for the territory. We argue over symbols as though they were reality itself.
My Collins atlases, the Madaba mosaic, Ptolemy, Ordnance Survey maps, Google Earth – all are ways of seeing. None is the land itself. The land has always contained more languages, more memories, more ancestors and more contradictions than any map can accommodate.
“The myth of fingerprints” captures the seductive belief that somewhere, if only we point to precisely the right place on precisely the right map at precisely the right moment in history, all our moral and political arguments will dissolve into certainty.
History has never been that obliging. It is less a straight line than a palimpsest. The fingertips point confidently enough. It is the ground beneath them that refuses to stand still.
The Map on the Wall
It is an education to view an old map that was not so long ago a snapshot of the world as it was geographically: Bacon’s Standard Map of the World, dating from about 1930 and drawn on the old Mercator projection. It is, at first glance, merely an antique map. In fact, it is a portrait of a vanished world.
The first thing that strikes the modern eye is the colour. The great pink expanses are British; the green ones French. Empire is not something the map explains because, in 1930, it scarcely needed explaining. It just was! .
Africa is largely divided between European powers. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the Raj. China is a republic. Iran is Persia. The Baltic states are independent. Germany includes Konigsberg in East Prussia, now Kaliningrad. Lemburg is Lemburg, in Poland, rather than Lviv, in Ukraine. Even the names have become historical artefacts.
Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq are tiny pieces of the British imperial jigsaw. The map predates the State of Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian national struggle in its modern form and the territorial arrangements that emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of European empire. The great arguments that now seem immemorial were, when this map was printed, still largely unfinished arguments. New states have now appeared where old ones disappeared; boundaries that once seemed immutable are redrawn, sometimes peacefully and sometimes in blood.
That is one of the great lessons of cartography. We tend to mistake the map we inherit for the world itself. Borders acquire the appearance of permanence; names acquire the authority of fact; colours make political control look geographical and geography look natural.
Mercator himself was not attempting to deceive anyone. His projection was designed for navigation, where maintaining accurate bearings mattered more than preserving the relative size of continents. Yet every projection makes choices, and every map consequently tells only one version of the world. The Bacon map adds another layer: it colours the world according to the political realities of its time. Geography and power are superimposed upon one another.
The map is a kind of silent witness to the contingency of history. What appears to us as the settled political geography is, viewed from the perspective of 1930, only one moment in a much longer process of imperial collapse, national awakening, migration and territorial invention.
Perhaps that is why old maps are so strangely affecting. They show us not merely where the world was, but what people once imagined the world to be. And once we recognise that, the boundaries on our own maps begin to look a little less eternal.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, July 2026
Thomas Suárez is a New York–born author, historical researcher, lecturer, and accomplished concert violinist and composer, now based in London. He writes and speaks frequently on Palestine, and his critically acclaimed book Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea has been hailed by historian Ilan Pappé as “a tour de force”. His other works include Writings on the Wall: Palestinian Oral Histories and Palestine Mapped: From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought.
The featured picture at the head of this blog post of the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map.
* A list of Collins abd Harper Collins historical atlases follows Greenstein’s review.
How the West’s earliest mapping of Palestine continues to shape its understanding of Zionism today
The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)
Palestine Mapped. From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought
Thomas Suárez
Tom Suarez is one of the most meticulous and careful researchers on Palestine and Zionism although he is relatively unknown. His first book, which the Zionists did their best to prevent being publicized, disrupting his speaking tours, The State of Terror was a majestic tour de force of the Zionist terrorism that created the Israeli state and their strategies for the future ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Suarez’s second book, ‘Palestine Hijacked – How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from the River to the Sea’ was another tour de force. As Ilan Pappe wrote, Suarez showed how “The use of terror was deliberate and sustained, carried out or supported by the same leaders who then established and led the Israeli state. We are still living this history: The book proves that Israel’s regime of Apartheid against the Palestinians and the continued expropriation of their country are not the result of complex historical circumstances, but the intended, singular goal of Zionism since its beginning.
It is not surprising that Suarez’s latest book is in the tradition of his previous books even if it concentrates mainly on the visual rather than the verbal.
Palestine Mapped guides the reader through the Greek and Roman concepts of Palestine, the various medieval Mediterranean civilizations and the European Christian “Holy Land” mapping that has dominated since the Reformation and continues to inform modern political thought. This isn’t simply a book about cartography or map making but how notions of the ‘Holy Land’ and Palestine informed the maps and visual representations that were produced.
A beautifully illustrated book on the mapping of the river to the sea might seem a luxury disconnect given that Palestinians are being massacred daily. Suárez is very much aware of this. He explains in his Introduction why the ongoing genocide in fact makes the topic all the more relevant. Perhaps key to this is the subtitle’s final word, geographic thought.
Much of the West’s fanatical support for Israel is rooted in Evangelical messianism, the psychosis (to use the author’s word) that the Israeli state is the place in the Biblical Genesis, “placing it apart from the realm of all other earthly nations and securing wide Christian devotion.”
Suarez argues that this collective elite and religious mindset is powered by our own geographic wiring, and that the book is intended in part as an antidote to what he calls the “mapping of the Holy Land” narrative.
Al-Idrīsī, map of the Levant, mid-12th century (National Library of France; Image Library of Congress)
Since the book is organized roughly chronologically, its real-world relevancy is borne out mostly in the final chapter — though the Israeli state’s manipulation of ancient maps is already demonstrated with the sixth century ‘Madaba’ map.
The book begins with the earliest extant mapping of the Levant, that of the Greeks and Romans, then devotes two chapters to the medieval period. The first addresses mapping by Europeans in which Palestine is a focus: those from the distance of the Church, and that of on-the-scene pilgrims.
The interior of the Church of St. George, Madaba, Jordan, and the remains of a mid-6th century mosaic map of the Levant.
The second addresses mapping in which Palestine was not the focus, but through which the mapping — and Western perception — of Palestine nonetheless evolved: sea charts, advanced world maps, Ptolemy’s Geography, and what the author calls ‘Arabic’ mapping, a term used in place of the usual ‘Islamic’ mapping of academia, which he considers to be flawed terminology.
The book then arrives at what is described as the pivotal year of 1500. Three revolutions of the period are said to influence Palestine’s future: Europeans’ dramatically widened world view, the advent of printing, and above all, Lutheranism.
World map in the Fasciculus Temporum of the Carthusian monk, Werner Rolewink, 1484. Woodcut.
The future stage is set during that century, and Suárez gives short shrift to the years 1600-1800, other than to establish the rise of proto-Zionist ideology.
European mapping of Palestine during that period is said to be stuck in a time warp, Biblically oriented no matter the variety of renderings, in stark contrast to Europe’s mapping of the rest of the world, which was a quest for the latest, the most accurate. It is, however, here that today’s manipulation of geographic thought is first addressed, because a 1714 work of one Adriaan Reland is cited today to erase Palestinians (for which Reland is said to be blameless).
The final, long chapter begins at the year 1800, at which simmering Christian Zionist ideology takes active form with the confluence of Christian millennialism, Western imperialism, and advanced mapping techniques.
The end of the century brings of course Theodor Herzl and the advent of Political Zionism. Suárez cites both Herzl’s 1896 Der Judenstaat and a map from his 1897 newsletter, Die Welt, to argue that Herzl failed to understand the opportunity Christian Evangelicalism offered his project. I’m not so sure that this is true. One of his main supporters was William Hechler, the Chaplain at Britain’s Vienna Embassy, where Herzl was living.
Star of David with a map of the Eastern Mediterranean, on the heading of the weekly Die Welt, June 4, 1897.
Hechler believed firmly that the Jews must be enabled to resettle in Palestine in order to hasten the second coming of Christ. He was constantly looking forward to a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy along these lines. He presented a memorandum to Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, urging him to take up the cause of the Jewish return to Palestine even before he had met Herzl or read the “Jewish State”.
Hechler had been a tutor to the Grand Duke of Baden, and he introduced Herzl to him and also to the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II. He also accompanied Herzl to Palestine where he met Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem.
Herzl had an instructive meeting with the Grand Duke April 23 1896 in Karlsruhe and he noted in his diaries that Grand Duke
‘took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-Semitism’.
As Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University observed:
‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel is often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction.’
With Herzl’s death, Zionism continued to receive the enthusiastic endorsement of Christian Zionism and its millenarian supporters. Prominent supporters included Arthur James Balfour who combined antisemitism and Zionism effortlessly.
The 1947 UN Partition map receives its due attention: the author deconstructs it as a scam intended to produce the opposite result.
Suarez analyses the manipulation of geographic thought employed by Israel’s propagandists and argues that the ‘pro-Palestine’ community defeats itself by engaging with this propaganda on its own terms.
Put in its crudest form, when Zionists say ‘there was never such a place as Palestine’, we respond with an old map in which the entire land is called ‘Palestine’, or other such ‘evidence’.
Suárez argues that this is a mistake, a trap, the result of cultural conditioning:
we are geographically hard-wired to accept [that] the ancient origins of a place-name has the power to grant or deny personhood today, to justify the expulsion of anyone to whom that geographic name is or is not attached.
This is a heavily cross-disciplinary work, and it is hard to imagine anyone with Suárez’s background in the Palestinian issue who is so experienced in the history of cartography. It strikes me that this might be a book that can bring the Palestinian issue to a wider audience: Everyone, it seems, loves old maps, and perhaps this book is the perfect Trojan Horse gift for acquaintances who believe they are fair-minded but can’t quite make the break from Israel.
The reader is disarmed by the earlier ‘apolitical’ part of the book, gradually drawn into cultural conditioning addressed in the middle part, and already long engrossed when encountering the final chapter. But it is also a cautionary work for those long active in the issue of Palestinian liberation, who, as with all aspects of the issue, often disempower themselves by responding to Israel’s propaganda on its own terms.
Tony Greenstein
Tony Greenstein is a longstanding Jewish anti-Zionist and an anti-fascist activist from Brighton. In 1982 he was a co-founder of Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Tony was suspended from the Labour Party in 2016 and expelled in 2018 as a result of the antisemitism witch-hunt–the first Jewish person to be expelled. Tony is the author of The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast. He has written extensively on Palestine and Zionism for, amongst others, the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Tribune and the Weekly Worker. Tony was the child of an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and when young a member of the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva, now part of the Greater Israel movement.
Historical Atlases
My collection of Collins and Harper Collins historical falls into five broad groups:
General World History
Collins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, Collins
HarperCollins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, HarperCollins
History of the World in Maps: The Ultimate Cartographic Exploration of Our Past – Philip Parker, Collins
The Times Complete History of the World – The Times / Collins
Military, Political and European History
The Times Atlas of the Second World War
Atlas of the Crusades – edited by Jonathan Riley-Smith
Atlas of European History
Archaeology and Exploration
Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology – also published as the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology
The Times Atlas of World Exploration
Biblical History and Geography
HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History – James B. Pritchard
HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible
HarperCollins Concise Atlas of the Bible
5. Biblical Geography – Evangelical Reference
NIV Atlas of the Bible – Zondervan / HarperCollins
There are 13 titles, although a couple represent different editions or titles of essentially the same work: The Collins Atlas of World History and the HarperCollins Atlas of World History are essentially the Barraclough atlas in different editions/imprints [Henry Barraclough was a renowned British historian, historiographer, and medievalist. I read his The Meaning of History back when I was in Sixth Form at Moseley Grammar School] Past Worlds and the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology anre alternative titles/editions of the archaeological atlas. The HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible and Concise Atlas of the Bible are related but distinct editions. The HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History is a separate, more specialised biblical-history work.
In chronological and subject breadth the collection isn’t simply a collection of history books with maps. It is almost a cartographic library of human history:
Prehistory → Archaeology → Ancient Near East → Biblical world → Greece and Rome → Christianity → Crusades → European kingdoms and empires → exploration → global history → the Second World War → the modern world.
And that perhaps explains why the physical atlases mattered to me in the first place. Their great virtue was not merely the information contained in them but the ability to see history spatially: peoples moving, empires expanding and contracting, frontiers shifting, trade and exploration routes opening, armies advancing and retreating, and religious and political worlds overlapping.
They are heavy both literally and figuratively, providing a way of understanding history that a conventional chronological narrative often cannot: history as movement across landscape and time.
For our old friend and co-founder of HuldreFolk, the acclaimed bandurist Victor Mishalow, Ukrainian composer Hryhory Kytasty’s Echo of the Steppes (Гомін Степів) was much, much more than a piece of music; it was an evocation of a lost homeland.
It was Victor’s signature piece, and when introducing it in our concerts – an eclectic combination of stories, songs and music – he would describe the boundless Ukrainian steppe: waves of tall grass bending beneath an endless wind, and beneath it all the legendary black chernozem, among the richest soil on earth, so deep it seemed almost without end. In his telling, the bandura was “the soul of Ukraine”, its shimmering strings giving voice to the wind, the grasses, the little creatures that dwelt within them, and the immenseness of the plains.
The music also carried folk memory: of open frontiers where the Kozaks once found refuge from oppression, where freedom could still be breathed beneath an enormous sky, and where the landscape itself became part of the nation’s identity. Listening to Victor play, one did not simply hear an instrument; one heard the echo of the steppes – a vast, living landscape in which earth, wind, history and people were bound together in a single, resonant voice.
Fingerprints, ghosts and the long arm of History
In an illuminating essay in the e-zine Unherd, republished below, former war-correspondent Aris Roussinos begins an extensive and expansive review of Australian archeologist Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe with three mute stone figures – Cuman balbals – standing beside the road between Sloviansk and Bakhmut in Donetsk, watching the endless movement of armies across what is now Ukraine’s disputed and devastated Donbas. They are ancient witnesses in a landscape where Russians and Ukrainians now fight over ground that, for most of human history, belonged to neither, and yet, for countless people over millennia, became pasturelands and polities, battlefields and burial grounds.
This is history as I like it: the historian as storyteller, where landscapes become characters and the past refuses to remain buried.
Long before Slavic speech reached these plains, the steppe was the domain of nomadic peoples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Turks, Mongols and many others whose empires rose and vanished like storms over the grasslands. They left few cities and fewer written records, but their fingerprints are everywhere: in languages, military traditions, political institutions, myths and identities. The grass remembers what libraries often forget.
Roussinos’ central argument is that we have misunderstood Europe by looking too exclusively westward, towards Rome. The steppe was never merely a barbarian wilderness beyond civilisation, waiting to burst through the gates. It was one of the great engines of European history. Europe was shaped not only by the legacy of Rome and Christianity but also by repeated encounters with the peoples of Inner Asia. The old frontier between “Europe” and “Asia” dissolves under closer inspection. What appears on a modern atlas as a dividing line was, for centuries, a vast zone of movement, exchange, conquest and adaptation.
The present war in Ukraine unfolds across precisely this ancient geography. The early Russian thrust towards Kyiv moved through forests and marshes that belonged historically to the old Slavic world. The grinding war of attrition in the east is being fought across the open “Wild Fields”, the immense Eurasian grasslands where mounted nomads once travelled with astonishing speed and where empires repeatedly collided. Roussinos draws parallels with the mechanised battles of the twentieth century – Kursk, Kharkiv, Stalingrad – where tanks replaced horses, but the strategic significance of the landscape remained unchanged. Geography, as Napoleon is said to have observed, is often the most enduring ally in war.
It is an enticing argument because it encourages us to look beneath the familiar surface of European history. Perhaps Europe itself carries far more of the steppe within it than we usually acknowledge. Hungary and Bulgaria were founded by peoples of the steppe. The Polish nobility cultivated a proud Sarmatian ancestry. The Magyars’ memory of their eastern origins helped shape nineteenth-century nationalism. Even the nation state, so often presented as an entirely European invention, may owe something to political traditions carried westward across the grasslands by mounted confederations whose influence extended far beyond the horizon they inhabited.
There are historical echoes scattered throughout this story. The Sarmatians and Alans revolutionised warfare with armoured cavalry, heavy lances and mounted tactics that would eventually blossom into the chivalric traditions of medieval Europe. Even the Arthurian legend may preserve a distant resonance of the steppe in the enduring image of the sword planted in the earth, waiting for the rightful king to draw it forth.
Filmmakers, naturally, could not resist. The 2004 film King Arthur, for example, stitched together Romans, Celts, Sarmatians, Picts and enough historical liberties to make any medievalist wince. Clive Owen wandered through a fictional Northumbria Britain as a brooding half-Roman, half-Sarmatian Arthur, while Keira Knightley appeared as an improbably glamorous and scantily clad Guinevere whose Pictish origins seemed less convincing than her plummy English accent. It was glorious nonsense, but enjoyable, nonetheless. The Irish landscapes were striking, the horses magnificent, the ‘Knights’ (the picture at the head of this essay) with their “Rus! Rus!” war cry (and they actually do sit at a round table) improbably photogenic. A battle fought across a frozen lake owed as much to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky as it did to any surviving historical source. Ridley Scott later recycled much the same visual conceit in his disappointing Napoleon. History often survives in cinema not because the facts are accurate but because certain images possess extraordinary emotional truth.
The Cossacks offer a far more convincing example of the cultural blending that characterised the frontier. They emerged not from ethnic purity but from mixture. Runaway serfs, adventurers, escaped peasants and soldiers settled the borderlands, adopting the customs, military practices and vocabulary of the Turkic peoples who had occupied the steppe before them. Even the word “Cossack” derives from a Turkic root meaning “to roam”. The frontier was never a wall separating civilisations. It was a workshop in which entirely new identities were forged.
It is here that Roussinos, following Warwick Ball, arrives at his most provocative claim. Muscovite Russia, he argues, cannot be understood without recognising the formative influence of the Mongol world. Moscow’s rise was anything but inevitable. The Golden Horde required dependable tributaries capable of collecting taxes, maintaining order and supplying troops. The princes of Moscow proved remarkably efficient servants of the khans and, in doing so, transformed what had once been a relatively insignificant Rus’ principality into the nucleus of a future empire. The irony is delicious. Mongol domination helped create the very Russian state that would eventually conquer the steppe itself.
The fingerprints remain visible today. Administrative practices, institutions of government, systems of taxation and even elements of the Russian language bear traces of Mongol influence. Yet fingerprints are curious things. They tell us that contact occurred; they do not tell us everything that followed.
That question lies at the heart not only of Ball’s thesis but also of historian Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia, which, by happenstance, I am reading at the moment. It is one of those literary coincidences in which two writers, approaching the same landscape from different directions, find themselves asking precisely the same question. What made Russia, Russia?
Figes is, in many respects, the perfect companion to Roussinos because he shifts our attention from inheritance to interpretation. He readily acknowledges that the Mongol conquest of the Rus’ principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the defining ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde and created the circumstances in which Moscow could eventually emerge as the dominant power. Like Roussinos, he recognises the profound irony that Mongol domination did not simply interrupt Russian state formation but helped shape its eventual character.
Yet Figes is ultimately less interested in what Russia inherited than in what Russia chose to become. The Mongols bequeathed methods of rule: taxation, military organisation, communications and a conception of authority that differed markedly from Western feudalism. Russia’s imagination, however, was nourished elsewhere. Orthodox Christianity, Byzantine political theology, the doctrine of Moscow as the “Third Rome” and the almost mystical conception of the Tsar as God’s anointed gave Russia a vocabulary through which it understood itself. Its civilisation emerged not from a single source but from the convergence of many.
This distinction is important because it rescues history from determinism. Fingerprints reveal contact; they do not reveal intention. They cannot tell us why someone picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. Likewise, cultural inheritance explains possibilities, not inevitabilities.
Figes presents Russia as a civilisation assembled from multiple traditions: Slavic, Byzantine, Mongol, European and imperial. The country’s enduring paradox is that it has persistently imagined itself as both European and somehow apart from Europe. Peter the Great attempted to drag Russia westward, shaving beards, importing European science, founding St Petersburg (a German name, which was changed to Petrograd during World War I for the same reasons the British royal house changed its German name to Windsor) embracing Enlightenment ideas. Yet beneath these reforms older structures of autocracy survived. Later generations reversed the argument entirely. Slavophiles celebrated Russia’s uniqueness while Westernisers lamented its failure to become sufficiently European. The debate has never really ended. It merely changes its vocabulary.
Maps have always encouraged these arguments. A glance at any atlas suggests that Russia occupies an almost impossible position: a European power that expanded across Asia until it became the largest contiguous empire on earth. The geography itself tempts us into historical mythology. Is Russia European? Asian? Eurasian? The answer has varied according to who was asking and what political purpose the answer was intended to serve. Geography creates opportunities, constraints and temptations. It does not dictate outcomes.
Figes’ also explores of recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the suffering nation, the belief that Russia possesses a unique historical destiny. These are not immutable characteristics embedded in some mystical national DNA. They are stories Russians have told about themselves across the centuries – including Vladimir Putin’s house ideologue, philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Stories matter because people act upon them. Nations, no less than individuals, become attached to narratives that explain who they are and why they exist.
Juxtaposed against Ball, Roussinos and Figues is a comment on Roussinos’ essay by Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University. Every grand historical narrative requires its sceptic. Elegant theories are seductive precisely because they reduce complexity to a single organising principle. Morrison accepts much of Ball’s argument while quietly resisting its more deterministic conclusions. It is an exemplary piece of historical criticism because it neither dismisses nor genuflects. Instead, it refines.
He readily acknowledges that Muscovy inherited important administrative practices from the Mongol world and points out that Russia was far from unique. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions alongside older local institutions. Borrowing across Eurasia was commonplace. Civilisations have always learned from their neighbours, even while claiming absolute originality.
Where Morrison parts company with Ball is over the temptation to confuse influence with destiny. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic structures connected with taxation, communications and administration. Indeed, the Russian language still preserves Mongol echoes in words such as kazna for treasury, den’gi for money and yam for the postal relay system. Yet the ideological foundations of the state remained overwhelmingly Byzantine and Orthodox. Ivan IV became Tsar by invoking the legacy of Caesar and the vision of Moscow as the Third Rome, not by presenting himself as the heir of Genghis Khan. Administrative inheritance did not erase cultural identity.
That distinction becomes even more important when considering the modern world. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or some timeless Russian soul. Such explanations possess an undeniable elegance because they transform political choices into historical inevitabilities. Morrison rejects this outright. Contemporary Russia, he argues, is shaped above all by decisions made by particular elites drawing upon nineteenth-century nationalism, memories of the Soviet collapse, selective readings of Russian history and modern political ideology. The past provides the vocabulary; it does not dictate the speech.
His discussion of Ukraine is equally persuasive. Southern and eastern Ukraine were settled comparatively recently by a remarkable mosaic of peoples: Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians and many others. The region’s history is therefore extraordinarily layered. Yet historical complexity does not undermine modern sovereignty. Ancient settlement patterns explain why memories remain contested, but they do not invalidate internationally recognised borders. History illuminates’ claims; it does not automatically legitimise them.
This strikes me as one of the most important lessons historians can offer our own age. We are living through a period in which politicians, nationalists and activists increasingly seek legitimacy by reaching deeper into the past. Ancient kingdoms, medieval battles, archaeological discoveries, linguistic survivals and genetic studies are all recruited into contemporary arguments about identity and territory. History becomes less an investigation than a courtroom brief.
Yet the past is a notoriously unreliable witness.
Landscapes accumulate memories without issuing verdicts. The Donbas bears the fingerprints of Scythians, Greeks, Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Mongols, Tatars, Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians and countless others. None of those fingerprints constitutes a title deed. They testify to presence, movement and encounter. They remind us that almost every place we imagine possessing an eternal identity has, in reality, been shaped by successive waves of migration, conquest, adaptation and coexistence.
Perhaps that is why I find Roussinos’ essay so compelling. Like the best historical writing, it restores movement to landscapes that modern maps often freeze into static national colours. It reminds us that frontiers have rarely been fixed and that civilisations have always been more entangled than their later myths would admit. Europe did not simply civilise the steppe. The steppe helped create Europe.
Equally, Morrison reminds us that historical explanation should never become historical imprisonment. Institutions endure, languages preserve old borrowings, myths outlive empires and landscapes retain astonishingly long memories. But people still make choices. Nations inherit the consequences of the past without becoming its captives.
The three weathered balbals still stand beside the road to Bakhmut. They have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers advance across the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently above the same ground. Every generation has believed its struggle to be unique, its empire enduring, its victories permanent. The stones know otherwise.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. It leaves them in words, in institutions, in ruined cities, in forgotten roads, in songs, in legends and in the memories of peoples who continue to argue about what happened centuries before they were born. Those fingerprints deserve to be studied because they tell us where we have come from and how our worlds were made. But fingerprints are not destiny. They record contact, not ownership; inheritance, not inevitability; memory, not command. The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, but they do not write the future. That task, as it always has been, belongs to the living.
Coda. The myth of fingerprints.
History leaves fingerprints.
That may seem an odd metaphor, but I have found myself returning to it again and again. Archaeologists brush them from shards of pottery, linguists discover them buried inside forgotten words, historians recognise them in institutions, laws, customs and myths. They are the traces left behind whenever peoples encounter one another, whenever empires rise and fall, whenever civilisations borrow, conquer, imitate or remember.
Fingerprints fascinate us because they appear to promise certainty. In a criminal investigation they identify who touched the weapon. Yet they tell us remarkably little about what actually happened. A fingerprint cannot reveal motive, explain intention or determine guilt. It records contact, not consequence.
History is much the same.
Every landscape is covered with fingerprints. They survive in place names and languages, in ruined cities and forgotten roads, in religions, legal systems, songs, frontiers and collective memory. The three ancient balbals still standing beside the road to Bakhmut are surrounded by them. For nearly a thousand years they have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers cross the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently overhead. Every empire believed its moment would endure. Every generation imagined itself to be the culmination of history. The stones know otherwise.
And this is where I arrive at what I have come to think of as the Myth of Fingerprints.
The fingerprints themselves are not mythical. They are real. History leaves them everywhere. The myth begins when we misunderstand what they are telling us.
A fingerprint is evidence that someone was here. It cannot tell us why they came, whether they belonged, whether they acted justly or what rights their descendants may possess centuries later. In a court of law, a fingerprint may place someone at the scene; it cannot, by itself, decide the case. History works in much the same way. It explains how we arrived here, but it cannot by itself determine who ought to possess the future.
Too often we ask it to do precisely that.
Ancient maps become modern borders. Archaeological discoveries become political manifestos. Genetic inheritance becomes moral entitlement. Historical suffering becomes an enduring licence for vengeance. We confuse explanation with justification, inheritance with ownership, memory with legitimacy. That confusion – the transformation of historical evidence into historical entitlement—is what I mean by the Myth of Fingerprints.
It is a myth because it is one of the oldest stories nations tell themselves. Every people constructs narratives from the traces left by earlier generations. Sometimes those stories preserve genuine memory; sometimes they simplify; sometimes they become propaganda. But they all begin with the same temptation: to believe that because history explains the present, it therefore authorises it.
This question lies beneath far more than the current war in Ukraine. It echoes through the history of Palestine and Israel, through Australia’s History Wars, through debates over monuments, migration, frontiers and national identity. Again and again we encounter the same temptation: to search the past not for understanding, but for permission.
That is why Aris Roussinos’ essay on Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe struck me so forcefully. Ball demonstrates how profoundly the Eurasian steppe shaped Europe. Orlando Figes traces the inheritance of Byzantium, the Mongol world and the frontier in the making of Russia. Alexander Morrison reminds us that inheritances are never destinies. Together they illuminate a larger truth. Geography creates opportunities. Culture bequeaths inheritances. Myths provide meaning. Only human beings make choices.
The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, just as the ghosts of every civilisation whisper through the landscapes they once inhabited. Historians should listen carefully to those whispers, for they reveal how the world came to be. But they should resist the temptation to mistake echoes for commands. The past deserves understanding rather than obedience.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. They are among our most valuable clues to the human story. They reveal connections, influences, migrations and memories that would otherwise be forgotten. Yet they are not title deeds, nor verdicts, nor chains binding the living to the ambitions of the dead. They explain inheritance without dictating destiny.
That is the real lesson of the Myth of Fingerprints.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
This essay was written in conversation with books I’ve read, ideas formed and half-formed, and, more recently, in sustained dialogue with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.
I highly recommend Ukrainian scholar Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression. See, in In That Howling Infinite, Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism
And, finally, who or what were HuldreFolk? Named for the mythical and mystical ‘hidden people’ of Icelandic legend, for two years in the early nineteen eighties, they played throughout Australia. Their fame was short-lived; after two years they pursued their own paths and projects. But during the following decades, they would pop up in unexpected places, like their namesakes, in ones, twos, threes, and on occasions with guest HuldreFolkies. Their last outing as a trio was in October 2007 at the North By Northwest Poetry And Folk Club. Google the videos on YouTube. See also, Yuri The Storyteller … We’ll sure miss the old bastard!
Roussinos’ essay follows, and also, for readers with time on their hands, more on Figes’The Stiry of Russia and on Morrison’s critique.
The fate of Europe lies in the steppes Warwick Ball: ‘The Eurasian Steppe’
Aris Roussinos, Unherd 28 July 2022
Genghis has won (Dean Conger/Corbis via Getty
On the road between the frontline cities of Sloviansk and Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, three stone statues stand mutely by the side of the road, observing the coming and going of military traffic with impassive detachment. Known as balbals, they are funerary monuments erected by the Cuman Turks, known in Russian archaeology as the Polovtsians, who once ruled this vast sea of grass, long before Russian or Ukrainian speech was ever heard in this region.
For thousands of years, the empty, spreading steppe, stretching from Hungary to Mongolia, was the home of nomadic peoples, speakers of Iranic, Turkic and Mongolic languages, who drove their herds across the vast plains in search of fresh pastures. They founded great empires, which time and the steppe grasses would soon swallow up, leaving barely a trace. Their constant irruptions into Europe sounded the death knell in turn for other, settled civilisations, part of the endless cycle of growth, invasion and collapse that has shaped our continent’s history.
The war in Ukraine has taken place in two very different climatic and cultural zones: its initial phases saw Russian armour wend its way through the dark forests and marshes of northern Ukraine, the ancient homeland of the first Slavic peoples, to be destroyed in close fighting on the narrow wooded roads in a stunning and unexpected Ukrainian victory. Yet the gruelling war of attrition in the country’s east is taking part in a very different landscape, in the open steppe that was once the home of nomadic peoples.
The expansion of Slavic peoples, both Ukrainians and Russians, into the open steppe was a very recent historic event, broadly contemporaneous with the European settlement of the Americas, its fertile plains, now the breadbasket of the developing world, Europe’s equivalent of America’s Midwest. These open plains, the “Wild Fields” of local historiography have always been a contested space, where great empires wrestled for control: in the great Second World War battles of Kursk, Kharkiv and Stalingrad, Europe’s entire fate hinged on the battle between the two great tank armies wheeling and clashing like nomad hordes.
But then, as The Eurasian Steppeby the archaeologist Warwick Ball makes clear, rather than a semi-wild anteroom to the continent, “the history, languages, ideas, art forms, peoples, nations and identities of the steppe have shaped almost every aspect of the life of Europe”. Europeans from further west have for centuries been prone to viewing the steppe as the haunt of wild tribes, and the source of occasional, fearsome destruction.
But what if the Europe of today is in fact the product of steppe dynamics? As Ball argues, rather than being a product of 19th century nationalism, some historians trace the origin of Europe’s oldest nation states to the steppe, observing that “Peoples newly arriving from the east were also among the first to create nationally defined states, such as kingdoms of the Bulgars or Magyars”. “In some ways,” Ball argues, “the incipient idea of a nation state might have been stronger with the nomadic groups from the steppe, who were bound more closely by tribal loyalties” than among the polyglot peoples of the imperial Roman successor states they conquered.
Did the steppe peoples then create the fractious patchwork quilt of nationalities that we understand as Europe? Ball cites the archaeologist Hyun Jin Kim who claims that: “The political and cultural traditions of Inner Asia brought to Europe by Central Asian immigrants, the Huns and the Alans, were just as fundamental to the formation of western Europe as the rich legacy left behind by the Roman Empire. The political and cultural landscape of early medieval Europe was shaped by the fusion of Roman and Inner Asian influences.”
While Hungary and Bulgaria were directly founded by steppe nomads, the influence of steppe rulers also helped shape the political forms taken by Poland (whose szlachtanobles claimed Sarmatian descent well into the 19th century), Bohemia, Denmark and even, it is claimed, France. Even into the 19th century, as Ball notes, it was the Hungarian awareness of their steppe Magyar ancestry that helped bring about the rise of nationalism which shook apart the great Austro-Hungarian empire. “In the long evolution of the idea of the nation state,” then “from their beginnings in late-antique Europe to their emergence in the nineteenth century, we must look east as well as west”.
Viewed in this light, the war in Ukraine, a battle between a European nation-state and a vast Eurasian empire, is resonant with all manner of strange echoes of the steppe’s dimly-understood history. The colossal earthern ramparts of the “serpent walls” outside Kyiv, erected by early Slavic kingdoms to guard against invasion by steppe nomads from the Huns to the Mongols, fulfilled their ancient role admirably earlier this year when they prevented the movement of Russian armour towards the capital’s suburbs, corralling the latest wave of invaders into killing zones to be picked off at leisure by guided missiles.
The Cossack heritage both sides claim is the result of earlier Slavic peoples, runaway Ukrainian and Russian serfs, claiming the freedom of the open steppe and adopting the customs, lifestyle and much of the vocabulary of their nomadic Turkic predecessors. The very word Cossack, Ball notes, “derives from the Turk root qaz, ‘to roam’”, and is cognate with the ethnonym Kazakh further east, as the Cossacks “comprised mainly Russians — usually renegades, escaped serfs or criminals — but they also included Turks, Tatars and remnant Polovtsi.” Even now, Ukrainian is sprinkled with Turkic words, a legacy of the two cultures’ long history of interaction and competition. One Ukrainian commander I met went by the nom de guerre “Duman”, or fog, deriving from the Turkic word for smoke or mist. Even now, Ukrainians refer to Russians with the dismissive Turkic epithet Katsab, or butcher.
On the Russian side, the war effort has been marked by the use of steppe peoples as infantry, with many of the heaviest casualties borne — and apparently some of the worst war crimes committed by — the Buryat Mongols of the Russian steppe, along with the Kalmyks of the lower Volga, Europe’s only Buddhist nation, who once watered their horses as far west as Paris following the defeat of Napoleon. Similarly, among the many subject peoples of the Russian empire deployed to Ukraine are Ossetians from the Caucasus, a tiny Iranic-speaking nation who are all that remain of the Alans, who once fought the Romans across Central Europe, settling as far west as France and Spain: some of their descendants, now Magyarised, still live in Hungary as the Jasz people. Their Iranic speech is now heard in Ukraine’s steppe for the first time in a thousand years, dragged along into a war of European conquest by another great Eurasian empire.
The very concept of chivalry which defined Europe’s medieval history was the product of Iranian-speaking steppe peoples like the Sarmatians and the Alans, whose innovations in the use of cavalry — stirrups, lances and long chainmail coats — changed the face of late Roman warfare and set the stage for the knights of the High Middle Ages. Even our own medieval romances may owe something to their distant steppe traditions, after the border forts of what is now northern England became the garrison home of Sarmatian levies in Roman service. As Ball notes: “Sarmatian warrior worship of a sword fixed in the ground has been suggested as furnishing the origin of the Excalibur legend. This appears to have been a long steppe warrior tradition: Ibn Rusta in the tenth century, for example, describes how the Viking Rus ruler — whom he calls by the steppe title of Khagan or khāqān — would plant a naked sword in the earth pointing towards his newborn son.” Perhaps it is not mere coincidence, then, that the Azov Regiment’s torchlit ceremonies in the southern steppe city of Mariupol took place beneath three giant swords embedded in the ground, a striking symbol that has now become the group’s emblem.
Again and again, these strange resonances between the steppe’s ancient nomad past and its bloody present swim to the surface like long-forgotten memories. The great statue to Mother Russia, sword in hand, that rises above Stalingrad’s Hill 102, where tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were ground into the soil by artillery possesses the grim grandeur of some ancient steppe monument. And indeed, Hill 102, the crucial position of the battle that decided the war’s outcome, is perhaps better viewed by its alternate name as the Mamayev Kurgan, the burial tumulus of a long-forgotten Tatar khagan. From the ancient past to now, Russia’s history was written on the steppe, and without the steppe Russia’s imperial past and present is simply impossible to understand. Indeed, as Ball observes, without the historic domination of steppe nomads, there would be no Russia as we understand it.
As Ball observes: “The future of Russian greatness was both a response to and a legacy of the Mongols… Indeed, to a large extent Muscovite power was a creation of the Golden Horde: the khans required a stable central authority as a client state which could be relied upon to raise auxiliaries for the khan’s armies and to collect and deliver taxes and tribute. Moscow fitted the bill, so the Golden Horde deliberately strengthened it against the other Russian cities and appointed its prince as their chief tax collector.” Without the Mongol-enforced primacy of Muscovy, the land that is now Russia may well have remained a series of disunited kingdoms and city states, just like medieval Italy or Germany: “The Mongols, in other words, brought about the emergence of Russia.”
Even the great king Sviatoslav of Kyivan Rus, whose legacy is claimed by both Ukraine and Russia, extended his rule across the steppe by defeating the great Jewish Khazar kingdom and in doing so, “adopted the techniques and warfare of the steppe nomad: in other words, Kievan Rus was at first simply another steppe nomad state, albeit with a Scandinavian element. Sviatoslav never decisively defeated the Pechenegs and was killed by them in 963, and his skull was made into a cup in steppe tradition.” Medieval Russia was, then, as much a steppe polity as a European state, perhaps more so. After all, “up until 1480 Muscovite coins still carried inscriptions in Arabic. As late as 1531 Vasili III of Moscow was still paying tribute to the successors of the Golden Horde: Crimea, Kazan and Astrakhan”, and the eternal symbol of Russian power, Moscow’s St Basil’s Cathedral, was modelled on Kazan’s Great Mosque, in thanks for the conquest of the great Tatar capital.
Tracing Muscovy’s traditions of governance, and then those of imperial Russia, to the Mongol and Tatar customs of the inner steppe, Ball observes that “Even by the fourteenth century the civil and military institutions of Muscovy ‘were overwhelmingly Mongol in origin’… Ivan IV, the first Russian to proclaim himself Tsar (in Russian the title is actually Tsezar), added Ulugh Khan, ‘Great Khan’, to his titles.” Though he dismisses the “Mongol Yoke” hypothesis of Russian historiography, Ball nevertheless traces Russia’s unique and terrible form of autocratic rule to steppe customs, deep into the modern period: “Ivan also adopted the Mongol policy of ‘collective guilt’ where all male relatives and retainers of a guilty man would be executed, a policy even extended to entire communities. Stalin’s similar policy was a continuation of this.” The steppe’s long influence stretches deep into the cultural DNA of our modern world: even such a giant 20th century figure as Lenin, destroyer of one great Eurasian empire and founder of another, was of part-Kalmyk descent, after all.
Imperial Russia’s second largest minority after the Ukrainians, whose post-independence relationship with their giant neighbour is today a source of such bloodshed, was the Muslim Tatars, from whose Russified nomad aristocracy some of the greatest names in Russian culture — Rachmaninoff, Turgenev, Nureyev and Akhmatova — claimed descent. “The list [of Tatar surnames] covers all walks of Russian life: artistic, religious, scientific, literary, military, political and royal. The list is virtually endless,” Ball notes, and even today “the descendants of the Mongol ‘hordes’ — the Tatars — are the second-largest minority in Russia after the Russians themselves, and the Republic of Tatarstan is the second-largest republic in European Russia.”
Written for a general audience, Ball’s book nevertheless synthesises the latest archaeological research and historical debate on the steppe’s ancient and modern peoples, archaeological research on the steppe’s history, delving back into the deepest mists of time. The burgeoning community of esoteric archaeology and anthropology posters on Twitter will surely appreciate his summarising of the latest research on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, the fate of the Khazars and the birth and decline of the great Scythian kingdoms, who’s exquisite goldwork was the highlight of the British Museum’s recent blockbuster exhibition.
Noting that St Petersburg’s great Hermitage Museum was founded primarily as a place to store the newfound Scythian treasures unearthed by Russian colonists in Crimea, Mariupol and the rest what is now Ukraine’s contested southern steppe, and alert to the theft of Scythian treasures from Ukrainian museums by their new-old Russian conquerors, we realise that the relentless cycle of history has brought a new relevance to Ball’s book, even since its publication last winter. Just as in the Middle Ages and in the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, the fate of Europe is once again being written on the endless, grassy steppe.
Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.
Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia
That is a very happy coincidence, because Roussinos’ essay and Figes’ The Story of Russia are really circling the same enormous question from different directions: what made Russia Russia?
Figes is, in many ways, the antidote to the more sweeping “fingerprints of the steppe” argument. He certainly does not deny the Mongol inheritance – quite the opposite. The Mongol conquest of the Rus principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the decisive ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s old political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde, and created the conditions in which Moscow could eventually rise. The irony, as both Roussinos and Figes emphasise, is that the Mongols did not simply delay Russian state formation; they helped create the particular form of state that emerged.
But Figes is interested less in what Russia inherited than in what Russia made of those inheritances. The Mongols supplied mechanisms of rule – taxation, military organisation, hierarchy, a relationship between ruler and subject that was very different from Western feudalism. Yet Russia’s self-understanding was built around other ideas: Orthodox Christianity, Byzantium, the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, and the notion that the Tsar was not merely a monarch but a sacred figure.
This is where it links beautifully with Morrison’s critique. The danger is that we see the Mongol “fingerprints” and assume they explain everything. But fingerprints do not tell you why the person picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. They tell you something about contact and inheritance; they do not reveal intention.
Figes’ Russia is a civilisation built from multiple inheritances: Byzantine, Slavic, steppe, European and imperial. The great Russian paradox is that it has often defined itself simultaneously as both European and apart from Europe. Peter the Great famously tried to drag Russia westward — shaving beards, building St Petersburg, importing European science and manners — yet the deeper structures of autocracy, hierarchy and imperial expansion remained. Later Slavophiles rejected the West and celebrated a distinct Russian path, while Westernisers argued that Russia’s tragedy was precisely its failure to become sufficiently European.
This also connects with our earlier discussion of maps and historical memory. Russia is, geographically, an extraordinary historical anomaly: a European state that expanded across Asia until it became a continental empire. The map itself creates the tension. Is Russia Europe? Asia? Eurasia? The answer has shifted depending on who was asking and what political argument they wanted to make.
One of the things I suspect you will appreciate in Figes is his attention to recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the tension between obedience and rebellion, the recurring belief that Russia has a unique destiny. These are not “genes” or immutable cultural DNA; they are traditions — stories Russians told about themselves. And stories matter enormously because people act upon them.
That brings us back to Roussinos’ evocative phrase, “the echo of the steppes”. Echoes are fascinating precisely because they are not the original sound. They are altered, refracted and carried forward. The Mongol conquest echoed through Muscovy; Byzantium echoed through the Tsars; Soviet power echoed through Putin’s Kremlin. But each generation chooses which echoes to amplify.
There is also a pleasing connection with your earlier fascination with maps and atlases. A physical map of Russia looks almost inevitable: the enormous landmass stretching from Europe to the Pacific. But Figes and Morrison both remind us that geography creates possibilities, not destinies. The Russian Empire was not simply “there” waiting to happen. It was built by choices — by princes, tsars, revolutionaries and commissars who made decisions within particular historical circumstances.
So perhaps the combined lesson of Figes, Roussinos and Morrison is this:
Russia is not merely a European country contaminated by Asia, nor an Asian empire wearing European clothes. It is a civilisation formed in the meeting place of worlds. The tragedy is not that it has a complicated past; all great civilisations do. The tragedy comes when a complicated past is reduced to a single myth of inevitable destiny.
Which, interestingly, brings us back to your recurring theme: the power – and danger – of maps. Every map is an argument about the past. Every empire is a story it tells about itself. And every story leaves fingerprints. The historian’s job is to work out which ones are real, which ones are imagined, and which ones have been deliberately placed there.
Alexander Morrison’s critique
Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University, specialising in the Russian conquest of Central Asia, commented on Roussinos’ essay in Unherd. Here it is in full.
Roussinos, seems to have made good use of Ball’s research. Some of these arguments are completely uncontroversial when applied to the Asian neighbours of the Eurasian steppe in the early modern period: the Ottomans, the Safavids of Iran and the Qing all made use of Chinggisid and TImurid political repertoires in building their states alongside other elements (Byzantine heritage for the Ottomans, the existing Chinese imperial tradition in the Qing case, Sufi religious charisma for the Safavids). The Mughals were of course actually of Timurid (and in the female line of Chinggisid) descent, and it was at the core of their dynastic ideology in India.
However the steppe political tradition seems to have produced ever larger polities in Asia, which makes it hard to explain why it would instead produce political fragmentation in western and Central Europe – I think that part of Ball’s argument is a bit overstretched.
The Muscovite example seems to fit the Asian pattern better, and Roussinos is spot on in saying that it was the willingness of the Princes of Moscow to act as particularly loyal and effective satraps and tax collectors for the Golden Horde that allowed what had previously been a minor Rus’ princedom to rise to pre-eminence.
However we need to be clear about what it was that Muscovy took from the Mongols: it was largely bureaucratic structures linked to taxation or communication. This why key Russian words such as kazna (treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal service) are of Mongol origin. On the cultural side the ruling ideologies of the state were all to do with Orthodox Christianity and the semi-mythical link to Byzantium (the ‘Third Rome’), which was what Ivan IV (the Terrible) was evoking when he took the title of Tsar (Caesar) – he may have added the title of khan for good measure but this was largely for the purposes of communication with steppe peoples.
Many Tatar nobles of Chinggisid descent did become incorporated into the Muscovite aristocracy after the fall of Kazan in 1552, but you need to be careful about 19th and 20th-century claims to this ancestry, which are often bogus (it was fashionable at the time). In the case of Akhmatova it was her nom de plume (she was born Anna Gorenko – in fact a Ukrainian name). In any case Chinggisid descent did not give you any kind of claim to the throne of Muscovy, which had its own dynastic legend in the Rurikids. A better guide to the relationship between Muscovy and the Mongols than Ball is Donald Ostrowski.
There is also a bit too much cultural determinism in all of this to my liking – it suggests that neither Russia nor Ukraine can ever shake off this bloody past etc. etc. Nowhere in the world is simply a prisoner of its past. What is happening now is a result of very specific political choices made by Vladimir Putin and Russia’s ruling elite. Their thinking is rooted partly in their reading of 19th-century Russian historians (who first came up with the idea that Russians and Ukrainians were the same people), vicious forms of anti-semitic Russian nationalism of the early 20th century and the emigration (the Black Hundreds, Ivan Il’in), a particular, tendentious interpretation of both Soviet history and their own memories of the Soviet collapse.
What is perhaps more relevant is that this steppe past means that most of southern and eastern Ukraine was only relatively recently settled – not just by Russians and Ukrainians, but by the whole range of peoples of the empire (Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Armenians…probably also some Ossetians). They are certainly not ‘ancient Russian lands’ as Putin has claimed, but they are part of Ukrainian territory under international law and the Budapest memorandum assuring the country’s territorial integrity which Russia signed.
A couple of other corrections – the Buryats are not a steppe people, they live East of Lake Baikal. I am a bit queasy about the implication that they and the Kalmyks are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the Russian army because of their ‘savage’ steppe nature – it is simply because these are some of the poorest parts of the Russian Federation, and because the Russian regime is very deliberately trying to avoid recruiting troops from metropolitan regions of European Russia whose families might cause political trouble or have ties to Ukraine.
The ethnic Russians who are fighting are also disproportionately from Siberia or the Altai. The regiment which committed the atrocities at Bucha was from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, and its commander appears to have been originally from Karakalpakstan. Most Ossetians speak Russian these days, and have long identified with Russian rule. A good piece though – not many outlets would allow as thorough and as thoughtful a review of a work on Eurasian History.
Morrison’s comment stands apart from most of the thread because it does what the best scholarly criticism should do: it accepts the broad thesis where the evidence supports it, corrects errors where necessary, and resists the temptation to replace one grand narrative with another.
The essence of Morrison’s critique is this:
He accepts the central proposition that Muscovy inherited important features from the Mongol world. Indeed, he strengthens it by pointing out that similar borrowing occurred across Eurasia. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions into their own states. Russia was therefore not unique in absorbing institutions from the steppe.
Where he parts company with Ball is over determinism. Ball appears to argue that steppe political culture explains not only Muscovy’s rise but much of Russia’s subsequent history and perhaps even Putin’s Russia today. Morrison thinks this stretches the evidence too far. Administrative institutions can endure for centuries; they do not imprison nations forever. Modern Russia, he argues, is the product of choices made by a particular elite, drawing on nineteenth-century nationalism, Soviet memories and contemporary ideology, rather than the inevitable flowering of Mongol political culture.
He also introduces some valuable nuance. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic techniques—taxation, communications, administration – from the Golden Horde, but its ideological heart remained Orthodox and Byzantine. Ivan IV’s claim to be Tsar rested on the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, not the successor of Genghis Khan. Even the Russian language preserves this administrative inheritance in words such as kazna (also in Arabic,treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal relay), all of Mongol origin, illustrating that institutional borrowing need not imply cultural subordination.
Morrison is equally careful about ethnicity. He rejects romanticised claims of Chinggisid ancestry, notes that many were fashionable nineteenth-century inventions, and cautions against portraying Buryats or Kalmyks as somehow naturally warlike. Their prominence in today’s Russian army is explained far more convincingly by economics and recruitment policy than by any inherited “steppe mentality”. That is a useful reminder that socio-economic factors often explain what cultural stereotypes merely decorate.
His discussion of Ukraine is similarly restrained. Southern and eastern Ukraine were indeed settled comparatively recently by a mosaic of peoples across the imperial period, making simplistic claims of ancient ethnic ownership difficult to sustain. Yet that historical complexity does not undermine Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders or Russia’s commitments under the Budapest Memorandum. History explains; it does not necessarily justify.
Finally, Morrison performs the historian’s essential task of distinguishing influence from destiny. States inherit institutions, myths and habits, but they are not condemned to repeat them. This is perhaps his strongest point. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or the “Russian soul”, just as earlier generations invoked “ancient Balkan hatreds” to explain Yugoslavia. Such narratives are elegant because they reduce contingency to inevitability. Historians, however, are generally suspicious of elegant explanations.
His recommendation of Donald Ostrowski is also telling. Ostrowski’s work has long argued that Muscovy’s relationship with the Mongol world was one of selective adaptation rather than wholesale inheritance. That is a subtler – and probably more persuasive – account than one that sees Russia as simply Europe’s most successful steppe empire.
In short, Morrison doesn’t demolish Ball’s thesis. He refines it. He accepts that the steppe mattered enormously, but insists that institutions are not destiny, that cultures borrow selectively, and that political choices remain more important than historical determinism. It is precisely the kind of intervention that lifts an online discussion from polemic into genuine historical
What Unherd Readers had to say about Roussinos’ essay
The comments divide into several broad themes rather than converging on a single interpretation, and in many ways become a debate about contemporary Russia as much as about history.
Many readers found the article fascinating and praised it for opening an unfamiliar chapter of Eurasian history. Several immediately ordered Christopher Ball’s book, while others supplemented the discussion with examples ranging from the Kalmyks’ influence on Austrian costume to the chess capital of Elista, the legacy of the Mongols in Central Europe, and the wider political traditions of the Eurasian steppe. A number of contributors recommended additional works, notably Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads and Donald Ostrowski’s scholarship on Muscovy.
A second group challenged aspects of the historical argument. Critics argued that the article overstated the influence of steppe culture on later European political development, confused mythology with history in discussing Poland and Hungary, and oversimplified the origins of the Cossacks and the Azov Regiment’s symbolism. Others objected to what they saw as cultural determinism: the suggestion that Russia’s present behaviour is somehow an inevitable product of its Mongol inheritance. Several historians in the discussion -Morrison particularly, stressed that Muscovy certainly inherited administrative and fiscal practices from the Golden Horde, but that its religious ideology and dynastic legitimacy remained fundamentally Byzantine and Orthodox. They argued that modern Russian policy reflects political choices by Vladimir Putin and his circle, not an inescapable historical destiny.
As often happens, the historical discussion quickly became a proxy for arguments over the war in Ukraine. One camp maintained that Ukraine is an artificial state whose disputed regions deserve internationally supervised referendums, criticising NATO expansion and Western military support while advocating diplomacy. The opposing view rejected these claims as Russian propaganda, pointing to Ukraine’s overwhelming vote for independence in 1991, insisting that no genuine referendum is possible under military occupation, and arguing that Russian aggression – not Western policy – is the central issue. A more extreme minority advanced familiar pro-Kremlin narratives, portraying NATO as the true aggressor and Russia as a defensive victim, provoking vigorous rebuttals from other commenters.
There was also a meta-debate about free speech. An inflammatory remark describing Russians in derogatory terms prompted accusations of hate speech and counter-accusations of “crybullying”, illustrating how discussions of Russia often slide into arguments over acceptable language as readily as they do over history.
The most substantial contribution came from historian Alexander Morrison, whose lengthy critique was widely praised by other readers. Morrison broadly accepted the article’s central insight – that Muscovy’s rise owed much to its role within the Mongol imperial system – but argued that the thesis was pushed too far. He emphasised the distinction between administrative inheritance and cultural identity, corrected numerous historical inaccuracies, warned against deterministic readings of history, and reminded readers that modern events stem from contemporary political decisions rather than immutable civilisational characteristics. His intervention effectively became the intellectual centre of the comment thread, with several readers declaring that it improved upon the article itself.
Overall, the discussion reveals both the appeal and the risks of grand historical narratives. Most readers accepted that the Eurasian steppe profoundly shaped Russia’s development. Where they diverged was over the extent to which that past explains the present, and whether history should be read as a story of enduring civilisational patterns or of contingent political choices. The resulting debate ranges from thoughtful historiography to contemporary geopolitics, with occasional excursions into conspiracy theory and internet polemics.
President Donald Trump has described the US bombing campaign against Iran as “a little excursion,” then a “skirmish,” then a “mini-war” – ostensible breaches of a subsequent ceasefire are called “trifles”. He was doing something powerful men have always done: reach for a word small enough to sit comfortably in a sentence while the fires it describes are still burning, without actually committing to the potential political consequences calling the conflict a war. The gesture is familiar. Vladimir Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” History, in the end, has usually insisted on its own vocabulary. What begins as euphemism tends to end as a chapter heading.
The US-Iran conflict – a sustained bombing campaign, a naval blockade constricting a fifth of the world’s oil supply, and an increasingly fragile ceasefire – is, by any honest accounting, a war. That we have not yet fully agreed to call it one is itself revealing. Language shapes the choices we are willing to contemplate; the choices we refuse to contemplate have a habit of being made for us, usually at greater cost and on someone else’s timetable.
But naming the war is only the first act of reckoning. The second – and more treacherous – is understanding it. And here, almost instinctively, we reach backwards. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, the analogies arrive.
For this is what nations do when confronted with uncertainty: they search the past for usable maps. Yet wars are not equations, and analogies illuminate only by partial light. Gallipoli warns of overconfidence and the fantasy of the decisive stroke. Crimea evokes mismanagement and systemic incoherence. Vietnam and Iraq conjure the slow dread of entanglement – wars that move, expensively and violently, without ever quite arriving at conclusion.
We rarely encounter a new war on its own terms. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, it is already being narrated through the past – the Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – names invoked less as history than as instruments of comprehension. This reflex is not mere intellectual laziness. War, in its immediacy, is too vast, too contradictory, to grasp without scaffolding; analogy supplies the frame. It tells us where to look for overconfidence, where to suspect mismanagement, where to anticipate drift. Yet it also does something subtler, and more dangerous: it invites us to believe that the present can be read off the past, that by matching patterns we might master outcomes.
The essay that follows proceeds from that tension. It does not treat these conflicts as competing verdicts on America’s confrontation with Iran, but as different lenses trained on different moments of a war’s life: conception, execution, and duration. Each captures a recognisable failure mode – the decisive stroke that overreaches, the system that cannot align means to ends, the conflict that persists beyond its rationale. To “refight” these wars in argument is not simply to indulge historical memory; it is to reveal how deeply our strategic thinking remains shaped by unresolved experiences. The past, in this sense, is not behind us. It is the grammar in which we continue to write the present.
Seeking storylines to explain the present
The quest begins, as these often do, reaching backwards in search of a usable past, a storyline that suits the present and what is now unfolding between America and Iran.
No war arrives naked; it comes draped in analogy. War is too large, too chaotic, to apprehend all at once; analogy shrinks it to something graspable. Analogies, like maps, tell you where to look, but also, just as often, where not to. Gallipoli (1915–16) is summoned, and Crimea (1853–56), and then, inevitably, Vietnam (1955-75, the war of my generation, though one that we British chose not to join) and Iraq (2003-11), those twin lodestars of modern American unease. Each is offered up as a key. Each, in its way, fits a lock. None, taken alone, opens the door.
Start with the British campaign during WWI to seize the strategic Dardanelles straits with the aim of threatening Istanbul and taking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. That analogy tends to be invoked by those who see overconfidence at the top: a belief that a bold stroke – decapitation strikes, limited escalation, a sharp application of force – can produce a decisive political outcome in a complex theatre. Gallipoli was conceived as a shortcut around stalemate; it became a lesson in underestimating geography, logistics, and the enemy’s will. If the critique is that Washington imagined a controlled, almost surgical confrontation with Iran that would bend reality to its design, then Gallipoli fits – particularly in its early optimism curdling into stubborn, costly entanglement.
There is something almost aesthetic about the Gallipoli temptation. It promises clarity. A narrow strait, a defined objective, a hinge upon which the whole great mechanism might turn. Strategy reduced to geometry. Yet wars have a way of refusing such elegance. The Turkish defence stiffened; the terrain asserted itself; the timetable dissolved into dust and flies and blood. The decisive stroke became an extended ordeal. And here the analogy deepens: not merely in the initial miscalculation, but in the dawning realisation that what was meant to be quick has become something else entirely – sticky, resistant, unyielding.
The Crimean War comparison is subtler, and in some ways more damning. Ostensibly a campaign by Britain and France (ironically, the architects of the Dardanelles venture) to challenge Czarist Russia’s design on the ailing Ottoman Empire – the so-called Eastern Question. Crimea was not just a military muddle; it was a war of misaligned systems: unclear objectives, poor coordination, inflated rhetoric masking administrative incompetence, and a media environment that amplified both heroism and absurdity (the Charge of the Light Brigade as both myth and indictment). If the Iran conflict appears strategically incoherent – multiple actors, shifting goals, allies pulling in different directions, public narratives outpacing operational reality – then Crimea begins to look uncomfortably familiar. It’s less about one disastrous decision and more about a system that cannot quite align means with ends.
Here the failure is quieter, but more pervasive. Not the single grand error, but the accumulation of smaller ones: supply chains that falter, commands that overlap, allies who agree in principle but diverge in practice. Crimea is what happens when the machinery of war – bureaucratic, logistical, political – fails to mesh. The guns fire, the troops advance, the dispatches glow with rhetoric, but somewhere beneath it all the connection between effort and outcome frays. One might say, borrowing that withering line in the 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica, that it becomes “perhaps the most ill-managed campaign in English history” – and the sting lies precisely in that word managed. Not conceived, not fought, but managed: as though war were an administrative exercise that has slipped its clerical bounds.
And then, inevitably, we arrive at America’s misbegotten wars in Indochina and Iraq. When people reach for these, they are usually pointing to something deeper: not the opening moves, but the trajectory. Vietnam is the archetype of gradual escalation into a conflict that cannot be cleanly won because its political premises are flawed. Iraq (particularly post-2003) adds another layer: the illusion of quick victory followed by insurgency, fragmentation, and the long tail of unintended consequences. If Iran becomes a drawn-out contest of proxies, asymmetric retaliation, and domestic fatigue – where tactical successes accumulate but strategic clarity recedes – then Vietnam/Iraq is the more predictive analogy.
Vietnam was once called “chaos without a compass,” and the phrase endures because it captures the feeling of the war more than its formal doctrine. There was, in fact, a compass – containment, credibility, dominoes – but it spun uncertainly, pointing in several directions at once. Washington oscillated between coercion and restraint, escalation and negotiation, measuring progress in tonnage dropped and bodies counted, even as the political centre of gravity drifted further out of reach. The war moved, violently and expensively, but it did not arrive. It accumulated.
Iraq echoes that pattern but begins differently – with a burst of clarity that dissolves into ambiguity. The regime falls; the statue topples; the map is redrawn in a matter of weeks; victory is declared. And then the afterlife begins. Insurgency, sectarian fracture, proxy entanglement- the slow discovery that winning the war is not the same as securing the peace. Iraq is what happens when the end state is assumed rather than constructed. It is, in that sense, less a campaign than a condition.
Set beside these, the earlier analogies sharpen. Gallipoli was not “chaos without a compass” at the outset; it had a very clear aim. Nor was it quite Crimea’s administrative farce, though elements of mismanagement crept in as the campaign stalled. Its distinctive flaw was the belief that a bold, limited stroke could shortcut the hard arithmetic of war – geography, supply, enemy adaptation. When that belief failed, the campaign slid, almost reluctantly, toward something more protracted, more wearing, with flashes of Crimean dysfunction flickering at the edges.
And this is the point at which the analogies begin to overlap, to blur into one another. The opening may be Gallipoli: confident, compressed, persuasive in its apparent simplicity. The conduct may drift toward Crimea: systems straining, coordination fraying, rhetoric outrunning reality. The trajectory may lengthen into Vietnam or Iraq: time stretching, purpose thinning, the war becoming less an event than an environment.
So which is most apt? If you’re judging initial strategic conception: then it is Gallipoli. If you’re judging systemic dysfunction and coalition incoherence: it’s Crimea. If you’re judging likely long-term dynamics and risk of quagmire: look to Vietnam and Iraq.
Forced to choose one, the most useful analogy is probably Iraq (with a Vietnam shadow). It captures both the confidence of the opening act and the chronic instability that can follow when political end states are ill-defined. Gallipoli was a failed gamble; Iraq became a condition. And it is the risk of becoming a condition – open-ended, absorbing, resistant to tidy resolution – that should trouble policymakers more than the memory of any single historical blunder.
For there is something peculiarly modern in that transformation. Nineteenth-century wars could be mismanaged; early twentieth-century campaigns could be disastrously conceived; but late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century conflicts have a habit of enduring. They slip their temporal bounds. They resist conclusion. They persist in the form of insurgencies, proxy struggles, regional destabilisations, so-called “forever wars” – echoes rather than endings.
History, in this sense, does not repeat so much as it offers a set of recurring traps, each labelled in a different hand. The names change – Lone Pine and The Nek, Balaclava, Khe Sanh, Fallujah – but the pattern is recognisable: ambition outruns understanding; institutions struggle to keep pace with intention; time erodes clarity; and strategy discovers, too late, that the map was never the territory.
The past, obligingly, provides the metaphors. The present decides which of them it is willing to become.
Forever wars and the persistent Eastern Question
Ironically, the repercussions and ricochets of the Crimea and Gallipoli linger still in the “forever wars” of the Ottoman Succession that continue to be fought in the Levant. Though the “sick man of Europe” has long gone, so-called “Eastern Question” that he precipitated is with us still. And the irony is not merely poetic, it is structural.
The Crimean War and Gallipoli were not just episodes in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire; they were moments in which the European powers tried, and failed, to manage that decline without resolving it. The Eastern Question – what to do with a weakening empire whose territories sat athwart trade routes, faiths, and ambitions – was never answered. It was deferred, patched, internationalised, moralised, and, when necessary, fought over. But never settled.
Crimea was, in essence, a war about containment without clarity. Britain and France fought not to destroy the Ottoman Empire, nor to reform it decisively, but to prevent Russia from exploiting its weakness. The result was a kind of geopolitical holding operation – costly, confused, and inconclusive. The patient survived, but the illness deepened. The war did not solve the Eastern Question; it ensured that it would return, more complicated than before.
Gallipoli, sixty years later, was almost the inverse: an attempt at decisive intervention that miscarried. Where Crimea sought to stabilise the system, Gallipoli tried to break it open – knock the Ottomans out of what became known as The Great War, reorder the strategic map, and force a resolution. It failed, and in failing, prolonged the life of the very problem it aimed to solve. When the Ottoman Empire did finally collapse in 1918, it did so not through elegant strategy but through cumulative exhaustion – and the settlement that followed (the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement, the Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Great War and shaped the modern Middle East, the mandates, improvised borders, and the legacies inherited by Israel and Palestine, by Syria and Lebanon, and by Iraq carried within it the seeds of future instability.
And here is the connective tissue to the present: the “forever wars” of the Levant are, in a very real sense, the afterlife of those unresolved choices.
The Ottoman system, for all its inequities, provided a kind of imperial coherence – a loose, often improvised order that managed diversity through hierarchy rather than uniformity. Its removal created a vacuum that external powers attempted to fill with lines on maps and imported state structures, often indifferent to local realities, including religious and ethnic divisions. The mandates were not solutions; they were transitional fictions that hardened into permanence. The Eastern Question did not end; it metastasised.
Thus the region becomes a palimpsest of earlier interventions:
The Crimean instinct persists in modern coalition warfare – external powers seeking to contain instability without fully committing to its resolution, managing symptoms rather than causes.
The Gallipoli impulse reappears in periodic attempts at decisive intervention – strikes, invasions, regime-change strategies – each promising to reset the board, each discovering the board is more complicated than imagined.
And over all this hangs the long shadow of Vietnam and Iraq: the recognition that once engaged, these conflicts do not conclude cleanly, but evolve into layered, persistent struggles involving states, militias, proxies, and narratives.
What we call “forever wars” are, in this sense, not aberrations but continuations – the modern form of an old, unanswered question. The Ottoman Empire is gone, but the strategic problem it embodied remains: a region where internal fractures intersect with external interests, where no single power can impose order, and where every intervention alters the conditions for the next.
There is a quiet, almost melancholic symmetry in this. Nineteenth-century statesmen spoke of the “Sick Man of Europe” as though the problem were a patient to be diagnosed and treated. But the illness was never confined to the patient; it was embedded in the system around him. Remove the patient, and the condition does not disappear – it redistributes itself.
So when modern observers reach for Gallipoli, or Crimea, or Vietnam, or Iraq, they are not merely searching for analogies of method. They are circling, perhaps without quite naming it, the persistence of a problem without closure.
The Eastern Question was never answered. It simply changed its language.
Challenging the analogies
You can’t really make sense of the analogies – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – without restoring Iran itself to the centre of the frame. Otherwise the country becomes a backdrop, a stage upon which other powers replay their historical anxieties. But Iran is not the Ottoman Empire in decline, nor Iraq in 2003, nor Vietnam in 1965. It is an old state with a long memory of being acted upon – and that memory shapes how it acts now.
What changes, once you bring Iran back in, is the direction of the analogy. The earlier comparisons mostly describe how outside powers misjudge wars. Iran’s history reminds you how those same powers are often experienced from the inside – as intrusion, manipulation, or existential threat.
Iran enters the story not as an abstraction – “the enemy,” “the regime,” “the theatre” – but as a historical actor formed in the crucible of the very system the earlier analogies describe.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Persia was itself entangled in a version of the Eastern Question, pressured by Russian and British imperial competition, its sovereignty compromised, its politics penetrated. The First World War and its aftermath did not dismantle Iran as they did the Ottoman Empire, but they confirmed its vulnerability to external design. The Second World War made that vulnerability explicit: Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1941, the removal of Reza Shah, and the installation of his son – an early demonstration that great powers could, when required, rearrange Iran’s internal order.
From there, the pattern sharpens. The 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh – engineered by Britain and the United States – lodges itself in Iranian political consciousness as a defining moment: not simply a change of government, but a lesson about the limits of independence in a world of larger powers. The Shah’s subsequent rule, modernising yet authoritarian, Western-aligned yet domestically brittle, becomes the next act in this long drama of externally entangled sovereignty.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 then reads, in part, as a rupture with that pattern- a violent reassertion of autonomy, clothed in religious language but grounded in political memory. “Neither East nor West” was not just a slogan; it was a rejection of the very dynamics that had shaped Iran’s modern history. Yet revolutions do not escape geography. The new regime inherits the same strategic environment, the same pressures, the same suspicions.
The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) is crucial here. For eight years, Iran fights a brutal, attritional conflict against Saddam Hussein – largely isolated, facing external support flowing to its adversary. This is Iran’s Vietnam, one might say, but with a different lesson drawn: not the futility of war, but the necessity of endurance. The war entrenches a doctrine of asymmetry, resilience, and proxy capability – precisely the features that later confound American strategy in the region.
From that point on, the Islamic Republic is not simply surviving; it is adapting. It builds networks – Hezbollah, militias, regional alliances – not as ideological ornaments but as strategic depth. It becomes, in effect, a state that has internalised the lessons of the very wars others use as analogies. Where outside observers see Vietnam or Iraq looming, Iranian planners see something else: a long game in which time, patience, and indirection offset conventional inferiority.
To reinsert Iran into the narrative is to complicate every analogy. Gallipoli assumes an opponent who will react predictably to a decisive blow; Iran’s history suggests otherwise. Crimea assumes mismanagement on one side; Iran’s experience reminds us that what appears as dysfunction externally may be met by coherence internally. Vietnam and Iraq warn of quagmires; Iran has, in many respects, built its strategy around drawing others into them.
In that sense, the question is not only which past war America risks refighting, but which past experiences Iran believes it is reliving – or avenging. The 1953 coup, the isolation of the 1980s, the long memory of foreign interference: these are not background details, but active ingredients in the present.
And so our frame subtly shifts. It is no longer simply about the hazards of analogy, or the repetition of strategic error, but about the collision of historical memories. One side reaches for Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq- warnings drawn from its own past misjudgments. The other carries a different archive: intervention, resistance, survival.
Between those two archives lies the present conflict – less a replay of any single war than a convergence of many, each side reading from a different script, each convinced, in its own way, that history has already shown it how this story goes.
Conclusion
To refight old wars in the mind is, at one level, an act of prudence. It reminds us that others have stood at similar thresholds, armed with confidence, intelligence, and good intentions – and have nonetheless misjudged the terrain, the enemy, or themselves. But there is a fine line between learning from history and being governed by it. Analogy can clarify; it can also constrain. It can sharpen perception, or it can trap us in inherited scripts, seeing Gallipoli where the problem is administrative, or diagnosing Vietnam when the flaw lies in the opening wager.
The deeper unease running through these comparisons is not simply that wars go wrong, but that they linger – that they slip their boundaries and become conditions rather than episodes. From the mismanaged campaigns of Crimea to the failed gambles of Gallipoli, from the disorientation of Vietnam to the long aftermath of Iraq, one sees not repetition but recurrence: ambition outrunning understanding, institutions straining to keep pace, time eroding clarity. And beneath it all, especially in the Levant, the longer echo of an older, unanswered question – how to order a region where external power and internal fracture are perpetually entangled.
History does not offer a single, authoritative mirror. It offers a cabinet of them, each slightly warped, each catching a different angle of the present. The task is not to choose one reflection and mistake it for reality, but to recognise the distortions for what they are – and to ask, with some humility, whether we are illuminating the path ahead or merely retracing, with greater eloquence, the steps that led others into the same uncertain ground.
The Western cabinet of mirrors – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – captures recurring pathologies: the overconfident opening stroke, the misaligned machinery, the war that lingers beyond its logic. Yet these are, inescapably, insider narratives. They describe how campaigns look from the bridge, the штаб, the situation room. They are diagnoses of our own errors.
What the Iranian story, set against the longer afterlife of the Eastern Question, forces back into view is the perspective from the other shore. The Young Turks, confronting encroachment and dismemberment, did not experience Gallipoli as a misjudged Allied gamble; they experienced it as a defence of survival. Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese did not inhabit “chaos without a compass”; they pursued a coherent, if costly, struggle against a foreign presence. Iraqi insurgents, and later ISIS in its own brutal and aberrant way, did not parse the war as a case study in post-conflict planning; they resisted, adapted, endured, and exploited.
They did not conduct war games about us. They fought.
Iran belongs in that lineage – not as an analogue, but as an heir to a particular historical consciousness: one shaped by intervention, by imposed settlements, by long wars of attrition, and by the conviction that time can be turned into a weapon. From that vantage, what appears to Western observers as drift or dysfunction may look like opportunity; what is feared as quagmire may be cultivated as strategy.
And so the question shifts. It is no longer simply which past war America risks refighting, but whether the very act of choosing among Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, and Iraq obscures the more important reality: that the other side is not reading from the same book – or as many commentators are reminding us today, “the enemy has a vote”. One side searches its history for warnings about overreach; the other draws from its own past a repertoire of resistance.
History, then, does not just offer competing analogies. It offers competing memories. And where those memories diverge – where one side analyses and the other endures – there lies the most persistent danger: not that we will repeat the past, but that we will misunderstand the present, even as we describe it with perfect historical fluency.
Forward. The Gravest Crime – and selective conscience
On March 25, the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” 123 countries voted in favour, three against, and 52 abstained – including the UK, all 27 EU member states and Australia.
The moral core is unobjectionable. The slave trade was monstrous, its consequences did not end with abolition, and saying so plainly is not theatre – it is history. But UN resolutions are not history lectures. They are political instruments.
This one was carefully engineered. Its most controversial element was the recognition of slavery as a violation of jus cogens – peremptory norms of international law binding on all states. Not a historical observation, but a legal foundation for future liability claims. The EU noted the resolution’s “unbalanced interpretation of historical events” and legal references inconsistent with international law, including retroactive application of rules that simply did not exist at the time.
The 123 who voted yes include states with active, present-tense records of forced labour and ethnic persecution. Their zeal for condemning 18th-century European slave traders carries a faint whiff of convenience. And the Western abstentions were the diplomatic equivalent of leaving before the bill arrives – not endorsement, but not courage either.
Slavery was real. The suffering was immense. But a resolution shaped by reparations politics and the arithmetic of bloc voting is not the act of collective moral reckoning it claims to be. It is politics, dressed, as so much UN business is, in the language of justice.
Whitewashing slavery’s deep and dark history
Slavery sits in the human story like a dark, deep river that refuses to keep to its banks. It runs from the Assyrian deportations and Roman estates, mines and galleys, through the markets of old Baghdad and the longships on the rivers of Keven Rus, down into the Atlantic crossings from Africa to the Americas and thence to Europe. and out again into the contract-labour regimes and hidden rooms of the present. Names change – thrall, concubine, slave, servant, “sponsored worker” – but the underlying grammar is stubborn: power converting vulnerability into utility, often with a theory to justify it and a market to sustain it.
Into this long, uneasy history steps the modern urge to judge it – to apportion blame, to rank crimes, to extract from the past a usable morality for the present. The UN resolution is one such attempt: part commemoration, part indictment, part politics by other means. A counter-brief insists that this particular ledger has been selectively drawn, that some entries are inked in heavily while others are left in the margin or omitted altogether. Between them lies not a settled account but a contested one, in which the Atlantic system with its Islamic trades, and African agency, “King Cotton” and John Brown, and modern forms of coercion all jostle for place and proportion.
The following essay does not endeavour to tidy that argument into a single verdict. It widens the frame without dissolving the particulars; to hold in view both the universality of slavery and the distinctiveness of its forms; to recognise the rarity of abolition without mistaking it for completion. History, in this register, is less a courtroom than a map – dense, overlapping, and resistant to clean lines.
The deep and dark river
That UN resolution formally condemned slavery as a universal crime – indeed, the “gravest crime”. But, in practice it narrows its indictment to the transatlantic trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presenting it as a distinctively Western, racialised, and capitalist enterprise.
It is precise, almost prosecutorial, assigning blame, embedding the trade in a narrative of structural injustice that echoes into the present. Yet it grows evasive when confronting the forces that ended slavery: the Enlightenment, abolitionist movements, legal reforms – reduced to a kind of historical afterthought.
More significantly, as economist and commentator Henry Ergas argues in an article in The Australian, republished below, the resolution omits the long and substantial history of slavery in the Islamic world – trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean – systems that endured for centuries, moved millions, and in many places persisted well into the modern era. Unlike in the West, he contends, there was no sustained, institutionalised moral revolt against slavery at scale; abolition came late, often under external pressure, and in some cases remains incomplete in practice.
He pushes further. By declaring the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity, the resolution risks collapsing distinctions – most notably between exploitation and extermination – thereby, in his reading, relativising the Holocaust. And finally, he notes the political choreography: strong support from authoritarian states and those with troubling contemporary records, contrasted with the hesitant abstention of many Western democracies.
That is his case – straightforward, and cleanly drawn – perhaps a little too cleanly. Because once we widen the frame, the lines begin to blur in ways that resist both the UN’s moral staging and Ergas’s counter-brief.
Slavery is not an aberration of one civilisation but a near-constant of many; and it spans millenia. The Assyrians and Persians deported whole populations as instruments of empire. Sennacherib and other potentates would empty a conquered land of its indigenous peoples and replace them with deportees from another conquest. The Romans built an economy on servile labour whilst the Byzantines continued the practice. Muslim caliphates and emirates, including the Abbasids and Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans, sustained vast networks of concubinage and domestic and military slavery.
The Vikings – often reduced in popular memory to picturesque if violent raiders – operated something closer to a transcontinental syndicate. The river systems of the Rus, threading south through the Volga and Dnieper, connected the Baltic to the Black Sea and Baghdad. Silver flowed north; human beings flowed south. This was not episodic plunder but a business model – structured, repeatable, and profitable. And conducted across astonishing distances. Baghdad and York sat at the far ends of a human supply chain. [The illustration at the head of this article is that of a young Slavic woman being sold into slavery by Vikings to a Persian merchant (Image: Tom Lovell / National Geographic)]
So, in short. Salvery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world, and across the ocean, among the First Nations people of the Americas, treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.
It is necessary therefore to resist any account that isolates the Atlantic trade as if it emerged sui generis from European wickedness. The Islamic world sustained large-scale slave systems over a long durée; and African polities were not merely passive victims but active participants in capture and sale; Arab traders were integral intermediaries. The Atlantic system, or “the Middle Passage” and “Triangular Trade” as it was euphemistically described, depended in its operation on a web of local agency as well as European demand. To acknowledge that is not to dilute culpability but to complicate it – uncomfortably, but necessarily.
And yet – here the counterweight – the Atlantic system was not merely one more iteration of an ancient practice. In the Americas – north and south – fused race, heredity, and commerce into something peculiarly rigid and self-reproducing. Slavery became not just a condition but a caste, encoded in law and biology, and scaled through plantation economies that fed a global market. Cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco were not marginal commodities but engines of early modern capitalism. The system’s brutality was not incidental; it was structural.
It is here that the North American story assumes its central, paradoxical role. Chattel slavery became both foundational and explosive – so deeply embedded in the economy that its removal threatened the entire edifice, and yet so morally corrosive that it generated its own opposition. The American Civil War was among many things, the moment when that contradiction could no longer be managed rhetorically or regionally; it was settled, instead, in blood. Abolition here was not simply argued into being; it was fought into being.
Slavery was America’s original sin, and its malign influence ricochets still through its politics and society. [See American historian Sarah Churchwell’s.chilling account of darkest Dixie in In That Howling Infinite’s The Wrath to Come. Gone With the Wind and America’s Big Lie]
Which brings us to what may be the most historically unusual feature in all of this: not slavery itself, but the sustained movement to abolish it. The West generated, from the 17th century onward, a mounting moral and political challenge to slaver, in legal cases, religious agitation, popular campaigns – that eventually dismantled it – significant help from the Royal Navy. Comparable, system-wide movements were less evident in the Islamic world, where dissent existed but did not crystallise into mass abolitionism with similar force or effect.
The distinction matters. Saying it did not happen is a statement of fact; suggesting it could not have happened, or that its absence reflects some deeper civilisational failing, goes beyond the evidence. The divergence likely owes as much to political economy, state structure, and the contingencies of modernity as to theology alone. Which is where English historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland’s excellent doorstop of a book Dominion hovers, suggestively, over the argument [See In That Howling Infinite’s Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion
Holland’s claim – broadly put – is that the moral vocabulary underpinning abolition in the West owes much to a Christian inheritance: the elevation of the weak, the insistence on the equal worth of souls, the suspicion of unrestrained power. Even as the Enlightenment secularises these ideas, it carries their imprint. One need not follow him into every chapel of that argument to see the outline: abolition is historically anomalous, and anomalies tend to have genealogies. The West did not simply stumble into anti-slavery; it argued its way there, drawing on intellectual and moral resources that had been accumulating, often ambivalently, for centuries.
One must exercise caution here. Moral discomfort with slavery existed elsewhere and earlier, even if it did not produce mass abolitionist movements in the same way as in the West. Nor does the existence of Western abolition somehow erase the brutality or scale of European colonial slavery, particularly the Atlantic slave trade and plantation economies. The West occupies both roles in history: architect of the largest racialised slave system in modern history, and birthplace of the most influential abolitionist movements against it.
History is often untidy like that.
Old poison, new bottles
The story end in the 19th century however much resolutions might prefer it to. The Gulf states remind us that abolition in law does not always mean abolition in practice. The kafala system – sponsorship, contract labour – operates in a grey zone where dependence can harden into coercion. Passports withheld, mobility constrained, recourse limited: not chattel slavery, but an echo, or perhaps a mutation. History rarely repeats itself verbatim; it adapts, keeping the structure while altering the terminology.
And then there are the moments when the past returns not as echo but as revival. ISIS, with its enslavement of Yazidi women, did not merely exploit chaos; it articulated a doctrine. Slavery, and most particularly, sexual slavery, was justified, systematised, and bureaucratised with price lists, allocations, and rules, and even, trans-national trafficking: one captive ended up in Gaza where she was eventually rescued from a war zone. It was, in the grimmest sense, a reactivation of an old logic under modern conditions. Old poison in new bottles. If abolition was an anomaly, here was the reminder that anomalies can be reversed.
Governments and citizens of ostensibly westernized states should look to their self-awarded laurels. We should be wary of treating coercion as something that happens “over there.” The exploitation of domestic workers – underpaid, over- controlled , sometimes effectively trapped – appears not only in the Gulf but in Lebanon, Israel, and also parts of Western Europe and North America, where immigration status and private households create shadows the law struggles to reach. And closer still, in our own economies, sweatshop labour, debt bondagea and various forms of servitude persist at the margins, along with physical violence and sexual exploitation – which is precisely why regulation, inspection, and enforcement remain not moral luxuries but necessities.
Against this broader canvas, the UN resolution begins to look less like a statement of history than a negotiation, negation, even – of memory. Its selectivity – foregrounding Western guilt, backgrounding Western abolition, omitting other systems – is not unusual in such documents; it is, in some sense, as we have often seen, their defining feature. They are less concerned with completeness than with consensus, less with analysis than with alignment. Countries with difficult presents often find it convenient to condemn curated pasts.
Ergas is justified in objecting to that selectivity. Where he overreaches is in answering it with a counter-selectivity of his own – one that risks understating the distinctiveness of the Atlantic system and overstating the clarity of civilisational contrasts. History, inconveniently, refuses to stay within either brief.
On the question of the Holocaust, however, his warning lands. To rank atrocities – to declare one “the greatest” – is to turn history into a macabre competition. More importantly, it obscures differences of intent. Most slave systems, however brutal, were premised on exploitation; the Holocaust was premised on annihilation. That distinction is not a matter of moral bookkeeping but of historical substance.
And so we arrive, circuitously, at a position that satisfies no one entirely – which is probably how one knows it is closer to the truth.
Slavery is not the property of any one civilisation; it is a recurrent human institution, appearing wherever power, profit, and permission align. The Atlantic trade is distinctive but not unique; Islamic and African systems are substantial but not singular; modern forms persist under altered names and legal veneers. What is genuinely unusual is the emergence of sustained, organised movements that declare slavery illegitimate and succeed – partially, unevenly – in abolishing it.
Between the UN’s moral narrowing and Ergas’s corrective widening lies a more uncomfortable landscape: one in which culpability is diffuse, agency is shared, and progress, where it occur, is contingent, fragile, and slow. The past does not arrange itself into neat indictments or tidy vindications. It lingers, instead, as habit and warning.
And, if one is honest, as a question still not fully answered.
On the Holocaust comparison, Ergas is on firmer ground. Collapsing all historical crimes into a single ranked category – the greatest” – is less analysis than moral theatre. The distinction between exploitation and extermination is not pedantic; it goes to intent. The Nazi project was annihilatory in a way most slave systems, however cruel, were not. History flattens at our peril.
And then there is the politics of the thing. UN resolutions are not monographs; they are negotiated texts, shaped by blocs, interests, and the quiet arithmetic of votes. Selectivity is almost baked in – as is prejudice. Countries with uncomfortable presents often find safety in condemning selective pasts. Western abstentions, too, are rarely acts of intellectual surrender; more often they are the diplomacy of not quite wanting to pick a fight that cannot be cleanly won.
Unfinished business
So we end where we began, with a familiar tension. Yes, slavery is a near-universal inheritance, and any telling that singles out one civilisation to the exclusion of others is suspect. But neither does the universality of the crime dissolve its particular forms. The Atlantic system, the Islamic trades, ancient chattel systems – they rhyme, but they are not identical verses.
And there remains a broader, less comfortable truth: the story of slavery is not a morality play with a single villain, but a long human habit, periodically challenged, never entirely extinguished, and always ready, given the right circumstances and excuses, to return.
History, in other words, refuses both the courtroom brief and the absolution. It is messier than Ergas allows, but also less conveniently moralised than the resolution he criticises.
It leaves us not ranking guilt, but paying closer attention. The Atlantic system was distinctive; the Islamic and other trades were vast and enduring; African rulers and Arab merchants were participants as well as intermediaries; the West generated powerful abolitionist movements even as it profited from what it eventually condemned. None of these claims cancels the others. Together they form a picture that is, at once, more accurate and less flattering than any single narrative allows.
And the present refuses to sit quietly beneath the verdicts we pass on the past. The exploitation of domestic workers in the Gulf, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Western Europe; the persistence of sweatshop labour, debt bondage, and coerced work within Western economies themselves – these are not historical footnotes but contemporary reminders. Laws and conventions matter, but so do inspection, enforcement, and the unglamorous work of closing the gap between principle and practice.
Which is why the most suspect posture, at the end of such an inquiry, is self-congratulation. There is no stable ground here for laurel wreaths, no civilisational vantage point from which to survey a completed moral victory. At best there is a difference in degree – of scrutiny, of institutional capacity, of willingness to act. And even that requires constant renewal.
Slavery, in its older forms, has been dismantled in many places; in its newer guises, it adapts. The question is less who was worst than who is still looking, and still prepared to do something about what they find.
Postscript: Etymology
The history lingers, as it often does, in the words. They carry within themselves their own freight.
“Slave” in English carries within it a map of early medieval Europe. The term is widely traced to the Latin sclavus, itself derived from Sclavus – “Slav” – a reflection of the large numbers of Slavic peoples captured and sold through the trading networks that ran from the Baltic down the great river systems to Byzantium and the Islamic world. What began as an ethnonym hardened into a condition. By the High Middle Ages the word had shed its geographic specificity and settled into general use- esclave, schiavo, esclavo, slave – the person eclipsed by the status, the origin story buried in the syllable. The modern word is not, in itself, a slur; but its lineage is a reminder of how readily a name can be stripped of personhood and repurposed as a category of subjection.
Arabic offers a parallel, though not an identical one. The root ʿabd (عبد) denotes a servant or slave, but in its primary register it is theological: ʿabd Allāh, servant of God – a posture of submission before the divine rather than a description of worldly bondage. Yet the plural ʿabīd (عبيد) – once a straightforward term for slaves – acquired, over time and in certain contexts, a sharper edge, used for Black slaves and, by extension, Black people more generally. In modern usage it can carry derogatory force, depending on context and intent, illustrating how a neutral descriptor can drift into insult as it absorbs the hierarchies of the societies that use it.
In both cases, language records a quiet transformation. A people becomes a condition; a condition gathers associations; those associations harden into overtones that may wound long after their origins are forgotten. The vocabulary survives the systems that shaped it, carrying their traces forward – compressed, half-visible, but still there for those inclined to listen.
Afterword: Thraldom, it’s unwinding and its afterlives
A final turn of the lens, back to northern Europe, where the language and the practice briefly align – and then, tellingly, reappear in altered guises.
In Anglo-Saxon England, þræl – thrall – named a condition within a broader spectrum of unfreedom. These were the captured, the indebted, the born into it: men and women who laboured in households and on estates, who could be bought and sold, though not yet within the fully racialised, hereditary system that would later define Atlantic chattel slavery. The boundaries were hard but not always impermeable. Manumission occurred; over generations, absorption was possible. It was a system of subjection, but not yet a totalising one.
The British port of Bristol stands as a reminder of how visible and organised that system could be. It became wealthy with the transatlantic slave trade. But in the 11th century it also functioned as a significant slaving port, exporting captives – often from Wales and the Welsh borderlands – into Irish and wider networks. This was not an anomaly but a node in a broader medieval traffic in human beings, linking the British Isles to circuits that extended, directly and indirectly, toward the Mediterranean and beyond.
Nor was England unique. Across medieval Europe, slavery persisted in varied forms: Italian city-states drew on Black Sea supplies; Iberian polities, both Muslim and Christian, trafficked in captives amid the long wars of the Reconquista; eastern Europe fed human cargo into Byzantine and Islamic markets. The word “slave” itself, with its Slavic root, is a linguistic fossil of that traffic (see below)..
And yet, in England at least, something shifted – and the Norman Conquest appears to have hastened it. On the eve of 1066, Domesday would soon record servi in significant numbers, perhaps around a tenth of the population. By the 12th century, however, chattel slavery had largely withered. The causes were less a single decree than a convergence. The Norman regime imported a more continental feudal logic, in which labour was bound to land rather than owned outright; a villein, fixed, dues-paying, and reproductively stable, was often more useful than a saleable slave. The Church, already critical of slave trading – Wulfstan of Worcester’s condemnation of the Bristol trade is emblematic. – found firmer footing in the new order, aligning moral pressure with institutional power. Trade patterns shifted too, as England’s orientation tilted across the Channel, loosening older Irish Sea networks that had sustained export markets.
None of this amounted to abolition in the modern sense. What replaced slavery was serfdom: a different architecture of dependence, less overtly transactional but hardly free. The change was real, but it was also a translation—from one form of unfreedom into another, quieter one.
And, as if to underline the point, elements of the older logic resurfaced later under new names. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain exported large numbers of indentured labourers – many English, but also Scots and Irish, including prisoners of war and political rebels after uprisings – to the American colonies and the Caribbean. Bound by contract rather than owned outright, they nonetheless occupied a coercive world of limited rights, harsh discipline, and restricted movement. The loss of the American colonies in 1783 did not end this habit of displacement; it redirected it. Transportation – of convicts and dissidents – to Australia became the next imperial outlet for managing surplus and troublesome populations, a system different in law but recognisably akin in its logic of removal and compelled labour [see in In That Howling Infinite, Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore
Meanwhile, further east, a different trajectory prevailed. In eastern Europe and Russia, serfdom did not wither but intensified. From the late medieval period into the early modern era, landlords consolidated control over peasant populations, binding them ever more tightly to the land and to service. In Russia, this culminated in a system that, by the 18th century, bore striking resemblances to slavery in practice, if not always in name – serfs bought, sold, and mortgaged along with estates, their mobility sharply curtailed, their obligations exacting. Emancipation would come late: 1861 in Russia, and even then imperfectly, leaving behind structures of dependency that proved stubbornly durable.
Which is, perhaps, the thread worth keeping in hand. Systems of coercion rarely disappear cleanly; they evolve, recur and rephrase. From thrall to serf, from market to manor, from indenture to transportation, from eastern estate to western plantation. The names change; the grammar does not. Waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again. waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again.
In that Howling Infinite, May Day 2026
This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to researching, drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: directed and selected, revised and revised again, and owned.
When this essay was published on Facebook, it elicited several comments that amounted to a polemical defense of the West that began with a legitimate historical observation – slavery was historically near-universal and abolitionism emerged most powerfully from Enlightenment Europe – but then overextended the claim into a triumphalist narrative about Western moral uniqueness and non-Western incapacity for self-criticism. Its tone is combative, culturally chauvinistic, and marked by sweeping generalisations about “the Third World,” Islamic societies, Arabs, and Asian civilisations.
Intellectually, they mixed valid historical points with selective history, rhetorical exaggeration, and resentment politics. They treated “the West” as unusually self-critical and morally generative, while caricaturing other societies as conformist or authoritarian. The result is less a sober historical analysis than a reaction against contemporary anti-Western discourse, expressed through broad-brush civilisational language.
A more balanced critique might read as follows:
Slavery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.
One of the major intellectual shifts of the Enlightenment era was the emergence, particularly in Western Europe and North America, of the idea that slavery itself was morally illegitimate. Philosophical ideas about natural rights, combined with religious and humanitarian movements, helped give rise to organised abolitionism. Britain, France, and the United States were deeply implicated in the Atlantic slave trade, yet they also produced influential movements that eventually challenged and dismantled it. Modern international norms against slavery owe much to these developments.
At the same time, slavery was not uniquely Western, nor was opposition to injustice confined solely to the West. Different forms of servitude and human bondage existed across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, and criticism of oppression has emerged within many cultures and traditions. The historical record is complex: societies can simultaneously perpetrate injustice and generate the ideas that challenge it.
Contemporary debates about slavery and colonialism sometimes oversimplify history by treating Europe and the West as uniquely culpable, while overlooking the broader global history of slavery. But responding to that simplification with sweeping condemnations of non-Western societies is equally reductive. A more useful approach is to recognise both the universality of slavery in human history and the particular historical significance of the abolitionist movements that emerged during the Enlightenment and after.
UN resolution on slavery falsifies history by ignoring Islamic world’s role
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026
The UN resolution sparks debate over historical interpretation: Getty Images
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026
That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.
Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a “racialised capitalist system” and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime. To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and “structural racism” that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.
Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.
While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as “certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century” that “questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement”.
That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.
It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service”, and affirmed “that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty”.
Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was “too pure for slaves to dwell in”. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself – an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.
Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.
Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world – even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century – when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery – the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as “savages”, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.
There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that “even the most radical Muslim modernists” fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.
It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it – beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade “contrary to the holy law of Islam” and any official who attempted to enforce it “lawful to kill”.
Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania – after repeated ineffectual measures – in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of “modern slavery”, eight are majority-Muslim.
But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn’t exist. It declares the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty – which converts the horrors of the past into a “suffering Olympics” – is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.
It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust – whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews – were close to or above 90 per cent. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport – and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.
In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes’ lives”. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.
Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the “middle passage” had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.
But to acknowledge those facts – which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust – might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.
Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.
Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries – the US, Israel and Argentina – had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren’t we?
In his Global Public Square “take” on CNN last weekend, American commentator Fareed Zakaria discussed political scientist Stephen M. Walt’s recent article in Foreign Affairs: The Predatory Hegemon – how Trump wields American Power. He distilled Walt’s thesis into a phrase at once elegant and accusatory: the United States, he suggested, has drifted from an “enlightened hegemony” – a system in which power was exercised with an eye to legitimacy, stability, and long-term advantage – toward something more immediate, more transactional, and ultimately more predatory.
Walt’s essay gives that intuition a harder edge. He is not merely describing a tonal shift in American foreign policy, but a reorientation of its strategic logic – a change in how power understands itself, justifies itself, and, crucially, sustains itself.
The older model, Zakaria’s enlightened hegemon, was always something of a paradox, a balancing act performed with varying degrees of grace. The United States built a global order that advantaged itself, certainly, but did so by embedding its dominance in institutions, alliances, and norms that others found tolerable, even beneficial. It is tempting to see this as benevolence; it is more accurate to see it as enlightened self-interest, a recognition that power travels further when it is partially disguised as cooperation.
Consider the architecture: NATO as both shield and tether; the Bretton Woods institutions as both stabilisers and amplifiers of American economic influence; open markets that allowed others to prosper while quietly anchoring them within a U.S.-centred system. Even American restraint – selective, inconsistent, sometimes hypocritical – played a role. By not always extracting the maximum possible gain, Washington lowered the incentives for resistance. It made its leadership feel less like domination and more like gravity: inescapable, but not actively oppressive.
Zakaria’s emphasis falls on this temporal discipline. The United States, at its postwar best, accepted short-term costs – trade imbalances, alliance burdens, the irritations of multilateral compromise – in exchange for long-term influence. It invested in a system that would, over time, repay those investments many times over. The wager worked, not perfectly, but well enough: allies aligned, rivals were constrained, and the American-led order acquired a kind of grudging legitimacy.
Walt does not romanticise this past. He is too much the realist for that. He knows the system was riddled with contradictions: interventions justified in the name of norms that were selectively applied, economic openness that coexisted with strategic coercion, ideals that bent under pressure. But – and this is the hinge of his argument – the system’s imperfections did not negate its utility. On the contrary, they were often part of its flexibility. What mattered was that the United States appeared to play by rules it had helped create, and that appearance mattered enormously.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s approach, across both terms, but especially in its more fully articulated second incarnation, appears not as a mere policy adjustment but as a philosophical break. Walt’s term, “predatory hegemony,” is deliberately provocative, but also precise. The United States remains the central power in the system; what changes is how it treats the system itself.
Alliances, in this telling, are no longer strategic communities but balance sheets. NATO becomes a venue for cost-sharing disputes; Asian alliances are framed in terms of payments and protection fees. The language of shared purpose gives way to the language of reciprocity stripped to its transactional core: what are you paying, and what are we getting? There is a certain brutal clarity in this – no more pretence, no more sentimental talk of values – but it comes at a cost. Alliances that once rested on a mixture of interest and trust begin to tilt toward interest alone, and interest, as history reminds us, is a notoriously fickle glue.
In the economic realm, the shift is equally stark. Trade and finance become explicit instruments of leverage, deployed not only against adversaries but against partners. Tariffs are imposed with a freedom that disregards institutional constraints; sanctions proliferate; export controls tighten. Interdependence – once celebrated as a stabilising force – is recast as a field of vulnerabilities to be exploited. The system, in effect, is turned inside out: what was designed to bind becomes a means to coerce.
Zakaria’s gloss on this is telling. He notes that the United States has always used economic power strategically, but that it once did so within a framework that preserved the overall attractiveness of the system. Under a predatory model, that framework erodes. The message sent to the world is no longer “join us and prosper,” but “join us, and be prepared to be squeezed.” The rational response, for others, is not enthusiastic participation but cautious diversification.
Walt’s third line of argument concerns norms and institutions, the often invisible scaffolding of the international order. Here, too, the change is less about abandonment than about downgrading. Agreements become optional, commitments provisional, rules contingent on immediate advantage. The United States does not necessarily withdraw from every institution, but it treats them as tools rather than constraints, to be used when convenient and ignored when not.
Again, Zakaria’s lament is that something subtle but vital is lost in this process: legitimacy as a force multiplier. The old order worked, in part, because others believed – however imperfectly – that it was more than a façade for American power. Strip away that belief, and cooperation becomes thinner, more conditional, more brittle.
All of which leads to Walt’s central concern: that predatory hegemony, for all its apparent toughness, is strategically myopic. It operates on a shortened time horizon, prioritising immediate, tangible gains over diffuse, long-term benefits. In economic terms, it applies a high discount rate to the future. Why tolerate an imbalance today for a payoff tomorrow when you can extract a concession now?
The answer, in the older model, was that the future payoff was larger and more durable. By maintaining a system that others trusted and depended on, the United States ensured a steady stream of influence, cooperation, and alignment. By contrast, predation yields diminishing returns. Allies coerced too often begin to hedge. Partners subjected to pressure seek alternatives. Rivals exploit the cracks.
One might say – stretching the metaphor, but not too far – that enlightened hegemony was a form of cultivation, while predatory hegemony is a form of harvesting. The former assumes renewal; the latter risks depletion.
Walt is particularly attuned to the feedback effects of this shift. By treating allies as clients, the United States encourages them to behave like clients – transactional, calculating, ready to shop around. By weaponising interdependence, it incentivises others to de-risk and decouple, thereby reducing the very leverage Washington seeks to wield. By disregarding norms, it lowers the costs for others to do the same. The hegemon, in short, models the behaviour it will later lament.
Zakaria, for his part, situates this within a broader narrative of American political change. The appetite for the burdens of leadership has waned; the patience required for long-term strategy has thinned; the domestic rewards accrue to visible wins rather than invisible stability. Enlightened hegemony, in this reading, was not just a foreign policy doctrine but a political achievement, sustained by a consensus that no longer holds.
And here the essay acquires a slightly elegiac tone. For what is being described is not merely a shift in tactics but the possible unravelling of a particular idea of order—one in which power and restraint were, if not reconciled, then at least held in productive tension. Walt’s realism strips away nostalgia, but it does not eliminate the sense that something functionally valuable is being lost.
The unresolved question – hovering over both Walt’s analysis and Zakaria’s commentary – is whether this transformation is contingent or structural. Is predatory hegemony a phase, a deviation that can be corrected by a future administration rediscovering the uses of restraint? Or does it reflect deeper currents in American society and politics, suggesting a more permanent recalibration?
If the former, the system may yet be repaired, though not without scars. Trust, once eroded, is slow to rebuild; institutions, once weakened, do not spring back fully formed. If the latter, then the post-1945 order begins to look less like a stable architecture and more like a historical anomaly – a period in which an unusually powerful state chose, for its own reasons, to exercise power with a degree of restraint that history rarely sustains.
The irony. – one that both Walt and Zakaria, in their different registers, seem to appreciate – is that the older model of enlightened hegemony was not naïve but deeply pragmatic. It recognised that in a complex, interdependent world, the most effective way to maintain dominance was often to make that dominance acceptable. Predatory hegemony, by contrast, risks proving that the most direct expression of power is not always the most effective.
And so we return, as these arguments often do, to a question of time. Not simply what the United States can extract today, but what kind of world it is shaping for tomorrow – and whether that world will still, in any meaningful sense, run through Washington.
For now, the shift is unmistakable. The language has changed; the assumptions have shifted; the system is being tested from within. The hegemon remains, formidable as ever. But it no longer quite plays the same game. And the other players, watching closely, are already beginning to adjust their moves – quietly, pragmatically, and with an eye, as ever, to the long term.
Peace brokers
The following picture, featuring as it does the key players in Trump’s transactional diplomacy is an apt illustration of Walt’s thesis.
The “Board of Peace” is in essence a Trumpian confection of narcissism and megalomania, wrapped around what began, one must concede, as a not wholly foolish premise. Announced at Davos between lectures on Europe’s decline and intimidating talk of Greenland’s future, it was offered as a world-historical corrective – a leaner, sharper alternative to the United Nations, capable of doing, as Trump put it, “pretty much whatever we want to do,” albeit now “in conjunction” with the very institution it implicitly rebukes.
That hedge – in conjunction with the UN – betrays both ambition and unease. For all its frustrations, the UN remains the only broadly legitimate architecture for peace-making, its dysfunction less a design flaw than a record of unresolved rivalries. Trump’s instinct is to bypass such encumbrances: to replace the labyrinth with a boardroom, procedure with deal-making, paralysis with will. If peace were merely a coordination problem, this might even work. But peace is never merely procedural.
And the Board of Peace, for all its architectural neatness, rests on far shakier ground – a stage set awaiting actors who may never agree to the script, and a script that assumes conflicts can be edited rather than endured.
A body intended to gather the decisive actors of the age has assembled, thus far, a scattering of small and middle powers, most of them keen to curry Trump”# favour, whilst the big players keep tore distance. The Europeans hover at the edges; China sees no advantage in diluting its influence under a Trump-chaired forum; Russia, a principal source of present disorder, remains undecided about joining the mechanism meant to restrain it. A peace table without the principal enablers and disruptors is not an innovation so much as a rehearsal.
And what of the Board’s raison d’etre? Gaza and the implementation of Trump’s ambitious and arguably impossible “Twenty Point Plan”. It is there, loitering offstage, the ghost at the feast – unmistakably present in its absence, and as ever, intractable, morally fraught and resistant to shortcuts. Under an “enlightened hegemonic” model, it would demand sustained, often frustrating engagement – a willingness to absorb political cost in pursuit of incremental progress. Under a more predatory or transactional model, it becomes something else: a crisis to be managed, a variable in a broader strategic equation, or, at times, a problem to be worked around rather than through. See In That Howlong Infinite’s Gaza Sunrise or False Dawn (2) Spectacle or strategy?
What about the venue, the United States Institute of Peace? This was created in the late Cold War, not as an instrument of policy execution but as a buffer against its excesses: a congressionally funded, ostensibly bipartisan body designed to study conflict, train mediators, convene adversaries, and inject into Washington’s bloodstream a measure of patience. Its board was meant to reflect that mission – drawn from across government, the military, academia, and civil society, combining practitioners with thinkers, hawks with doves, all under the assumption that peace required pluralism, process, and time.
It was, in short, an institutional expression of what Zakaria later calls enlightened hegemony: the idea that American power could be made more durable – more effective, even – by embedding it in norms, procedures, and habits of restraint. It was never glamorous. Its successes were rarely visible. But it represented a wager that the slow, untelevised work of conflict resolution was not ancillary to power, but constitutive of it.
Now place that inheritance alongside the renaming.
To recast the United States Institute of Peace as the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace is not merely to change a sign; it is to alter the centre of gravity. The original name gestures outward- to a national project, even a universal aspiration. The new name turns inward, attaching the idea of peace to a single, highly particular figure. Given Trump’s public persona – combative, transactional, attuned to victory and recognition – the effect is jarring. There is an unmistakable note of narcissistic inscription here, as though peace were not a condition to be cultivated but a brand to be owned.
Layer onto that his long-standing preoccupation with the Nobel Peace Prize- the sense, often voiced, that it is an accolade he ought to have received – and the renaming begins to look like a kind of symbolic compensation. If peace cannot be awarded, it can be appropriated; if it cannot be conferred, it can be named. The irony is not subtle: an institution built to depersonalise the pursuit of peace now bears the name of a man whose approach to conflict has been anything but disinterested.
Into this reframed space step the individuals in the photograph.
At the centre sits Donald Trump, President, whose foreign policy instincts – whatever label one prefers – tilt toward the immediate and the demonstrable. Alliances are assessed in terms of cost and return; diplomacy is valued for the deals it produces; outcomes are to be visible, claimable, ownable. Gaza, in this schema, is less a process to be patiently engaged than a problem that stubbornly resists the kind of resolution that can be announced from a lectern. It is, therefore, both central and strangely unsuited to his method.
To one side, J.D. Vance, Vice President, leans away – his posture almost a visual footnote to his politics. Vance represents a current of scepticism about the entire postwar architecture: alliances as burdens, interventions as misadventures, institutions like the USIP as relics of an overextended America. His interest is not in refining the Board’s work but in questioning its premise of necessity.
Behind them, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, carries the formal responsibility for American diplomacy. His role, traditionally, would align closely with the Board’s ethos: sustaining alliances, managing crises, preserving channels. Yet here he appears slightly off-axis, as though translating between two languages—one institutional, one transactional. Gaza, for him, is not optional; it demands engagement. But the tools available are shaped by a broader shift away from the very processes the Board was designed to support.
Next, Jared Kushner, whose entrée into diplomacy came not through the usual apprenticeships but through proximity and trust. His approach – most visible in the Abraham Accords – privileged state-to-state normalisation and deal-making, often sidestepping the Palestinian question rather than confronting it. Gaza, in that sense, was not resolved but deferred, treated as a complication that could be managed while other, more tractable agreements were pursued.
Beside him, Steve Witkoff, another figure from the world of real estate and finance, reinforces the sense that diplomacy here is being conducted by negotiators rather than stewards. His expertise lies in closing deals, aligning incentives, reading counterparts – skills not irrelevant to diplomacy, but distinct from the slow cultivation of legitimacy and trust that institutions like the USIP were built to foster.
This is, then, a kind of board of directors of the Board of Peace, in composition if not in spirit: a gathering of individuals whose orientations toward conflict and resolution are divergent, even dissonant. Their gazes in the photograph – scattered, non-convergent – capture that lack of shared focus. They are in the same room, under the same banner, but not quite engaged in the same enterprise.
Which brings us back to Walt and Zakaria.
Zakaria’s “enlightened hegemony” lives in the architecture of the institution—in the idea that power can be extended by embedding it in processes others trust. Walt’s “predatory hegemony” is visible in the orientation of the actors – in the preference for leverage over legitimacy, transaction over system, immediacy over patience.
The photograph, in this sense, is not merely illustrative; it is diagnostic.
The Board of Peace: conceived as a guardian of process, pluralism, and long-term thinking.
The renaming: a shift from institutional ethos to personal branding, from shared endeavour to individual inscription.
The individuals: a mix of diplomats, sceptics, and dealmakers, each carrying a different theory of what peace is and how it is achieved.
The context of Gaza: a test case that exposes the limits of transactional approaches and the absence – or attenuation – of sustained mediation.
And threaded through it all, the larger question both Walt and Zakaria pose from different angles: whether the United States still believes that its power is best exercised by building systems others will inhabit, or whether it has turned, more decisively, toward extracting advantage within systems it no longer feels bound to sustain.
The Board still sits. The name still proclaims peace – twice over, now, with the addition of a personal signature. But the scene suggests something unsettled: an institution designed for one kind of hegemony now operating within another.
And the eye, moving across the image, cannot quite find a single point of convergence—only a series of individuals, each holding a piece of the argument, while the larger coherence—the thing the Board was meant to supply – remains, like Gaza itself, unfinished, unresolved, and just out of frame.
In That Howling Infinite, April 2026
This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.
Oil tankers, container ships and bulk carriers shimmer all over the horizon to the left of the windswept beach here at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. They have been bottled up in the Persian Gulf ever since the US and Israel launched the war on Iran more than a month ago. To the right, with the Iranian coast only 65km away, the dark-blue sea is completely empty. Only a handful of vessels a day manage to cross the Strait of Hormuz, down from well over a hundred before the war. They take a circuitous route through Iranian territorial waters, often paying the Iranian regime a hefty toll.
Tehran’s ability to control this international waterway, through which one-fifth of the worldwide oil supply used to pass, has become Iran’s biggest leverage against the US, its Gulf neighbours and the global economy. Whether the war ends in a success or defeat for Iran depends first and foremost on whether Tehran emerges from this conflict still holding the strait – and, with it, the keys to the worldwide energy markets.
Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 3 Aptil 2026
What follows is a piece for history tragics – and for all who, metaphorically or intellectually, nostalgically or romantically, still yearn to “go down to the sea in ships and do business in deep waters”. For those who hear, beneath the churn of headlines and hot takes, the older music: the creak of hulls, the logic of tides, the long memory of trade and war written across the surface of the world.
Because when the Strait tightens, when Hormuz flickers from map detail to global anxiety, there is a reflex, almost tidal in itself, to reach backwards. To steady the present with the ballast of the past. The antique mariners Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, the classical strategists Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder, the catechisms of geopolitics and sea power half-remembered, half-invoked. The old grammar returns: command the sea, command the world.
And yet, while the past is summoned, it does not settle easily over the present. It frays at the edges. It argues back.
Some voices insist on restoring the full weight of history – reminding us that the Persian Gulf was not merely sailed but administered: the Royal Navy’s long vigil, the latticework of protectorates, Aden and Suez as imperial hinges. Sea power, in this telling, was never abstract; it was local, granular, enforced in specific places against specific resistances. Empire did not “command” the sea so much as continuously work it.
Others, just as insistent, suggest the sea’s primacy has already ebbed. Pipelines, railways, overland corridors – the new Silk Roads – quietly subvert the tyranny of chokepoints. Hormuz matters, yes, but not as it once did. The map has thickened; the old determinisms loosen.
And threading through it all – more unsettling than either nostalgia or revision – is a harder recognition: that the balance has tilted. That it is now easier to disrupt the sea than to command it. That a few well-placed risks – mines, missiles, drones, or even the rumour of these can achieve what fleets once guaranteed.
Which is precisely why this moment—and this place—invites a longer gaze. For Hormuz is not merely a crisis point. It is a lens. A narrow passage through which history, strategy, and imagination are forced to pass in close quarters, revealing not just what we think we know about the sea – but how much of that knowledge still holds when the waters grow tight.
And so we follow the thread.
A choke point and a global hinge
The essay, republished below, by English historian and author Peter Francopan turns on an old, almost Elizabethan intuition – Walter Raleigh’s dictum that “whoever commands the sea commands the trade… and so the world” – and asks whether it still holds in the age of drones, pipelines, and petro-politics. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow, anxious funnel through which a fifth of the world’s oil must pass, becomes his stage: not merely a geographic chokepoint, but a historical echo chamber where empires, from the Portuguese to the British to the Americans, have tested the proposition that control of the sea is control of destiny.
The core argument is deceptively simple. However much globalisation has diversified supply chains, the world remains perilously dependent on a handful of maritime arteries. Hormuz is the most critical of them. Iran, by geography alone, sits with its hand on the tap.
What follows is a kind of strategic paradox. The United States possesses overwhelming naval superiority, yet cannot easily guarantee safe passage. Iran, comparatively weak in conventional terms, can still disrupt—through mines, missiles, drones, and plausible threat alone—the flow of global energy. Control, in other words, has become asymmetrical: it is easier to deny the sea than to command it.
Frankopan folds this into a wider historical arc. Sea power has long structured global order – from the Iberian empires to Pax Britannica to the American century—but it has never been absolute. It is contingent, fragile, and dependent on political will as much as on fleets. The current crisis exposes that fragility. The cost of keeping Hormuz open – economically, militarily, psychologically – may exceed what even a superpower is willing to bear indefinitely.
Layered atop this is his reading of Trump’s confrontation with Iran: a clash driven as much by misapprehension and political impulse as by coherent strategy. The implication (never quite stated, but hovering like heat haze) is that great powers still stumble into old traps—overestimating control, underestimating local resolve.
Obstacle Course. Credit: New York Times
Command of the sea, or command of risk?
If Frankopan writes like the historian he is, the comments read like a dockside argument, a fractured chorus of rum, empire, drones, and Trump all sloshing together.
Several bridle at Francopan’s selectivity. Where, they ask, is the Royal Navy in the Gulf? The British protectorates? Aden? The Portuguese seizure of Hormuz in 1515? There is something almost touching here: a yearning to reinsert imperial continuity into a narrative that feels too compressed, too presentist. History, they insist, is longer – and perhaps more reassuring – than Frankopan allows.
Yet beneath the pedantry lies a point: chokepoints are never just geography; they are administered spaces, historically managed through bases, treaties, and coercion. Hormuz did not simply “matter”—it was made to matter, policed into significance.
A sharper critique comes from those who accuse Frankopan of naval determinism, of succumbing to Mackinder in sea going form. Where, they ask, are the pipelines, the highways of the modern Silk Road? If oil can flow overland, if energy can be rerouted, then the tyranny of chokepoints diminishes. The vulnerability of Hormuz is not just a military problem but a failure of diversification. If the Strait can be “closed,” it is because the world has allowed it to remain indispensable. Overland infrastructure does exist, but not at sufficient scale, nor with sufficient redundancy, to replace maritime flow quickly. The sea remains cheaper, denser, stubbornly dominant. Mackinder haunts the room after all.
Then there is the Trump versus Iran morality play. And here, the thread fractures into familiar ideological lines. One camp sees Trump as reckless, blundering into war without strategy; another as a hard realist confronting an implacable regime. But more interesting than the partisan positions is the shared assumption beneath them: that the conflict must be read through the personality of a single leader. Structural forces – energy dependency, regional rivalries, the logic of deterrence – fade into the background. The theatre of personality displaces the machinery of geopolitics.
Meanwhile, a darker undercurrent runs through several comments: casual talk of forcing the Strait, toppling regimes, even nuclear options. The language slips, almost unconsciously, from analysis into annihilation. One is reminded how easily strategic abstraction can become moral amnesia.
What the article and its commentariat together reveal is not a consensus but a tension – between old frameworks and new realities.
Francopan is right, broadly, that chokepoints still matter. Geography has not been abolished. Hormuz remains a lever capable of moving the world.
But his critics are right, too, that the nature of control has shifted. The age of decisive naval supremacy – Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway – has given way to something murkier. Control is now probabilistic. It lies in deterrence, in risk calculation, in the shadow of what might be done rather than what is done.
Iran does not need to “command” the Strait in Raleigh’s sense. It need only make others doubt that it is safe.
And here the deeper irony emerges. The more globalised the world becomes, the more sensitive it is to disruption at key nodes. Interdependence, that liberal promise, doubles as systemic fragility. A few missiles, a handful of drones, a rumour of mines—and the bloodstream of the global economy clots.
The comments circle this insight without quite naming it. They argue about navies versus pipelines, Trump versus Tehran, Britain versus decline- but beneath it all is a shared unease: that no one, not even the United States, can fully guarantee the openness of the system on which everyone depends.
Raleigh revisited
Raleigh’s maxim survives, but in altered form. To command the sea once meant mastery – fleets, flags, unquestioned passage. Now it means something closer to managing uncertainty, policing risk, absorbing disruption. Or, to invert it (and perhaps this is the real lesson of Hormuz): whoever can unsettle the sea can unsettle the world.
The Strait, narrow and ancient, becomes a kind of TARDIS of geopolitics – small on the map, vast in consequence, containing within it centuries of empire, trade, ambition, and miscalculation. You can sail through it in hours. You can be trapped by it for decades. Hormuz is one of those places where scale misbehaves.
On the chart it is almost an afterthought: a narrow blue incision between Iran and Oman, barely 21 nautical miles at its tightest navigable squeeze. A cartographer’s margin note. You could blink and miss it, the way you might skim over a comma in a long sentence. And yet – inside that comma, the world pauses.
Tankers queue like thoughts that cannot quite be completed. Insurance markets twitch. Futures spike. Admirals rediscover their relevance. Presidents improvise resolve. Somewhere in Delhi or Shanghai, a planner recalculates the cost of keeping the lights on. The Strait is not large, but it contains largeness: economics, empire, anxiety, history – all folded into a channel so narrow that a missile battery on one shore can imagine the other.
That is the TARDIS trick: disproportion. Interior vastness concealed within exterior modesty. A space where time thickens. Because Hormuz is not just a place. – it is an accumulation. Portuguese forts, British gunboats, American carrier groups, Iranian fast boats – all still present in the mind, layered like ghost traffic moving in opposite directions through the same confined lane.
And like the TARDIS, it distorts power. The strong discover their strength is conditional; the weak discover they possess a lever. To command the sea here is less about domination than about enduring the possibility of interruption.
It is gigantically small, metaphorically huge, a bottleneck that behaves like a universe.
In a wide ocean, power projects as a roar – carrier groups, satellite grids, the choreography of dominance. In a narrow strait, the same power ricochets. It echoes, distorts, sometimes even dampens. The voice is still large; the space refuses to carry it cleanly.
Hormuz does this to everyone. It compresses asymmetry into something almost theatrical. A superpower arrives with an orchestra; a regional actor needs only a well-timed cymbal crash – mines, missiles, the rumour of both – and suddenly the symphony falters. Not silenced, but unsettled. Hesitant. Listening to itself.
It tells us less about the decline of hegemony than about the environments in which hegemony operates. Power at sea is expansive; power in a choke point is negotiated, contingent, on the edge
The old imperial instinct – force the passage- still murmurs in the background (you can hear it in the comments: convoy the ships, clear the mines, damn the cost). But the modern world hesitates, because the cost is no longer just ships sunk – it is markets convulsed, alliances strained, escalation spiralling in ways that do not end neatly at the waterline.
Which leaves us with a paradox worthy of the place: the hegemon can still roar – but here, in this narrow theatre, it must decide whether the echo is worth the noise.
Historians these days doubt that Sir Walter Raleigh ever laid down his cloak to stop Queen Elizabeth I from stepping in a puddle. They do agree, though, that he understood the nature and benefit of maritime power. “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade,” he wrote in A Discourse of the Invention of Ships in the early 17th century. “Whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself”.Raleigh lived in a different era, of course — one that most of us imagine as a time of swashbuckling sailors and risk-taking pirates, when control of the High Seas was a competition between the European states building empires in both the New and Old Worlds.
This was also an age when geography mattered every bit as much as resources. Many of the first European footholds overseas were chosen less for what lay in the ground than for where they sat along the great sea routes that were beginning to bind the world together. The Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 was not about spices growing nearby but about controlling the narrow maritime gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea through which much of Asia’s trade passed.
The same strategic logic shaped the expansion of the British empire. Outposts were established above all because of their position along the world’s shipping arteries. The British occupation of Gibraltar in 1704 secured control over the entrance to the Mediterranean and the vital route between the Atlantic and Europe’s inland sea. In the Caribbean, islands such as Jamaica — seized from the Spanish in 1655 — were major naval and commercial hubs sitting astride the shipping lanes linking the Americas and Europe. Likewise, further south, control of Cape of Good Hope allowed Britain to dominate the maritime passage between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.The empire that Raleigh’s generation started building was not only created through conquest and extraction: it was built through the control of the sea lanes and strategic points that allowed commerce, information and manpower to move across the oceans. The same ports that handled cargo could shelter naval squadrons, repair ships and project force across vast distances. Britain’s empire was fuelled by sugar, silver, slaves and more; but it was built on being able to move these at will across the oceans, and on the islands, harbours and strongpoints that underpinned maritime, economic and imperial power.
These days, we have become used to future-gazers insisting that the future belongs to those who control data and algorithms, or satellites and space rockets, or rare earths and critical minerals. Ships, shipping, and transport networks do not sound quite so exciting, so fresh or so unknown. To a historian, though, in a world that is hyper-connected, logistics are king.
In its heyday, Britain’s reach rested heavily getting the basics right. At Gibraltar, ships entering or leaving the Mediterranean could refuel and undergo repairs, while Malta secured British control of Mediterranean shipping routes. Further east, Aden functioned as a crucial coaling station at the mouth of the Red Sea once steam navigation transformed long-distance travel; or there was Singapore, which, from the early 19th century, grew into a key naval base guarding the approaches between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
Each of these places mattered less for what they produced than for the services they provided: coal, water, repairs, provisions, intelligence and protection. Ships could not roam the oceans indefinitely; they required an interconnected chain of harbours capable of maintaining hulls, repairing sails or (later) overhauling, to provision with fresh food and water. Maritime power was not just about ships, captains and crews — but about a dense mesh of locations that were spread out around the world and reinforced each other.
Over time, however, it became easy to forget just how central these routes and nodes were. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, the world entered a period of globalisation underpinned by overwhelming American economic, political and military power — and by the mantra of free trade being the engine of prosperity and the bedrock of the international world order. Attention shifted elsewhere, and strategists and commentators forgot about shipping lanes. Yet as geopolitical competition intensifies and the world moves into a more multipolar era, the importance of the arteries of global commerce has once again become startlingly clear.Maritime transport moves over 80% of goods traded worldwide. Around 11 billion tons of goods are transported by sea each year — roughly one and a half tons per person. Ships carry around two thirds of global oil production, as well as around a fifth of natural gas, moving energy to places where they are most needed. Without global shipping networks, computers can’t be switched on, assembly lines can’t work, and houses can’t be heated.While the crisis in Iran and the Gulf have focused attention on oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and petroleum products, global shipping is fundamental in almost every aspect of daily life. Seaborne trade moves almost two billion tonnes of iron ore per year, with major exporters in countries like Australia, Brazil and South Africa being matched with demand in China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. Hundreds of millions of tonnes of bauxite and alumina are sent by sea from mines and processing plants in Guinea, Indonesia and Australia, as are tens of millions of tonnes of copper ores from Chile, Peru and south East Asia.
Global shipping is not just the backbone of international trade; it is crucial in keeping the world fed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a UN body, international trade plays a crucial role in supporting global food security by linking food surplus with deficit areas and enabling access to basic food products. 80% of agricultural commodities are transported by sea, with shipping again playing a crucial role in matching “breadbasket regions” with those that suffer from food production deficits.As Sir Walter Raleigh would have recognised, globalisation makes control of the seas more, not less important; as peoples, regions, goods and resources get moved from one part of the planet to another, dependencies rise — and so, therefore, do vulnerabilities. Things that we take for granted are always ones that we should pay special attention to, not least since it never seems to cross people’s mind that small shocks can have major implications.
In the summer of 2011, Thailand experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of unusually high levels of rainfall, which had an enormous impact on global car production. At the time, Thailand was one of the world’s leading producers of hard-disk drives and wiring harnesses for cars, as well as electronics modules. As factories closed because of flooding, the effects spilled over into the global economy. Hard drive prices doubled in a matter of weeks; shortages of parts crippled automotive production not only in Thailand, but across Asia, North America and even Europe. The associated costs ran to tens of billions of dollars.
If that gives one example of the risks that come from the assumption that supply chains are dependable, then another comes from Covid-19. Lockdowns and collapsing industrial demand caused an immediate decline in maritime activity. Global maritime trade volumes fell sharply, with estimates suggesting a reduction of as much as 10% in the first eight months of 2020, representing cargo worth at least $225 billion in trade value — if not considerably more, precipitating an unprecedented logistics crunch.
In the past few days we have seen another classic case of the risks posed by pressure on supply chains. Energy markets have been spooked by the implications of attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, with oil prices almost doubling in a matter of days. But it is shipping prices that have truly gone through the roof. Spot charter rates for LNG carriers are six times larger than they were before 28 February — a rise some industry experts refer to as “unthinkable”. Some charterers are paying as much as 10 times the rate they paid before the attacks on Iran began to secure prompt tonnage because of the scale of the shock.
The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s key chokepoints, a narrow stretch that connects the Gulf with the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, a crossroads where geology and geography dovetail to create perfect opportunities for disruption.
Bordered by Iran to the north and Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the south, the Strait is one of the world’s most strategically significant waterways. At its narrowest navigable point, the shipping lanes are only a few kilometres wide in each direction, meaning that at a time of conflict — such as today — the ability to restrict shipping is considerable. Considerable volumes of goods pass through the Strait — something that is clear from the fact that Jebel Ali in Dubai is the ninth-busiest port in the world. But Hormuz is more crucial to global energy markets, with around 15 million barrels of oil passing through each day, equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption. Other chokepoints are significant; but Hormuz is the most important oil chokepoint in the world.At the moment, almost no shipping is transiting the Strait, with an estimated 1000 vessels waiting for the conflict with Iran to pass. A small handful of ships have sailed through, with several others reported to be trying their luck by either claiming to be Chinese or by turning off transponders that reveal both their location and their true identities. More than a dozen ships have been damaged so far, with Iran saying that British ships are “legitimate targets”.Political leaders have tried to project confidence. Donald Trump said that merchant crews and shipowners simply needed to show “some guts” if they wanted trade to keep moving through the Strait. Yet the reality suggests that courage alone is rarely enough to keep maritime commerce flowing during wartime. Guts are one thing; a US Navy ship being damaged by Iranian mines, missiles or attacks from land is another. For now, then, such are the risks to crews, cargo and hulls that shipping in the Gulf is at a standstill.Just how high the strategic stakes have become is clear from the military deployments now underway. That message has not been lost on Greece, Italy or France — all of which have dispatched warships towards the Gulf to secure maritime traffic and monitor the Strait, although it remains unclear whether or how they will solve the problem of getting traffic moving again. In Britain, there has been fierce criticism of the Royal Navy’s absence from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, but the absence is not imminently solvable. It is the result of the British government’s catastrophic lack of foresight, decades of not investing in the sort of naval forces one needs in this century.Trump has insisted that the shutdown in the Gulf is temporary and that oil, gas and more besides will soon start to flow again. It is typical fighting talk from a president who chose to start a confrontation with Iran because he was not able to understand why the regime in Tehran had refused to “capitulate” to American demands regarding nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile programmes and more.Trump came to office promising never to drag the US into “forever wars”, sneering at the “so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits” from who had inflicted disaster on the Middle East. Now, while Trump and his team work out how to stop Iran from inflicting damage on its neighbours, others must pay the price. India imports the overwhelming majority of its oil and gas by sea, partly because it has access to a limited network of pipelines. So the collapse of shipments from the Gulf is producing an existential crisis: although the US has granted a “temporary waiver” to allow Delhi to buy Russian oil, the facts that the rupee has weakened sharply, and that authorities are reportedly speeding up customs procedures to allow faster unloading, are signs that compression of logistics at sea is already having ripple effects. Moscow emerges as an unexpected beneficiary of the crisis, as the spike in oil and gas prices will provide much-needed relief to a beleaguered economy. Russia’s geopolitical role could be additionally bolstered by the country’s purported long-standing “security concept for the Persian Gulf” as an off-ramp for the US intervention in Iran.The consequences of the current crisis, however, extend well beyond the coming days or even the coming weeks. What we are witnessing is not simply a temporary disruption in the Gulf, but a reminder of a deeper truth about how power works in the modern world. Maritime routes remain the arteries through which prosperity, security and resilience flow. Data, algorithms, satellites and artificial intelligence may dominate the language of the 21st-century economy, but they still depend on the movement of physical goods across oceans. Microchips require minerals, energy and specialised manufacturing equipment that must be transported. Data centres require copper, aluminium, rare earths and vast amounts of energy infrastructure. Without ships and secure sea lanes, even the most advanced digital economy quickly runs into very practical limits. Power is and always has been about logistics.For Britain in particular, this requires a series of profound shifts. The protection of shipping routes is already a central strategic task. The Gulf is one theatre where the risks are currently obvious, but it is far from the only one. The North Atlantic and the High North are rapidly emerging as arenas of growing geopolitical competition as melting Arctic ice opens new routes and as submarine cables, energy infrastructure and shipping lanes become ever more exposed to interference and disruption.These are not challenges that can be addressed through strategy documents or policy papers; they require investment in ships, in platforms, in training and in the infrastructure that allows maritime forces to operate effectively across long distances. They also require the rebuilding of the kind of interconnected networks of ports, facilities and partnerships that once underpinned Britain’s global reach. In an increasingly multipolar world — one in which predation, risk-taking and opportunism are often rewarded — maritime resilience will become a defining measure of national strength.In that sense, the current crisis offers a glimpse of the future. Control and protection of shipping routes is key to stability, to reduction of risk and to long-term national resilience. The resources on which new economies depend may have changed, technologies may have evolved and ships may look different. But the underlying reality remains exactly the same as when Raleigh wrote four hundred years ago: whoever commands the sea commands far more than the sea itself.
Peter Frankopan is the author of The Silk Roads (2015), The New Silk Roads (2018), and The Earth Transformed (2023). He is also a Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford
A curated selection of comments from Unherd readers
This includes everything that carries an argument, stripped of noise but not over-pruned. There was a lot buried in that thread once one scraped away the rhetorical noise. Francopan’s essay and the comments rehearse empire, contest strategy, litigate politics, invoke technology, argue personality. They reach for certainty and find, instead, contingency.
Here they are:
Historical framing matters. Analyses of maritime power that ignore Britain’s long role in the Persian Gulf, its protectorates, and control of trade routes through Aden and Suez are incomplete. Control of sea lanes has always been exercised locally, even when its effects are global.
There is a fundamental tension between classical naval theory and modern infrastructure realities. Traditional doctrines of sea power emphasise chokepoints, yet pipelines, rail corridors, and overland routes increasingly challenge that dominance. Disruption of maritime trade today may reflect failures of diplomacy and diversification as much as limits of military power.
The strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz is clear, but control is asymmetric. It is easier to threaten shipping than to secure it. A weaker power can impose risk without achieving dominance, using missiles, drones, and dispersed systems that are difficult to eliminate.
Modern warfare reinforces this asymmetry. Low-cost technologies can disrupt high-value assets, raising questions about the long-term viability of traditional force projection. At the same time, countermeasures are evolving, suggesting an ongoing cycle of adaptation.The scale of resources required to secure global shipping is immense. Sustained convoy operations would demand naval capacity that is not readily available. Even if assembled, such efforts would be costly and unlikely to restore previous economic conditions quickly.Alternative strategies exist but are slow to implement. Expanding pipelines, rerouting supply chains, and hardening vessels can reduce vulnerability, but require long-term investment and coordination.
Many states failed to prepare despite the predictability of such a crisis.There is deep disagreement over the nature of the current conflict. Some view it as a necessary confrontation with a regime that threatens regional and global stability. Others see a lack of clear objectives, inconsistent strategy, and the risk of open-ended escalation.The question of escalation remains unresolved. One side retains capacity to intensify, while the other relies on disruption. Proposals for decisive action raise further uncertainties about feasibility, consequences, and post-conflict stability.
Regime survival is interpreted differently. Some argue that mere survival constitutes success under pressure; others contend that survival after severe degradation would represent strategic defeat.Geopolitical decision-making often operates without clear or fixed end states. Objectives may shift in response to opportunity, reflecting the contingent nature of strategy rather than coherent long-term planning.
Historical analogies are widely used but often misleading. Claims of past maritime dominance are contested, with evidence that control has always been partial and constrained by other factors such as air power and competing theatres of war.
Debate over Western power reveals competing narratives. Some emphasise decline, overstretch, and lack of strategic coherence. Others point to enduring capabilities and the need for renewed investment, particularly in naval forces.
The scale of global security challenges exceeds the capacity of individual states. Effective responses likely require collective action, yet coordination remains difficult and politically constrained.
New vulnerabilities complicate traditional strategy. Subsea infrastructure, including data cables, represents a vast and exposed network that is difficult to defend, illustrating the expanding scope of strategic risk.
Legal frameworks exist but are contested in practice. International law mandates freedom of navigation, yet interpretations of neutrality and belligerency vary, particularly in complex conflicts.
Economic interdependence amplifies the consequences of disruption. Even limited interference with key trade routes can trigger wider global effects, including energy shocks and recessionary pressures.
At root, the issue is no longer simply control of the sea. The emerging reality is a system where disruption, deterrence, and alternative routing shape outcomes as much as traditional dominance.
And the words that are used for to get the ship confused Will not be understood as they’re spoken
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes in
When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, with the serene arrogance of the ideologue, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
State governments weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases; lawyers parse syllables; activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. And this is where Lewis Carroll, with his disarming Edwardian whimsy, begins to feel less like a children’s author and more like a diagnostician. Alice, still tethered to an older moral physics, asks the only sensible question: whether words can, in fact, be made to mean so many different things. The answer – never quite resolved in Wonderland is being tested here and now on our streets, in own legislatures, and on our social media feeds. For if words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm.
More than words can say …
We like to imagine that words live quietly in dictionaries, disciplined by etymology and tamed by definition. But they do not live there. They live in history. And history leaves fingerprints.
So, what’s in a word? A root, yes. A history. A memory. A strategy. Sometimes a slur. Sometimes a lament. Often, a rhetorical shortcut. Occasionally a doorway into understanding. We pretend words are neutral. They are not. They are histories. They are wounds. They are strategies. They are prayers. They are threats. They are pleas.
What’s in a word? Enough to start a war. Enough to end a conversation. Enough, if handled carefully, to begin one. The question is not simply what a word means. It is what it does. Does it illuminate complexity, or obscure it? Does it invite argument, or pre-empt it? Does it name suffering without erasing another’s?
Words are fall differentially upon the tongue and the ears; words which some see only as incitement and which the others see only resistance. And yet, these words did not come out of nothing. They arose from lived experience. Palestinians do experience dispossession. Israelis do experience existential threat. Jews carry a historical memory of annihilation that makes the word genocide resonate differently in their ears. Palestinians carry a memory of erasure that makes Nakba less metaphor than inheritance. Each community carries memory as identity. To police to and sanction vocabulary without acknowledging origin and memory is to misunderstand both.
To study a language is to develop a kind of double hearing. You recognise when metaphor shades into innuendo—and when it darkens further into menace.
To study a language is to learn when freedom names a horizon – and when it licenses the powerful to act without restraint. To notice when peace is an aspiration – and when it is a performance designed to defer justice. To recognise when security protects life – and when it expands to govern it; when it names legitimate protection – and when it justifies suffocating control. To feel when homeland gathers memory and when it redraws the map to exclude others. To understand when return is a longing—and when it becomes an argument that displaces those already there.
To study a language is to hear when muqamawwa – resistance – signals dignity – and when it becomes a script that traps a people inside permanent defiance. To know that sumud – steadfastness—can describe dignified endurance and also calcify into the romanticisation of endless struggle. To detect when tadhāmon solidarity – binds people together—and when it flattens complexity into slogan. To recognise when itishhad – martyrdom – honours loss – and when it recruits the living into the service of the dead. To hear when terror names violence—and when it is stretched to delegitimise any form of opposition.
To study a language is to hear when history explains—and when it is curated to absolve.
For years I have studied Arabic – and its roots and patterns: how three consonants generate a constellation of meanings. And I have studied Middle Eastern history with more than academic curiosity – not as spectator sport but with what I would called metaphorical “skin in the game.” Words like jihad, intifada, nakba, aliyah, ‘awda, sumud, words that now ricochet across social media feeds and protest placards, are not abstractions or exotic imports to me. They are layered. Sedimented. They carry centuries in their syntax and sentiment. They are lived terms, argued over, felt in the mouth. And so when someone asks “What’s in a word?” I cannot pretend the answer is neutral.
Intifada. From nafada – to shake off, to shake free. Dust from a cloak. Subjugation from a people. The metaphor is physical, almost domestic. Yet in common Arabic usage, it implies resistance and uprising, and neither are peaceful or passive. In Israeli memory the word is fused to sirens, shrapnel, blown-out windows. It is impossible to hear it without recalling the Second Intifada’s exploding buses and cafés, bloody streets and scattered body parts. So when someone chants “globalise the intifada,” they may imagine solidarity with resistance; others hear a call that premises funerals. The dictionary definition is technically correct. It is also profoundly incomplete. It does not arrive alone; it brings its dead with it.
Or alNakba. In ordinary Arabic, a misfortune. A bad year. But in Palestinian consciousness it has fossilised into 1948 – villages depopulated, olive groves left untended, families scattered, deeds and keys preserved like heirlooms. It is no longer a generic calamity; it is The Catastrophe. Say it in Ramallah and you evoke dispossession. Say it in western Jerusalem and you may hear, in reply, the memory of a war launched to strangle a newborn state. 1967 is referred to as al Naksa, the setback.
And then there is jihad — perhaps the most mistranslated word in modern political discourse. Its root, jahada, means to strive, to exert oneself. Classical Islamic thought distinguishes between inner moral striving and outward struggle that can be intellectual, and yes, armed defence under defined conditions. Yet modern movements – from anti-colonial insurgencies to nihilistic terror groups – have narrowed and weaponised it. The word has travelled. It has acquired passengers it did not originally carry. To deny that is to be naïve. To reduce it solely to “holy war” is equally ignorant.
Al ‘Awda – the return – carries a weight for Palestinians comparable to the resonance of intifada or nakba. It is not a mere political slogan; it is a moral, legal, and emotional claim bound up with exile, memory, and inheritance and the enduring hope, however fraught, of returning to one’s ancestral land. For Israelis, the concept often triggers apprehension, a fear that the abstract ideal of return could translate into demographic and existential challenge, potentially threatening the state itself. Like intifada or nakba, the word carries histories and futures simultaneously: one side sees longing and justice, the other sees danger.
Hebrew political vocabulary is no less charged. Aliyah – ascent – frames immigration as spiritual elevation. Ge’ulah -redemption – maps theology onto statehood. Am Yisrael Chai – Let Israel Live – evokes covenant, not population. Political vocabulary hums with biblical resonance. It is impossible to excise theology from nationalism in a land where scripture is mapped onto soil.
The power of these words lies not in dictionary meaning, but in the lived and imagined consequences each community projects onto them. So when commentators insist that “intifada just means struggle,” or that “Zionism just means Jewish self-determination,” they are not wrong linguistically. They are incomplete historically. Words do not live in morphology alone. They live in memory.
Let’s cast our etymological web wider and delve deeper in our dictionary and examine words that ricochet across the howling internet in these troubled times. Genocide. Ethnic cleaning. Apartheid. Settler-colonialist. Terrorist. Resistance. Each carries not only denotation but detonation and accusation. Each holds an argument inside a noun. Each is more than description; but also a moral verdict disguised as vocabulary. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck called such terms Kampfbegriffe – battle-words. Words of iron forged in particular historical furnaces, hardened by trauma, and redeployed not merely to describe reality but to shape it.
The same dynamic now saturates discussion of Israel–Palestine. Let’s not pretend that careful language will resolve a conflict this old, this layered, this saturated with grief. But careless language can only make things worse.
Call Israel a “settler-colonial state or an apartheid state” and you situate it in the moral lineage of Algeria, Rhodesia and Pretoria. Call Hamas’ October 7 assault “resistance” and you shift the frame from massacre – to revolt, or to shift the timeframe, to pogrom, the Russian word for destruction, now interpreted as referring to the organised massacres of a particular ethnic group – which, ironically, precipitated the first settlement of European Jews in what was to become Palestine. Call Gaza “genocide” and you summon Auschwitz – whether you intend to or not. Call protesters “terror sympathisers” and you evacuate the possibility of grief motivating them at all. Each move does moral work before the evidence is even considered.
It is here, amid the discourse of colonialism and statehood, that the word genocide warrants careful attention. Unlike settler-colonial or apartheid, which describe systems of domination and segregation, genocide describes intent – the deliberate aim to destroy a people as such. It is not simply a scale of death; it is a moral calculus applied to the machinery of annihilation. To deploy it is to summon not only bodies but histories, to conjure not only numbers but the moral shadow cast by deliberate erasure. In debates over land, displacement, and occupation, it is tempting to apply the term as an ethical accelerant, to compress outrage into a noun. Yet to do so responsibly requires rigor: assessment of intent, systematic targeting, and legal definition. Without that, the word risks inflation, becoming a rhetorical hammer rather than a precise lens. Each word narrows the moral aperture.
And yet, Genocide” now circulates online as hashtag and chant. It trends. It compresses argument into a single, morally incandescent noun. For many who use it in the Gaza context, it is less a legal claim than an expression of horror at the scale of devastation. It is a cry. But cries, once repeated often enough, harden into verdicts.
In Australia, we are hardly innocent of this. We live in a country still wrestling with its own founding vocabulary: terra nullius, invasion, genocide, reconciliation, Voice. These are still contested. We know – or should know – that words can both clarify and inflame. To call Australia “founded on genocide” may be defensible within certain scholarly frameworks; it is also rhetorically maximalist. It shocks the moral nerve. That shock may awaken conscience – or entrench defensiveness. Language is never inert. Words do not merely describe history; they frame it. They allocate blame. They assign virtue. They shape identity.
In That Howling Infinite has spent months untangling these labels. Is Israel a settler-colonial state? Does apartheid apply, and if so, where? Does genocide cross the threshold from metaphor into actionable accusation? Each term compresses arguments into a noun. It performs moral work before the debate even begins.
That compression is seductive. We prefer our tragedies simple: one culprit, one origin story, one clean fingerprint. Words that arrive pre-loaded with moral clarity spare us the labour of nuance. They allow passion and empathy to outrun reason and understanding – which, in an age of instant reaction, they reliably do.
Historical illiteracy compounds the problem. The conflict is older than most of its loudest commentators. Its history is layered with Ottoman legacies, British mandates, partition plans, UN resolutions, wars declared and undeclared, refugees, intifadas, failed peace processes, withdrawals, rockets, settlement blocs, religious revivals, and fractured leaderships on both sides. Yet online discourse flattens this into memes, and to pretend this can be reduced to a meme is historical illiteracy A map. A slogan. A 30-second clip untethered from context. Algorithms reward the sharpest edges. The most incendiary noun travels furthest. Nuance, by contrast, is penalised. It does not trend. It does not fit neatly into a caption. I worry about the generational shift in how these debates unfold. Previous eras had gatekeepers – flawed, certainly – but also editors who demanded sourcing, historians who insisted on chronology. Now discourse is democratised and accelerated. A meme outruns a monograph. A slogan outruns a syllabus.
The language used evolves accordingly. Rhetorical shortcuts proliferate. “From the river to the sea.” “Open-air prison.” “Terror state.” “Colonial entity.” “Death cult.” These phrases are not random; they are engineered for virality. Each word comes preloaded, historical analogies that compress decades into chantable cadences. But chants and slogans compress complexity. They must; that is their function. And that compression distorts: two national movements, two historical traumas, two competing narratives of return and belonging, reduced to a rhyme shouted through a megaphone.
And then there are the slurs: the truncations and code-words. For example, “Zio.” A syllable masquerading as political shorthand yet unmistakably functioning as ethnic hostility. Its power lies partly in deniability. It skirts the boundary of explicit antisemitism while retaining its charge. Deniable enough to evade sanction, sharp enough to wound. But we should be intellectually honest: this phenomenon is not one-directional. The same phenomenon occurs in reverse when “Islamist” becomes a catch-all smear for Muslim political expression, or when “pro-Palestinian” is lazily equated with antisemitic intent. The grammar of dehumanisation is bipartisan: collapsing an entire spectrum of political and religious identity into a caricature designed to foreclose engagement.
So, what, finally, is in a word?
Not merely meaning, but momentum. Not simply definition, but direction. Words do not sit still; they lean. They incline us toward certain conclusions before we have done the work of thinking. They smuggle history into the present tense and call it common sense. They arrive already freighted—with grief, with fear, with memory, with accusation—and we, often unwittingly, become their couriers.
The temptation, always, is to choose the word that does the most work for us—the one that collapses ambiguity, that secures the moral high ground in a single utterance. But that is precisely where language becomes most dangerous: when it relieves us of the burden of holding two truths at once; when it permits us to name one suffering in a way that erases another; when it transforms description into verdict before evidence has even entered the room.
What we do when we misuse words is not trivial. We erode precision. We inflame passions. We collapse law into slogan. We substitute moral theatre for argument. And perhaps most dangerously, we teach ourselves that the loudest noun is the truest one.
History suggests otherwise. It is rarely the loudest words that endure, but the most exacting; not the most incendiary, but the most honest about complexity. The archive is not kind to slogans. It remembers, instead, where language clarified—and where it concealed.
To speak about Israel and Palestine—indeed, to speak about any conflict so saturated with history—is to enter a linguistic minefield in which every term has a past and every past has its partisans. There is no neutral vocabulary here. Only more or less careful usage. Only degrees of awareness. Only the choice, conscious or otherwise, between illumination and incitement.
The task, then, is not to purify language—that is impossible—but to discipline ourselves in its use. To resist the seduction of the Kampfbegriff when it outpaces our understanding. To ask, each time we reach for a word: what history does it carry? What work is it doing? What—and who—does it leave out?
Because if words can start wars, they can also foreclose the possibility of ending them. And if they are capable, at their best, of opening a space for understanding, then that space is narrow, fragile, and easily collapsed by carelessness.
Language will not resolve this conflict. But without care in language, we will not even be able to speak about it honestly.
Coda
To study a language, in the end, is not simply to acquire vocabulary. It is to acquire conscience. It is to hear the echo behind the utterance—the ghost in the grammar. To recognise that every word, especially here, is a small archive: of exile and return, of fear and defiance, of prayer and propaganda. To speak, then, is to handle those archives with a certain humility, aware that one is always, in some sense, trespassing on someone else’s memory.
History suggests otherwise than our instincts: the loudest noun is rarely the truest one. The archive keeps its own counsel. It remembers where language clarified – and where it concealed.
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow.
Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow
And in that shadow – linguistic, historical, human – words do their quiet, consequential work.
Postscript
While writing this essay – contemplating the slipperiness of words and widening the lens to the long weather system that has carried them into our mouths – I found myself returning to a simple, disquieting observation: it is no coincidence that so many of the words we have been parsing are Arabic.
It is not that Arabic words per se have become uniquely prone to distortion, nor that there is anything intrinsic to the language that invites what might loosely be called “gaslighting.” What I was circling, rather, is something more historically contingent – and more revealing.
Many of the most contested political ideas of the present moment – intifada, shahid, muqawama, even place-bound words and phrases that travel into English unchanged – are being transmitted untranslated, or only half-translated, into Western discourse. They arrive carrying dense, layered meanings shaped by decades (sometimes centuries) of conflict, theology, nationalism, and lived experience. And then, almost immediately, they are flattened, reframed, or strategically reinterpreted within a different moral and political vocabulary.
In other words, the instability I am sensing is not linguistic but translational – and beyond that, political.
There is, of course, a history to this. One thinks of how words like jihad were narrowed in Western usage to mean “holy war,” their broader theological and ethical dimensions quietly stripped away; or conversely, how certain terms are defended as benign by appeal to their most anodyne, etymological meanings, while bracketing how they are actually heard in context. The same word may present itself as metaphor, slogan, prayer, or threat – depending on who is speaking, who is listening, and what work the word is being made to do.
It is here that the instinct about Wonderland clicks back into place. The move is not uniquely Arabic; it is Humpty Dumpty’s move: control the meaning, and you control the moral frame. But the reason Arabic terms are so prominent in this moment is that the conflicts which have globalised our discourse – Israel–Palestine above all, but also Iraq, Syria, and the wider post-9/11 landscape – have carried those words into English without fully carrying their context with them. They become, in effect, linguistic migrants: visible, charged, and often unmoored.
So yes, it does say something about the modern world. Not that Arabic is uniquely problematic, but that we are living in an age where conflicts travel faster than comprehension, and where words – lifted from one history and dropped into another – become sites of struggle in their own right.
These words have crossed worlds. And in crossing, they have become unmoored enough to be contested, claimed, and weaponised. That unmooring creates opportunity: for some, to soften; for others, to sharpen; for many, to obscure.
It says something, too, about our times – about the way the Middle East has not merely intruded upon but come to dominate political, and indeed social, discourse for more than half a century; at least for as long as I have been paying attention, which is to say, for as long as I have been trying to make sense of the world and finding the same landscape returning, again and again, like a half-remembered refrain.
Let us take June 1967 as a point of departure. For a few brief weeks, the world’s gaze lifted from the humid, grinding quagmire of Indochina and fixed instead upon the sudden, almost biblical drama unfolding in the not-so-Holy Land – a war measured in days but reverberating in decades. Territory shifted, certainly; but something else shifted too: attention, imagination, the sense that this small, overburdened strip of earth had become a stage upon which the modern world would repeatedly rehearse its anxieties.
The focus has waxed and waned since, but it has never truly moved on. 1973 Oil Crisis and the realisation that the region’s tremors could rattle the global economy. The long, theatre-of-the-absurd years of hijackings and televised terror. Camp David’s fragile choreography. The Iranian Revolution, bending time backward and forward at once. The Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. Lebanon’s fracturing. The attritional horror of the Iran–Iraq War. Kuwait and the return of great-power spectacle. Oslo’s brief, luminous promise. Then 9/11, collapsing distance altogether, followed by Afghanistan again, Iraq again – the sense of recursion, of history caught in a tightening loop.
Then the Arab Spring – hope flickering, briefly, before giving way to Syria’s abyss, to ISIS and its grotesque theatre, to the multiplication rather than the resolution of fault lines. And through it all – before it, beneath it, after it – Israel and Palestine remain: a permanent fixture in the taxonomy of torment, sans pareil, the conflict that resists conclusion, that absorbs language and returns it sharpened, refracted, or hollowed out.
It is from this long saturation – this decades-long immersion in images, slogans, translations, and retranslations – that our present arguments about words emerge. They are not sudden. They are sedimentary. Each phrase we now parse carries within it the residue of these moments, these crises, these unfinished stories.
Which is to say: when we argue about what a word means, we are never only arguing about language. We are arguing about history – compressed, contested, and still very much alive.
(words that travel intact, and arrive with their weather still clinging to them)
What follows is not a neutral glossary – if such a thing were even possible here – but a kind of field manual for words that arrive already aflame, freighted with history, sharpened by use, carrying within them entire arguments about the world. They are not merely descriptive; they are performative. To utter them is to place a piece on the board, to tilt the frame, to summon histories that do not politely remain in the past.
Some are legal terms that have slipped their moorings and now drift through polemic. Some are borrowed intact from Arabic or Hebrew, carrying their original cadence like an echo that translation cannot quite still. Others are modern coinages – hybrids, sometimes ungainly – that try to compress entire arguments into a single, breathless label. And a few are names – of places, of movements – that have become arguments simply by being spoken.
What unites them is not agreement but charge. They are contested, elastic, often weaponised. They do not just describe reality; they compete to define it. They do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They travel across languages without quite translating; they narrow, expand, harden, or blur as they move. They do not simply describe events; they encode perspectives on those events. To use them is not merely to speak—it is to situate oneself, however unconsciously, within a contested moral and historical landscape.
I. Catastrophe & Historical Singularity
Nakba (النكبة) – literally “catastrophe.” In Arabic it could name any disaster; in English it has hardened into the disaster—1948—fixed, immovable, dense with exile and keys kept as heirlooms. It no longer describes; it declares.
Naksa (النكسة) – “the setback,” 1967. A softer word for a different kind of loss—diminution rather than rupture. Its retention signals an internal Arab chronology, slightly askew from the familiar “Six-Day War.”
Shoah (שואה) – “catastrophe” or “destruction,” used specifically for the Holocaust. Left untranslated in part to preserve reverence, in part to resist the easy metaphorisation that “Holocaust” sometimes invites.
Holocaust – from the Greek “burnt offering” to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and then outward into broader usage. Its expansion has given it reach—and thinned its edges.
Pogrom (погром) – a Russian word meaning violent devastation, carried into English with the memory of anti-Jewish attacks in Tsarist lands. “Riot” feels too incidental; pogrom carries its own geography.
II. Legal Terms, Moral Weapons
Genocide – a word forged in law (Lemkin, 1944), precise in definition—intent to destroy a group. In public discourse, however, it often arrives as accusation before judgment, its moral force outrunning its legal threshold.
Ethnic Cleansing – deliberately imprecise, emerging particularly from the Balkan Wars of the Nineties, but predating that in Türkiye after WWI, Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, and I dia and Pakistan in 1948. Its vagueness is its power: suggestive, elastic, difficult to refute without seeming to concede.
Apartheid – Afrikaans for “apartness,” rooted in South Africa but now globally mobile. Once invoked, it frames the system under discussion—analogy and indictment in a single stroke.
Colonialism / Settler-Colonialism – analytic frameworks that, once applied, tend to fix the narrative: indigenous and invader, permanence and removal. Illuminating, but often closing off alternative readings.
III. Resistance, Struggle, Sanctification
Intifada (انتفاضة) – “shaking off,” like dust from a sleeve. In English it is no longer generic; it points almost unavoidably to the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000. The word carries images—stones, tyres, and checkpoints—and a moral ambiguity that shifts with the speaker.
Muqāwama (مقاومة) – “resistance,” yet left untranslated to avoid the bland universality of the English. Muqāwama signals a particular ideological and regional framing—Hezbollah, Hamas, dignity under pressure.
Ṣumūd (صمود) – “steadfastness,” though the translation feels thin. Not an event but a posture: staying, enduring, tending olive trees under threat. Translate it, and it risks becoming sentiment; leave it, and it remains an ethic.
Jihad (جهاد) – “struggle,” spanning the inner and the outer. In English, that range has narrowed sharply; the word arrives intact, its semantic field diminished, sharpened toward violence.
Shahid (شهيد) – “witness” or “martyr.” It does not merely describe death; it consecrates it. In English, its retention often signals an attempt to preserve that sacred charge.
IV. Faith, Doctrine, and Internal Tensions
Kāfir (كافر) – “unbeliever,” literally one who “covers” truth. A theological category that, in polemical use, hardens into insult—a boundary drawn sharply between inside and out.
Fitna (فتنة) – “discord,” “trial,” “temptation.” Historically tied to early Islamic civil strife, it carries a deep anxiety about internal fracture. To invoke it is often to warn: this way lies chaos.
Taqiyya (تقية) – a specific Shi’a doctrine allowing concealment of belief under threat. In English polemic, however, it has been stretched well beyond its doctrinal bounds—transformed into a generalised suspicion of deception.
Hudna (هدنة) – “truce.” Yet when retained in Arabic, it often implies something tactical, provisional—a pause rather than a peace.
Fatwa (فتوى) – a legal opinion within Islamic jurisprudence, part of everyday religious life. In English, especially post-Rushdie, it has narrowed into something darker—almost synonymous with a death sentence.
V. Identity, Ideology, and the Politics of Naming
Zionism – a 19th-century movement for Jewish self-determination. In English today, it rarely sits neutrally: liberation for some, colonialism for others. The word refracts entirely different histories.
Zionist – once descriptive, now often accusatory. Its meaning depends less on definition than on tone.
“Zio” – a clipped, abrasive form that has shed any descriptive function. It lands as insult, not argument.
Aliyah (עלייה) – “ascent.” More than immigration; a movement upward, spiritually and historically. The English equivalent feels earthbound by comparison.
Al-‘Awda (العودة) – “the return.” In ordinary Arabic, a simple going back; in Palestinian discourse, the Right of Return—dense with memory, law, and longing. It sits beside the mafteah (مفتاح, the key), object turned symbol, continuity held in the hand.
Settler – on its face neutral; in contested زمین, it hardens into accusation. Biography collapses into ideology.
Hilltop Youth – a specific Israeli subculture that has become shorthand for a certain strain of ideological extremity and violence – detail turned symbol.
VI. Totalising Labels & Historical Echoes
Nazi – historically precise, rhetorically promiscuous. Now shorthand for absolute evil, its overuse both amplifying and diluting its meaning.
Fascist – from Mussolini’s doctrine to a generalised insult; elasticity has eroded precision.
“Islamo-fascist” – a hybrid, polemical term attempting to map European categories onto Islamist movements. It says as much about the speaker’s framework as the subject.
VII. Organisations as Symbols
Hamas (حماس) – “zeal,” and acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya. In English, it does not settle: government, militia, resistance, terrorism – meanings shift with the voice that utters it.
Hezbollah (حزب الله) – “Party of God.” Political party, armed movement, regional proxy; the name itself already contains a claim to divine alignment.
Da’ish (داعش) – acronym for al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fī al-‘Irāq wa al-Shām (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). Its use, rather than “ISIS,” often signals rejection; the group dislikes the term, so naming becomes a small act of defiance.
VIII. Circulating & Mediated Words
Fawda (فوضى) – “chaos,” but after its journey through Hebrew and global television (Fauda), it now carries a particular aesthetic: kinetic, morally ambiguous, intelligence-driven disorder. Chaos, but stylised.
Blitz – from Blitzkrieg, lightning war. In English, softened into metaphor—“media blitz”—yet still faintly haunted by sirens over London.
IX. Place as Argument
Al-Aqsa (الأقصى) – “the farthest.” Rarely translated, because the Arabic name carries sanctity, geography, and sovereignty in one breath.
Al-Quds (القدس) – “the holy,” the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Its use signals perspective: a city not just inhabited, but claimed, sanctified, contested.
Gaza (غزة) – a place-name that has become a metonym: war, siege, suffering, المقاومة. Geography turned symbol.
Sabra and Shatila (صبرا وشاتيلا) – no longer merely locations; the names themselves are the event. To say them is to accuse.
Coda: The Grammar of Conflict
What began as a request to a Chat GPT – to gather, sort, define – ends, rather predictably, in something the machine cannot quite resolve. Because the instability is not in the definitions; it is in us. In the way we reach for these words, load them, deploy them, defend them. In the way a term like genocide or Zionist or shahid can close down conversation as quickly as it opens it.
These are not just words. They are positions. Each one carries a shadow text: a history remembered, a grievance asserted, a legitimacy claimed or denied. They compress time, flatten complexity, and yet—paradoxically—expand into entire moral universes the moment they are spoken.
And so the lexicon does not settle the argument; it reveals its terrain.
Between the word and the world, as ever, falls the shadow. And it is in that shadow—where meaning slips, hardens, fractures, reforms—that these battle words continue to do their work, long after they have left the mouth that uttered them.
Lay these words out like this and a pattern emerges. Some words narrow as they travel (jihad, intifada). Some harden into proper nouns (Nakba, Shoah). Some expand until they blur (fascist, genocide). Some are left untranslated to preserve their charge (ṣumūd, muqāwama, al-‘awda).MNone of them are innocent.
They do not simply describe the world; they position the speaker within it. Each word a small act of alignment, a quiet declaration of where one stands. Between what a word once held, and what it is now made to carry, between language as description, and language as argument, there falls that same, shifting shadow. And it is there, in that narrow space, that these words continue to live, and to do their work.
These words do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They are anchored in place but mobile in use, precise in origin but elastic in deployment. They compress centuries into syllables, turning speech into stance.
To speak them is rarely innocent. Each carries a shadow text- unspoken assumptions, moral alignments, historical claims. They do not simply describe reality; they compete to author it.
And so the disturbance lies here: between what a word once meant, what it now does, and what we need it to prove. In that gap – narrow, shifting, and charged – language itself becomes a kind of battleground, where meaning is not fixed but fought over, again and again.
In That Howling Infinite, March 2026
The following is an essay published in The Australian by economist and commentator Henry Ergas, whom we have republished often in In That Howling Infinite.
Henry Ergas’s essay is essentially an argument about language, memory, and the way slogans prepare the emotional ground for violence long before violence itself occurs. His central claim is that chanting “Globalise the intifada” cannot be dismissed as harmless political speech or reduced to a neutral dictionary definition of intifada as merely “struggle” or “shaking off”. Words, he argues, accumulate historical meaning, and by now intifada is inseparable in the public imagination from the Palestinian uprisings associated with suicide bombings, bus attacks, café massacres, and the Second Intifada’s civilian bloodshed.
Many charged words once had ordinary meanings — holocaust once referred to a burnt offering, pogrom to devastation, nakba to catastrophe. But history hardens language. Certain events become so dominant that they permanently colonise a word’s emotional and moral resonance. Linguists call this “prototype entrenchment”: when people hear “Holocaust”, they do not think of ritual sacrifice; when they hear “intifada”, they do not think of generic resistance. They think of televised violence, bombings, and dead civilians. To insist otherwise is effectively to demand that language forget history.
From there he moves into the philosophy of slogans. A slogan, he argues, is not a precise sentence but a compressed moral universe: heroes, enemies, threats, permissions, identities. He argues that slogans often function through deliberate ambiguity. Their literal wording provides plausible deniability, while their implied meaning carries the emotional force. “Globalise the intifada” can be defended in polite settings as meaning “internationalise the Palestinian struggle”, yet in the street — shouted rhythmically in crowds — it evokes something far darker. The deniability is not a flaw in the slogan; it is part of its design.
The essay’s second movement is about repetition and crowds. Here Ergas draws heavily on Victor Klemperer, the Jewish diarist and philologist who documented how Nazi language gradually normalised extremism. Repetition, he argues, changes moral atmosphere. The first time a slogan shocks; the hundredth time it becomes ordinary. What was once unsayable becomes ambient, then accepted, then difficult to challenge without seeming hysterical or repressive. Language shifts incrementally until society adjusts itself around ideas it would once have recoiled from.
He then turns to crowd psychology, arguing that chants synchronise people emotionally and suppress individual hesitation. In a crowd, slogans cease merely to communicate ideas; they generate collective identity and emotional fusion. The chant creates an “us” and a “them”, and in doing so hardens moral boundaries. Chants such as “Globalise the intifada” are therefore not simply political expressions but mechanisms for creating an atmosphere in which violence becomes imaginable, permissible, even inevitable.
The essay culminates in the claim that the historical relationship between inflammatory slogans and violence is not accidental. Once a society becomes accustomed to rhetoric associated with past massacres, the gap between speech and action narrows. Ergas is careful not to claim that chanting directly causes violence in a mechanical sense; rather, he argues that it conditions people emotionally and morally to accept or rationalise it when it arrives.
Underlying the piece is a broader warning against what Ergas sees as liberal complacency about language — the comforting belief that “they’re only words”. He rejects that entirely. Words, especially ritualised and repeated words, shape moral perception. They define enemies, normalise hostility, and gradually acclimatise societies to what once seemed intolerable. His conclusion is that pretending not to hear the violent historical echoes within “Globalise the intifada” is not tolerance or sophistication, but a dangerous refusal to confront what language is doing in public life.
Chanting ‘intifada’ is a dangerous act that shortens the distance to violence
It took scarcely a moment, once “Globalise the intifada” began to be chanted on our streets and campuses, for its champions to insist the phrase meant nothing of the sort. Intifada, they patiently explained, simply meant struggle; the slogan was no more than a plea to “internationalise the cause”. According to the Palestine Action Group and its Islamist allies, who rallied in Sydney earlier this week, to claim otherwise is to misread the Arabic.
The defence is not merely intellectually dishonest; it reveals why “it is only words” is among the most dangerous sentences people permit themselves to believe.
As an Arabic noun, intifada does indeed possess an old, generic sense: a shaking, a dusting off. That is hardly unusual: holocaust once meant nothing more than a burnt offering; pogrom, in Russian, mere devastation; nakba, in Arabic, a misfortune ranging from mishap to calamity.
Words such as these begin life as ordinary common nouns. But each was claimed by a particular event: from 1945, the Holocaust; from 1987, the intifada. After that, the generic sense survives only in the dictionaries. It does not survive in the public mind.
Linguists call the process “prototype entrenchment”. The mind, hearing a word, reaches for the most vivid, most repeated, most emotionally charged instance and treats that as what the word stands for. Once the historical event has acquired that role, the bare definition recorded in the dictionary can no longer be peeled away from the moral, emotional and political charge the word has come to convey. To hear “Globalise the Holocaust” in 2026 and think “proliferate the supply of burnt offerings” is to misunderstand spoken English.
Asking language to forget history
Exactly the same is true with intifada. Its prototype, in the global imagination, is not struggle in the abstract: it is two uprisings whose iconography, indelibly embedded by the violence that broke out in September 2000, includes suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and a Passover Seder. That is what the word now carries, not at its margins but as its core. The defender of “Globalise the intifada” is in effect asking language itself to forget history. But human communication does not work that way.
The point is more general: a slogan is not a sentence, and the test of whether one has understood it is not whether one can render it in a dictionary gloss. It compresses an entire moral world – heroes, villains, demands, threats – into a phrase made for chanting and succeeds by being two things at once: precise enough to be grasped, ambiguous enough to be denied.
Paul Grice, one of the 20th century’s most important linguistic philosophers, gave the manoeuvre its name: implicature, the part of communication that travels not by what one says but by what one obviously means. To remark “I am not going to call him corrupt” is to inform the room that he is corrupt.
The structure is double-jointed: tested under cross-examination, the speaker retreats to what was literally uttered and accuses the critic of putting words in his mouth. The implicature does the work; the deniability provides the shelter. “Globalise the intifada” provides a textbook case.
A public forum, called “Why it’s right to say: globalise the intifada”, at a park in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, after City of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore announced council had revoked the organisers’ booking of City of Sydney-owned venue.
Pressed in a courtroom, the chant is glossed away as “internationalise the struggle”. Chanted from a stage on a Saturday afternoon, it means burnt buses, bombed cafes, murdered children.
The audiences who hear it – on both sides – hear that second meaning with perfect clarity. A slogan that everyone really took to mean only “internationalise the struggle” would hardly stir emotions; what does the stirring is precisely the violent imagery the speaker can also deny.
The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.
The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.
Repetition is normalisation
Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who retained his sanity during the Third Reich by recording its language in his diary, observed that the regime’s most powerful instrument was its vocabulary, not its decrees: a handful of words, drilled into daily life, did more to remake ordinary Germans than any speech. “Fanatisch”, once unambiguously pejorative, became under repetition a term of praise. “Aktion” became the bureaucratic veil behind which mass shootings disappeared – to incite an aktion was to incite the slaughter of millions of Jews, without actually saying so. Those shifts required no argument, only iteration.
Repetition is, in short, normalisation: hear a phrase once and it can shock; hear it for the 200th time and it has become part of the air we breathe. The extreme becomes ambient; the ambient, obvious; the obvious, embarrassing to question. Thus, each repetition of “Globalise the intifada” wears the menace in rather than out. The cost of saying it falls while the cost of objecting rises. What was once unsayable becomes ever easier to say.
Repetition does its most lethal work, however, not on the solitary newspaper reader but on bodies in a crowd. Slogans are designed not to be murmured but to be chanted rhythmically in unison. Once a phrase enters a crowd, it ceases to function as communication and begins to function as synchronisation. Voices align, breath aligns, sometimes feet align. Individuals shed the small frictions of doubt and hesitation that, in private, would have given them pause.
Anti-zionism group protest at Town Hall with a sign reading “Globalise the Intifada”.
Sociologists call this “collective effervescence” and anyone who has been in a stadium at the right moment has felt it. What was an idea in a single skull becomes a felt fact across thousands. Disagreement is not refuted; in the passion of the moment it simply ceases to be available.
The tool that drills the hatred
This is what the pioneering scholars of mass behaviour – Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Elias Canetti – meant by a crowd “having a kind of mind”. Not a mind in the literal sense but something far more dangerous: a temporarily uniform attention, a uniform emotion and – crucially – a uniform sense of who is “us” and who is “them”. Slogans are the instrument that does the tuning: and they are, as Canetti observed in the rise of Nazi antisemitism, the tool that drills in the hatred.
Put these mechanisms together and the result is not innocent speech but the manufacture of an atmosphere. A word historically captured by a violent prototype, dressed up in a deniable paraphrase and chanted by bodies whose private hesitations have been switched off – that is the recipe by which a society talks itself into permission.
It tells one group who it is by telling it who its mortal enemy is. And it tells “the other” – nowadays “the Zios” – that they are no longer part of the moral community. It hardens the shouters against dialogue and compromise. And it thickens the air with the sense that violence, when it comes, will have been only the natural conclusion of what everyone already knew.
The historical record is unambiguous: where crowds are taught to chant a word that already names a massacre, the distance between word and violence, speech and act, never grows it shortens.
The claim that slogans are innocent has always been a flattering one because it relieves us of the duty to attend to what is being said. It allows us to continue repeating comforting platitudes about freedom of expression. But words are not inert, and chanted words least of all.
Whatever else “Globalise the intifada” may mean in the dictionary, what it means in the street is what we must be willing to hear. Pretending otherwise is not tolerance. It is how societies learn, slowly and without noticing, to live with the unforgivable.
The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)
In That Howling Infinite 
That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.