Middle East

The great trading companies that originated in early modern Europe are often seen as pioneers of western imperialism. The Levant Company was different, argues James Mather.

In the light of current events in North Africa and the Middle East, David Motadel examines the increasing frequency of popular rebellions around the world.

Since its discovery in Yemen in 1972 a collection of brittle documents, believed to be among the earliest Koranic texts, has been the subject of fierce and divisive debate among scholars of Islamic history, as Scott MacMillan reports.

Outremer, the crusader kingdom, and its capital Jerusalem entered a golden age during the 1130s. Simon Sebag Montefiore portrays its extraordinary cast of kings, queens, conquerors and criminals.

Nigel Jones celebrates a great humanitarian who navigated the perilous paths between good and evil, a mission that was to cost him his life.

A solution to the turmoil in the Middle East seems as far away as ever. But, says Martin Gilbert, past relations between Muslims and Jews have often been harmonious and can be so again.

At the height of the Roman Empire, hundreds of merchant ships left Egypt every year to voyage through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, exchanging the produce of the Mediterranean for exotic eastern commodities. Raoul McLaughlin traces their pioneering journeys. 

Disillusionment with Iran’s secular king brought the Islamists to power in 1979. Will the population now oust the ruling theocracy, asks Baqer Moin?

On the eve of the Second World War, the navies of Italy, France and Britain plotted for supremacy in the Mediterranean. Their actions resulted in the fracturing of the sea’s age-old unity, with consequences that persist to this day. Simon Ball explains how the ‘Middle Sea’ became the Middle East.

With a solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as far away as ever, James Barker looks back to Britain’s occupation of the region and the efforts made by the future Viscount Montgomery to impose peace on its warring peoples.

Richard Cavendish remembers Israel's own Iron Lady, who became Prime Minister on March 17th 1969

James Barker reveals how parsimony and muddle in Whitehall in the first years of the British Mandate in Palestine almost led to disaster in August 1929.