Colonial Activism in Open Territories: The Origination of the 1917 Global Order

This review essay examines how the new sovereign, legal and spatial order in the Middle East was imagined by those who worked to create it since 1917. Loevy argues that a new wave of studies indicates that the parties involved in the redrawing of the region during the war years imagined a “new Middle East” – an open colonial space rife with possibilities. Reviewing a number of these current studies, the essay weaves a rich story of the unexpected and unfamiliar channels of that colonial activism — in law, infrastructure development, international diplomacy and administration – that took place as part of the supposedly familiar moment of 1917.