Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands Making a Boundary, 18431914 [Paperback]

This book examines the making of the present day Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish boundary, shedding new light on some of the most contentious issues of today.This book is the story of the making of the present day Iranian, Iraqi, and Turkish boundary. It details how Russian, Ottoman, British, and Iranian commissioners worked intermittently over seven decades to create a boundary in an ethnically, religiously, and geographically diverse region. By highlighting the voices of various borderland peoples the book provides a more inclusive and egalitarian version of modern Middle Eastern history, and so sheds new light on some of the most contentious issues of the present day, such as the Kurdish question and the frontier issues that led to the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.This book is the story of the making of the present day Iranian, Iraqi, and Turkish boundary. It details how Russian, Ottoman, British, and Iranian commissioners worked intermittently over seven decades to create a boundary in an ethnically, religiously, and geographically diverse region. By highlighting the voices of various borderland peoples the book provides a more inclusive and egalitarian version of modern Middle Eastern history, and so sheds new light on some of the most contentious issues of the present day, such as the Kurdish question and the frontier issues that led to the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.Using a plethora of hitherto unused and underutilized sources from the Ottoman, British, and Iranian archives, The Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands (18431914) traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, British, Ottoman, and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was tranl#4