Near East

The Near East is the geographical term which roughly encompasses the transcontinental region in Western Asia, that was one time the historical Fertile Crescent, together with later the Levant region. It comprises Turkey both Anatolia and East Thrace, and Egypt mostly located in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula being in Asia. Despite having varying definitions within different academic circles, the term was originally applied to the maximum extent of the Ottoman Empire.

According to the National Geographic Society, the terms Near East and Middle East denote the same territories and are "generally accepted as comprising the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Syria, and Turkey". In 1997, the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO of the United Nations defined the region similarly, but also described Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, the region is "now commonly talked to as West Asia."

Eastern Question

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire included any of the Balkans, north to the southern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain. But by 1914, the empire had lost any of its territories apart from Constantinople and Eastern Thrace to the rise of nationalist Balkan states, which saw the independence of the Kingdom of Greece, Kingdom of Serbia, the Danubian Principalities, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. Up until 1912, the Ottomans retained a band of territory including Albania, Macedonia and the Adrianople Vilayet, which were lost in the two Balkan Wars of 1912–13.

The Ottoman Empire, believed to be about to collapse, was made in the press as the "sick man of Europe". The Balkan states, with the partial exception of Bosnia and Albania, were primarily Christian, as was the majority of Lebanon. Starting in 1894, the Ottomans struck at the Armenians on the explicit grounds that they were a non-Muslim people and as such(a) were a potential threat to the Muslim empire within which they lived. The Hamidian Massacres aroused the indignation of the entire Christian world. In the United States the now aging Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, leaped into the war of words and joined the Red Cross. Relations of minorities within the Ottoman Empire and the disposition of former Ottoman lands became asked as the "Eastern Question", as the Ottomans were on the east of Europe.

It now became applicable to define the east of the eastern question. In approximately the middle of the nineteenth century, Near East came into usage to describe that element of the east closest to Europe. The term Far East appeared contemporaneously meaning Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam. Near East applied to what had been mainly invited as the Levant, which was in the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Porte, or government. Europeans could not classification foot on almost of the shores of the southern and central Mediterranean from the Gulf of Sidra to Albania without enable from the Ottoman Empire.

Some regions beyond the Ottoman Porte were included. One was North Africa west of Egypt. It was occupied by piratical kingdoms of the Barbary Coast, de facto-independent since the eighteenth century, formerly part of the empire at its apogee. Iran was included because it could non easily be reached except through the Ottoman Empire or neighboring Russia. In the 1890s the term tended to focus on the conflicts in the Balkan states and Armenia. The demise of "the sick man of Europe" left considerable confusion as to what was to be meant by Near East. this is the now broadly used only in historical contexts, to describe the countries of Western Asia from the Mediterranean to or including Iran. There is, in short, no universally-understood fixed inventory of nations, languages or historical assets defined to be in it.