Empire and its legacy in the Middle East

'The Poisoned Well: Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East' by Roger Hardy (Hurst, £20, 272 pages)

The centenary of the First World War has prompted much reflection on events 100 years ago. The war's Middle Eastern theater witnessed the complete collapse of the old Ottoman system and the emergence of a new order of modern nation states. The effects of that destructive, bloody process are still playing out today. Many are looking back to a century ago to understand the violent flux that again engulfs the region.

The order born from Ottoman rubble was midwifed by Western imperialists. There has been a lot of talk about "artificial countries" and arbitrary "lines in the sand" at the root of today's problems. But as Roger Hardy writes in "The Poisoned Well," a vivid account of the half-century between 1917 and 1967, those borders are less important than what goes on within them. "If Western powers are at fault," Hardy suggests, "it is not primarily for the way they drew the borders of the Middle East after the First World War, but because their interaction with the region ... has often served to accentuate the crisis of the state, rather than helping to resolve or mitigate it." Today, he argues, "Islamism, the Arab Spring, and global jihadism are the products, not of artificial borders, but the long-simmering crisis of the state."

Hardy is a former BBC World Service correspondent and a research associate at the Centre for International Studies in Oxford. "The Poisoned Well" is a lively and elegant book full of colorful details. Its 10 chapters knit together the many dramas of decolonization - including the rise and fall of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the Suez crisis, the Algerian war of independence, and the founding of the State...