Geographic Realities in the Middle East and North Africa

State, Oil and Agriculture

George Joffé, Richard Schofield, George Joffé, Richard Schofield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138387874
• eBook ISBN: 9780429681622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Social Sciences

Celebrating the work of Keith McLachlan, a well-known and much-admired geographer of the Middle East and North Africa, this book combines three interrelated topics that define the region. The Middle East has been integral to the growth of the global oil industry, an aspect of its evolution since 1908 which has had profound geopolitical implications as well.

The territory was also the arena for the last European experiment in colonialism, a development that has left its legacy even today. And, historically, it has been the location of the great hydraulic civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia yet is still dependent on the flow of its two major river systems – the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates – in an era of impending climate crisis. These themes form the essence of themes that are discussed in the chapters that follow. Keith McLachlan played a significant role in our understanding of these themes and of their effects in the contemporary world, as the comments of those who worked with him and have contributed towards this book reveal.

Examining agriculture, oil and state construction, this volume offers an insight into how the contemporary Middle East was constructed after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is a key resource for scholars and students interested in geopolitics and the geography of the Middle East.

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Geographic realities in the Middle East and North Africa

State, oil and agriculture

George Joffé and Richard Schofield

These essays have been brought together to commemorate the work of a significant geographer of the Middle East and North Africa, Keith McLachlan, whose work tied together the three themes upon which it is based – state, oil and agriculture. It is, perhaps, a truism that the contemporary concept of the state in the Middle East and North Africa forms part of the poisoned chalice bequeathed to the region by colonialism. The Western vision of the state, as the political super-structure that frames and organises society on a defined territory (Montevideo 1933),¹ sits at odds with indigenous concepts of universal society ordered by divine precept for the purpose of the proper practice of Islam. When combined with the concept of the unique nation which legitimises it, the Western vision of the state approaches Hegel’s concept of what the state should be and that, in turn, recalls Islamic principle.² It remains distinguished from it, however, by innate differences of the meaning and location of sovereignty. For the Western vision, sovereignty remains a secular concept, embedded within the state itself as sole sovereign actor; in Islam, sovereignty is a divine attribute, inherent in the relationship between the godhead and society (Lambton 1981; 1–17).

The memorial volume

Rarefied though these issues might seem, they also went to the heart of Keith McLachlan’s academic interests as a geographer for they relate to the tension between Western and Islamic concepts of the territorial extent of the state. Whilst the Western state, concerned with sovereignty, was acutely concerned with its precise territorial reach, traditional Islamic concepts of sovereign territory, whilst relevant for administrative purposes, were really subordinate to the articulation of power over communities, ideally over a single community, the umma. In reality, of course, there were competing power centres within that ideal unit, but all of them essentially conceived of power projection – and therefore of sovereign control – in terms of the communities subject to that control. The tensions inherent in these two opposed concepts of state power within the Middle East and North Africa found its academic expression in his interest in the implications of international boundaries throughout the region.

It was an interest that expressed itself, not only in academic terms – through his creation, together with Tony Allan, of the Geopolitics and International Boundaries Research Centre (GRC) in the Geography Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) – but also in more practical respects. Keith McLachlan was responsible for the organisation of several consultancy projects advising on the historical, economic, anthropological and geographic aspects of boundary disputes in West Asia and Africa – some of which served ongoing arbitral or judicial legal cases. He and Tony Allan also created a small publishing company, Menas Press, which published books reflecting these interests in the static definition of the state. As the company’s list developed, it also began to publish historical and social studies, as well as monographs, related to the Middle East and North Africa.

But the state, as territory, was only one aspect of these interests; states, after all, are dynamic entities, given meaning for their populations by the economic activities they incorporate alongside their coercive power. Traditionally, such economic activity was dominated by agriculture, artisanal industry and trade. As an economic geographer, Keith McLachlan’s primary interest was in agriculture and the way in which it sought to adapt traditional labour-intensive practice to modern capital-intensive innovation, together with its social implications. Associated with this was the issue of water and irrigation, particularly traditional irrigation systems such as the qanat or falaj. These were a set of interests particularly expressed through his work on Iran and Libya.

The Middle East and North Africa, however, also had another dimension, one that related exclusively to the modern colonial and post-colonial era and that also formed the subject of Keith McLachlan’s academic interests. This was the development and implications of the international oil industry in which the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, North Africa played a central role. Once again, Iran, as one of the central states in which the region’s oil industry developed from the start of the twentieth century, together with Iraq and Kuwait, as well as Libya, the focus of the Independents after the Second World War, dominated his academic horizons in this respect. And here, too, Keith McLachlan was responsible for organising an academic team to advise regional states on the economic aspects of dispute resolution, a responsibility which fed into the development of innovative approaches on inter alia economic valuation within the context of nationalisation and expropriation.

This book, therefore, seeks to bring these three strands of Keith McLachlan’s academic interests together as a cohesive whole, centred around the dilemma of the state as a static physical entity, whether defined by territory or in terms of community. Yet, since the state is also a dynamic driver of communal economic activities, his interests as a geographer in the state inevitably extended into the two activities that have dominated communal economic well-being there – agriculture and oil. The contributors to this book, therefore, reflect this tripartite unity within Keith McLachlan’s academic career and, at the same time, seek to make an insightful contribution into the unique political and economic dimensions that define the contemporary Middle East and North Africa, as exemplified by Iran and Libya. In an era where critical approaches are the vogue in geography and in the social sciences more generally, the editors would like to think they have assembled a notably grounded collection of chapters – in what would have been, had the dispute existed then, in the McLachlan tradition.

A career

Before we comment on the contents of this book, we would like to record our immense personal debt to Keith McLachlan for his constant encouragement and support over many years. He was, in truth, largely responsible for what we do now, and we have tried to follow his example in our own careers. We are not alone, of course, in benefitting in this way for Keith McLachlan saw it as part of his academic and personal responsibility to encourage students to realise their potential. He certainly did not indulge failure, but, equally certainly, his open support turned out to be the essential catalyst for many of us, and, as the editors of this volume, we are both truly grateful.

In academic terms, however, Keith McLachlan was in the very best sense a savvy regional geographer – in himself a lasting tribute to the Middle East regional geography school founded by W. B. Fisher in the decades after the Second World War at the University of Durham. By the time he completed his doctorate at Durham on the geography of the Libyan coastal tract around Misuratah in 1961 (in three volumes!), he was already publishing on Middle Eastern geography – for example on ‘The Wadi Caam Project: Its Social and Eonomic Aspects’ in Willimott and Clarke [eds.] (1960), Field Studies in Libya, University of Durham (Durham). His first academic post in 1961 was as a Research Fellow in Contemporary Iranian Affairs, the beginnings of his long and successful career at SOAS, University of London – where he would go on to be a Lecturer in Agricultural Economics and subsequently Senior Lecturer in Geography, receiving his professorship in 1990.

Keith McLachlan crowned his career as a scholar in 1988 by penning The Neglected Garden: The Politics and Ecology of Agriculture in Iran (London: IB Tauris) to widespread acclaim. The 1980s had also proved a particularly productive phase as a large number of research collaborations resulted in jointly authored books and edited collections spanning his varied geographical interests in the Middle East region. Predating The Neglected Garden on the agricultural development theme had been a substantive collection of published essays (co-edited with Peter Beaumont): Agricultural Development in the Middle East (Chichester: Wiley, 1985). Keith’s long record of research into Libya, following his doctorate, would find reflection in the release of The Social and Economic Development of Libya, edited jointly with George Joffé (Wisbech: Menas Press: 1984). Around the same time, research into another area of interest, Kuwait’s labour force from the early 1980s, resulted in the publication (with AA Al Moosa) of Immigrant Labour in Kuwait (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1985). Keith’s long-standing interest in the traditional irrigations systems of the region culminated in a significant international conference at SOAS in 1988. This inspired a book (co-edited with Peter Beaumont and Michael Bonine) that was entitled Qanat, Kariz and Khat-tara: Traditional Water Systems in the Middle East and North Africa (Wisbech: Menas Press, 1989).

Around this time, Keith lectured and wrote widely about the calamitous 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War, in which a million and half (mainly young) lives were lost. Its political, geographic, economic and strategic dimensions were ably highlighted in a series of influential publications (co-written with George Joffé) for the Economist Intelligence Unit: The Gulf War (1985); Iran and Iraq: The Next Five Years (1987); Iran and Iraq: Building on the Stalemate (1989). This built upon a longstanding interest in the wider political geography of the Gulf region – earlier cemented with an article penned with another late lamented Lancastrian, Mike Burrell – who taught Middle East history at SOAS (‘The Political Geography of the Persian Gulf States’ in Alvin Cottrell [ed.], The Persian Gulf States [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979, pp. 121–139]). Keith’s academic interest in the region’s territorial concerns continued with the publication of A Bibliography of the Iran–Iraq Borderland (Wisbech: Menas Press, 1987), co-authored with Richard Schofield (he had earlier published A Bibliography of Afghanistan with William Whittaker (Wisbech: Menas Press, 1985). Then came his editorship of The Boundaries of Modern Iran (London: UCL Press, 1994), a title in the SOAS/GRC Geopolitics Series, and joint editorship (with Ieuan Griffiths and Dick Hodder) of The Landlocked States of Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 1995). The latter was a special issue of the Geopolitics and International Boundaries journal – one of a series of titles inaugurated in the mid-1990s as a result of a series of conversations between Frank Cass and George Joffé. Its founding editor was Richard Schofield, and it is still publishing two and a half decades later as Geopolitics.

Keith contributed scholarly articles to a wide range of academic journals emanating from geography, the social sciences and regional studies. These included, inter alia, Arab Gulf Journal, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Geoforum, Geojournal, Iranian Journal of International Affairs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. He contributed an authoritative chapter (‘Economic Development, 1921–1979’, pp. 608–658) to the last edition (volume 7) of The Cambridge History of Iran: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), something he was very pleased about at the time.

This long record of engagement with Middle East geography extended to catering for younger readers too – for instance, his contribution to John Murray’s Case Studies in the Developing World Series, a co-authored title with his wife, Anne McLachlan (Oil and Development in the Gulf [London: John Murray, 1989]). Keith was equally proud of the travel books he penned (again, with his wife Anne) for Trade and Travel (later renamed Footprints) on North Africa – suggesting on one occasion with a typical mischievousness that the SOAS Geography Department should feel free to enter them for the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

Keith McLachlan’s role as a consultant was widespread; he was the Iran author for the Economist Intelligence Unit and, as mentioned, George Joffé worked with him on three special issues on the Iran–Iraq War. They even wrote a book together on future Iran–Iraq relations at the end of the Iran–Iraq War, due for publication just before Iraq invaded Kuwait – an event that rendered it irrelevant! He also wrote for other periodical publications, such as the Encyclopaedia Britannia Book of the Year and Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, in which he also covered Gulf affairs. He also undertook a wide range of consultancy projects on his areas of interest – Libya, Iran and the Gulf – over the years.

His main role as consultant, however, came about through Menas Press, the company that he and Tony Allan had founded at the end of the 1970s to act as a vehicle for the publication of PhD theses that were too specialist for commercial publishers. However, although the press continued for several years, publishing several important books, its activities were gradually taken over in the 1980s by a new range of activities that stemmed from Keith McLachlan’s original academic interests in Libya.

In 1980, Keith McLachlan and Tony Allan were approached by some of their Libyan contacts to advise the country’s lawyers, Frere Cholmeley (now part of Eversheds), on a maritime border dispute between Libya and Tunisia. Keith McLachlan’s role was to put together research teams for historical, geological and geographic background research and to direct the advice given to the lawyers. It proved to be a winning combination, and, after Libya’s success before the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 1982, other cases followed – the Libya–Malta maritime delimitation in 1984, the Taba arbitration between Israel and Egypt in 1986 and the Libya–Chad land border case in 1994.

The contribution made by the team that he put together to Libya’s success in the Tunisia case led to a further request to provide an economics team to advise Libya on a dispute it had over unpaid taxes with Mobil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Geographic realities in the Middle East and North Africa: state, oil and agriculture
• Part I Boundaries and the state
• Part II Oil and Iran
• Part III Agriculture and water
• Index