Abstract:
Using a framework inspired by Edward Said's notions of "othering" and "discourses of representation", this study examines three major newspapers which contain and represent a broad section of the early twentieth-century British discourse regarding the Middle East in a preliminary attempt to unearth the British imagining of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. By examining a network of images, narratives and interpretive frameworks over the course of a period which saw dramatic changes in Britain's relation to and engagement with the heartlands of Islam, it sketches the contours of Britons' "imagined geography" of the Muslim East and uncovers a connection between the provinces of Britain's imagined geography and the apparatus of justification which underpinned British imperial power.
