Syrian history

19th century colonisation; living off the spoils, then and now: The Syrian empire?

Distinguishing Syria

I have to piece together this entry from my limited book collection and the material, which is available on the internet. In the last entry I mentioned, that Syria included the Lebanon and Palestine, at the time of the Crimean war. This must be borne in mind, even if I refer to the countries separately.

Syria has a long history of structural change, it was once known as  Assyria, which, in 671 BC, incorporated parts of Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and Turkey, which interestingly extended to the Black sea; or to relate it to recent entries, the Crimean.

There is some controversy as to whether Assyria and Syria are inter-changeable place names. The scholar Richard N Frye indicates, that in the 7th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus observed, how certain Peoples in the above regions spoke Aramaic, or Syriac as it became known in some areas and wore the same dress and thus identified them as Assyrian.

Frye adds, that it was common for the Greeks and other invaders to drop the ”A” from place names so they referred to the region as Syria rather than Assyria. There are other theories, as to the origin of the word Syria but that, of Herodotus, has withstood the test of time.

As time passed, the Syrian empire devolved and colonisation by the Ottomans, created changes, which were capitalised upon by the west, when they carved the Levant into Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, at the end of the 1914, 1918 war.

Stability has its price

We’ve lived off the ”spoils” of others’ misery, for centuries, Britain is a smug country steeped in tradition and run by an entrenched ruling class, which will never be removed. I say this here, after listening to a radio programme, which looked at the impact of the industrial revolution on the working class in Britain.

This relates to Syrian history, as the industrial revolution coincided with Britain’s entry into that part of the world; as its search for markets and resources stepped up a notch. This is not an attack on the British working class, as poverty is not pretty but it is worth remembering, where our ”security” came from.

”Stability” and ”security” do come with the relative eradication of poverty but are maintained at a cost. The price is high, it entails appeasement, innovated by divide and rule policy and by a form of social control, which only a country, with an entrenched ruling class, can make work. Someone once said to me, that Britain has the most sophisticated ruling class in the world and how right they were.

Britain has centuries of expertise at governing by the pen, both here and overseas, an art, that makes it seem like a benign country; though an endless amount of people have died or have been marginalised, due to its method of governance and colonisation.

More very soon folks, I have been really off the boil recently




One thought on “19th century colonisation; living off the spoils, then and now: The Syrian empire?

  1. Pingback: Pan Islamism |  SHOAH

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