Thought and Reflections on: "Lines in the Sand" and "Remapping the World"

Ben Howson
World History 2 per.3
Thoughts and Reflections
04/03/15

The boundaries of the new countries drawn in the Middle East following World War I was based on the greed for oil. The Europeans separated drew the map not thinking of anything else other than oil.  

The new boundaries caused many problems, but probably the biggest was imperial interest rather than local realities. The Imperial interest was all about oil, so many conflicts came out of this, with the new countries fighting for it.

T.E. Lawrence had many great ideas for drawing up new boundaries. He saw that the Middle East should be broken into separate Kurdish and Arab states. He tried to take regional characteristics in to account, because he saw that the political boundaries of the Middle East don't always work with social, religious, and demographical contours.
This process is a product of the modern era, because the idea of separating countries via regional characteristics, ethnicities, religions, and demographical contours is an idea that has just recently come up. This process had many different ways of separating countries, to make a very far and simple border, in which for example divided up resources fairly, putting simular ethnicities close together and more, just to try and get around conflict. Basically all of the other ideas around this time were made by greed and power, but this process looked for the good, the things that would best suite everyone.         

T.E. Lawrence