The term Middle East originated sometime in the second half of the 19th century, reportedly, within the British

India office, the organizational body that managed the then-provinces of British India,

and at the time this term Middle East referred to those managed provinces, which were made up of

what is today, India, Pakistan, Burma,

and Bangladesh. In 1902, the term was used by an American naval strategist named Alfred

Thayer Mayen, who was writing in the National Review, in reference to the area between Arabia

and India, with a specific focus on the

centrality of the Persian Gulf and its surrounding region to the so-called great game of

Asiatic influence peddling that was taking place between the British and Russian

empires at the time. The term Middle East then became a designation for the

land around the Persian Gulf that the British could not allow the Russians to take, because it

was the most strategically important landmass in the hemisphere, beyond perhaps the Suez Canal

and Egypt. That national review piece was reprinted in the British paper The Times,

and the concept of the Middle East was expounded upon

by a British journalist and author Sir Ignatius Valentine Kyrl,

who redefined the term over the course of a 20 article series entitled the Middle Eastern

Question, to encompass all Asian regions that either border India or, in his words, quote,

command the approaches to India, end quote.

This term then was contextualized around an important British territory at this point

in history, and not generally applied beyond that use case.

This moniker then fell roughly into place between two other commonly used labels in the

pre-World War era. The Near East was generally applied to

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