The crusades began in 1095 with an invasion of the middle east by Franks (we would call them Frenchmen), which, all excuses aside, became a land grab. It didn’t have anything to do with the Moors and an invasion of Europe, which had already happened centuries before. While many Muslims allege that the crusades never ended, just saying so doesn’t make it true.
Hero of Alexandria, a Greek living in Roman Egypt came up with a steam turbine in the first century of the common era. There were various “re-inventions” of the steam turbine in China, the Ottoman Empire (Egypt again, i think), in Italy and in England after the Renaissance. In the 1880s, an Englishman invented a practical steam turbine which could be used to generate electricity. It had other applications, too, and one of them revolutionized marine propulsion systems. Previously, coal was burned to heat water and run huge piston engines with steam—these were called reciprocating steam engines. Such engines, however, could not develop high steam pressures because coal did not burn hot enough and fast enough. The steam turbine invented in England in the 1880s was seen to be most efficient with high, continuous heat for the boilers, and as petroleum was now being widely used in many places in the world, there was soon experimentation to produce boilers which were oil-fired rather than coal-fired.
One of the results of that was the development of warships with steam turbine engines, which allowed those warships not only to steam at high speeds, but to carry more weight—additionally, they could generate electricity with the “waste” steam from the turbines to run smaller turbines.. So naval engineers began dreaming of bigger and more powerful warships. The first such warship was HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906. (The United States launched USS Texas in 1912, and it’s still afloat as a museum.) Warships now had greater speed, and could carry heavier armor and bigger guns (Dreadnougth was an “all big gun” battleship), The first such battleships were built in Japan, but they tried to do it on the cheap, and they carried too little armor. Dreadnought had the heavy guns and it had the heavy armor.
Now you’re thinking “this guy is nuts, what does that have to do with the middle east?” In 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (modern British Petroleum—BP) was founded. Persia (now called Iran) is in the middle east. At that time, petroleum suddenly looked very scarce now that national governments had a crying need for it. A naval arms race began between Great Britain and Germany, and access to petroleum became critical. After the discovery of a huge oil field in Iran, surveyors went running all over the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the lands next-door to Iran, looking for petroleum. And they found it, lots and lots of it. Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1912, considered to be the end of the arms race between Great Britain and Germany. He certainly understood the need for petroleum. Of the “Great Powers,” only the United States had large reserves of petroleum within its borders (North Sea oil had not yet been discovered, and anyway, no one in 1912 would have known how to get at it.) After the First World War, the Allies wanted to carve up the middle east, which they had helped to take away from the Ottoman Empire, now defunct. France had other fish to fry, so they left it up to the Brits. Lloyd George appointed Arthur Balfour to work out the details. He was an old man, however and in poor health. So they gave him an assistant . . . Winston Churchill. Unsurprisingly, the areas with the largest known petroleum reserves ended up in British hands.
I could write pages more, but suffice it to say that for six or seven centuries, the West had not given a rat’s patoot about the middle east. But the development of the steam turbine for marine engines, the building of HMS Dreadnought and the naval arms races (there was more than one down the years) suddenly made that real estate interesting again. Whatever else people may say, the petroleum found in the middle east has made it far more significant than its people and borders otherwise would have done.
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