In this narrative, the first comprehensive account of recent Kurdish history, David McDowall traces the roots of Kurdish nationalism from the collapse of the Kurdish emirates in the nineteenth century and the consequent crisis in tribal politics, through the post-1918 peace settlement for which the Kurds were wholly unprepared, to the slow emergence of an educated non-tribal class during the middle years of this century. This new class faced two enemies. Externally, it had to resist the recently established regimes in Iran, Turkey and Iraq, all of which equated modernization with state nationalism, ethnic subordination and centralization. Internally, it had to transform a society based primarily on the socio-economic ethic of tribal patronage to one based on ethnic identity. .…
"This is one of the textbook-type histories of the Kurds written by a historian. It’s a very good book for somebody who wants a fairly comprehensive survey of Kurdish history. One of the disadvantages of not having your own country is that you don’t have the archives and scholarship to write your own histories. There are not many surveys to choose from. This is one of the few, and it’s quite good. It’s important to understand that the way in which a national identity is defined in the Eastern Hemisphere—Europe, Asia and the Middle East—is quite different from how we look at it in the Western Hemisphere. In the Western Hemisphere, national identity goes with geography. In the United States, it doesn’t matter whether your ancestry is Greek, African, English or Chinese. Regardless, you are an American. This is true throughout the Western Hemisphere, including South and Central America and most of Canada. It is one reason why there is so little separatist sentiment in the Western Hemisphere, aside from Quebec. Everybody can belong to a geographic space if they live there. But in the Eastern hemisphere, the concept of nation, of nationality, goes with ethnicity. That’s how it is with the Kurds. They are citizens of the four countries among which they are divided, but they have a national identity as Kurds. So if you are a Kurd living in Turkey, you you are a Turkish citizen but you are not a Turk. This way of defining a nationality always makes people who are not from the dominant ethnicity feel as if they are second class citizens, and this fuels separatism."
