Modern Arab World

The modern Arab world took shape in the twentieth century, as Ottoman provinces became mandates and then independent states, most of them between the 1930s and the 1970s. The borders drawn in that period, and the institutions built inside them, still define the region's politics.

Oil transformed the economics of the Gulf from the 1930s onward, and within two generations turned pearling and fishing towns into some of the fastest-growing cities on earth. Elsewhere the drivers were different — agriculture and industry in Egypt and the Maghreb, trade and finance in the Levant, phosphates, gas, shipping and services in between.

The Arab League, founded in Cairo in 1945 with six members, now has twenty-two, and Arabic became one of the official languages of the United Nations in 1973.

What defines the region now is the speed at which the old and the new sit together. Riyadh, Doha, Dubai, Casablanca and Cairo are building at a pace few places can match, while at the same time investing heavily in restoring the old towns, museums and heritage sites that the same growth once threatened.