cial ways. First, it remained under Ottoman Turk control longer than Egypt did, insulating it from British involvement in and complication of governance than was the case in Egypt in the first half of the 20th century. Second, Jordan had a political culture organized less on institutional lines, as in Egypt, than along Arab tribal lines.
Even so, Jordan as it is currently constituted was a derived political entity and an attribute of European as well as Ottoman imperial influence. From a nation-state standpoint, the key moment in the modern period of Jordan was World War I, when the Arabs, whose national boundaries had been fundamentally undifferentiated under the Ottomans, joined the Allies against the pro-German Ottoman Turks. In 1918, the area now covered by Syria, Jordan, and Israel was partitioned as a "mandate" whereby Syria fell under French control and Palestine fell to the British; the Conference of San Remo in 1920 was expressly set up to dispose of what had become the former Ottoman Empire. The British further partitioned its mandate, creating the emirate of Transjordan under the nominal rule of Abdulla, who was a brother of the Arab Hashimite prince Faysal and whose policies were as a practical matter subject to British review (Kramer, 1993). Only after World War II was over did Transjordan become fully independent, changing its name in 1949 to the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan. Within that scheme of action, however, was a dynamic of evolving political consciousness that has persisted into the contemporary period. That is a point to which this research will return.
Nationalist sentiment operated in Egypt during both Ottoman and British occupation, accelerating and becoming more complicated under the latter regime. In 1892, 'Abbas Hilmi II, age 17, assumed the title of khedive, which was the name given to the Egyptian ruler under British control. In the decades that followed, Egypt was ruled a series of successors in a co...