3 - Wilsonian Self-Determination

Summary

This chapter focuses on the maps of Kurdistan produced by Western travellers and colonial officers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period of the end of the empires. Colonialist understanding of what constitutes national identity, which had strong perennialist and civilisationalist underpinnings, shaped the way territorial identity was understood. Western map-making in this period was also shaped by the political, economic and geostrategic interests of the colonial powers engaged in the region. Western travellers’ and states’ perceptions of nationality and colonisation and their view of the peoples of this region shaped the construction of a retrospective view on Kurdish national identity in the nineteenth century. Such perceptions overlook the ambiguous, tribally defined and non-universal conceptions of Kurdish territoriality in the late Ottoman era. Nonetheless, Western maps of Kurdistan were adopted and used by Kurdish nationalists in early twentieth century and became the key sources of mapping the Kurdish nation.