Winding its way from Damascus through the vast desert wastes of Jordan and into the spectacular barren mountains of north-west Saudi Arabia, the Hejaz Railway was a testament to the fading, but still potent power of the Ottomans in Arabia.

Railway expansion was symbolic of modernization in the late 19th century, and Britain, Germany and France built railways at enormous speed and reaped great commercial benefits. In the Middle East, railways were no less important and the Ottoman Empire's Hejaz Railway was the first great industrial project of the 20th century. A route running from Damascus to Mecca, it was longer than the line from Berlin to Baghdad and was designed to function as the artery of the Arab world - linking Constantinople to Arabia. Built by German engineers, and instituted by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the railway was financially crippling for the Ottoman state and the its eventual stoppage 250 miles short of Mecca (the railway ended in Medina) was symbolic of the Ottoman Empire's crumbling economic and diplomatic fortunes. This is the first book in English on the subject, and is essential reading for those interested in Industrial History, Ottoman Studies and the geopolitics of the Middle East before World War I.

This atlas aims to provide the reader with key pointers for a spatial analysis of the social, economic and political dynamics at work in Jordan, an exemplary country of the Middle East complexities. Being a product of seven years of scientific cooperation between Ifpo, the Royal Jordanian Geographic Center and the University of Jordan, it includes the contributions of 48 European, Jordanian and International researchers. A long historical part followed by sections on demography, economy, social disparities, urban challenges and major town and country planning, sheds light on the formation of Jordanian territories over time. Jordan has always been looked on as an exception in the Middle East due to the political stability that has prevailed since the country’s Independence in 1946, despite the challenge of integrating several waves of Palestinian, Iraqi and - more recently - Syrian refugees. Thanks to this stability and the peace accord signed with Israel in 1994, Jordan is one of the first countries in the world for development aid per capita.

Introduction -- Construction -- Financing -- Operations -- Impact upon society

With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.