Exercise 1: A Region's Name as a Real Political Convention — Possible Solution
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This exercise asks you to explain why "the Middle East" is a genuine
political/strategic convention rather than a neutral geographic fact,
using this chapter's own real 1902 Mahan example, and to name one other
real regional label that works the same way.

THE MAHAN EXAMPLE'S OWN STRUCTURE
"The Middle East" was not drawn from any pre-existing geographic survey
or from how the region's own inhabitants described themselves. It was
coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval strategist, in a
September 1902 article about the Persian Gulf's importance to British
naval power. Mahan's own stated purpose was strategic - describing a
zone of British imperial interest - not descriptive. The term was
picked up and expanded within weeks by a second writer, Valentine
Chirol, specifically to cover "regions of Asia which extend to the
borders of India or command the approaches to India" - a definition
built entirely around British imperial priorities (protecting the route
to India), not around any shared feature of the region itself.

WHY THIS MAKES IT A CONVENTION, NOT A FACT
A neutral geographic fact would be independently verifiable regardless
of who was doing the naming - a river's own length, a mountain's own
height. "The Middle East" instead reflects a specific, external,
historically situated point of view: middle and east of what? Of
Britain and its own imperial holdings, specifically. A region named
from a different vantage point (say, one centered on India, or on the
region's own inhabitants) would have no particular reason to draw the
same boundaries or use the same name at all.

A SECOND REAL EXAMPLE
"The Far East" works identically - it names East Asia as "far" only
from a European vantage point; the same region is not "far" from
itself. "The West" (as in Western civilization/the Western world) is a
similar case: a real, widely-used political and cultural grouping with
no fixed, agreed-upon list of member countries, defined more by a
shared reference to certain historical and institutional traditions
than by any strict geographic boundary.

ANSWER: "The Middle East" is a political convention because it was
coined for a specific, external strategic purpose (Mahan's own 1902
British naval-interest framing) rather than derived from any neutral,
independently verifiable geographic feature - and "the Far East" is a
directly comparable real example, since it too only makes sense as
"far" from one particular vantage point rather than describing anything
inherent to the region itself.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It grounds the claim in the chapter's own specific, dated, sourced
example (Mahan, September 1902) rather than treating "conventions
aren't neutral" as an abstract assertion, and it extends the same
reasoning to a genuinely comparable second case rather than restating
the first one in different words.