The Near East got its name from British worries about Russia
Before the 1850s, 'the far east' could mean any distant corner east of wherever you stood, even the far side of a village. Then the Crimean War pushed British officials to give the phrases fixed meanings. Near East came to mean the Ottoman lands, Far East meant the East Indies, and the labels stuck.
Pairing near and far places is an old habit. Linear B tablets, the earliest known European writing, mention a near province and a far province of the kingdom of Pylos. Romans spoke of near and far Gaul and near and far Spain, usually divided by a river or mountain range. Ptolemy split Asia the same way, dividing India into the lands west of the Ganges and those past it.
By the mid-1800s Russia was pressing on two fronts at once, against the Ottoman Empire and against China. Britain decided both were needed to preserve the balance of power and opposed Russia in each theatre, which led to the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856. During that war, British administrators began using Near East and Far East as names for those two specific arenas.
One of the earliest public airings came in 1855, when a reprinted letter to The Times by Thomas Taylor Meadows, a veteran interpreter of Chinese, warned that propping up the 'sick man' in the Near East was expensive, and that the West should avoid creating a 'sick giant' in the Far East. The terms caught on quickly and gradually pushed aside older labels. Levant, like Anatolia and the Latin Oriens, had simply meant the land where the sun rises.
Once the Ottoman Empire dissolved, the name lost its anchor. Today it has no fixed list of countries. National Geographic treats Near East and Middle East as the same region, covering Turkey, Egypt, Iran and the lands between, while a United Nations agency in 2012 made the Near East a smaller piece of the Middle East. Near, Middle and Far East all measure distance from Europe.
Source: Near East
