Wheeled vehicles came to the Middle East only with British imperial needs

Evidence

It remained unusual in the Middle East. The camel for a long time continued to be much more cost-effective than any kind of vehicle. Carts need roads, roads need upkeep; carts need to be drawn, and are dangerously open to seizure or requisition. Wheeled vehicles didn’t really come into general use until the early nineteenth century, when the British were interested in establishing overland links through Egypt, between the Mediterranean and the Asian waters, as a short route to their imperial possessions in India. That is when the Middle East began to acquire roads and wheeled vehicles on those roads. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 793

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the argument that Western imperial logistics, not endogenous Middle Eastern development, created the modern transport infrastructure Orientalist travelers then traversed and described.
• QUESTION: Was the absence of wheeled vehicles truly cost-optimal, or does Lewis understate security risks as the decisive factor?