History

The book examines the process of Westernization and social change during the 18th and 19th centuries in the Ottoman Empire. Using empirical analysis of archival documents and historical chronicles, the book questions the prevailing scholarly interpretation that Westernization leads to social change. Rather, it argues that social change precedes and contributes to the process of Westernization.

This book explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. The conceptual innovation at the heart of the book is its identification of a “discourse of place,” a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place included such varied works as topographical histories, literary anthologies, religious treatises, world and regional geographies, poetry, travel literature, and maps. By subjecting these works to close reading and analysis, this book argues that their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities, and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious and political authority. The discourse of place constitutes evidence of the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world. Now more than ever, when the competing forces of nationalism and globalism inspire new notions of rootedness, it is vital to ponder the changing ways in which land has mattered over the centuries.

This book attempts to understand modern Iraq through a close examination of the political discourse used by the Baʿth regime and its leader, Saddam Hussein. By analysing political terms, concepts, and idioms as disseminated through the official Iraqi mouthpieces, the book illuminates Iraq's political culture and the events that these expressions have both reflected and shaped. Not only does this study hope to add to our understanding of the “Saddam enigma,” but it also hopes to offer a more universal truth: that under any regime or political culture is built on public discourse.

This book is a holistic environmental history of the Middle East and North Africa over the last half millennium. It shows how the intimate connections between peoples and environments shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and often unforeseen ways. Nearly all political powers in the region based their rule on the management and control of natural resources, and nearly all individuals were in constant communion with the natural world. To grasp how these multiple histories were central to the pasts of the Middle East and North Africa, the chapters in this book demonstrate the power of environmental history to open up new avenues of historical research and understanding. The book furthermore traces how the Middle East and North Africa deeply affected the global histories of climate, disease, trade, energy, environmental politics, ecological manipulation, and much more. At the intersection of three continents and as many seas, the Middle East and North Africa have been central to world history for millennia. Studying the ecological implications of these global connections, both for the region itself and for the rest of the world, helps bring the Middle East and North Africa into global history and shows how the region must be an essential part of any understanding of the environments of Eurasia over the last five hundred years.

The term ‘Fertile Crescent’ is commonly used to refer to the group of territories extending around the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. In this book, it is assumed to consist of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine. Much has been written on the history of these countries, which originated from the Ottoman Empire after 1918 and became Mandates under the League of Nations. This book provides a comparative overview of how Britain and France came to rule these five portions of the Ottoman empire during 1914-1958 and how they dealt with them. It examines contrasting imperial techniques for controlling these temporary dependencies, as well as the interaction between western imperialism in its final phase and the power of nascent Arab nationalism. Essentially, these European powers converted what had been relatively quiescent provinces of the Ottoman empire into some of the least stable and internationally explosive states in the world. This was certainly not the intention of the mandatory powers, and the reasons for this outcome are specific to each of the five territories. This book investigates why it happened.