Middle East History

This book focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration — a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. The book's research reveals clear links to colonial practice in India, Sudan, and Cyprus amongst other places. It argues that land officials’ views on sound land management were derived from their own experiences of rural England, and that this was far more influential on the shaping of land policies than the promise of a Jewish National Home. The book reveals how the British were intent on preserving the status quo of Ottoman land law, which (when few Britons could read Ottoman or were well grounded in its legal codes) led to a series of translations, interpretations, and hence new applications of land law. The sense of importance the British attributed to their work surveying and registering properties and transactions is captured in the efforts of British officials to microfilm all of their records at the height of the Second World War. Despite this, however, land policies remained in flux.

This book uses the climatic year of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate, to explore a clash of civilizations — between the Jews, Christendom, and Islam, as well as that between the New World and the Old. In the same year that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, the book reminds us, the Spanish monarchy captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, and also expelled the Jews. It uses these three epochal events to explore the nature of the European-Islamic conflict, placing the voyages of discovery in a new context. It traces Christian Europe's path from being a primitive backwater on the edges of the vast, cosmopolitan Caliphate, through the heightening rivalry of the two religions, to the triumph of the West over Islam, examining the factors behind their changing fortunes and cultural qualities. The book provides a new understanding of the distant events that gave shape to the modern world.

This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress. Her unpublished “Family History” (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India — thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. Cornelia Sorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahnashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhian nationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, Sunlight on Broken Column, represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offering insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.

When the young Republic of Turkey claimed the Sanjak of Alexandretta in 1936, France resisted, insisting that the province was part of the French mandate for Syria. The contest over territory pitted Turkey and her irredentist claims against both the French colonial regime and the government of Syria that was engaging in its own efforts to construct a political community that conformed to European notions of nationalism. The League of Nations was called in to broker an agreement between the contending parties that would be consistent with the spirit of the ideology of self-determination. But self-determination was predicated on the existence of a dominant collective self, and efforts to implement the League’s solution led to violence as Turkish and Syrian activists struggled against each other to demonstrate the predominance of their own group. In the end, however, self-determination gave way to the needs of outside powers as Europe’s crisis of democracy deepened during the late 1930s. The struggle over the Sanjak reverberated far beyond the chambers of the League of Nations, encouraging the irredentist and revisionist movements that threatened the stability of post World War I Europe, forcing France to reconsider her commitments in the eastern Mediterranean, and introducing new kinds of identity politics into the Middle East.

This book addresses the origins, development, and aftermath of the Armenian genocide in a reappraisal based on primary and secondary sources from all the major parties involved. Rejecting the determinism of many influential studies, and discarding polemics on all sides, it founds its interpretation of the genocide in the interaction between the Ottoman empire in its decades of terminal decline, the self-interested policies of the European imperial powers, and the agenda of some Armenian nationalists in and beyond Ottoman territory. Particular attention is paid to the international context of the process of ethnic polarization that culminated in the massive destruction of 1912–23, and especially the obliteration of the Armenian community in 1915–16. The book examines the relationship between the great power politics of the ‘eastern question’ from 1774, the narrower politics of the ‘Armenian question’ from the mid-19th century, and the internal Ottoman questions regarding reform of the complex social and ethnic order under intense external pressure. It presents detailed case studies of the role of Imperial Germany during the First World War (reaching conclusions markedly different to the prevailing orthodoxy of German complicity in the genocide); the wartime Entente and then the uncomfortable postwar Anglo-French axis; and American political interest in the Middle East in the interwar period which led to a policy of refusing to recognize the genocide.

Histories of Palestine in the pre-1948 period usually assume the emergent Arab-Zionist conflict to be the central axis around which all change revolves. In contrast, this book suggests an alternative historical vocabulary is required in order to broaden our understanding of the region’s recent past. In particular, for the architects of empire and their agents on the ground, Palestine was conceived primarily within a developmental discourse that pervaded colonial practice from the turn of the twentieth century onwards. A far cry from the post-World War II focus on raising living standards, colonial development in the early twentieth century was more interested in infrastructure and the exploitation of natural resources. Land of Progress charts this process at work across both the Ottoman and British periods in Palestine, focusing on two of the most salient but understudied sites of development anywhere in the colonial world: the Dead Sea and Haifa. Weaving the experiences of local individuals into a wider narrative of imperial expansion and anti-colonial resistance, the book, demonstrates the widespread excitement Palestine generated among those who saw themselves at the vanguard of progress and modernisation, whether they were Ottoman or British, Arab or Jewish. Against this backdrop, Land of Progress traces the gradual erosion during the mandate period of the mixed style of development that had prevailed under the Ottoman Empire, as the new British regime viewed Zionism as the sole motor of modernisation. As a result, the book’s latter stages relate the extent to which colonial development became a central issue of contestation in the struggle for Palestine that unfolded in the 1930s and 40s.

In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim nullthe Grimnull conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military, and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia. This study is the first comprehensive historical account of this century-long struggle for global dominance, a struggle that raged from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, and from the interior of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. Based on extensive research in the archives of Turkey and Portugal, as well as materials written on three continents and in half a dozen languages, it presents an unprecedented picture of the global reach of the Ottoman state during the 16th century. It does so through a dramatic recounting of the lives of sultans and viziers, spies, corsairs, soldiers-of-fortune, and women from the imperial harem. Challenging traditional narratives of Western dominance, it argues that the Ottomans were not only active participants in the Age of Exploration, but ultimately bested the Portuguese in the game of global politics by using sea power, dynastic prestige, and commercial savoir faire to create their own imperial dominion throughout the Indian Ocean.

This book aims to profoundly alter the accepted version of the history of post-World War II pan-Arabic foreign policy. To this end, it demonstrates the absence of any true pan-Arabic front from the very beginning of the Arab League. Reconsidering Cairo's policy decisions during the critical years from 1944 to 1948, it proves that Egyptian national interests were always placed before the united Arab front against Israel. Even while participating in the 1948 war with Israel, Egypt regarded Zionism and the Palestine Question as less important than achieving independence from Britain and thwarting the expansionist aims of Iraq and Jordan. Ultimately, this study is a rethinking of twentieth-century Middle Eastern politics and history, with key implications for both the study of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict and the volatile politics of the Middle East in general.

Newspapers and journalism began in the Middle East in the nineteenth century and evolved during a period of accelerated change which shaped their unique political, social and cultural role. Drawing on a wealth of sources, this study for the first time explores the press as a Middle Eastern institution. It focuses on the circumstances that influenced the growth of the Arab press, its own impact on local historical developments, and the long-term effects that early patterns of its emergence have had on later evolution.