The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World

Cyrus Schayegh

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780674088337
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674981096
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world's ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization.

To make this case, Schayegh's study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map 1. Ottoman Greater Syria, 1888 to World War I
• Map 2. Railroads in Greater Syria, 1914
• Map 3. Greater Syria in the Mandate Period
• Introduction
• Prelude 1. Khalil Sakakini Has a Dream
• 1. Rise of an Urban Patchwork Region: 1830s–1914
• Prelude 2. Rafiq al-Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat Make a Tour
• 2. Crucible of War: 1914–1918
• Prelude 3. Alfred Sursock Keeps Busy
• 3. Ottoman Twilight: 1918–1929
• Prelude 4. Hauranis Migrate to Palestine
• 4. Toward a Region of Nation-States: 1929–1939
• Prelude 5. Eliahu Rabino’s War
• 5. Empire Redux: 1939–1945
• Postscript. The More Things Change: 1945–2017
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index