Modern Arab Kingship

Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East

Adam Mestyan

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780691278322
  9780691190976
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691249353
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

How the “recycling” of the Ottoman Empire’s uses of genealogy and religion created new political orders in the Middle East

In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–World War I Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. These polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation-states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority. Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination.

Drawing on previously unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and, in doing so, sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. Mestyan considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mestyan’s innovative analysis shows how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Principal Players
• Glossary
• Chronology of Events
• A Note on Transliteration
• Chapter 1: Recycling Empire
• Part I: A Theory of Sovereign Local States
• Part II: Composite Routes Out of Empire
• Part III: From Imperial to Local Muslim Authority
• Part IV: Paths of Extrication
• Afterword: Subordinated Sovereignty in the Twentieth Century
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index