Authors: James L. Gelvin
ISBN-13: 9780195327595, ISBN-10: 0195327594
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: July 2007
Edition: 2nd Edition
James L. Gelvin is Professor of History at UCLA. An award-winning teacher, he is the author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (2005), Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (1998), and numerous shorter works.
In the wake of 11 September 2001, there has been much talk about the inevitable clash between "East" and "West." This book presents an alternative approach to understanding the genealogy of contemporary events. By taking students and the general reader on a guided tour of the past five hundred years of Middle Eastern history, this book examines how the very forces associated with global "modernity" have shaped social, economic, cultural, and political life in the region. Beginning with the first glimmerings of the current international state and economic systems in the sixteenth century, The Modern Middle East: A History explores the impact of imperial and imperialist legacies, the great nineteenth-century transformation, cultural continuities and upheavals, international diplomacy, economic booms and busts, the emergence of authoritarian regimes, and the current challenges to those regimes on everyday life in an area of vital concern to us all.
Engagingly written, drawing from the author's own research and other studies, and stocked with maps and photographs, original documents and an abundance of supplementary materials, The Modern Middle East: A History will provide both novices and specialists with fresh insights into the events that have shaped history and the debates about them that have absorbed historians.
Introduction : September 11 in historical perspective | 1 | |
1 | From late antiquity to the dawn of a new age | 15 |
2 | Gunpowder empires | 27 |
3 | The Middle East and the modern world system | 35 |
4 | War, diplomacy, and the new global balance of power | 47 |
5 | Defensive developmentalism | 73 |
6 | Imperialism | 88 |
7 | Wasif Jawhariyyeh and the great nineteenth-century transformation | 100 |
Photo essay : the great transformation | 111 | |
8 | The life of the mind | 123 |
9 | Secularism and modernity | 132 |
10 | Constitutionalism | 139 |
11 | State-building by decree | 175 |
12 | State-building by revolution and conquest | 186 |
13 | The introduction and spread of nationalism | 197 |
14 | The origins of the Arab-Israeli dispute | 206 |
15 | State and society in the contemporary Middle East : an old/new relationship | 231 |
16 | Oil | 247 |
17 | The United States and the Middle East | 257 |
18 | Israel, the Arab states, and the Palestinians | 268 |
19 | The Iranian revolution | 278 |
20 | Islamic political movements | 291 |
Conclusion : the Middle East in the "age of globalization" | 300 |