Princeton University Press
Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East
Key Metrics
- Adam Mestyan
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691190976
- -
- -
- History > Middle East - Turkey & Ottoman Empire
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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. The 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 hitherto unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and, 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.
Author Bio
Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Arab world. Using the approach of global legal history, he is working on a new monograph Modern Arab Kingship (under contract), a social history of constituting Arab political orders in the interwar period. His next project is a history of land administration (taxation, agrarian shari‘a, and the land survey) in modern Syria and Egypt. He is the author of Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Ifao, 2021) and Arab Patriotism (Princeton University Press, 2017).
He has been interested in digital humanities in Arabic, especially in creating tools and databases for scholars and the public. He supervises an online bibliography on Arabic periodicals: Jara'id: A Chronology of Arabic Periodicals, 1800-1929; co-directs a digital humanities project on the urban history of Cairo and another one on Islamic book history.
Source: Duke University
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