Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues in Middle East History

with Betty Anderson

hosted by Chris Gratien

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The political, social, and cultural roots of the modern Middle East stretch into the early modern period of Ottoman and Safavid rule and even beyond. So how should we narrate the long making of the Middle East within the context of an ever-changing present? In this episode, we talk to Betty Anderson about the perspectives and practices that inform her new textbook A History of the Modern Middle East:  Rulers,  Rebels, and Rogues. We consider ways of organizing and thematically arranging the history of a diverse region over hundreds of years, we discuss the importance of bringing previously silenced actors and groups into the historiography, and we reflect on how the past decades of historiography as well as recent events have changed how we conceptualize prevailing narrative of Middle East history.

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Contributor Bios

Betty Anderson is author of Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State, The American University of Beirut:  Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education, and A History of the Modern Middle East:  Rulers,  Rebels, and Rogues. Her current project examines the economic, educational, political and social changes that have come to Beirut, Amman, and Ramallah over the last 25 years. At Boston University, she is director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations.

Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History and is currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.

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CREDITS

Episode No. 288
Release Date: 11 December 2016
Recording Location: Belmont, MA
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: from archive.org - Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; from Excavated Shellac - Munira al-Mahdiyya – Aldahre Kataâ Awsali
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the intro and outro music
Bibliography courtesy of Betty Anderson

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Click the cover below to find A History of the Modern Middle East:  Rulers,  Rebels, and Rogues on the Stanford University Press website

Barkey, Karen.  Empire of Difference:  The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Beinin, Joel.  Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Chalcroft, John T.  The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories:  Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914.  Albany:  State University of New York, 2004.

Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 2004.

Khater, Akram Fouad.  Inventing Home:  Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920.  Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 2001.

Khoury, Philip S.  Syria and the French Mandate:  The Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920-1945. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1987.

Nordbruch, Götz.  Nazism in Syria and Lebanon:  The Ambivalence of the German Option, 1933-1945.  London and New York:  Routledge, 2009.

Vatter, Sherry.  “Journeymen Textile Weavers in Nineteenth-Century Damascus:  A Collective Biography.”  In Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East.  Edited by Edmund Burke, III. Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1993.

Wien, Peter.  Iraqi Arab Nationalism:  Authoritarian, Totalitarian, and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932-1941.  London:  Routledge, 2006.