The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History

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Very well written, I found it easy to read and extremely interesting on a subject I realise I knew very little about.

Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Provence’s Last Ottoman Generation is a solid work of scholarship, with an exemplary reinterpretation of the history of inter-war Middle East. Is it merely a result of “physical” occupation by European powers, or does it begin in another set of relations? Jonathan Dimbleby Jeremy Bowen, the International Editor of the BBC, has been covering the Middle East since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present.After all, the last Ottoman generation not only knew one another from Ottoman schools but they also socialized in revolutionary societies where they built ties of trust and cultivated a revolutionary vision for the Ottoman Empire. Part of a wider revisionist push to undo methodological nationalism in the historiography of modern Middle East, Provence’s The Last Ottoman Generation challenges the dominance of singular national histories and instead seeks to reconstruct ‘a connected history’ of the inter-war Middle East.

Six days of war by Michael B. Oren | Open Library Six days of war by Michael B. Oren | Open Library

Insurgent leaders, trained in Ottoman military tactics and with everything to lose from the fall of the Empire, challenged the mandatory powers in a number of armed revolts. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget.

Carlton Green, author of High Hopes and Great Expectations and Bernard Westcarr, creator of Memoirs of A Peasant Boy, were both born in Jamaica and came to live in Gloucester in 1957 and 1960. The failure of the Syrian revolt in 1927 marked a rapprochement between the last Ottoman generation in Syria and the colonial authorities, whereby the ex-Ottoman civil servants either began to pursue careers in the emerging mandate structures or became influential figures in the emerging nationalist political parties. While the subtitle of Six Days of War claims to describe “the making of the modern Middle East,” Oren himself is more equivocal on this point, noting that this short, distant war is liable to erupt again, once more changing our interpretation. While some of the figures Provence pursues certainly cut across these mandate boundaries, the way the book is structured still seems to reproduce some of the conventions that the author set out to challenge in the first place.

The Making of the Modern Middle East | SOAS

Likewise, ‘they had been in the same army or served the same government, they had a common way of looking at the world; behind the vision of Arab unity lay memories of a lost imperial grandeur’. On the whole this book answered them and illuminated the overbearingly sad and depressing state of the region. They join Gail Johnson, whose book A Long Five Years explores the lives of older Black citizens in Gloucester, most of whom came to the City from Jamaica in young adulthood, to talk about their lives and experiences in the city.Even Israel which in many ways has created a genuinely democratic society has done so by crushing Palestinians. From this point, Oren devotes a chapter to each day of the war, balancing tactical descriptions with diplomacy and politics. I think the shared militaristic ideology Öztan mentions was probably unsystematic and focused on saving the state, and ultimately salvaging something from the catastrophe. In tracing the stories of this generation across time and space, Provence is able to show continuities instead of ruptures in the transition from empire to nation-state and to highlight a common historical trajectory for the post-Ottoman Middle East during the inter-war era. The author's skilled approach allowed me to understand the fundamental political, social, and economic factors that have shaped the region throughout the years.