The rural history of the Middle East in the twentieth century

2013 ◽  
pp. 77-130
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Rural History ◽  
History Of

Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Official Records

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

She Came from Kasaba

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 582-585
Author(s):  
Leslie Hakim-Dowek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Modal Approach ◽  
History Of

As in Marianne Hirsch’s (2008) notion of ‘devoir de memoire’, this poem-piece, from a new series, uses the role of creation and imagination to strive to ‘re-activate and re-embody’ distant family/historical transcultural spaces and memories within the perspective of a dispersed history of a Middle-Eastern minority, the Sephardi/Jewish community. There is little awareness that Sephardi/Jewish communities were an integral part of the Middle East and North Africa for many centuries before they were driven out of their homes in the second half of the twentieth century. Using a multi-modal approach combining photography and poetry, this photo-poem series has for focus my female lineage. This piece evokes in particular the memory of my grandmother, encapsulating many points in history where persecution and displacement occurred across many social, political and linguistic borders.

The Middle East in World History

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Obert Voll
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World History ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Other World ◽  
Specific Label ◽  
Broad Region

This article describes the role of the Middle East in world history. The Middle East is both a strategic concept and a geo-cultural region. As a concept and a specific label of identification, it is a product of analysts writing about twentieth-century world affairs. However, as a region, its peoples and cultures are associated with the history of humanity from ancient times. This regional name itself shapes a way of understanding the history of the broad region of Southwestern Asia and Northern Africa. Both of the terms in the name — ‘Middle’ and ‘East’ — identify the region in relationship to other world regions and reflect the importance of the region's involvement in broader global historical processes. Along with examining the history of the region, the discussion also notes how the concepts of the historical units involved in that history have changed in the presentations of the history of the Middle East.

The Middle East in World History: Spatial and Temporal Reorderings

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Carter Vaughn Findley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
World History ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
First Year ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ex Nihilo

In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

scholarly journals A History of Modern Yemen

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 175-178
Author(s):  
Paul Roochnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
History Of ◽  
Arab States ◽  
The One

If you have time to read a single book on Yemen's recent past, PaulDresch's A History of Modern Yemen is the one for you. Dresch, aUniversity Lecturer at Oxford University's Institute of Social and CulturalAnthropology, elucidates the history of Yemen, starting in the 19thCentury, with the British and the Ottomans vying for power and influencein this most ancient and original of Arab states, and culminating in Yemen'sunification in 1990 and the Yemen-Saudi border settlement of 2000.Within these 285 pages, the author traces over a century and a half of theevents and trends, men and movements, that have shaped today's Yemen. To be sure, a thorough familiarity with Yemen's long history - if suchknowledge lies within reach - would require a lifetime of reading andstudy. And Dreschs Modern Yemen does not pretend to cover such a span.What Dresch does cover, nevertheless, he covers well and offers afascinating account not just for historians and Middle East analysts, but forYemenophiles such as the present reviewer.The author divides the book into seven chapters, along with twoappendices, a glossary of Arabic terms, a chronological outline of Yemenihistory since 1831, copious notes and references, and an index. ChapterOne, "Turkey, Britain and Imam Yahya: the Years Around 1900", sets thestage not just for the anti-imperialist rebellions which would culminate inthe mid-twentieth century, but also for the on-going internal strugglesfought along tribal, regional, sectarian, and political lines. To follow theplethora of personalities, tribes, and place names which populate thesepages can be a daunting task prepare to jot down notes unless you own aphotographic memory! ...

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume IV

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Complex Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diverse Cultures

This volume examines the globalization of Protestant ‘dissenting traditions’ in the twentieth century. During this period, Protestant Dissent achieved not only its widest geographical reach but also the greatest genealogical distance from its point of origin. This process, attended by some of the most momentous developments in human history, was marked by a multitude of pathways or starting-points, continuities and discontinuities, as well as complications and contradictions. The regional framework adopted in this compilation (coverage encompasses Africa, Asia, the Middle East, America, Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific) provides detailed snapshots of Protestant Dissent as a globalizing movement. Contributors probe the radical shifts and complex reconstruction that took place as dissenting traditions encountered diverse cultures and took root in a multitude of contexts, many of which were experiencing major historical change at the same time. This extensive overview unambiguously reveals that ‘Dissent’ was transformed as it travelled.

The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine. By Jacob Metzer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxii, 275.

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1128-1129
Author(s):  
Tarik M. Yousef
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Native Population ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of

Like the rest of the Middle East, the economic history of Palestine in the early twentieth century has traditionally been the domain of social and political historians. The complexity and controversy surrounding the era of the British Mandate (1919–1948) ought to deter any serious economic historian from contemplating a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of economic life. After all, this was the period when the Zionist goal to create a Jewish national home in Palestine came into direct conflict with the native Arab community, and stretched the flexibility of a British administration that had committed itself to promoting the Zionist project while protecting the native population. Fortunately, Jacob Metzer has assumed the difficult task of producing an economically sophisticated study of the origins and the evolution of this divided economy while circumventing the political pitfalls associated with Mandatory Palestine.

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