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In this groundbreaking book, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. She shows that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. In situating the Middle East within the context of world history, Khuri-Makdisi challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. The book demonstrates that these radical trajectories played a fundamental role in shaping societies throughout the world and offers a powerful rethinking of Ottoman intellectual and social history.
This volume analyzes a century of intellectual debates, political ideologies, and literary media in order to track the emergence, spread and decline of liberal thought as a response to both authoritarian rule and Westernization in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s nineteenth-century reforms, as guilds waned and new professions emerged, the scholarly ‘estate’ underwent social differentiation. Some found employment in the state’s new institutions as translators, teachers and editors, whilst others resisted civil servant status. Gradually, the scholar morphed into the public writer. Despite his fledgling status, he catered for the public interest all the more so since new professionals such as doctors, engineers and lawyers endorsed this latest social role as an integral part of their own self-image. This dual preoccupation with self-definition and all things public is the central concern of this book. Focusing...
The Harvard Design School is a leading center for education, information, and technical expertise on the built environment. Its departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design offer masters and doctoral degree programs and provide the foundation for its Advanced Studies and Executive Education programs. --Book Jacket.
Contributors to this volume explore the changing concepts of the social and the economic during a period of fundamental change across Asia. They challenge accepted explanations of how Western knowledge spread through Asia and show how versatile Asian intellectuals were in introducing European concepts and in blending them with local traditions.
The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed in human history. Railroads linked remote hinterlands with cities; overland and undersea cables connected distant continents. New and accessible print technologies made the wide dissemination of ideas possible; oceangoing steamers carried goods to faraway markets and enabled the greatest long-distance migrations in recorded history. In this volume, leading scholars of the Islamic world recount the enduring consequences these technological, economic, social, and cultural revolutions had on Muslim communities from North Africa to South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and China. Drawing on a multiplicity of approaches and genres, from commodity history to biography to social network theory, the essays in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print offer new and diverse perspectives on a transnational community in an era of global transformation.
Although climate change has become the dominant concern of the twenty-first century, global powers refuse to implement the changes necessary to reverse these trends. Instead, they have neoliberalized nature and climate change politics and discourse, and there are indications of a more virulent strain of capital accumulation on the horizon. Adrian Parr calls attention to the problematic socioeconomic conditions of neoliberal capitalism underpinning the worldÕs environmental challenges, and she argues that, until we grasp the implications of neoliberalismÕs interference in climate change talks and policy, humanity is on track to an irreversible crisis. Parr not only exposes the global failur...
Arab Patriotism presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East. While standard histories claim that the roots of Arab nationalism emerged in opposition to the Ottoman milieu, Adam Mestyan points to the patriotic sentiment that grew in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, arguing that it served as a pivotal way station on the path to the birth of Arab nationhood. Through extensive archival research, Mestyan examines the collusion of various Ottoman elites in creating this nascent sense of national belonging and finds that learned culture played a central role in this development. Mestya...
The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Yet several aspects of their history remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.
A fundamental overhaul of modern Arab intellectual history, reassessing cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship.