-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
James Ryan, Adam Mestyan. Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 397–398, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae534
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
How are new political orders built on the ruins of destroyed ones? Historians, sociologists, political theorists, and other disciplines have tussled with this question from the moment empires began to die. In Modern Arab Kingship, Adam Mestyan takes up this question again, focusing on the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and entering a nascent historiography of the “post-Ottoman world.” By bridging legal history and political theory, the book elegantly constructs articulations of postimperial politics that will serve as building blocks for a paradigm across post-Ottoman space; in renarrating the eruption of Arab kingdoms following World War I, it offers a fresh take on how various stakeholders utilized the ruins of Ottoman order to contest for power and shape the post-Ottoman Arab world from the top-down and the middle-out.
Mestyan is concerned not merely with an Ottoman “legacy” nor the postimperial careers of its nobility, but rather their “recycling” of the content or form of the ancien regime to colonial, national, or, monarchical ends. He borrows (or recycles) Richard Brilliant’s distinction between types of spolia—spolia in se (reusing material) and spolia in re (reusing form). By focusing on spolia, Mestyan contends that in the creation of post-Ottoman Arab mandates from a European imperial or local Arab standpoint, no party involved could dispense with certain legal, genealogical, religious, and social vestiges of the Ottoman’s unique making. Thus, the book roots the creation of the mandates and local states that evolved in their wake in the Ottoman Empire’s own legal and political refashioning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
