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Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East

Online ISBN:
9780691249353
Print ISBN:
9780691190976
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Book

Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East

Adam Mestyan
Adam Mestyan
Duke University
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
8 August 2023
Online ISBN:
9780691249353
Print ISBN:
9780691190976
Publisher:
Princeton University Press

Abstract

This book argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.” The book shows that in the post-World War I Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. These polities, the book contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation-states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority. Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on previously unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, the book explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and, in doing so, sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. The book considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s. The book's analysis shows how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day.

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