Being Modern in the Middle East ：Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class

Publication subTitle ：Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class

Author： Watenpaugh Keith David;;;

Publisher： Princeton University Press‎

Publication year： 2014

E-ISBN: 9781400866663

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780691121697

Subject： K1 World History;K3 Asian History

Keyword：世界史,亚洲史

Language： ENG

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Description

In this innovative book, Keith Watenpaugh connects the question of modernity to the formation of the Arab middle class. The book explores the rise of a middle class of liberal professionals, white-collar employees, journalists, and businessmen during the first decades of the twentieth century in the Arab Middle East and the ways its members created civil society, and new forms of politics, bodies of thought, and styles of engagement with colonialism.

Discussions of the middle class have been largely absent from historical writings about the Middle East. Watenpaugh fills this lacuna by drawing on Arab, Ottoman, British, American and French sources and an eclectic body of theoretical literature and shows that within the crucible of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, World War I, and the advent of late European colonialism, a discrete middle class took shape. It was defined not just by the wealth, professions, possessions, or the levels of education of its members, but also by the way they asserted their modernity.

Using the ethnically and religiously diverse middle class of the cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, Syria, as a point of departure, Watenpaugh explores the larger political and social implications of what being modern meant in the non-West in the first half of the twentieth century.

Well researched and provocative, Being Modern in the Middle East makes a critical contribution not just to Middle East history, but also to the global study of class, mass violence, ideas, and revolution.

Chapter

Preface and Acknowledgements

Note on Translation and Transliteration

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ONE Introduction: Modernity, Class, and the Architectures of Community

TWO An Eastern Mediterranean City on the Eve of Revolution

SECTION I Being Modern in a Time of Revolution: The Revolution of 1908 and the Beginnings of Middle-Class Politics (1908–1918)

THREE Ottoman Precedents (I): Journalism, Voluntary Association, and the “True Civilization” of the Middle Class

FOUR Ottoman Precedents (II): The Technologies of the Public Sphere and the Multiple Deaths of the Ottoman Citizen

SECTION II Being Modern in a Moment of Anxiety: The Middle Class Makes Sense of a “Postwar” World(1918–1924)—Historicism, Nationalism, and Violence

FIVE Rescuing the Arab from History: Halab, Orientalist Imaginings, Wilsonianism, and Early Arabism

SIX The Persistence of Empire at the Moment of Its Collapse: Ottoman-Islamic Identity and “New Men” Rebels

SEVEN Remembering the Great War: Allegory, Civic Virtue, and Conservative Reaction

SECTION III Being Modern in an Era of Colonialism Middle-Class Modernity and the Culture of the French Mandate for Syria (1925–1946)

EIGHT Deferring to the A'yan The Middle-Class and the Politics of Notables

NINE Middle-Class Fascism and the Transformation of Civil Violence Steel Shirts, White Badges, and the Last Qabaday

TEN Not Quite Syrians: Aleppo’s Communities of Collaboration

ELEVEN Coda: The Incomplete Project of Middle-Class Modernity and the Paradox of Metropolitan Desire

Select Bibliography

Index

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