In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of 鈥渞ecycling empire.鈥� Mestyan shows that in the post鈥揥orld 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, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation-states but as subordinated sovereign local states鈥攍ocalized 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, Mestyan 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. Mestyan 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.
Mestyan鈥檚 innovative 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.
Adam Mestyan is associate professor in the History Department at Duke University. He is the author of Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (91桃色) and Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo.
"Modern Arab Kingship is destined to become an influential text in the study of post-Ottoman state formation."鈥�Choice
"An impressive work."鈥擟amille Lyans Cole, The Developing Economies
"By bridging legal history and political theory, [Modern Arab Kingship] 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."鈥擩ames Ryan, American Historical Review
“By questioning the shift from empires to nation-states in the twentieth century, Adam Mestyan’s ambitious new book offers us a new genealogy of state-making during this period. His exploration of subordinated sovereignties in the post-Ottoman Middle East links them to federal structures from the Soviet Union to the European Union in a highly original reworking of the ways in which the history of this era in the Middle East has been understood.”—Faisal Devji, author of Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
“In this deeply researched and conceptually rich history of the Arab monarchies that succeeded the Ottoman Empire, Adam Mestyan explores the recycling and transformation of imperial ideas and practices by elite and ordinary Arabs, former Ottoman officials, and European agents. Modern Arab Kingship vividly chronicles how local actors repurposed the spoils of empire to create new polities and new internationalisms even as the League of Nations was replicating the sovereign state as a vehicle of western domination.”—Jennifer Pitts, author of Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire
“A remarkable book. By focusing on ideas of monarchy and genealogy, Mestyan shows the vital role Ottoman elites played in shaping the constitutions and political cultures of the modern Arab states. The approach is unconventional, compelling, and filled with intellectual surprises."—Andrew Shryock, University of Michigan
