Book talk description:
Adam Mestyan, Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East
In this talk, I argue that the concepts of new imperial history better describe and explain state-making among the post-Ottoman Arab peoples than the old national, imperial, colonial, and postcolonial vocabularies. First, I introduce the main terms in my recent monograph, Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking The Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), such as recycling empire, governing without sovereignty, local states, imperial constitutionalism, and modular (federative) state-making. Next, I apply this vocabulary to the story of the State of Syria's formation in the 1920s under the League of Nations class “A” French mandate.
Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Arab world. He is Associate Professor of History at Duke University and the Director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center and the Duke Islamic Studies Center. Most recently, he was a Member in the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He is the author of Arab Patriotism (2017), Primordial History (2021), and Modern Arab Kingship (2023), and the lead PI of the Digital Cairo and Jara’id digital humanities projects.