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Middle East History Is Social History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2014

Gavin D. Brockett
Gavin D. Brockett*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Arts, Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

My engagement with the social history of the Middle East, as I embarked on graduate studies, coincided with Judith Tucker's lamentation in 1990 that it was a field understudied to the point of being largely ignored. I came to the study of this new region with training in the native history of Canada, which had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of reconstructing the stories of people who had been denied agency in a narrative dominated by European conquest and nation-building.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Politics of Benevolence , May 2014 , pp. 382 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 Tucker, Judith E., “Taming the West: Trends in the Writing of Modern Arab Social History in Anglophone Academia,” in Shirabi, H., ed., Theory, Politics and the Arab World: Critical Responses (New York: Routledge, 1990), 198–227Google Scholar.

2 The best example is İnalcik, Halil and Quataert, Donald, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

3 Zürcher, Erik Jan, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905–1906 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984)Google Scholar. Tunçay, Mete, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nde Tek-Parti Yönetimi'nin Kurulması (1923–1931) (Istanbul: Yurt Yayınları, 1999)Google Scholar.

4 See Brockett, Gavin D., ed., Towards a Social History of Modern Turkey: Essays in Theory and Practice (Istanbul: Libra Kitap, 2011)Google Scholar.

5 See Göçek, Fatma Müge, “Defining the Parameters of a Post-Nationalist Turkish Historiography through the Case of the Anatolian Armenians,” in Turkey Beyond Nationalism, ed. Kieser, Hans-Lukas (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 85–103Google Scholar.

6 An initial article on this subject will be titled “From Pan-Islamism to International Islam: The World Muslim Congress of 1951.”

7 It was in 1961 that E. H. Carr declared: “the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both.” Carr, E. H., What is History?, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 66Google ScholarPubMed.

8 The 1970s witnessed a “new social history,” one aspect of which was a distinct “cultural turn.” See Hunt, Lynn, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Having served on the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award Committee in the Social Sciences and on the Albert Hourani Book Award Committee in the past two years, I can testify to the impressive scope and the quality of current scholarship in social history.

10 It is useful to consider the state of Middle East social history in light of the field as a whole. For helpful essays evaluating the first half-century of sociohistorical enquiry, see The Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003) and 39, no. 3 (2006).

11 For example, Yılmaz, Hale, Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey, 1923–1945 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

12 This has begun to change. See, for example, Atabaki, Touraj and Brockett, Gavin, eds., “Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History,” International Review of Social History 54, Suppl. 17 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.