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The “Politics of Notables” Forty Years After

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

James L. Gelvin
James L. Gelvin*
Affiliation:
UCLA
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Type
Forty Years of MESA
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 1: Celebrating 40 Years! , June 2006 , pp. 19 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2006

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References

1 Hourani, Albert, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in The Modern Middle East, ed. Hourani, Albert, Khoury, Philip S., and Wilson, Mary C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 87.Google Scholar All further citations of “Ottoman Reform” are from this volume.

2 Roniger, Luis, “Clientalism and Patron-Client Relations: A Bibliography,” in Political Clientalism, Patronage and Development, ed. Eisenstadt, S.N. and Lemarchand, René (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), pp. 297–330.Google Scholar

3 Khoury, Philip S., “The Urban Notables Paradigm Revisited,” Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée 55–56 (1990): 215–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Hourani, Albert, “The Present State of Islamic and Middle Eastern Historiography,” in Europe and the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Hourani, , “Ottoman Reform,” p. 87.Google Scholar

6 Until recently, a correspondent affliction affected Ottoman imperial historians as well. See Faroqhi, Suraiya, “Coping with the Central State, Coping with Local Power: Ottoman Regions and Notables from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century,” in The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography, ed. Adanir, Fikret and Faroqhi, Suraiya (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 351–81.Google Scholar

7 See, inter alia, Khoury, Philip S., “Continuity and Change in Syrian Political Life: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” American Historical Review 96:5 (December 1991): 1374–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Muslih, Muhamma, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Khalaf, Samir, “Changing Forms of Political Patronage,” in Lebanon’s Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 73–101.Google Scholar

8 See Naff, Thomas, Paths to the Middle East: Ten Scholars Look Back (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 48.Google Scholar The categories “foreigners,” “notables,” and “common people” are Lapidus’s. See Lapidus, Ira, “Muslim Urban Society in Mamluk Syria,” in The Islamic City: A Colloquium, ed. Hourani, A.H. and Stern, S.M. (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1970), pp. 195–205.Google Scholar

9 Shils, Edward, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. xl–xli.Google Scholar

10 Naff, , Paths, pp. 28,45.Google Scholar See also Owen, Roger, “Albert Hourani the Historian,” in Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas: A History from Within, ed. Pappé, Ilan and Ma’oz, Moshe (London: Tauris, 1997), p. 9Google Scholar; Gallagher, Nancy, Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians, (Ithaca Press, 1994), p. 36.Google Scholar

11 For the debt modernization theory owed to struc-func, see, for example, Latham, Michael E., Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

12 See Shils, , Center and Periphery, pp. xii, 3–13Google Scholar; Eisenstadt, S.N. and Curelaru, M.The Form of Sociology: Paradigms and Crises (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976), pp. 179–82.Google Scholar

13 Owen, , “Albert Hourani,” p. 14.Google Scholar

14 Hourani, , “The Present State,” p. 187–88.Google Scholar

15 Naff, , Paths, p. 48.Google Scholar

16 Eisenstadt, S.N. and Roniger, Luis, “The Study of Patron-Client Relations and Recent Developments in Sociological Theory,” in Political Clientalism, 275Google Scholar; Eisenstadt, and Curelaru, , The Form of Sociology, pp. 194–98.Google Scholar

17 Lemarchand, René, “Comparative Political Clientalism: Structure, Process and Optic,” in Political Clientalism, Patronage and Development, ed. Eisenstadt, S.N. and Lemarchand, René (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), p. 9.Google Scholar

18 According to E.P. Thompson, for example, “No thoughtful historian should characterize a whole society as paternalist or patriarchal. But paternalism can, as in Tsarist Russia, Meiji Japan, or in certain slave-holding societies, be a profoundly important component not only of ideology but of the actual institutional mediation of social relations.” Thompson, E.P., “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?,” Social History 3:2 (May 1978): 137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Ibid., p. 135.

20 Ibid., p. 145; Gilsenan, Michael, “Against Patron-Client Relations,” in Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, ed. Gellner, Ernest and Waterbury, John (London: Duckworth, 1977), pp.167–68, 179–80Google Scholar; Waterbury, John, “An Attempt to Put Patrons and Clients in their Place,” in Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, pp. 329, 332–33.Google Scholar

21 Thompson, , “Eighteenth-Century English Society,” p. 136.Google Scholar

22 Gilsenan, , “Against Patron-Client Relations,” p. 181.Google Scholar

23 Toledano, Ehud, “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites (1700–1900): A Framework for Research,” in Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas, p. 146.Google Scholar

24 Hourani, Albert, “The Ottoman Background of the Modern Middle East,” in The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 2–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 See, for example, Hathaway, Jane, “The Military Household in Modern Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27 (February 1995): 39–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toledano, , “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites,” pp. 145–62Google Scholar; Khoury, Dina Rizk, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

26 Toledano, , “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites,” p. 155.Google Scholar

27 See, inter alia, Dawn, C. Ernest, From Ottomanism to Arabismi Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urban: University of Illinois Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Khoury, Philip S., Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Hourani, Albert, “The Arab Awakening Forty Years After,” in Hourani, (ed.), The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 201–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Hourani, , “Ottoman Reform,” p. 100Google Scholar; Kedourie, Elie, “Pan-Arabism and British Policy,” in The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), p. 213.Google Scholar

30 Hourani, , “The Arab Awakening,” p. 202.Google Scholar

31 See Khoury, , “The Urban Notables Paradigm,” p. 224.Google Scholar

32 For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see my “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc?: Reassessing the Lineages of Nationalism in Bilad al-Sham,” in Philipp, Thomas and Schumann, Christoph (eds.), From the Syrian Land to the State of Syria (Würtzburg: ERGON Verlag, 2004), pp. 127–44Google Scholar; “Modernity and Its Discontents: On the Durability of Nationalism in the Arab Middle East,” Nations and Nationalism 5:1 (January 1999): 71–89; Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

33 Dawn, , “From Ottomanism to Arabism,” p. 377.Google Scholar

34 A more thorough discussion of this phenomenon can be found in Gelvin, , “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc?” and Gelvin, , The Modern Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 197–201.Google Scholar

35 Hourani, , “The Arab Awakening” p. 199.Google Scholar