In the innovative book Being Modern in The Middle East, 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.
REVIEWS
“Keith David Watenpaugh has broken ground with this study of the middle class in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Aleppo. . . . Being Modern in the Middle East is an insightful and thorough narration of Aleppo’s middle class that paves the way to further understand and question the ever shifting dynamics and implications of modernity in the Middle East and beyond.”
—Sherene Seikaly, Arab Studies Journal
“It is refreshing to read nowadays a book that does not simply repudiate modernity, but rather explores the anticipations and reactions of the studied agents themselves towards modernity . . . Being Modern in the Middle East is a superb work of cultural, political, and social history instructed political-sociological questions pertaining to modernity, civil society, and the middle class in the context of the Middle Eastern region especially its East-Mediterranean cities in the Ottoman, colonial and post-colonial era. The book, which alludes to an ample number of theoretical issues and whose forte is its scrutiny of history, will be of interest both to those concerned with the ‘middle class’ as a social phenomenon and with the Middle East as a modernizing region.”
–Uri Ram, Middle East Journal
“Watenpaugh’s style is clear and effective. The book is a considerable achievement that will benefit both Middle East specialists and others who wrestle with themes of nation, empire, minorities, and modernity.”
–Donald Malcolm Reid, International History Review
“This is an original study that should be of great interest both to historians of the Middle East and to scholars working on the evolution of ‘modern’ lifestyles and modes of expression globally.”
–James Jankowski, Historian
“Watenpaugh has utilized the available sources well for his study, including French, Ottoman and British archives. He approaches his history rather in the manner of the French Annales school in that he also makes good use of contemporary newspaper articles, speeches, autobiographies and advertisements to construct a picture of contemporary society.”
–Derek Hopwood, Journal of Islamic Studies
“In sum, Being Modern in the Middle East is an important, interesting, and instructive contribution to the history of ideas, while also being social and cultural history at its best. It is the laudable result of years of research. Overall, it reflects the author’s empathy with his subject, a quality that definitely contributes to the depth of his insights and conclusions.”
–EyalZisser, H-Net Reviews
“Keith Watenpaugh’s work is a seminal contribution to the history of the region and to the larger scholarly universe …. It must be a required part of any sort of reading list on modern Middle Eastern history, and I am sure that it will form an important component of graduate courses on the history of the region. But, perhaps equally significant, Being Modern in the Middle East is a very important contribution to the rank of scholarly studies of the middle class across the world. It adds one more work to a relatively small list of books that can and should be used to illustrate how the experience of modernity and the formation the middle class are both unique to specific regions yet offer a wealth of possibilities for comparative historical scholarship.”
–Sanjay Joshi, Comparative Studies in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia
“Keith Watenpaugh’s Being Modern in the Middle East is a ground-breaking tour de force…. In the final analysis, what is novel and interesting about this book is that it theoretically engages the intellectual history of the middle class in the Middle East more fully than any previous work. Conceptually, it reconnects three periods (Ottoman revolution, nationalism and colonialism) in the history of the eastern Mediterranean that have been unconvincingly sundered apart within most studies of Middle Eastern history. In the process, Watenpaugh raises pertinent questions …about several ideological binaries (national/colonial, patriot/collaborator, modernity/tradition) that have come to dominate the history of the Middle East. As such, it is a most valuable contribution not only to the history of the Middle East, but also to the history of modernity and the nonwestern middle classes.”
–Akram Fouad Khater, Social History
“It is his insistence on the historically contingent and contextually specific nature of the transition to modernity that makes Watenpaugh’s work such a strong contribution to both Middle Eastern social history, and to our understanding of the advent of “modernity” and the development of self-identified and self-fashioned “middle classes” more generally. By establishing local conditions and non-Western agency as determining factors in one of the defining social and cultural transformations of recent world history, Watenpaugh makes an important contribution to revising the dominant Eurocentric paradigm for understanding the formation of the modern world.”
–Nathan C. Godley, Itinerario