A glance at a map shows what an important role the sea played in the vast empire of the Ottomans in the 18th century, linking as it did the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa that made up the Old World. The Ottoman Empire dominated not only the eastern Mediterranean but also the major part of the southern shore of the western Mediterranean, the Black Sea—a “Turkish lake” until the 1780s—the Red Sea, and part of the Arab/Persian Gulf.Geography gave the sea a decisive role in the trade that took place in the Ottoman Empire both internationally and domestically.

According to its constitution and the ideology of the ruling Ba?th party, Syria is a socialist people's republic with a planned socialist economy. This does not mean, however, that there is no place for a private economic sector: agriculture is almost entirely private,1 as is small-scale industry, almost 90 percent of internal trade, most road transport, tourism, construction, and up to one-third of Syria's foreign trade. There is also a Syrian bourgeoisie apparently flourishing under the auspices of Syrian socialism. Since independence, however, the specific development of Syria's private sector has to a large extent been determined by political decisions, i.e., by decisions of those running state affairs.

In the late 1950s and the 1960s, an Egyptian welfare state was developed to provide the economic basis of a new social contract between the Nasser regime and its key class allies. Its main beneficiaries were the men and women of both the middle class and the labor aristocracy, who were to staff and run its expanding state sector. For Egyptian women, who were scorned by the pre-1952 states, the new welfare state offered explicit commitment to public equality for women. It contributed to the development of state feminism as a legal, economic, and ideological strategy to introduce changes to Egyptian society and its gender relations. In its own turn, state feminism contributed to the political legitimacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime and its progressive credentials.

One of the most important ways that the members of a society express their cultural preferences is through the names they select for their children. Whether it is made by the elder members of the extended family or the parents of the child, there is no doubt that the choice reveals something about the attitudes and values of the selectors through the name's origins and meaning.

In societies that enjoy a multilinguistic heritage, first names can be divided into categories according to their linguistic origins. This phenomenon is most visible in societies with long histories of encounters among various cultures. One such society is Iran, whose pre-Islamic Persian culture combined with the culture that was introduced by Muslim Arabs after they entered Iran on a religious crusade in the 7th century. While the Arab conquest did not cause the Persian language to be replaced by Arabic, its impact was nevertheless permanent in the thousands of Arabic words that entered into Persian along with the Arabic alphabet.

From March until late April 1919 Egypt suffered one of the great peasant revolts of her history and of the 20th century.1 Contemporaries viewed it as having international importance because it was the result of thirty years of European domination, and its resolution would be likely to affect all Western colonial empires.2 For us, it marks the emergence of Egyptian liberalism and the construction of the modern state.3.

The insurrection began when four leaders of the Egyptian national movement were arrested on 9 March 1919. They were then exiled to Malta for insisting that the Egyptian delegation (wafd) to the Versailles Conference be recognized, so that it could demand that Egypt be accepted as an independent national state.

If the Revolution of Persia has been so astonishing, when taken only in a general View, and according to the very imperfect Ideas we can form of it from the Gazettes and other publick News Papers, we may affirm, it will appear still more amazing, when we come to give a particular Account of the remote Causes and Events that prepar'd the Way to it for above twenty Years…