“A brilliant new history that captures the Ottoman foundations of the modern Middle East in the decades between the First and Second World Wars. The hopes and disappointments of the interwar years shaped the Arab world down to the present day. Engagingly written, Michael Provence brings this era to life for readers today.”
“This is a wonderfully original book, a merciless reconstruction of the British and French mandates in the Middle East as local contemporaries would have experienced them. The end of Ottoman rule in the eastern Arab world did not mark the end of ‘the oppression of alien rulers’. Instead, the imposition of British and French rule in the 1920s introduced an almost permanent state of counterinsurgency, surveillance by agents of the state, and long periods of martial law. Particularly in Syria and Palestine, the new arrangements aroused deep resentment and outbreaks of passionate hostility.
Provence describes the manifestations of colonial rule though the eyes of the ‘last Ottoman generation’, whose early lives had in no way prepared them for the rigours of colonialism. He exposes the sham of the Permanent Mandates Commission, and the ways in which its structure completely excluded colonial subjects. It was a far cry from the days when the subjects would petition the sultan and often gain redress for their requests. This is a masterly evocation of a lost world, and of a much harsher new world, and of the lives that were bisected by the end of the Ottoman Empire.”
“This remarkable work examines how the peoples of the Middle East perceived their present and future before the cataclysm of World War I, famine and death, Ottoman collapse, and foreign occupation completely reshaped their region. Instead of looking at the main features that we think of when we look back on the twentieth century in the Middle East, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East rather starts with the hopes and expectations of an elite, in what became the separate Arab states and Turkey, that in many respects shared a common background, expectations, and outlook. This is an original and illuminating interpretation of events in a region that is still deeply affected by the transformations that Michael Provence illustrates so perceptively.”
“Michael Provence’s book is a revelation. Casting aside the old pieties of state nationalism, Provence sets the story of the Arab Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century squarely in the context of the late-Ottoman scene, bringing to life the world of soldiers, politicians and intellectuals struggling to cope with the loss of the Ottoman system, which they believed was a fairer dispensation than the colonial nation states imposed on the Middle East in the wake of World War I. Deeply researched and written in clear, compelling prose, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the history of the modern Middle East.”
