HIST 308A The Modern Middle East
From Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the 18th century to the Arab Spring and the emergence of ISIS in the 21st, this course surveys the politics, societies, cultures, and religious transformations of the Middle East, North Africa, and the wider Islamic world in the modern era. Major topics include the Islamic Middle East's incorporation into global economies and politics; modernist Islamic reform movements; European and American imperial intrusions; World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire; modern ethnic nationalisms (Arab, Turkish, and Zionist); authoritarian states in the twentieth-century Middle East; and the rise of Islamism, the Arab Spring, and oppositional politics. Our abiding concern will be the transformation of Middle Eastern and Islamic traditions through their encounters and struggles with global economic and political structures.