Middle Eastern history Books

First published in 1988. Following up on a previous visit in the 1970s to the site of Hierakonpolis this publication records the work of the author from the 1980s to 1986 when she was part of the research team. This work concentrates on the cemetery...

Since the 19th century the Gulf region has been an area of intense interest, having been influenced first by the British and more recently by the Americans. This book charts the changing security and political priorities of these two powers and how...

The state of Israel is one of the most controversial countries in the world. Yet, its unique creation and rise to power in 1948 has not been adequately explained either by its friends (mainstream Zionists) nor by its detractors (Arabists and...

US Foreign Policy and Iran is a study of US foreign policy decision-making in relation to Iran and its implications for Middle Eastern relations. It offers a new assessment of US-Iranian relations by exploring the rationale, effectiveness and...

Conspiracy theories, while not unique to the Middle East, are a salient feature of the political discourses of the region. Strongly reflecting and impacting on state-society relations and indigenous impressions of the world beyond the region, they affect...

Gleave brings together studies by experts in the area of religion in nineteenth-century Iran in order to present new insights into Qajar religion, political and cultural history. Key topics covered include the relationship between religion and the...

Providing a contemporary history of the Palestinian prisoners movement, this book illustrates the centrality of the movement in the broader Palestinian national struggle. Based on direct interviews with former prisoners and former security sector...

The book examines the birth, development, and mode of operation of the Hebrew popular press that progressed in Ottoman Palestine between 1884 and the eruption of World War I in 1914. The inquiry yields a profile of the printers, editors, and journalists,...

Investigating key features of contemporary Egypt, this volume includes Egypt's modern history, politics, economics, the legal system, environment, and its media and modes of cultural expression. It examines Egypt's capacities to meet developmental...

The works collected in The Lure of Authoritarianism consider the normative appeal of authoritarianism in light of the 2011 popular uprisings in the Middle East. Despite what seemed to be a popular revolution in favor of more democratic politics, there...

The Evolution of Urban Societyis concerned with the presentation and analysis of regularities in the two best-documented examples of early, independent urban society: Mesopotamia and central Mexico. It provides a systematic comparison of institutional...

The Burden of Silence is the first monograph on Sabbateanism, an early modern Ottoman-Jewish messianic movement, tracing it from its beginnings during the seventeenth century up to the present day. Initiated by the Jewish rabbi Sabbatai Sevi, the...

“Poignant . . . deeply personal . . . an indelible history of the largely forgotten Jews of Egypt . . . ”--Miami Herald In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado re-creates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel...

In the months leading up to March 2003, fresh from its swift and heady victory in Afghanistan, the Bush administration mobilized the United States armed forces to overthrow the government of Iraq. Eight months after the president declared an end to major...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Israel takes on the greatest threats faced by Israel todayIn addition to Hamas, which provoked the recent war and Gaza with its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, Alan Dershowtiz argues that...

Dedicated to the renowned Safavid historian Roger Savory, this book brings together a collection of studies on the Safavid state of Iran (1501-1722) from the perspectives of political, social, literary, and artistic history.Savory, a doyen of Safavid...

This book examines the Russian explorers and officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth century who came into contact with Iran as a part of the Great Game. It demonstrates the development of Russia's own form of Orientalism, a phenomenon that has...

This book compares the different intellectual atmospheres as between the pre-republican and the republican periods of the Ottomans.

First published in 2006. This delightful book written in 1892 by a founder of the National Trust is regarded as a classic of high Victorian travel writing. After three journeys to the East, Rawnsley decided that existing guide-books were not sufficiently...

The discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 aroused unprecedented excitement in the field of Egyptology. In the tomb of a "colourless youth, who reigned for a few years only" were found unmatched riches, the study of which has led to numerous insights...

Leila Farsakh provides the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and fall of Palestinian labour flows to Israel. Highlighting the interdependence between Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land and the use of Palestinian labour, she shows how...

This final book from Rosemarie Said Zahlan, renowned scholar of Middle East Politics and History, explores the relationships between Palestine and the Gulf since the 1930s. These relationships have ebbed and flowed, crisscrossed barriers...

This book, based on twenty-five months of anthropological fieldwork, examines activists and activism in Palestinian non-governmental organizations in Israel. It concentrates on the ways organizations enable certain processes of self-identification...

Surveillance is always a means to an end, whether that end is influence, management or entitlement. This book examines the several layers of surveillance that control the Palestinian population in Israel and the Occupied Territories, showing how they...

This book looks at opposition to the Ottoman government in the second half of the nineteenth century, examining a number of key political conspiracies and how these relate to an existing political culture. In his detailed analysis of these conspiracies,...

This book analyzes how the Egyptian intelligence community has adapted to shifting national security threats since its inception 100 years ago.  Starting in 1910, when the modern Egyptian intelligence system was created to deal with militant...

Fourteen specialists from across the European Union discuss current issues regarding Middle Eastern and North African immigrants in Europe, focusing on topics such as immigration legislation, assimilation, integration, multiculturalism, community...

This book provides a broad history of the Seljuq Turks from their origins and early conquests in the 10th century, through the rise of empire, until its dissolution at the end of the 12th. Where the history of the Seljuqs is usually studied in the...

The question of nationalism centres around the political, social, and cultural ways by which the concept and practice of a nation is constructed, and what it means to its various bearers. This book examines the issue of Jewish-Israeli nationalism,...

This book is a comparison of two ethnic-national "apartheid" states - South Africa and Israel - which have been in conflict, and how internal dissent has developed. In particular it examines the evolution of effective white protest in South Africa and...

The Israeli regime is a paradox. Considered a democracy, it has no recognized borders and controls the majority of Palestinians by military rule, while the resistance of non-citizen Palestinians exerts major influence over politics and policies. Drawing...

This book presents two extraordinary texts - The Shining of Swords by Al-Qarakhi and a new translation for a contemporary readership of Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat - illuminating the mountain war between the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus and the imperial...

This book provides an assessment of relations between Iran and Europe, identifying the areas of common interest as well as the issues of conflict, whilst putting contemporary relations into their proper context with an account of their development since...

Mariam F. Ayad explores how five women were elevated to a position of supreme religious authority. Drawing on a variety of textual, iconographic, and archaeological evidence, and containing fifty-one black and white and colour illustrations, the...

Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as:modern Jewish society,...

Private Contractors and the Reconstruction of Iraq examines the controversial role of military contractors in the reconstruction of Iraq. When 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' was launched in March 2003, few, if any, of the Coalition's political leaders could...

Eliash examines the relationship between Ireland and the Zionist movement, and the state of Israel from the context of Palestine's partition and the delay in Ireland's recognition of the State of Israel until 1963.Analyzing the Irish attitude to the...

This is a study of the nature of Ottoman administration under Sultan Abdulhamid and the effects of this on the three provinces that were to form the modern state of Iraq. The author provides a general commentary on the late Ottoman provincial...

Carter and Ehteshami consider the significant geopolitical, economic and security links between the Middle East and the wider Asian world - links which are often overlooked when the Middle East is considered in isolation or in terms of its relations with...

This book addresses the major generators of conflict and toleration at shared holy places in Palestine and Israel. Examining the religious, political and legal issues, the authors show how the holy sites have been a focus of both conflict and cooperation...

This book is a major and wide-ranging re-assessment of Anglo-American relations in the Middle Eastern context. It analyses the process of ending of empire in the Middle East from 1945 to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Based on original research into both...

This book is an exploration of the ideals and values of the ascetic and monastic life, as expressed through clothes. Clothes are often seen as an extension of us as humans, a determinant of who we are and how we experience and interact...

This literary-historical book draws out and sheds light upon the mechanisms of "the ideological work" that the Arabic Majnūn Laylā story performed for 'Abbāsid urbanite, imperial audiences in the wake of the disappearance of the "Bedouin cosmos." The...

Incorporating published and archival material, this volume fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from...