Week 5: Remaking the Middle East: The Mandate System

Mini Lecture

Seminar Readings:

1-Extracts of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, in John Felton, The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History (Washington: CQ Press, 2008).

2-The Sykes Picot-Agreement, in John Felton, The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History (Washington: CQ Press, 2008).

3-The Balfour Declaration, in John Felton, The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History (Washington: CQ Press, 2008).

Secondary Readings:

Michael Provence, Chap. 2 ‘The Theory and Practice of Colonialism in the Post-Ottoman Middle East,’ in The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 56-100.

Michael Provence, Chap. 6 ‘The Levant Mandates,’ in Amal Ghazal and Jens Hanssen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

James Renton, 'Changing Languages of Empire and the Orient Britain and the Invention of the Middle East, 1917–1918,' The Historical Journal 50, no.3 (2007): 645-667.

Further Readings:

Peter Sluglett, 'Les Mandats/The Mandates: Some Reflections on the Nature of the British Presence in Iraq (1914–1932) and the French Presence in Syria (1918–1946),' in Nadine Méouchy and Peter Sluglett, eds., The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives/Les mandats français et anglais dans une perspective comparative (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Susan Pedersen, 'The meaning of the mandates system: An argument,' Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32, no.4 (2006):560-582.

David K. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914-1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Philip Khoury, Syria Under the French Mandate; the Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).

Susan Pedersen, Guardians of Empire: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2012).

Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Stacy D. Fahrenthold, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Elizabeth F. Thompson, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020)

James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the struggle that shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).