Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Paradigms

In 1517, the Ottoman Empire had finally defeated the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, completing their conquest of the Middle East and turning Egypt into a province of the Ottoman Empire. While much has been documented about the Mamluk period until 1517, publication on the historical record about the sixteenth century reveals little from distinctly Egyptian perspectives. In Empires in Friction, Nelly Hanna explores this transitional period and provides insight into the intricate dynamics of imperial control and political transition. With an original approach to understanding empire, Hanna challenges traditional narratives that emphasize the centralization of power and the dominance of the capital. Instead, she proposes a nuanced paradigm that focuses on the imperial problem of distance, the autonomy of provinces, and the continuity of local customs and economic activities across different imperial regimes. Hanna dives into the financial, economic, and commercial domains where Ottomanization happened. In each, the new ruling power faced challenges in understanding the existing processes, but ultimately the ability of Egyptian merchants to prosper under Ottoman rule shows how Egypt remained under the Ottomans for so many centuries. Hanna deftly demonstrates the strain and areas of conformity in transferring from one imperial system with specific traditions to another. Fused together through the continuation of provincial operation, the Mamluk and Ottoman rules are not observably differentiable during the sixteenth century as the periphery operates at an arm's length from the Ottoman capital.

Why is the 1798 Napoleonic invasion of Egypt routinely accepted as a watershed moment between premodern and modern in general histories on the Middle East? Although decades of scholarship, most-notably Edward Said's Orientalism, have critiqued traditional binaries of developed and undeveloped in Arab studies, the narrative of 1798 symbolizing the coming of the modern west to the rescue of the static east endures. Peter Gran's The Persistence of Orientalism is the first book to take stock of this dominant paradigm, interrogating its origins and the ways in which scholarship is produced to perpetuate it. Gran surveys the history of American studies of Modern Egypt, examining three central issues: the periodization of modern professional knowledge in the US in the 1890s, the contemporary identity of orientalism and its critique, and the close connection between Oriental Despotism and the dominant formulation of American identity found in American Studies and in American life. Reinvigorating the conversation on the historiography of modern Egypt, this volume will influence a new generation of scholars studying the Middle East and beyond.