The ‘Arab Lands’ of the title refer to the Arab East (al-Mashriq), roughly including today's countries of Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Until a generation ago, these regions under Ottoman rule suffered from a curious neglect by historians. Several reasons for this neglect can be mentioned: Eyewitnesses of the Ottoman conquest and later Arab historians did not consider it a major change in the course of history and never choose to make Ottoman rule a specific topic of historiography. Earlier Western scholarship argued for generations that the blockage of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea by the Portuguese stopped almost all trade through the Middle East and converted the region into a backwater, enforcing a steady and general decline on society.

Arab nationalist historians have made the same point of general decline but distributed blame differently. Theirs is the argument of the deleterious impact the Ottomans had on the Arab Lands. It was perceived as a continuation of Mamluk rule of hardship, humiliation, and impoverishment: “Looking at the history of Bilad al-Sham at this time [that means 400 years of Ottoman rule] is like looking at earliest history of mankind. The Turks have degraded and plundered the country.”1 Finally there is, as Jane Hathaway correctly points out, the “…inordinate influence modern nation-state boundaries have had on the historiography of the Ottoman provinces, to the extent that studies spanning more than one province are extremely rare.” She recognizes as the major problem a teleological writing of history, which conceived of the territorial nation state as the “foreordained outcome of the historical process” (p. 3).

The various myths and doctrines about Arab history under the Ottomans held sway for over two generations. Since the 1980s a whole new generation of young historians has sprung up taking a great interest in all aspects of that history. With the rise of social and economic history, these disciplines could play a decisive analytical role in an area where political history seemed to result in analyzing only actions and measures taken at the centre of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, a highly sophisticated school of Indian Ocean Studies developed over the last thirty years, showing that the Indian Ocean region continued to have a huge impact on the “Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule”.

This has led to a constant flow of articles, conference volumes, edited books, and monographs on urban, social, economic, and rural history of the Arab Lands under Ottoman rule.2 Based on this development, the attempt is well timed and justified to write now a more general history of the region and the epoch. The last to do so was P.M. Holt some 45 years ago.3 Since then few have tried4, and most perceive, as Jane Hathaway does, the Ottoman period ending with the turn of the 18th century – a point to which I shall return.

The author of the present book is fully aware of the pitfalls and dangers of her project. She sees an artificial polarization between ‘Arabists’ and ‘Turkologists’, a rift between relying on purely Arabic sources as the more authentic sources for the indigenous, the non-elite population, while Turkish archives give the view of the elite interests and the imperial policy. The author explains this polarization as having to do with modern nationalism and academic politics. I am not convinced that this is an important polarization. If it exists it has to do more with the language knowledge of scholars (Arab as well as Western) and with the fact that the ‘view from the centre’ has been elaborated for a long time (Hathaway’s work belongs to this approach), while the ‘view from the periphery’ is fairly new.

She deals dexterously with the old tune of the decline of the Ottoman Empire In her well-researched chapter on ‘Provincial notables in the 18th century’, she demonstrates how decentralization was just another way of negotiating power between the centre and the periphery and raises the central issue of power: the question “…why the ayan of the Arab provinces did not rebel en masse against the Ottoman sultan [has been raised.] Such a question, however, is coloured by modern-day nationalist assumptions…that the ayan must have felt oppressed by, rather than empowered by, Ottoman rule” (p. 112). Jane Hathaway is familiar with the historiography of the region and the interfering ideologies.

Writing a general history of a large region and a long period always presents questions of how to deal with the mass of information, what to include, what to leave out, how to make it coherent. The author solves the problem by frequently applying thumbnail definitions and nutshell descriptions for certain terms and concepts. The chapter on ‘Marginal groups and minority populations’ (pp. 188–212), for instance, consists of a list of terms and concepts, most discussed on less than a page. Introductory entries on ‘The pact of Umar’, and on ‘communal administration and leadership’, are followed by ‘Jews’; ‘Syrian Catholics’; ‘Jews and Christians in financial services’; ‘Twelver Shiites’; ‘Non-elite slavery’; ‘Slave trade routes’; ‘Women’; ’Veiling and seclusion’; ‘The harem’, ‘Marriage’; ‘Inheritance’; ‘Occupations’; and ‘The poor and the disabled’. In the conclusion she asserts that all these groups made vital contributions to economic and social life in critical ways, especially women, “[b]ecause mothers were the major influence in the early lives of men and women alike…” (p. 211); such approach and assertions remain rather unhelpful. Though these entries are very informative, they remain highly problematic: for those readers who know their history, they provide too little information, for those who do not know, it remains difficult to deal with the information without the historical context. In spite of the repeated statement by the author that the meaning and structure of the concepts was changing over time, the encyclopaedic way of presenting information validates it as immutable.

Repeatedly it also remains unclear what was specifically Ottoman about a concept or institution and what was typically Islamic, such as Muslim court procedures (p. 119), or the uniquely Ottoman centralization of minority administration (p. 191). Factual errors occur occasionally: ‘Syrian Catholics’ (p. 197) is a term sometimes used for Jacobite converts to Catholicism. Those who converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Catholicism were called ‘Greek Catholic’ Christians. The author misses the fact that this development of new local Christian communities parallels the increasing role of local ayans during the 18th century and is part of the same decentralisation process.

For the Western reader the round number ‘1800 CE’ constitutes by itself a periodization of history and coincides comfortably with the French conquest of Egypt. Well documented by accessible Arab sources (al-Jabarti) and extensive French publications (Description de l’Egypte) this event has assumed an overrated historiographical importance. The first Arab historian, who claimed that with this event the Ottoman era in Egypt had come to an end, was probably Jurji Zaidan. But he applied it carefully only to Egypt, where it arguably may have played a role.

Most recently, Eugene Rogan, whose study focuses on the early modern and modern period of Arab history, has suggested the middle of the 18th century as the beginning of a new period in Bilad al-Sham.5 He then turns to Egypt where he discerns the new beginnings with the rise of Muhammad Ali and recognizes the reforms initiated by the central government and provincial centres as a driving force.

For Bilad al-Sham, not to mention Iraq, the turn of the century, 1800, remains historically irrelevant. The relations with the central government continued to be negotiated as before, until the disruption caused by the Egyptian invasion 1831–1841. Thereafter, the ‘second coming’ of the Ottomans re-established their presence in the region. Following the sectarian troubles of 1861 Ottoman reforms allowed local urban societies formal political participation thus ensuring loyalty to the Ottoman sovereign in person. Even for Arab nationalists a full separation from the Ottoman Empire remained unimaginable until World War I. In Egypt the political and especially economic separation from the Ottoman center had progressed much further than in the Syrian region.

The rather popular but arbitrary choice of 1800 as a caesura between periods raises the principal question, whether ‘Arab Lands’ is a meaningful category for historical analysis, even at the time of strong Ottoman rule. Jane Hathaway’s approach has weakened her objectives in writing the book. It neither offers the general reader a coherent survey of the history of the ‘Arab Lands’, nor does it contribute much to scholarship, of which her other works abound.

Notes:
1 al-Hilal XXV, Dec. 1916, 182ff.
2 One of the most recent and weightiest (with over 1100 pages) is: Stefan Weber, Damascus. Ottoman Modernity and Urban transformation 1808–1918, 2 vols., Aarhus 2010.
3 P. M. Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, London 1966.
4 See e.g. Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, Der Arabische Osten unter Osmanischer Herrschaft 1517–1800, in: Ulrich Haarmann (ed.), Geschichte der Arabischen Welt, München 1987/2001, pp. 323–364; Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab People, London 1991, pp. 207–262. The relevant section is titled “The Ottoman Age 1516–1800” followed by “The Age of the European Empires 1800–1939”.
5 Eugene Rogan, The Arabs. A History, London 2009.