A lucid and engaging breakdown of the history, culture, and politics that define today’s Middle East. Untangling the Middle East is a layman’s guide to the history—political, religious, and cultural—that led us to the current challenges plaguing the Middle East. It covers the major interests and actors in the region, and helps to spin a narrative of the evolution of violence and conflict in this age-old hotbed of unrest. There are no easy answers or simple explanations to be found here, only a clear-eyed and engaging recounting of the many factors that have brought this region to where it is today. Whether he is discussing the history of the Semitic peoples or the birth of Islam in the region, Soltes brings insight and much needed context to the people, places, and things that make up the inheritance of today’s Middle East. He possesses the historian’s appreciation for detail and the teacher’s knack for fashioning coherence out of complex material. This book should be a go-to resource for a solid foundation in understanding the Middle East and a bulwark against the disinformation regarding this region that is often found on cable television or in speeches on the campaign trail. The Middle East may be a mess but it need not be a mystery, with the help of this indispensable guide.

This text offers an examination of the economic history of the principal Arab countries, Turkey and Israel since 1918. Using the state as its major economic analysis, it charts the growth of national income and issues of welfare and distribution over two periods, 1918-1945 and 1945-1990. Important trends are explored, including the patterns of colonial economic management, import substitution, the impact of the 1970s oil boom, and the current process of liberalization and structural adjustment

The complexities of the Middle East made a little more understandable

In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization. To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.

Bernard Lewis looks at the new era in the Middle East. With the departure of imperial powers, the region must now, on its own, resolve the political, economic, cultural, and societal problems that prevent it from accomplishing the next stage in the advance of civilization. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other, he explains, to provide the basis for an advance toward freedom in the true sense of that word.

The definitive history of the Middle East, now updated in its fifth edition 'The best overall survey of the politics, regional rivalries and economics of the contemporary Arab world' Washington Post Over the centuries the Middle East has confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike. This now-classic book follows the historic struggles of the region over the last two hundred years, from Napoleon's assault on Egypt, through the slow decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the painful emergence of modern nations. It is now fully updated with extensive new material examining recent developments including the aftermaths of the 'Arab Spring', the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict and the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars. 'An excellent political overview' Guardian