Our Professor Cyrus Schayegh published a new book entitled The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World.
Professor Cyrus Schayegh presents an innovative socio-spatial history that traces how different geographic areas and networks molded the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
These developments did not cease with the Ottoman Empire’s collapse after World War I. Partitioned by the victorious British and French, this territory (known in Arabic as Bilād al-Shām) became an umbrella region from which new nation states would emerge—states whose very foundations were transnational and tied together multiple urban areas.
Building on the Middle Eastern case, Professor Schayegh argues that the making of the modern world is best seen as the reciprocal transformation of cities, regions, states, and global networks.