Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East

Adam Mestyan, Associate Professor of History, Duke University

In this talk, I argue that the concepts of new imperial history better describe and explain state-making among the post-Ottoman Arab peoples than the old national, imperial, colonial, and postcolonial vocabularies. First, I introduce the main terms in my recent monograph, Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking The Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), such as recycling empire, governing without sovereignty, local states, imperial constitutionalism, and modular (federative) state-making. Next, I apply this vocabulary to the story of the State of Syria's formation in the 1920s under the League of Nations class “A” French mandate.

Adam Mestyan is currently a Member in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Associate Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of Arab Patriotism (2017), Primordial History (2021), and Modern Arab Kingship (2023), and the lead PI of the Digital Cairo and Jara’id digital humanities projects.