In this innovative book, Keith Watenpaugh connects the question of modernity to the formation of the Arab middle class. The book explores the rise of a middle class of liberal professionals, ...white-collar employees, journalists, and businessmen during the first decades of the twentieth century in the Arab Middle East and the ways its members created civil society, and new forms of politics, bodies of thought, and styles of engagement with colonialism.
Discussions of the middle class have been largely absent from historical writings about the Middle East. Watenpaugh fills this lacuna by drawing on Arab, Ottoman, British, American and French sources and an eclectic body of theoretical literature and shows that within the crucible of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, World War I, and the advent of late European colonialism, a discrete middle class took shape. It was defined not just by the wealth, professions, possessions, or the levels of education of its members, but also by the way they asserted their modernity.
Using the ethnically and religiously diverse middle class of the cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, Syria, as a point of departure, Watenpaugh explores the larger political and social implications of what being modern meant in the non-West in the first half of the twentieth century.
Well researched and provocative,Being Modern in the Middle Eastmakes a critical contribution not just to Middle East history, but also to the global study of class, mass violence, ideas, and revolution.
Bread from stones Watenpaugh, Keith David
2015., 20150501, 2015, c2015., 2015-05-01
eBook
Bread from Stones,a highly anticipated book from historian Keith David Watenpaugh, breaks new ground in analyzing the theory and practice of modern humanitarianism. Genocide and mass violence, human ...trafficking, and the forced displacement of millions in the early twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean form the background for this exploration of humanitarianism's role in the history of human rights.Watenpaugh's unique and provocative examination of humanitarian thought and action from a non-Western perspective goes beyond canonical descriptions of relief work and development projects. Employing a wide range of source materials-literary and artistic responses to violence, memoirs, and first-person accounts from victims, perpetrators, relief workers, and diplomats-Watenpaugh argues that the international answer to the inhumanity of World War I in the Middle East laid the foundation for modern humanitarianism and the specific ways humanitarian groups and international organizations help victims of war, care for trafficked children, and aid refugees.Bread from Stonesis required reading for those interested in humanitarianism and its ideological, institutional, and legal origins, as well as the evolution of the movement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of late colonialism in the Middle East.
The essay centers of the efforts by the League of Nations to rescue women and children survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This rescue -- a seemingly unambiguous good -- was at once a ...constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community, a key moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing from a wide range of source materials in a number of languages, including Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic, the essay brings the intellectual and social context of humanitarianism in initiating societies together with the lived experience of humanitarianism in the places where the act took form. In so doing, it draws our attention to the proper place of the Eastern mediterranean, and its women and children, in the global history of humanitarianism. The prevailing narrative of the history of human rights places much of its emphasis on the post-World War II era, the international reaction to the Holocaust, and the founding of the United Nations. yet contemporary human rights thinking also took place within practices of humanitarianism in the interwar period, and is necessarily inseparable from the histories of refugees, colonialism, and the non-West.
Abstract
This article draws the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire into the comparative study of indigenous genocide. Using a Human Rights Studies approach, I focus on the transfer of ...indigenous children by state authorities through carceral institutions to argue that the ideology and practice of modern humanitarianism is a definitive shared element of indigenous genocides across the late-19th and early-20th Centuries. Common experiences of denial by powerful states and cultural erasure invite added comparison and intersectional solidarity. The article is written to address Native American and Armenian Studies scholars together, elaborate a working vocabulary for future collaborative research in Human Rights Studies and serve as a point of departure for public scholarship and policy engagement.
Dominant narratives of the Eastern Mediterranean's 20th century exclude the study of Western humanitarianism and refugee survivors of the 1915 genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. Reasons for this ...exclusion abound. At the forefront is the abject nature of the human beings who populate that history, something which often induces revulsion on the part of historians in the present: these were people who left little of the appealing and elegant traces left by a Beiruti journalist, a Damascene urban notable, or an elite Constantinopolitan feminist. They appear as an undifferentiated mass of survivors of intense violence, disease, and starvation who are bereft of any agency; slaves, and serially raped and pregnant teenagers in bureaucratic documents stored at the League of Nations archive or packs of feral emaciated street children roving the narrow alleyways of Aleppo's old city in the paternalistic memoirs of Western relief workers—usually American or Scandinavian female healthcare professionals. Their own voices are obscured, showing up in the occasional self-published autobiography written by an elderly genocide survivor for his grandchildren, or in handwritten accounts and letters in lost dialects inherited by descendants unable to read them.
The forced transfer of children from one group to another is considered an element of the crime of genocide, yet this subject has attracted little scholarly attention. Using the history of the mass ...transfer of Armenian children during the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1922 as a case, this article argues that the study of child transfer and recovery is critical to both the history of human rights and a more sophisticated understanding of genocide, including the forms of genocide accompanying the colonial encounter. The experience of transferred children and their recovery or loss can help better clarify the historical relationship between the concepts of the rights of the child and individual human and minority rights as these have evolved before and immediately after World War II. Moreover, this article also contends that it is important to characterize child transfer as genocide, as opposed to colonial assimilation or acculturation as a feature of modernization, when explaining the broader social impact of mass violence, forced migration, and cultural destruction on victim/survivor and perpetrator communities.
Bread from Stones, a highly anticipated book from historian Keith David Watenpaugh, breaks new ground in analyzing the theory and practice of modern humanitarianism. Genocide and mass violence, human ...trafficking, and the forced displacement of millions in the early twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean form the background for this exploration of humanitarianism's role in the history of human rights. Watenpaugh's unique and provocative examination of humanitarian thought and action from a non-Western perspective goes beyond canonical descriptions of relief work and development projects. Employing a wide range of source materials—literary and artistic responses to violence, memoirs, and first-person accounts from victims, perpetrators, relief workers, and diplomats—Watenpaugh argues that the international answer to the inhumanity of World War I in the Middle East laid the foundation for modern humanitarianism and the specific ways humanitarian groups and international organizations help victims of war, care for trafficked children, and aid refugees. Bread from Stones is required reading for those interested in humanitarianism and its ideological, institutional, and legal origins, as well as the evolution of the movement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of late colonialism in the Middle East.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the weak of World War I left an ideological and political vacuum in the cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Functionaries of the short-lived ...government of the Ottoman-Arab notable Faysal ibn Husayn, a British ally and leader of the Arab Revolt, attempted to fill this vacuum by using journalism to shape historical consciousness and impose an Arab nationalism on the Levant -- a process especially fraught in the ethnically and linguistically diverse city of Aleppo. In so doing they sought to cleans the area of non-Arabs and enhance their claim to rule in the name of Wilsonianism and 'national self-determination'. This article reads that process of diffusing, cleansing and historicizing in several episodes as each appeared in the Arabic language official newspaper "Halab." Using the paper's history of the Arab Revolt, its vilification of an 'other' and its creation of external and internal cultural boundaries -- often defined by European Orientalists -- it situates the journal's efforts in the confluence of the interwar spread of nationalist idealism and modern historicist typologies. Moreover, the paper's efforts bring into relief a crucial moment in the social and cultural history of the region: far from the mere choice between accepting the new identity of the Arab or remaining loyal to Turkey as the successor to the empire, a larger discursive movement had emerged in cities like Aleppo which centred on the persistence of empire, questions of liberalism, citizenship and secularism, and the role of Islam in governance and public culture.
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