- 26 Aug 2015
Transnationalisation: Perspectives from the Middle East
Abstract
This talk asks, “How can the Middle East illuminate the spatial making of the modern world?” I will argue that existing spatial-historical master narratives like globalization or nation-state formation or urbanization are, in isolation, insufficient; and posit another approach. The modern Middle East rose as a result of a mutually transformative encounter between ‘old’ and ‘new:’ between established regions and cities, and unprecedented state formation and now-Eurocentric world trade. I will trace that process from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. And focusing on the interwar decades, I will unpack what “mutually transformative” meant: why European rulers had to accept late-Ottoman spatial patterns, for instance; how new nation-states ‘nationalized’ cities and were in turn ‘urbanized;’ why cities used transnational ties, and why nation-states developed not simply in isolation but as part of regions; and how the very meaning of regions changed over time.
About the Speakers
Associate Professor
Princeton University
Cyrus Schayegh (PhD, Columbia University, 2004) is Associate Professor at Princeton University. He is the author of Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950 (California University Press, 2009) and of The Making of the Modern World: A Middle Eastern History (under contract with Harvard University Press); has co-edited A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940 (Tauris, 2014) and The Routledge History Handbook of the Middle East Mandates (Routledge, 2015); and has published in the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, amongst other journals. He is currently developing three new, collaborative projects. The principal one, which brings him to Singapore, bears the working title “Global/Third-World go-between cities: Revisiting post-war globalization and the Cold War from early post-colonial Beirut, Dakar and Singapore, 1940s-1970s.”
