This introduction provides a broad overview of the literature on caravan trade and economic history of the Middle East up to the nineteenth century. It is first a survey of existing literature on caravan trade with an emphasis on the role of caravans in the creation of regional markets. It moves then to challenging the paradigm of Silk Roads and argues against the idea of a homogeneous decline of overland trade since the seventeenth century. This introduction helps in bringing back Bedouin, camels, steppe and desert as historical actors by discussing sources and scholarly debates (the relationship between nomads and the Ottoman State in particular).

The conclusion sums up the main arguments of the book on the formative albeit discreet role of caravan trade in the political economy of the Middle East both during and after the Ottoman period. It draws on this history to challenge recent directions in the history of the Middle East by advocating for inner perspectives on connections thanks to the crossing of endogenous documentation (in Arabic and in Ottoman) with foreign sources, more attention for legacy, resilience and slowness in a period of rapid technological and political transformation. The history of caravan supports a new way of considering the Middle East from inside. It also offers insights on the background of debates over past carbonisation and present decarbonisation.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

The first city networks were as old as the first cities. The mud brick metropolises of the fourth millennium were built to accelerate a burgeoning regional trading system. Settlements were linked, for example, through the alpha city of Uruk. This chapter also explores the later Babylonian and Ur “world systems.” These were effectively knowledge-based global cities at the heart of robust trading networks. With the advent of the city came the first bureaucratic administrators finding advantages in large concentrated forms of living in a hitherto decentralized world. The strange new idea was hardly normal. Cities were labor intensive, dangerous places that exacted high demands on their populations. With their invention came new social hierarchies. The movement of unprecedented global resources through cities required seminal bureaucratic breakthroughs—not least of which cuneiform writing. This increased the power of a privileged few, extracting exorbitant tribute and labor. Cities were in reality systems of concentrated power and global resource management whose walls functioned to keep their populations in, rather than simply to repel invaders.

Egypt is the most populous state in the Arab world, with just over 100 million citizens residing in the country, and Egyptian nationals have long looked abroad for opportunities. This chapter examines the evolution of the country’s policies toward its diaspora and seeks to understand how the Egyptian government has attempted to protect, assist, and cultivate loyalty among its citizens abroad, as well as how it has sought to exert further control over this population. Beginning with targeted secondment policies that aimed to spread pan-Arabist ideology in the 1950s and 1960s, and broadening to mass labor exportation agreements directed primarily toward other Arab nations in the 1970s, Egypt sought to address demographic concerns of overpopulation and an overburdened and underfinanced public sector, and to reap the benefit of remittances as a major contribution to the country’s GDP. But the chapter also addresses Egypt’s failure to establish effective governance of, and engagement with, its diaspora. This includes the overlapping responsibilities of the numerous ministries in charge of emigration, an unwillingness to resolve domestic economic issues in order to prevent further brain drain and to incentivize the return of Egyptians abroad, and the state’s continued use of transnational repression toward its citizenry.

Chapter 8 evaluates the argument that ruling monarchs are more effective than other types of autocrats at avoiding blame through delegation. It does so by drawing on cross-national data from around the world in addition to more specific comparisons of monarchies and republics in the Middle East. First, the chapter establishes that ruling monarchs tend to share power more credibly than presidential autocrats both in the Middle East and beyond, and it shows that this difference is recognized by people living in these regimes. Next, the chapter draws on an original survey experiment administered in Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia, in addition to data on constitutions, to demonstrate that monarchs benefit from reduced expectations that they will govern and be held responsible for policy outcomes. These expectations imply that delegation by ruling monarchs will be more in line with how the public expects responsibility to function in the political system. The chapter concludes by tracing patterns of opposition during the Arab Spring and analyzing cross-national protest data to show that monarchs are less likely than other dictators to be targeted by mass opposition when the public is dissatisfied, suggesting their advantages in avoiding blame contribute to their resiliency.

This introduction poses the central thesis of this volume: that the early Islamic empire was tied together by networks of social dependency that can be tracked through the linguistic and material traces of interconnectivity in our sources. It is suggested that the particular relationships that emerge from the granular case studies in this volume can illuminate the constituent parts of the early Islamic empire as a whole. Studies link material and textual sources, and in particular focus on the language and rhetoric used by sources to describe relations and interactions, and what they show of the modes, expressions and conditions that governed communication and interaction. It is suggested that empires are not ruled by top–down force alone, but that legitimacy and stability are created in various ways, both top–down and bottom–up.

Forms of violence and the literary avenues for expressing them constitute allegorical worlds that place them on the fringes of literature. Such worlds submerged under the normative conception of world assert their existence through violent bonds and alliances. Against the predominantly secular and centrist underpinnings in the world literature debate, the chapter construes worlds through malleable, multiple, and contra-normative temporal coordinates. World-making through violence, as Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, Kae Bahar’s Letters from a Kurd, and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad show, unfolds deep within such temporalities where vernacular renditions of divine and organized vengeance have an insurgent mode. Contesting secular notions of the sublime as something to be revealed to the subject at the end of reason, the insurgent sublime manifests as an intrasecular force invoked on a whim at the limit of reason. This intrasecular sublime is salient to Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer and Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins, wherein death and dead bodies become breeding sites of violent alliances. Death in the two novels enables a thanatopolitical resistance where acts of naming, washing, resurrecting, and ennobling the dead lend themselves to a critique of necropolitical technologies that manufacture death as though it were a commodity.

Chapter 6 returns to William Thackeray’s Mediterranean travel writing to show how his humor fails to challenge the dominant heritage discourse in Jerusalem. Although Thackeray derides other Mediterranean sites for inauthenticity, he cannot profane Jerusalem, which means he cannot return it to human (and imperial) use, either by word play or physical contact. Anthony Trollope takes up this problem in his novel The Bertrams, in which he reconceives some places, like Alexandria, for modern use. These sites are wiped of their significance to British heritage discourse as ancient lands and rendered available for modernization. Jerusalem, though, proves too sacred, and thus too integral to British cultural heritage, to be colonized in the same way. Some holy sites thus endure as historical relics while others are rewritten as a “middle” East.

The Conclusion raises the question of how the study of the literature and visual cultural of non-Greek-speaking, non-Constantinopolitan communities in the East Roman empire should relate to Byzantine studies. It further asks how the literature and visual culture of these communities should be seen as relating to Byzantine studies after these communities came under Muslim political control. A cultural, “Big Tent,” understanding of Byzantium is advocated for, one which de-privileges the state and which recognizes the importance of Christianity and its literary and visual manifestations for defining Byzantium as an object of study. This exapanded view of Byzantium includes in Byzantine studies the broader eastern Mediterranean world, Greek-speaking and non-, Chalcedonian and non-, Christian and non-.