A Modern History of Syria Including Lebanon and Palestine

DESCRIPTION

441 pages of english text, Hard cover in dust wrapper, Index, Biblio, Notes, Figures, Maps, copy in good condition. This is a comprehensive history of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine east and west of the river Jordan from the closing decades of the eighteenth century to 1921, and then of the Republc of Syria to the summer of 1967. The book is in two parts. The first is devoted to a systematic study, with no gaps in the narrative, of all aspects of Ottoman Turkish rule - political, economical, social and cultural. The second details the war-time Anglo-Arabe neotiatios, the struggles that led to the division of Greater Syria into British and French spheres of influence, the operation of te French mandate and the Republic of Syria after independence. In addition to the standard Arabic sources, the author has drawn on a wide range of manuscript sources including American, British and French consular records. Above all, his book is the first to exploit the voluminous material in the British Foreign Office papers only recently made available to scholars. There is much in this book to arrest attetion. With a wealth of new evidence and a detached mind, the author re-examines and challenges te validity of a number of prejudices and historical myths. Thus he offers in the fifth and sixth chapters a new view of the Arabic literary revival and the first stirrings of Arab national sentiments, directly opposed to current and accepted notions. In the chapters dealing with the political settlement after the First World War he throws abundant light on British and French policy and calls incidentally for a reassesment of a number of Arab and British personalities such as Faisal and T.E. Lawrence.