The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914
Institute For Middle East Studies
The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. It shows that radical ideas (more often than not a selective adaptation of socialist and anarchist ideas) were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists,Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and others in these cities. It argues that migrant networks were central to the making of a globalized world, partly through the dissemination of ideas and practices that challenged the global world order and the logic of global capitalism.
The book challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. It seeks to “deprovincialize” the history of the Eastern Mediterranean by emphasizing its social, cultural and intellectual links with other parts of the world.
Speaker
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Ilham Khuri-Makdisi received her Ph.D. in History/Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in 2004. She is currently Associate Professor of Middle East and World History at Northeastern University. Her Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 was published by University of California Press in 2010, and she has authored a number of articles and book chapters on the history of the Left in the Arab Mediterranean region, global migrations, and theater in the late nineteenth century.