Transgressive moderns: social relations and cultural institutions in Middle Eastern History

Abstract

Each of these books analyzes the relationship between social stratification and modern state-building through case studies on political movements, on the one hand, and opportunistic individuals, on the other. The volume edited by Odile Moreau and Stuart Schaar presents eight case studies that compare and contrast the biographies of individuals that don’t fit squarely into contemporary political, ideological, or economic categories. Stephanie Cronin’s volume is a collection of eleven essays on bureaucratic and economic processes that created new notions of crime and poverty. Central to this edited volume is the concept of social class, which is less fundamental to Moreau and Schaar’s book. The last volume, edited by Ramazan Hakkı Öztan and Alp Yenen, deals with many of the same questions as Stephanie Cronin’s. However, its case studies deal more explicitly with the gray zone between conventional and clandestine politics during a period of upheaval and revolution that transformed the region into a collection of nation-states. Each book is unique but together they provide us with valuable insights into the processes that brought magnates, hustlers, revolutionaries, and criminals into a common political sphere. As such, these volumes contribute significantly to the historiographical debates about transregional political projects, empireand nation-building, and the multiplicity of ways that violence and capital accumulation have interacted with one another in the modern context.1 Striking in their topical breadth, the case studies in these volumes have significant thematic overlap as well as methodological insight. These books are valuable