In a region where Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ could deservedly have topped the charts for almost two centuries now, it would be interesting to see how all this change took off and gained momentum. The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World by Cyrus Schayegh, Associate Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, offers exactly such an account. In Schayegh’s book, we follow the socio-spatial making of the modern Middle East from the 1830s to 1945. The subject of our attention is Bilad al-Sham, an area roughly encapsulated by the Mediterranean Sea and the Nile Delta in the west, Anatolia in the north, the Euphrates in the east, and the Arabian Peninsula in the south. Even though the transitions in this area form the core focus of Schayegh’s work, his research is not limited by it; he guides the reader effortlessly through accounts from more distant regions such as Europe, the United States, and Latin America. By tracing their connections with Bilad al-Sham, maintained by its various diasporas, its colonial administrators, and its trading partners, Schayegh shows the continuously changing, but never disappearing, embeddedness of Bilad al-Sham within the world at large.

To be sure, landmark events such as both World Wars, the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, and the Great Depression caused the biggest shake-ups in the nature of this embeddedness. Yet, even though Schayegh lets these global events shape the chronological frames of his book’s chapters, he stresses that they did not have a monopoly on change. It was not only the global level that altered situations at smaller levels; the local level left its mark on the regional, the regional on the national, the national on the international, and the international on the global. Schayegh professes this interconnectedness between all levels as an antidote to the arbitrariness of singled-out, strictly confined heuristic scopes. Indeed, even the word “scope” already suggests too much hierarchy, which is why Schayegh prefers using the idea of a socio-spatial “field” when he argues that it does not suffice to study developments in just one field (e.g. cities or nations) if we want to understand the “making of the Middle East” (or actually the making of any given place). However, neither do we fully comprehend this process by looking at all of the fields separately, for this would suggest too much independence for each layer. Schayegh states that it is in fact the “interwovenness” of all fields that has to be described: the link between one layer and another. The historian Sebastian Conrad has described this method as: “shifting between, and articulating, different scales of analysis, rather than sticking to fixed territories”.Footnote ¹ In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Schayegh puts this strategy into practice and calls it the study of “transpatialization”. It is this phenomenon that he traces throughout his book.

The story commences in the 1830s, when the process of transpatialization suddenly became much more intense due to two developments, each occurring outside Bilad al-Sham: the centring of the global economy in Europe, and the emergence of modern state territoriality. Both developments are traced back to the region’s cities, for these became more consciously part of the Ottoman Empire, both administratively and socio-culturally. Also, their economies were remoulded in order to fit into the new Eurocentric world system. Interestingly, though, while these cities integrated increasingly within a global organization, they remained the cores around which the lives of their citizens unfolded. This is demonstrated elegantly in the prelude to the first chapter, in which Khalil al-Sakakini is introduced. This intellectual, living and working in New York City, wrote about his dreams. While sleeping, he is back in Jerusalem, where he was born in 1878. Al-Sakakini’s notes are not just an account of the local interlinking with the global; they also show how inter-urban Bilad al-Sham had become by the beginning of the twentieth century, for the descriptions of his dreams hint at Jerusalem’s connections with other cities in the area, maintained, for instance, by train tracks and telegraph wires.

Building on historian Jürgen Osterhammel’s emphasis on the importance of cities in nineteenth-century globalization, Schayegh’s book refers constantly to urban cores, their interurban ties, and their place in the world.Footnote ² Schayegh is particularly attentive to the development of Beirut. Before World War I, this city became increasingly powerful: with its large Christian population, it was an easy destination for European traders and entrepreneurs. Moreover, it gained a somewhat preferential position from its sovereign, Istanbul, when it was assigned its own province in 1888. Especially compared with non-coastal cities such as Damascus and Aleppo, Beirut flourished. This changed, however, during World War I. Although Bilad al-Sham experienced hardly any direct combat, it was not left untouched: a great famine forced people to move, and political power shifted from Beirut to Damascus because the region’s Ottoman general, Jamal Pasha, settled in the latter, while Beirut lost was its favourable trading position owing to an Allied naval blockade. Schayegh summarizes Jamal Pasha’s wartime strategies as the “exercise of modern state territoriality”. With Bilad al-Sham no longer governed from Istanbul, but directly from the region, Jamal Pasha found in the war a fertile moment to spur regional integration by investing in infrastructure and to reorganize the education system. Both of these undertakings leaned towards a more centralized, nation-state kind of approach. By and large, World War I did not disrupt the process of transpatialization, because, even though the international and global connections were hard to maintain, the local, the interurban, and the regional levels did not disintegrate.

Thus transpatialization continued to march on, though not always in the same way. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after the war causes Schayegh to turn his story into a diptych, roughly split along the chronological line of 1918–1929. This “Ottoman twilight period” is best characterized by the emergence of various strands of territoriality that were materialized not only in the region’s four new nation states (Palestine, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria), but also by Zionism and the French and British mandates. However, the rigidity of all these new divisions did not limit the region’s further integration: the urge to interweave, be it by car on new roads or by trains on new tracks, remained. Furthermore, free trade was boosted after the Anglo-French decision in 1921 to turn Bilad al-Sham into a customs-free zone, uniting the region economically.

Subsequently, Schayegh shows how this paradox of accelerating integration in a more divided region affected separate cities and their hinterlands. Despite their still rudimentary implementation (for instance, a border marked by a painted stone each kilometre), the rise of borders, checks, and laissez-passers did have a selective effect their communities. It is here that the first oral accounts trickle in, instantly reminding the reader of the story’s close links to our times. The personal, almost tangible dimension offered by interviews with people who were affected by the new borders leaves the reader’s curiosity wanting for more. This is not to say that The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World lacks sources; on the contrary: throughout the book, Schayegh builds his arguments carefully, while navigating between primary and secondary source material in German, English, French, and Arabic.

Admittedly, the skilfulness with which Schayegh zigzags smoothly between Bilad al-Sham’s diverse cities and regions might sometimes leave the reader a little disorientated. The fact that transpatialization can be traced back to many forms (roads, buildings, maps, and even dream journals, for example) makes the concept all the more intriguing, but it does not help to focus the reader’s geographically diffused attention. What does help, however, are the regular, zoomed-out perspectives on the ensembles of transpatialization. Together, these can stack new “layers” of territoriality upon older ones, as happened, for example, with the integration of regions and cities within nation-state structures in the 1930s. Yet, new layers sometimes appear to be transparent, allowing older, often more inter-urban and regional-based versions of territoriality to shine through.

The above outline gives us a glimpse of the intensifying changes that took place in the Middle East after the 1830s. Yet, in its bareness, this review bereaves the book largely of the subtlety of transpatialization. Especially difficult to maintain in any summary is the richness of detail necessary to describe the more modest socio-spatial fields (a city and its hinterland for instance) being affected by, or causing, transitions in larger circuits. It is this very attention to the diverse histories of the smaller fields, which Schayegh carefully extracts from the archives, newspapers, and interviews, that forms the greatest strength of his book.