With the recent marking of the centenary, the past decade has seen a surge of original scholarship on World War I in the Middle East. There also has been a concurrent increased interest among Middle East historians in rethinking and reframing the continuities and ruptures expressed in the region’s transition from the late Ottoman Empire to the early post-Ottoman period in the 1920s and 1930s, with recent works focused on the former Arab provinces as well as the Anatolian core. Adam Mestyan’s Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East is a significant contribution to this latter historiography, recasting our understanding of how the region transitioned from empire to an interstate system.

The book’s main object of analysis is “political order,” or the “conceptual realm behind political institutions,” and its central question is how the region’s political order was reconstructed after the Ottomans were defeated (p. 4). Contrary to the conventional rupture narrative, in which the British and French imposed mandate-veneered colonial states on a tabula rasa, Mestyan contends that the new Arab states were made from the conceptual imperial debris, the spolia, of the late Ottoman period. Although Mestyan’s story of “recycling empire” in the 1920s and 1930s Middle East includes Allied planners, it focuses mostly on elite and ordinary Arab actors who contributed to this “recasting of imperial political institutions” (p. 9). In this process, the local Arab Muslim monarchy emerged as the dominant form, with Palestine being the striking exception.

As a global legal history, the book vigorously engages literatures beyond its regional empirical focus, including works on political theory, the sociology of empire, and comparative legal history. Part 1 of Modern Arab Kingship lays out a sophisticated exposition of an “empire-based theory of successor political orders” (p. 21). Mestyan argues that empire, globally, was the cradle that shaped postimperial formations, much more than nationalism, and must be analyzed as such. This empire-oriented approach requires an inventory of the heterogenous array of religious, ethnic-national, and dynastic sources of authority deployed prior to World War I by the Ottomans and other empires. In this repertoire, Mestyan emphasizes that “subordinate dynasts” were a common and important tool through which imperial order was locally configured (pp. 30–32). This section, then, turns to the post–World War I era to clarify how these modes of rule were translated and reconfigured in the new League of Nations mandate framework, under which de jure sovereignty was unlinked from de facto governance in varied ways.

Shifting to the Middle East, Part 2 of the book tracks how the Ottomans cultivated and local actors strove to procure forms of political, cultural, and economic capital related to claims of genealogical descent from the Prophet Muhammad, focusing particularly on sharifian politics in the Hijaz and Basrah regions. It also explores the various federative frameworks envisioned in the region from the late 19th century through the early 1920s, including caliphates, a dualist Turko–Arab empire, and the idea of an Arab kingdom, which, along with local princely dynasties, contributed to the materials recycled to build the postwar, post-Ottoman political order. This careful analysis of the late Ottoman political frameworks generated in Istanbul and the provinces up to and through World War I adds invaluable context about what was in place as European colonial powers entered the scene to reshape the region after the war.

The last two parts of the book work through fascinating case studies that show us how local and colonial actors attempted to transition the post-Ottoman Middle East from imperial to local forms of authority, and why local Muslim monarchy emerged as the dominant mode. Mestyan first traces the attempt by the Hashemites to “translate Hamidian genealogical politics” into post-Ottoman rule in Damascus, then in Amman and Baghdad, which worked in tandem and tension with British and French decisions to retain rather than abolish this established repertoire of revealed law and religious genealogical authority (p. 145). He then addresses Egypt, analyzing how there, too, the political order was successively transformed, following the 1914 British declaration of a protectorate, from a khedivate into a constitutional monarchy still reconciled with shariʿa. Contrasting the Hashemite cases and post-Ottoman Egypt to Turkey’s secularizing constitutional path, Mestyan emphasizes how the French and British occupational authorities and local elites reconciled religious authority with reformulated local political orders.

The final section, which contains some of the most original and intriguing work in the book, turns to the making of the “Arab Saudi Kingdom” in the 1920s and 1930s, and the recurrent and persistent interest in constituting a local monarchy in French Mandate Syria from 1925 to 1939. This effort, to my knowledge, represents the first, and certainly the most in-depth, study to bring these two cases together and reveal the entwinement of Saudi and Syrian post-Ottoman state formation. The resulting story fronts the pan-Arab, specifically Syrian, role of Istiqlali activists traversing the Hijaz cities, Damascus, Cairo, and Jerusalem, and their influence. On one side, they inflected the international legal framework through which the Saudis merged the Kingdom of Hijaz with the Sultanate of Najd. In the parallel Syrian case, these activists vied with other post-Ottoman monarchists to pressure or collaborate with the French to reestablish an Arab throne in Damascus through the interwar period. As with the other cases, Mestyan’s work on the central role of Arab activists in the interlinked making of the Saudi kingdom and the Syrian Republic reshapes our understanding of the interwar Middle East, emphasizing the process of “coproduction” by Allied officials and local-regional actors rather than the imposition of the post-Ottoman order by the former alone (p. 224).

Ultimately, Modern Arab Kingship succeeds as a Middle East–focused comparative study that does important theory building relevant to the emerging field of global legal history, particularly with respect to recent works on the League of Nations, constitutionalism, and transitions out of empire in the interwar period in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It is a major contribution, too, to a new Middle East historiography intentionally situated across the often-segmented late Ottoman, World War I, and interwar periods. Through these eras, Mestyan skillfully works through a rich base of new Ottoman, Egyptian, Hijazi, Saudi, Syrian, French, and British archival sources to reconstruct dynamic interactions across the region that helped create local states. Although it is not a quick or easy read, the rewards of the book will be substantial for historians and social scientists engaged in these questions in the Middle East and elsewhere.