My engagement with the social history of the Middle East, as I embarked on graduate studies, coincided with Judith Tucker's lamentation in 1990 that it was a field understudied to the point of being largely ignored.Footnote ¹ I came to the study of this new region with training in the native history of Canada, which had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of reconstructing the stories of people who had been denied agency in a narrative dominated by European conquest and nation-building.

It was through the study of the Ottoman Empire that I found the opportunity to explore these interests. Tucker's comments applied primarily to the Arab Middle East; in Ottoman studies, scholars such as Halil İnalcik, Suraiya Faroqhi, and Donald Quataert, inspired in no small part by the Annales school, had already demonstrated the potential that lay in excavating the rich variety of court records, state documents, literary masterpieces, and even architecture to better construct a historical perspective not bound by imperial imperatives.Footnote ² In the past two decades the social history of the Ottoman Empire has developed into a truly impressive subfield as scholars have shed light on the diversity of practice and experience throughout the Mediterranean world, offering insight into how women and men, the poor and the affluent, criminals and rebels, urbanites and peasants all contributed to the transformation of empire both in Istanbul and in its many provinces. Teaching Ottoman history now poses a daunting challenge: we are forced to decide from what perspective we will approach the empire; how much emphasis to place on imperial unity versus provincial particularity; and just how we will present the very different realities of empire between the 15th and 19th centuries.

In the early 1990s, the promising future of Ottoman social history contrasted with the ideological agenda that all but suffocated historical inquiry into republican Turkey. My initial point of engagement with modern Turkish history was the study of social protest against state efforts to impose modernization. An important question was how people had experienced the “total transformation” that Atatürk ostensibly had succeeded in bringing about. How had the Turkish people contributed to their new nation and how had its very definition been a shared enterprise between elites and ordinary people? My exploration of these topics benefited from the work of Erik Jan Zürcher and Mete Tunçay, who had opened up new possibilities by challenging the dominant Kemalist constraints on historical interpretation.Footnote ³ Today, the single-party period of nation-building is the subject of sociohistorical inquiry by an ever-growing cadre of innovative scholars.Footnote ⁴ The outlines of a “post-national” scholarship have begun to emerge, and historians are now tackling the exceedingly difficult but crucial question of how minorities experienced and influenced the process of nation-formation, whether they were Armenians, Kurds, Jews, Dönme, or Alevis.Footnote ⁵

Social history necessarily eschews the strictures of nationalist narratives, but it is all too easy to remain bound by the seemingly concrete yet remarkably artificial boundaries of the nation-state. Inspired by the subjects I encountered in exploring the relationship between religious and national identities in Turkey, more recently I have found myself examining the degree to which their experiences transcended national borders.Footnote ⁶ Manifestations of “international Islam” after 1945 allow us to consider to what degree Islam is a unifying force and how the lives and actions of individual Muslims in particular contexts contribute to and affect transnational movements. The challenges are considerable, for one must not only work in multiple environments but also grasp the cultural and political factors that shape people in these different contexts. Nevertheless, social history of this sort offers the very real opportunity to cultivate comparative frameworks that can inform our understanding of events unfolding today.

Recent developments would seem to lend weight to the value of studying the social history of the Middle East. It is far too early to evaluate the significance of the Arab Spring, but we know that it is part of a big and necessary change in the region: the political and social order concocted by imperial statesmen and local elites is unraveling, and the Middle East itself is under revision. Given that for the better part of a century politics in much of the region invited only minimal input by the people, this wave of change from below is remarkable. It is driven by demands for transformation from ordinary people, the very subjects who populate sociohistorical studies.

Compared with the historiography of Europe and the U.S., a striking characteristic of scholarship on the Middle East is the relative prominence of sociohistorical enquiry. This may be explained by the fact that historical study of the Middle East took its current form at the same time as the maturation of social history in recent decades.Footnote ⁷ Questions concerning the significance of culture frequently occupy historians of the Middle East,Footnote ⁸ and we draw on a sophisticated corpus of anthropological and sociological literature that informs our study of the role of social structure and of social and economic causation. Moreover, the current emphasis upon interdisciplinarity only fosters an expanding imagination as to what social history might include. The impressive array of dissertations and monographs produced by scholars today is testimony to the vitality of Middle East social history.Footnote ⁹ Nevertheless, the health of the field is affected by several factors.Footnote ¹⁰ The greatest challenge is the difficulty we encounter searching for suitable sources. Useful resources in archives and libraries are extremely limited, and one often finds that the records of private institutions or individuals have been discarded by those who never imagined that they might possess any value. Even if they do exist, it can be an exercise in frustration to locate private collections and to convince their owners that access should be granted. One can only envy the serendipitous discoveries of many of our colleagues, while remaining impressed by the tenacity and creativity that has led them to discover sources permitting investigation of hitherto obscured aspects of lived history.Footnote ¹¹

One temptation associated with such good fortune is to be drawn into local studies that do not take into account larger comparative contexts. It is difficult to extend our gaze beyond one country, province, or town, yet there are rewards for doing so. Social historians of the Middle East have much to learn from our colleagues studying other regions. It is curious that, so far, social historians of the Middle East have preferred to publish in journals specific to our area, rather than in journals such as Social History, The Journal of Social History, or The International Review of Social History. Footnote ¹² The result is that the larger field of social history fails to be sufficiently informed about the Middle East, and that we do not benefit as we might from the inevitable synergies resulting from comparative critical analysis.

To be sure, social historians today do not figure prominently among those expected to explain to the public what is happening in the Middle East. Yet we have something worth offering if we can speak both to the big changes that have occurred and to those that are underway in a manner that is intelligible and meaningful. After all, our audience is not only fellow academics and students but also ordinary people similar to those we insist deserve agency and recognition in our own studies.