Newly revised and updated to explain events that have occurred since the American occupation of Iraq, the second edition of The Modern Middle East: A History explores how the forces associated with global modernity have shaped the social, economic, cultural, and political life in the region over the course of the past 500 years. Beginning with the first glimmerings of the current international state and economic systems in the sixteenth century, this book examines the impact of imperial and imperialist legacies, the great nineteenth-century transformation, cultural continuities and upheavals, international diplomacy, economic booms and busts, the emergence of authoritarian regimes, and the current challenges to those regimes on everyday life in an area of vital concern to us all. Engagingly written, drawing from the author's own research and other studies, and stocked with maps and photographs, original documents, and an abundance of supplementary materials, The Modern Middle East: A History will provide both novices and specialists with fresh insights into the events that have shaped history and the debates about them that have absorbed historians.

James L. Gelvin is Professor of History at UCLA. An award-winning teacher, he is the author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (2005), Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (1998), and numerous shorter works.