Join us for an engaging colloquium on Monday, May 12, from 16:15 to 17:45 (in person) at Freie Universität Berlin, FMI, Room A336 (Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin).

Convened by Sebastian Conrad, Michael Goebel, and Isabella Löhr, the session promises stimulating discussions in an academic setting.

We look forward to seeing you there!

About the Talk:

In this talk, Adam Mestyan argues that the concepts of new imperial history better describe and explain state-making among the post-Ottoman Arab peoples than the old national, imperial, colonial, and postcolonial vocabularies. First, he introduces the main terms in his recent monograph, Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), such as recycling empire, governing without sovereignty, local states, imperial constitutionalism, and modular (federative) state-making. Next, he applies this vocabulary to the story of the State of Syria's formation in the 1920s under the League of Nations class “A” French mandate.

Adam Mestyan is currently Associate Professor of History and Director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center and the Duke Islamic Studies Center at Duke University. He is the author of Arab Patriotism (Princeton UP, 2017), Primordial History (Ifao, 2021), and Modern Arab Kingship (Princeton UP, 2023), and the lead PI of the "Digital Cairo" and “Jara’id" digital humanities projects. Most recently, he was a Member in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Please see our Code of Conduct that applies to all Global History Events: