Dissertation Information for Keith David Watenpaugh NAME: - Keith David Watenpaugh
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1999)
ADVISORS: - Afaf Lufti-Al-Sayyid Marsot
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Carole Pateman - Michael Morony - Hasan Kayalt
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Bourgeois modernity, historical memory, and imperialism: The emergence of an urban middle class in the late Ottoman and inter-war Middle East, Aleppo, 1908-1939
Abstract: As the long 19th century drew to a close in the Ottoman Middle East, existing structures of power, legitimacy and knowledge came under increasing strain. The certainties of rank, faith and gender fell away in the face of several internal and external challenges. One of the most fundamental, and least understood, of these challenges was that posed by a new urban middle class made up of civil servants, liberal professionals, teachers, journalists, military officers, businessmen and their families; it was a group that did not fit neatly into established categories of Ottoman society.
This dissertation is an exploration of the emergence of the middle class in the Ottoman Empire's third largest city, Aleppo--now in northern Syria. Its central thesis is that the commitment of members of this new stratum to being modern. the ways they remembered the past, and their desire to recreate society on the basis of the manner in which they believed a reified European bourgeoisie behaved challenged the status quo and helped to shape the ideological, cultural and political dimensions of the contemporary Middle East.
Although its cosmopolitan nature was often threatened by moments of communal violence. Aleppo's ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity and high degree of continuing contact with Western centers of commerce and culture contributed to the rise of an important and complex urban middle class fluent, as it were, in the idiom of modernity. Over a period of time punctuated by the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, World War One, the Arab Kingdom and the French Mandate on Syria, the middle stratum of Aleppo employed ideology, competing definitions of self, and history writing to respond to the often violent transformations of the world around them. To produce a more complete and nuanced comprehension of this response this dissertation analyzes the group's intellectual and cultural productions and investigates its attempts to contest local hegemony. Such all inquiry will lead to a better understanding of the understudied groups of Middle Eastern society, in particular the region's urban middle classes and linguistic and religious minorities, it is also a contribution to a growing conversation about the historical experience of modernity in the colonial and post-colonial world.
| |
MPACT Scores for Keith David Watenpaugh A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-22 11:07:29
Advisors and Advisees Graph
generating graph, please reload |