What we now describe as the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia long existed in the European imagination as a vague amalgam, signified by the word ‘Orient’. It is this broad, ill-defined colonial geography which is deliberately referenced in my title. My paper seeks to integrate these ‘Oriental’ and European histories of the interwar era. In this sense it responds to the call for ‘metropole and colony…to be brought into one analytic field’, but it also moves beyond binary frameworks, to consider the emergence, during the interwar period, of transnational political and cultural networks across the colonised East, which in turn transformed the political and intellectual environment of the West. Rather than assuming Europe or the imperial metropole as the central node in a radial framework, whose influence disseminated outwards toward the colonies, I argue for the centrality of this ‘Orient’ for the evolution of politics in Europe during the twenty years which separate World War I from World War II. Expanding on Arendt’s 1951 thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism, my research documents how new technologies of violence and increasingly dehumanised logics of control originated in colonial wars across the Maghreb and Mashreq during the 1920s, and were then gradually imported to Europe by fascist and totalitarian regimes beginning in the 1930s. At the same time, I consider the ways in which European political discourses of the left and right were received, re-invented, and re-disseminated to Europe and the world by ‘Oriental’ intellectuals, artists and activists over the same period of time. In so doing, I draw on a range of primary material concerning the RAF bombardment of Mesopotamia in 1920; the Indian Khilafat Movement; Arab and Indian activism during the Spanish Civil War and Abyssinian Crisis; global mobilisation in reaction to the Arab Revolt in Palestine; Egyptian leadership in international feminist networks; and Mussolini’s Arabic and Hindi radio propaganda campaigns. In short, this paper explores how, between 1919 and 1939, the world Europe sought to dominate in fact shaped the mounting crisis within it. Research has so far involved the consultation of the British National Archives and the British Library Asian & African Studies Reading Room; the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi; the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and the Middle East Center Archive at St Antony's College, Oxford. Additional consultation of archival holdings in Cairo, Rabat, Seville, Nantes, and Rome is anticipated.

This paper examines the history of the concept of disaster in Arab social theory and historiography from the late nineteenth century to the present. Known in the singular as the “Nakbah,” disaster refers to the Palestinian exodus of 1948. Much has been written about the Nakbah as a central pivot in the historiography of the modern Middle East marking the beginning of the post-colonial era. The paper unravels previous uses of the concept of disaster in the plural, as a conception of time and circular causality. The paper examines the resurgence of the concept of disasters in the early twentieth century as a means of articulating cyclical periods of decay and prosperity, which helped Arab thinkers explain the dynamics of social and political formation. Intense armed conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine in the interwar period contributed to the resurgence of disasters as a framework for contriving the temporalities of Arab history. The paper follows the transition from thinking about disasters as a framework of history within which events may be situated, to presenting 'disaster' as a critical juncture and a call for action, resistance, and social reform. The paper then follows the trajectory of the concept of disaster throughout the second half of the twentieth-century, its global reception, and contemporary transformation in light of current armed conflicts. By comparing the nature and function of “disasters” with that of “crises” and “revolutions,” the paper opens a conceptual space for envisioning the relationship between war and the history of ideas, in the Middle East and beyond. It suggests that the Arab Nakbah helped to set strategies and discourses of resistance in motion in the postcolonial era, not only in the Middle East but also in other parts of the world.

In many ways, migration has characterized the narrative of human connectivity and exchange since the advent of the steamship in the mid-19th century. And while historians of the Middle East have been exploring tales of migration, settlement, and diaspora formation for myriad Middle Eastern populations across the world since Philip Hitti's seminal 1924 work, The Syrians in America, the contributions of these migrants to transnational historical developments have received minimal coverage. This paper explores the role that Arabic-speaking migrants from Greater Syria played in forging local, regional, and transnational cultures of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and moral citizenship in interwar Latin America, and specifically, 1920s Santiago de Chile. It examines a range of petitions and letters drafted by Arabic-speaking migrants as early as 1918 in Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico and which were sent to different colonial European offices locally and transnationally, including the desks of the League of Nations in Geneva, demanding national self-determination for the inhabitants of Greater Syria. The number of petitions soared in the aftermath of WWI as European powers transformed the legal, political, and social landscape of Greater Syria and left many nationalist aspirations frustrated, if not squashed, especially in Palestine. In responding immediately and politically to these developments from throughout the diaspora, Arabic-speaking migrants in Latin America introduced to their local communities a new kind of cosmopolitan awareness that was plugged into transnational developments. The paper also examines two Arabic periodicals from 1920s Santiago de Chile, al-Watan and ash-Sharq, to show how Arabic-speaking migrants there were active in promoting patriotic sensibilities among their readers that were at once local, regional, and transnational. Part of this agenda advocated for a new kind of migrant who embodied a modern, moral citizenship modeled on the North American experience. To be sure, this citizen was upstanding, industrious, "civilized but not imitative," patriotic, and, ideally, passably white. The paper explores how Arabic-speaking migrants brought transformative developments in political and social thinking and organization to Latin America through a range of transnational initiatives. Today, Latin America is home to sizable populations of Middle Eastern descent whose migrant ancestors, this research suggests, would have been at the forefront of forging local cultures of cosmopolitan worldliness and nationalism that promoted trendy conceptions of ideal, moral citizenship.

This paper examines the indispensable role the Arabic script played in Chinese linguistic modernization. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals––much like their counterparts in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia––singled out the written script as the culprit in the failure to modernize. What followed was decades of struggle to alphabetize Chinese, which finally culminated in the invention of pinyin in the 1950s, the system of Latinized transcription that coexists with Chinese characters. The scholarship on language and writing reform in twentieth-century China has long maintained a dichotomy between the Alphabet (i.e., the West) and the Non-Alphabet (i.e., China), treating alphabetization as essentially a derivative of Western colonial discourse. These studies have sought the origins of Chinese alphabetization in the long history of Sino-Western contacts, extending from Jesuit and Protestant efforts to alphabetize Chinese to twentieth-century linguistic notations. The purpose of this paper is to show the conceptual limitations and historical inaccuracies embedded in this enduring West/China dichotomy. Subverting the existing narratives, I argue that the invention of the first Chinese Latin Alphabet in the 1930s, which served as the mother of pinyin, was intimately connected not only to the reform of the Arabic script across Eurasia, but also to the Chinese Muslims’ long history of using the Arabic script to record Chinese sounds. This reform movement started in the Ottoman Empire and Russian Caucasus, and through unexpected twists and turns ended up as a Latinization movement, which spread like wildfire in Turkey, the Soviet Union, and China. Following the forgotten traces of the Arabic script in the rest of Eurasia, this paper unravels a world of letters and sounds that have long been erased from, and yet were central to, the history of linguistic modernization in China.