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Lebanon
A History, 600-2011
William Harris
400 pages
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35 halftones
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235x156mm
978-0-19-518111-1
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Hardback
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19 July 2012
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- Spans 14 centuries to narrate the basis of the origins of modern Lebanon.
- Argues that Lebanon's sectarian politics are as much (if not more) a product of prolonged indigenous evolution as of nineteenth century European/Ottoman interventions.
- Contends that modern Lebanon would not have broken down if the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war had not taken place.
- Synthesizes archival research and secondary sources.
For most Americans, the civil war in Beirut is their sole point of connection with Lebanon. But Lebanon, a crossroads of major religious communities, has held a central place in the geopolitical significance of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East for many centuries. In this book, William Harris synthesizes the history of Mount Lebanon and the surrounding areas within the modern Lebanese state—from the Islamic conquest of the Levant to modern times.
Harris relates the communities that characterize Mount Lebanon and its vicinity, while interpreting the evolution of modern Lebanon in its multi-communal context. He traces the
consolidation of Lebanon's Christian, Muslim, and Islamic derived sects from their origins between the sixth and eleventh centuries. The identities of Maronite Christians, Twelver Shia Muslims, and Druze, the mountain communities, developed alongside assertions of local chiefs under external powers from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. The chiefs began interacting in a common arena when the Druze lord Fakhr al-Din Ma'n achieved domination of the mountain under the Ottomans in the early seventeenth century. The book offers a fresh perspective on subsequent trends, knitting together the interplay of the elite under the Sunni Muslim Shihab relatives of the Ma'ns after 1700 with demographic instability as Maronites overtook Shia as the largest community and expanded into Druze districts. By the
1840s many Maronites conceived the common arena as their patrimony. Maronite/Druze conflict ensued.
Modern Lebanon arose out of European and Ottoman intervention in the 1860s to entrench sectarian peace in a special province. In 1920, after the Ottoman collapse, France and the Maronites enlarged the province into the modern country, with a pluralism of communal minorities headed by Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The book considers the flowering of this pluralism in the mid-twentieth century, and the strains of new demographic shifts and of social resentment in an open economy. External intrusions after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war rendered Lebanon's contradictions unmanageable and the country fell apart.
The book contends that Lebanon has
not found a new equilibrium and has not transcended its sects. There is an uneasy duality: Shia have largely recovered the weight they possessed in the sixteenth century, but Christians, Sunnis, and Druze are two-thirds of the country.Readership: Students/scholars of Middle Eastern history
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William Harris, Professor of Politics, University of Otago, New Zealand Associate Professor of Political Studies, University of Otago
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Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
Glossary
Timeline
Introduction
Part I: Foundations
1. Emerging Communities, 600-1291
2. Druze Ascent, 1291-1633
3. Mountain Lords, 1633-1842
Part II: Modern Lebanon
4. Emerging Lebanon, 1842-1943
5. Independent Lebanon, 1943-1975
6. Broken Lebanon, 1975-2011
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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