In this groundbreaking book, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. She shows that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. In situating the Middle East within the context of world history, Khuri-Makdisi challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. The book demonstrates that these radical trajectories played a fundamental role in shaping societies throughout the world and offers a powerful rethinking of Ottoman intellectual and social history. “A dazzling array of published and archival sources in Arabic, Ottoman, Italian, French, and English.” ― Arab Studies Journal Published On: 2012-07-16 “Effectively disputes tired and old paradigms. . . . An essential contribution to the literature of the origins of left-wing radicalism.” -- Fraser Ottanelli ― European Legacy Published On: 2012-10-19 The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism is the perfect antidote to the deterministic histories that have for so long obscured how the Middle East came to modernity. Khuri-Makdisi rightly argues that it was both more complex and more open to the outside influences than either nationalist historians (who see only the state) or the partisans of the new orientalism (who see only Islam) have been willing to admit. This book has been badly needed for some time. Edmund Burke III, co-editor of The Environment and World History “ The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism is the perfect antidote to the deterministic histories that have for so long obscured how the Middle East came to modernity. Khuri-Makdisi rightly argues that it was both more complex and more open to the outside influences than either nationalist historians (who see only the state) or the partisans of the new orientalism (who see only Islam) have been willing to admit. This book has been badly needed for some time.”―Edmund Burke III, co-editor of The Environment and World History Ilham Khuri-Makdisi is Assistant Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at Northeastern University. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 By Ilham Khuri-Makdisi UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-520-26201-0 Contents Acknowledgments, ix, Introduction, 1, 1. The late nineteenth-century World and the Emergence of a Global Radical Culture, 15, 2. The Nahba, the Press, and the Construction and dissemination of a Radical Worldview, 35, 3. Theater and Radical Politics in beirut, Cairo, and alexandria 1860–1914, 60, 4. The Construction of Two Radical networks in beirut and alexandria, 94, 5. Workers, labor Unrest, and the formulation and dissemination of Radical leftist ideas, 135, Conclusion: deprovincializing the Eastern Mediterranean, 165, Appendix, 173, Notes, 175, Bibliography, 241, Index, 263, CHAPTER 1 The Late Nineteenth-century World and the Emergence of a Global Radical Culture In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, various groups of people throughout the world—workers, peasants, intellectuals, activists—began agitating for social justice, using similar and interrelated discourses and adopting similar terminologies and praxis and circulating their ideas through print, performance, and word of mouth. Their activities fostered a plethora of ideas and practices pertaining to social justice, while simultaneously reflecting a convergence in the ways those ideas were articulated and implemented, and led to the establishment of an entangled worldwide web of radical networks. As a result, I would like to suggest, one can write about a global radical moment lasting roughly from the 1870s until the 1920s and about the making of a global radical culture during this period. In this chapter I examine the emergence of this global radical moment: its key players in the four corners of the world, the networks and institutions that helped them disseminate their ideas locally and globally, the movements' main ideas and causes célèbres, and their literary and political canons and reading lists. I focus on the players, movements, and networks that had a direct impact on the story of radicalism in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria and emphasize the links between world regions that help explain the interconnectivity of these radicalisms and the making of a global radical moment. Most traditional histories of the Left have crafted their genealogies on the works of specific Franco-German (and occasionally British) thinkers. These genealogies start somewhere in the early nineteenth