HIST 283 Peasant, Tribe, and Nation in the Middle East

This course examines the role of peasants and tribal formations in the process of nation and state building in the modern Middle East. In addition to looking at some of the empirical and theoretical problems inherent in defining and writing about "peasants" and "tribes" we will also consider how nationalism complicates these issues even more. We will investigate the ways that rural populations were incorporated into or excluded from the processes of state-formation. Finally we will look at how representations of peasant/tribe in ideologies of state-building and nationalism shaped social and political relations within some of the region's nation-states. While we will discuss the region as a whole we focus most of our attention on two empirical cases: Iraq and Egypt.