UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

This is a wide-ranging, nuanced, phenomenally well-informed, and humane history of the Arab peoples in the 20th Century. Andrew Arsan is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at Cambridge.

Arsan delves into newspapers, music, literature and social media, as well as the larger intellectual and political movements across the Arab world, to tell a story of intellectual creativity, political ferment, and continuous, churning ideological change. Ideologies and governments come and go - reform, independence, nationalism, economic liberalism, fundamentalism but the hunger for freedom, rights and modernity across the region never wanes.

It is this common search for rights and modernity for political freedom, social and economic protections, and cultural autonomy that forms the backbone of Arsan's argument. We discover that the history of the Arab twentieth century is characterised not just by repression, conflict, religious strife or great power interference, as is so often thought, but also by the ideas, beliefs, hopes and aspirations of successive generations of Arab men and women. Andrew is able to recover optimism and heroism from the frustrations of a troubled century.

Arsan is completely immersed in the Arab world, he travels everywhere, listening, observing, debating and unpacking the complicated and often censored public sphere. He seems to know every nook and cranny of the elites and the ghettos, the rivalries and snobberies, the labyrinthine power-politics, the sectarian divides, the distinct character of each city or province, and skilfully weaves them together in a coherent narrative that bursts with life and colour.

Andrew Arsan is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St. John's College. Born in Beirut and brought up in Lebanon, France, and the United Kingdom, Andrew speaks Arabic and French fluently, and has some knowledge of Turkish. He has conducted research on four continents, and has travelled widely through the Arab world. The recipient of a 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize in recognition of his work on modern Arab political thought, Andrew has appeared on BBC World News, BBC Radio 4, and Monocle Radio. He has previously taught at Birkbeck, University of London, and Princeton University, and was the 2016-17 Ganshof van der Meersch visiting Chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His first book, INTERLOPERS OF EMPIRE: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2014) was chosen as the joint winner of the Royal Historical Society's 2015 Gladstone Prize for the best first book in non-British history; the judges described it as 'transnational history of the very best kind'.