Middle East History Is Social History

Abstract

My engagement with the social history of the Middle East, as I embarked on graduate studies, coincided with Judith Tucker's lamentation in 1990 that it was a field understudied to the point of being largely ignored. I came to the study of this new region with training in the native history of Canada, which had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of reconstructing the stories of people who had been denied agency in a narrative dominated by European conquest and nation-building.