Customer Reviews

The Middle East On the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the 18th Century (Study of the Middle East Institute Ser)

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Marcus' work is an astonishing achievement in historical description and archival research. While being careful not to transgress of limitations of his sources, he nonetheless is able to construct a fascinating, intriguing picture of life in Aleppo, Syria in the 18th century. His organization scheme focuses predominately on beginning with a wide lens view of Aleppo as situated in the Ottoman Empire and the vicissitudes of political life, economic fortune and misfortune, and at times social chaos and upheaval down to the more narrow view of the every day life of individual and his relation to his body/health, religion, family and neighbors. The book is extremely readable while maintaining scholarly rigor at the same time. I would have no hesitations recommended it to anyone generally interested in the Middle East or traveling through the region with an interest in its history.

My impression of the overarching thesis of the book was that Aleppo as a society was anything but stagnant and frozen in time but was a dynamic society of adaptation and profound efforts to maintain tradition and religious belief. This being said, Marcus, unlike a scholar such as Peter Gran, see no tendencies or intimations of a development of an Aleppine modernity prior to contact with an ever-expanding Europe. In other words, there was no autochthonous tendency towards what is now considered to be the ostensibly universal process of `modernization'.

Professor Marcus has given us information that was not available to the public before. If you are interested in Aleppo and its history, you will love this book. It is very enlightening and carefully sourced. I thank Professor Marcus who is a obviously a true scholar.

This is a unique and scholarly award-winning study of the history of Aleppo in the eighteenth century. The author who is a history professor himself, did an exhaustive literature review of the events of this Syrian city around the time of the instant study. however, and wrightly so, he mainly relied on the review of the records of the religious court (shari'a) in the city.

I didn't find this text very helpful because it described Aleppo in the eighteenth century using narration. I didn't feel like the Author had the right to speculate the way he did. This text was required for a class I took. At the end of the semester we wrote a research paper, and I found this text to be useless.