Modern History of the Arab Countries

A reader who opens this book expecting the Arab world of 1969 - Nasser two years after the June defeat, the Ba'ath entrenched in Damascus and Baghdad, the fedayeen, the oil weapon - will be surprised to find that it ends in 1918, with British martial law proclaimed over Damascus and the Arab flag hauled down at Beirut.

Vladimir Lutsky's Modern History of the Arab Countries is a history of the Ottoman Arab provinces from the Turkish conquest of the early sixteenth century to the collapse of that empire in the First World War. Within those four centuries it is honest and often admirable scholarship: reliable on the structures of Ottoman rule, clear-eyed about the European penetration of the nineteenth century, sharp on Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration and the carve-up that followed, and consistently generous to the peoples whose struggle it recounts.

The book has an unusual provenance, and the front matter is candid about it. Lutsky (1906-1962) did not live to see it published; it appeared seven years after his death. It "consists of a series of lectures that took several years to prepare" - delivered at Moscow University between 1949 and 1953 - and where no verbatim transcript survived, the compilers fell back on a chapter he had contributed to a 1940 textbook. Three younger Arabists, R. G. Landa, I. M. Smilyanskaya and M. S. Lazarev, prepared particular chapters for the press from his archive and from students' notes.

So the date on the spine is the least reliable fact about it. What the reader gets is a mid-century Soviet Arabist's lecture course, reconstructed by his pupils.

Translated by Lika Nasser. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.