© Columbia University Press
The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria
Paper, 272 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-8540-0
$37.50
October, 2011
Cloth, 272 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4187-1
Edinburgh University Press
$105.00
Why, in the years around 1920, did the concept of ‘minority’ suddenly become prominent in public affairs worldwide? This book uses a study of Syria under the French mandate to show what historical developments led people to start describing themselves and others as ‘minorities’. Despite French attempts to create territorial, political, and legal divisions, the mandate period saw the consolidation of the nation-state form in Syria. There was a trend towards a coherent national territory with fixed borders and uniform state authority within them, while the struggle to control the state was played out in the language of nationalism. Through close attention to what changed in French mandate Syria, and what those changes meant, the book argues for a careful reappraisal of a term too often used as an objective description of reality.