By Cyrus Schayegh
The Twentieth-Century Global MENA Histories Primary Source Collection has been long in the making. It began around 2020, with me believing I could create it myself, using a variety of primary sources I had collected over the years. That was a fancy. My sources were not sufficiently varied, and my knowledge and time too limited. Hence, I began asking colleagues for contributions. Many, many agreed, for which I am deeply grateful. I am equally in debt to the Exeter University DAME team led by Dr. James Downs, who agreed to online-publish this collection free of charge. The DAME team has done a wonderful job making the collection presentable, formatting it, and tagging it in both English and Arabic. (The collection was originally meant to be published at the Wilson Center Digital Archives in Washington, DC, but the US Administration’s decision, in early 2025, to downsize that center nixed that possibility.)
The collection includes 83 contributions. Most feature one source, a few two or more sources. All include a blurb that contextualizes the source(s) and provides select bibliographical references.
The sources focus on the twentieth century—not because it forms a homogeneous unit, but for a practical reason. To cover a whole century even only somewhat adequately, many dozens of contributions were needed. Adding the nineteenth century would have overwhelmed my editorial and organizational capacities. (I hope somebody will create such a collection, though!) As most contributions are multi-thematic, I have listed them chronologically rather than ordering them thematically.
I have tried to keep the collection as diverse as possible. All decades of the twentieth century are covered, though some more than others. All sorts of fields are dealt with, including societal interactions, politics and governmental matters, international relations, culture and the arts, economic matters including finance, production, consumption, and trade, environmental issues, medicine, science and technology, transport and communication, migration and diasporas, religion, and ideologies and political thought. The primary sources were written in 19 languages: Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Dari, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Primary source types comprise a range of newspaper and magazine articles; varied documents from governmental and non-governmental archives; speeches; books, including biographies, autobiographies, and diaries; government, NGO, and INGO publications; unpublished manuscripts; letters; advertisements; photographs; a set of oral history interviews; and a stock exchange share. Finally, the sources regard relationships between and across MENA and all (other) parts of the world, i.e. the Americas, Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
À propos geography: as this collection is not a sharp argument, but hopes to be an expansive educational tool, its definition of MENA is broad. I told the contributors that it ranges “from Morocco eastwards to Egypt; Sudan; the Arab East including Palestine/Israel; Turkey; the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf; and Iran,” and that “I am also open to sources involving adjacent areas, e.g. Mauretania, very late Ottoman or post-Ottoman southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.” Similarly, this collection does not subscribe to—let alone promotes—a uniform definition of “global.” I told the contributors that “for this collection’s eminently practical, educational purposes, any source that documents a relationship between MENA and non-MENA (peoples) fits the bill.”
Seen as a whole, the collection’s primary sources involve, and reflect on, fundamental social categories such as gender, race, class, and religion that per se are not MENA-specific. Moreover, most themes are not exclusive to MENA, but, rather, show how thoroughly MENA (sub)region(s) and actors formed part of, were shaped by, and helped shape developments that created the modern world. These developments include, for instance, wars such as World War I and II; colonialism and empire building, including the Ottoman, British and post-WW2 international American ones and MENA actors’ places in, and engagements with, those imperial formations; settler colonialism and reactions thereto; migration to, from and across MENA, and diasporas; nation-state-building in a globalizing world; governmental issues such as urban planning; modern scientific, technological, and medical questions; various ideologies including Islamism and communism; the formation of authoritarian postcolonial states; artistic and cultural relationships; transport and communication infrastructures; and capitalism in its various forms, including finance and agriculture.
At the same time, there are some broad global themes in which (shifting parts of) twentieth-century MENA and MENA actors often played a relatively central role. The two most important examples are oil and Islam in its varied socioreligious forms.
Finally, (changing parts of) MENA and MENA actors often played a pivotal role in the modern world for two interrelated geographical reasons. For one thing, MENA is the only direct neighbor of Europe—and hence quite often directly on the route of, and involved in, world-embracing European imperial expansions and non-European engagements with Europe. For another thing, (various parts of) MENA are (and have been able to construe themselves as) key connectors of Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is not, of course, that geography is destiny: this would be much too simplistic and deterministic a view. And it is not that MENA actors and territories were involved in all planetary, global, or transregional relationships. But MENA’s double positioning—vis-à-vis Europe and in Eurafrasia—seems to have turned its subregions and peoples quite often into arenas and actors in the twentieth-century world.
I hope this collection—alongside other online collections such as https://revolutionarypapers.org and https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/international-dimensions-decolonization-middle-east-and-north-africa-primary-source, and books such as Julia Clancy-Smith and Charles Smith, The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents and Camron Amin, Benjamin Fortna, and Elizabeth Frierson, eds., The Modern Middle East: A Sourcebook for History—will allow interested readers to explore modern MENA and its many actors and global connections in all their variety and complexity.
The Global Histories of MENA in the 20th Century Primary Source Collection is now online as part of the Digital Archive of the Middle East.