The Middle East between the World Wars

These five volumes survey the history of the Middle East from the aftermath of WW I to the end of WW II. They deal primarily with Egypt, Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab Peninsula states. They also relate to the countries bordering on the region: Turkey, Iran, the Nile countries and North Africa. The volumes analyze the "Parliamentarian" 1920s and "The Crisis of the 1930s", focusing mainly on the dynamism of inter-generational tensions as a key to sociopolitical and ideological changes.

In so doing, the series surveys developments in each of the major countries, but also attempts to recount the history of the region as a whole, as the home of a common Islamic-Arab civilization. It ends with a discussion of the changes produced by World War II and the momentum it created for processes which shaped the Middle East from the 1950s to the present.

Volume 1: The spirit of the 1920s (1992, 312 pp., cat. # 10425-1)

Volume 2: The British Mandate countries in the 1920s (1993, 448 pp., cat. # 10425-2)

Volume 3: The French Mandate countries in the 1920s (1994, 516 pp., cat. # 10425-3)

Volume 4: The 1930s - Crises and rebellion (1996, 368 pp., cat. # 10425-4)

Volume 5: World War II - History in parentheses (2003, 479 pp., cat. # 10425-5)

Professor Haggai Erlich, of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University and the History Department at the Open University of Israel, is author of 10 books, among them Ethiopia and the Middle East (Lynne Rienner, 1994) and The Cross and the River – Ethiopia, Egypt and the Nile (Lynne Rienner, 2002) and co-editor of The Nile – Histories, Cultures, Myths (Lynne Rienner, 2000).

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