Introduction

The period from the late eighteenth century to the First World War is distinctive because it marked the time when the polities of the MENA region were under considerable pressure from the European powers, but still retained basic forms of sovereignty and relative autonomy, and engaged in various forms of self-strengthening and centralization. These kinds of sovereignty, statehood and hegemony were to be lost or completely transformed in the period surrounding the First World War, when colonial rule became general and new forms of political community based around the national principle came into being. From the mass uprising against the French occupation of Egypt (1798–1801), to the constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman empire (1908) and Qajar Iran (1905), and the revolutionary millenarianism of Al-Hiba in Morocco (1912), diverse strands of contentious mobilization owed much to the crises, reform and transformation of centralizing dynastic states whose hegemony was based on Islamic law, divine favour, the sultan's justice, and guarantees of customary autonomies and practices, cultivation and trade.

During this ‘long’ nineteenth century, the major, polyglot, multinational, de-centralized, agrarian and trade-based polities of the MENA, the Ottoman empire, Qajar Iran and Alawi Morocco, lost the autonomy vis-à-vis Europe that they had previously enjoyed. Some parts of these states were taken over outright by European powers: Algeria after 1830, Tunisia after 1881, and Egypt after 1882. The Ottoman empire also lost territories in the Balkans through nationalist secession. Colonial rule mattered enormously, but was not the key driver of contentious mobilization, in spite of the tenacious protests in Algeria throughout the period from the 1830s to the early 1900s. Instead, the key context had to do more with centralization and even empire-building in the region itself. Partly in response to the changing terms of war and trade, and partly to secure their own power, rulers engaged in major projects of dynasty building and state centralization, and military, fiscal and administrative change. In Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman centre, during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century ‘new power states emerged containing centralized bureaucracies, European-style armies, and directed by elites made up in part of men educated in the West’. These states borrowed from eighteenth-century rounds of state-building by provincial dynasts, but they still changed the form of the state decisively.