Marxist historians pioneered writing Near Eastern history from below.

Evidence

Cahen was a Marxist, and in La Syrie du Nord he struggled to present the region as a territory in its own right, rather than as a temporary imperial extension of medieval Europe. He paid particularly careful attention to the topography and economy of northern Syria. He wanted to get away from history as the story of the doings of great men. At the 1954 Orientalist Congress at Cambridge, he denounced what he saw as the amateur historiography produced by imperialists, colonialists and missionaries, and their excessive preoccupation with the affairs of sultans, scholars and great artists. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 455