UK-based scholars founded modern Middle East ethnopolitics as a break from Orientalism

Evidence

It was UK-based Middle East scholars who initiated the serious and systematic study of ethnopolitics and considered the role of ethnicity in the sociopolitical developments of the region in the post-Ottoman period. This was a scholarship which intended to break away from the prevailing Orientalist paradigm, with its philological approach to the study of society, and instead make use of contemporary social science methodologies and analytical concepts to study the region. Albert Hourani, based at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and considered to be the doyen of modern Middle East studies in the UK, led the way with the publication of his seminal text entitled Minorities in the Arab World (1947). Several essays and books followed this publication, by other prominent Middle East scholars such as Elie Kedourie, Gabriel Baer, and Bernard Lewis, which were published in the 1950s and early 1960s. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3487

Categorization

• XREF: Bernard Lewis’s trajectory resonates with the chapter’s larger point about the deeper history of ‘Middle East’ as a constructed category.