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My engagement with the social history of the Middle East, as I embarked on graduate studies, coincided with Judith Tucker's lamentation in 1990 that it was a field understudied to the point of being largely ignored. I came to the study of this new region with training in the native history of Canada, which had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of reconstructing the stories of people who had been denied agency in a narrative dominated by European conquest and nation-building.

If historians of the Middle East have turned their attention to the environment rather later than those in other subfields, a recent crop of books indicates that a new generation of scholars has spent much productive time considering environmental histories of other geographies. The books reviewed in this essay stand out for their insistence on examining Middle Eastern environments as both ecological facts and representational spaces. Taken in concert, they indicate the vibrancy of environmental history in the field. Moreover, their careful attention to methodology and creative use of sources opens up spaces for new investigations of politics, culture, and religion as mediated through environmental management and representation. Following on the recent work of Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke III, and others, these historians have marshaled environmental, climatological, epidemiological, biological, and geological data for historical argument. Thus, the resulting works situate themselves deeply within their respective historiographic narratives, yet also interrupt, redelineate, and unsettle those narrative assumptions. At its best, the so-called "environmental turn" in the history of the Middle East represents not an intellectual fashion, but rather a major methodological shift that involves a reframing of our understanding of the formation of the field.

It is the aim of this essay to classify various aspects of Islamic political activity (different religious factions, supporters and leaders, motives, and modes of operation) in modern Middle Eastern history from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, and to analyze their causes and relations

"The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures is an unapologetic collection of imaginative essays from thought-provoking Middle East scholar Richard W. Bulliet. Not your ordinary think pieces, this volume collects for the first time Bulliet's Big Bang-Big Crunch theory of Islamic history and his illuminating conception of the "Muslim South." Speculations range from future political events to counterfactual histories of how reversal of the outcome of a 1529 battle might have profoundly altered history. After fifty years of posing and answering daring historical questions, Bulliet happily tackles an array of conjectures on subjects as diverse as the origin of civilization, the end of Middle East history, and future interpretations of the twentieth century"

Statistical findings presented in this paper suggest that the writing and research in Middle Eastern history in the United States is narrowly focused and specialized, and that there are relatively few historians of the modern Middle East. (DÜI-Hns)