Michael PROVENCE

The structures of governance in the post-colonial countries of the global south are often poorly understood. The book investigates the circular interactions between Arab intellectuals corresponding with the League of Nations mandates commission and the French government. For the two-decade period of the mandates (1920-1939), the two representatives of France and the League’s mandates commission remained the same: Robert de Caix and William Rappard respectively. The main Arab petitioner, Shakib Arslan, also remained active during the entire period. The book seeks to understand the formative institutions of the post-colonial Arab states by excavating the relationship and interactions of protesters, colonial officials, and new international institutions.

Michael Provence is Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. In 2010-2011 and summer 2014 he was an Alexander von Humboldt senior research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. He earned a PhD in Modern Middle Eastern History from the University of Chicago under the direction of Rashid Khalidi in 2001. He has written two books, The Great Syrian Revolt and The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East, out in spring 2017, and many articles on the late Ottoman and colonial Middle East of the early 20th century.

PROVENCE, Michael. The Last Ottoman Generation and the making of the Modern Middle East, forthcoming 2017, Cambridge University Press.

PROVENCE, Michael. The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, University of Texas Press, Modern Middle East Series, No. 22, 2005.

PROVENCE, Michael. “The Levant Mandates,” in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle East and North African History edited by Jens Hanssen and Amal Ghazal, Oxford University Press 2016. UK.

PROVENCE, Michael. "Legitimidad y discurso entre el Estado y la revolución en Siria,” in Mundo árabe: levantamientos populares, contextos, crisis y reconfiguraciones, Gilberto Conde, Camila Pastor and Marta Tawil (eds.) México: El Colegio de México and CIDE (2016), (in Spanish). ,Mexico.

PROVENCE, Michael. “French Mandate Counterinsurgency and the Repression of the Great Syrian Revolt,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, edited by Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan, 2015. UK.