Daniel Neep’s excellent account corrects the traditional narrative to show a nation surviving and resisting the powers that have vied to dominate it.
Syria is as ancient, and as complex, as civilisation itself. Lying between antiquity’s great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it functioned as a bridge, sometimes a wall, between them. Rarely a conqueror, it adapted over millennia to invaders from all points on the compass: Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mongols, Turks and French.
All left indelible marks despite their ephemeral presence. On seeing Syria’s historic capital, Damascus, in 1867, Mark Twain reflected, “She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.”
It was only in 1946 that Syria, albeit in truncated form, governed itself after 26 years of French imperial rule. Its freedom of action remained provisional while outsiders — the US and Soviet Union on the global stage, Egypt and Hashemite Iraq within the Arab region — vied to dominate it. The struggle continues today between Turkey and Israel, whose armies occupy respectively the north and the south.
Daniel Neep’s excellent, comprehensive history of “modern” Syria corrects the traditional narrative of a passive Syria by placing its people at the heart of their story. As well as considering “the usual suspects of European colonialism, American imperialism and Soviet expansionism”, he also looks to “seemingly impersonal economic currents” that have played “a crucial yet often overlooked role in remaking modern Syria”.
His account begins in the mid-19th century, during what Turkish historian Selim Deringil calls “the Ottoman twilight”, when sultans in Constantinople grappled with modernising their empire to preserve it from European encroachment…
A History of Modern Syria
Daniel Neep
Allen Lane
To read the full review please visit the FT website.
Main image: Posters and graffiti showing Bashar al-Assad cover the streets of Damascus, 2014, Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
