Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864

From Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed responsibility to bring security in the Middle East. The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to ’liberate’, ’secure’, and ’educate’ local populations. They staged the first ’humanitarian’ interventions in history and established hitherto unseen international and local security institutions. Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts revisits the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of these imperial security practices. It questions how it all began. Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox--an ever-increasing demand for security despite its increasing supply--ever since? It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, freeing the latter f rom the monopoly of Great Power politics, and also foregrounding the experience of Levantine actors. It explores the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter’s economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law from their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests.

Ozan Ozavci, Assistant Professor of History, Utrecht University

Ozan Ozavci is Assistant Professor of Transimperial History at Utrecht University, and associate member at the Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques in Paris.