Using new archival material from Ottoman, Arabic and European sources, Eugene Rogan documents the case of Transjordan to provide a theoretically informed account of how the Ottoman state restructured itself during the last decades of its empire. In so doing, he explores the idea of frontier as a geographical and cultural boundary and sheds light on the processes of state formation that led to the creation of the Middle East as it is today. The book concludes with an examination of the Ottoman legacy in the modern state of Jordan.
Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. He taught at Boston College and Sarah Lawrence College before taking up his post in Oxford in 1991, where he teaches the modern history of the Middle East.