Surviving the Balkans’ twentieth century was no simple task for Albanian Christians. Facing a regime of capitalism that absorbed the socialist Balkans in the 1990s, the efforts of Albanian Orthodox Christians to adapt seem inadequate. This chapter explores how one may read the struggles of the post-Communist Albanian autocephalous Orthodox Church (Kisha Orthodhokse Autoqefale e Shqipërisë) that confronted the “universal” neoliberal enterprise in the context of the concurrent tensions within Albanian circles seeking the reaffirmation of ethno-nationalist concerns. In questioning how the rebuilding of the Church reflected an aggressive missionary approach led by Greek-born Archbishop Anastasios, whose recent passing in January 2025 begins a new period of uncertainty, it will become clear how necessary it is to read this ongoing process of rebuilding on several institutional and ideological/spiritual planes.

While increasingly included in general surveys of world and regional histories, the complex, multicentury histories of the Indian Ocean rarely attract a comprehensive analysis focused on trade. Cunliffe (formerly, archaeology, Univ. of Oxford, UK) offers just such a corrective study. This volume covers the history of trade in the Indian Ocean from antiquity to the early modern era, combining archaeological evidence and tales of the ocean’s great travelers to account for the origins of globalization. Focusing especially economic systems, this phenomenal study provides the historical perspectives needed to understand modern economies. Impressively, Cunliffe frames the origins of global maritime trade within the stories of the Indian Ocean's great voyagers, including Muslim travelers Ibn Battuta and Zheng He. More valuable still, he emphasizes the interconnections between these Indian Ocean traders and maritime trade routes in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and the Red and South China Sea regions. While the story invariably continues after 1600 CE, when European companies began to dominate global trade, this study's parameters are justified by invaluable reflections on how commodities traded during the period covered amply reflect an era predating capitalist imperialism. As such, Cunliffe considers the so-called birth of the modern world as the progeny of an already deeply connected Indian Ocean. 

For as much as it seeks to upset recycled tropes about Islam and its place, especially in Western tradition, this book succeeds in reaffirming the far more complex Muslim experience. Drawing on recent research that engages with the claims of Muslim diversity and complexity across centuries of practice, Tolan (emer., Nantes Univ., France) builds on his past contributions to rethink how the Islamic faith developed over the centuries. Rehabilitating much of the disparity work on the theme that corrects the mainstream view, Tolan reinforces the need to understand Islam’s variability and deep insinuation into the cultural and spiritual heritage of the world that predates the rise of the monotheistic faith. As such, the book serves as a perfect, revised narrative to present to students of all levels regarding how dynamic and diverse Muslim practices and the societies they built came to be. As a text, the book is fluid and accessible enough to serve as a primary entry point to help readers remember that the same dynamism that made the Islamic world of the past remains very much relevant to Muslims today. 

The multi-vector development discourse about ‘the Gulf’ as booming in an emerging multi-polar world sets a very high bar for the scholars who sustain the function of this anomaly in the Global South. Recognizing that a variegated propaganda-for-sale is at play in the production of an ideological Gulf narrative, we have invested in this Special Issue, titled ‘The Gulf and the World.’ We have sought to identify the prevailing hegemonic discourse devised to render palpable the geopolitical relationship between a Western capitalist project and their allies in the Gulf. The resulting findings situate the myth of a selective group of Western-leaning states circulating within often disparate, even rival, scholarly approaches. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have not only monopolized scholarly notions of the Gulf, but also engendered in developmental terms a disjointed, if not crumbling, MENA region. At this juncture, its character as a contemporary ‘anomaly’ carries concrete function in creating a new analytical prism that reinserts the Gulf’s strategic value as a particular operational node for the imperialist fracturing of the wider region in terms of socio-cultural, economic and political cohesion. As hinted throughout, scholarship on the Gulf contraption requires new frames of analysis.

Often treated as simply anti-modernism, a focus on three reformist figures with transnational intellectual ties—Shariat Sangelaji, Asadollah Kharaqani, and Muhammad Khalesizadeh—reveals how Iranian natives of the Gulf littoral contributed to reconstitute modern life by criticizing the global structures of power arising with European imperialism. Blurring the dichotomy of modern/traditional, Iran and the West, these intellectuals with trans-regional scholarly connections combined different aspects of modernity with a reading of Islamic practice to offer a global model of resistance for Muslims. A version of this Shi’i empowerment in the face of growing changes in the larger world and at home mobilized discussions about women in Iran as the source of the necessary social cohesion during the anti-imperialist struggle. A challenge to normative portrayals of Islam (and religion more generally) as an impediment to progress, studying these three Gulf scholars’ alternative modernity allows for identifying a campaign to free women from the consequences of their economic exploitation.

The Ottoman Empire’s territorial and maritime reach throughout its nearly 600-year existence is nothing short of extraordinary. Considering the plethora of adversaries at whose expense the empire continued to expand, its boundaries and their movement over time deserve close attention as sites of cultural, socioeconomic, as well as political history. Here we explore the theme of Ottoman borders as critical windows into the dynamics shaping the larger empire, including the great urban centers often located far from these frontiers. In providing a summary of the territorial limits (or beginnings) of this multiethnic empire, we provide insights into the complexities that constitute the processes by which the Ottomans administered as much as lived in these regions. Be they witness to the stability that accompanied peace between neighboring states or the frequent volatility caused by war, the empire’s edges served as theaters for intraimperial development that shaped subject and state alike.

The Ottoman Empire’s long history is infused with stories of migration, voluntary or not. Increasingly an area of focus for scholars, the migration story has diversified as studies seek to explain in new ways a larger historical process. From the very beginning of the empire, large flows of human beings animated Ottoman political, economic, and cultural life. From peasants uprooted by periods of administrative transition occurring as the empire replaced previous ruling structures to political, cultural, and economic exiles welcomed by various constituencies within the Ottoman state structure, migrants, nomads, and refugees have been critical to the framing of a wide variety of histories (Kasaba, 2009).

While previous scholarship has proven helpful, there is room to improve some ways of characterizing such migratory actors. The associations made by referring to sets of people moving within Ottoman territories as migrants, workers, and/or refugees shape our interpretation of events around them. Refugees, for example, are often portrayed as having been bereft of agency and dependent on the historical choices of their “hosts” – often the Ottoman state or its external rivals. Research has shown that their stories are far more complex (Fratantuono, 2017). Earlier work on refugees (muhacir in Ottoman) in the larger context of migration suggests that their contribution to Ottoman history was just as crucial to understanding the dramatic, often disconnected events. By the final century, for example, government officials sought to administer and regulate their settlement because of how critical they were to maintaining stability. In other words, at certain moments the refugee become an active agent of Ottoman history.

Long the destination for uprooted peoples in the broader Middle East, Jordan’s complex history of accommodating refugees regularly requires scholarly attention. Initially a dumping ground for Britain’s Palestinian victims and later for refugees from Iraq to Syria and beyond, Jordan today hosts upwards of three million refugees. It is from this dynamic setting of accommodation and the resulting political crises that this excellent volume intervenes. With multiple contributors casting a long historic light on the capacities of the state to manage each wave of refugees, the resulting exposé of policies expands readers' understanding of the complexities of constant adjustment. The important findings from this volume take place over three sections. The first includes contributions on how Jordanian officials work with international organizations to assimilate large numbers of refugees into the country’s exploitative labor markets and the more difficult task of shaping how refugees fend for themselves during long periods of funding scarcity. The final two sections reflect on the resulting attempts by various groups of refugees to organize their lives in camps and new neighborhoods of cities by way of solidarity communities, providing valuable insights for readers to better understand the modern Middle East more generally. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Upsetting tropes about Euro-American expansionism into Southeast Asia requires identifying a diverse cadre of imperialist benefactors who availed themselves as the racial go-betweens in the violent confrontations with Indigenous peoples. As imperial administrators sought alternative means of subjugating Indigenous Muslims in the South China Sea, a new complexity to the power dynamics informing Jafaar Alloul’s concept of ‘racial capital’ emerges. As we monitor first Spanish and then US efforts to balance expectations and methods of rule over Muslim populations, our analysis demands a reassessment of the elusive profile of the frontiersmen, settlers, pioneers, miners and state employees who brought modern capitalism’s empire from the North American Great Plains to the jungled highlands and coastal swamps of the Southern Philippines and Borneo.

A leader in her interdisciplinary trade, Stacy D. Fahrenthold reveals the full value of adopting a global perspective on the modern Middle East by way of a meticulous study of Syrian/Palestinian migrants to the Northeast United States and beyond. In her second monograph on migration from the Ottoman Empire, Fahrenthold combs local and regional newspapers to reveal a new perspective to the intercontinental channels of commerce that made US industrialization a global story. By offering a bottom-up story of the dynamic and expanding (if politically and socially diverse) Syrian American population in the rapidly industrializing United States, Fahrenthold makes a significant contribution to several genres of scholarship.

The focus is overwhelmingly on the urban working classes toiling to maintain their extended families in the miserable conditions of the industry towns of Massachusetts, Maine, and New York. Drawing from invaluable local sources, Fahrenthold exposes the complexity of the Syrian Mahjar (Arabic for Diaspora) story by finding new socio-economic actors to a story once privileging the grandee families who built commercial empires, the men who serviced the economic expansion in the Americas as “peddlers” (door-to-door salesmen) or owners of small convenience stores. In contrast, Fahrenthold reveals a rich subdivision of the Syrian American garment workers and weavers who serviced the textile trade their Syrian/Lebanese capitalist bosses dominated. As such, this fabulously researched book draws attention to untold contributions that Syrian women gave to this major sector in the US industrial economy.