Viewing Arab history through the prism of the dominant rules of the age yields four distinct periods in modern times: the Ottoman era, the European colonial era, the era of the Cold War, and the present age of U.S. domination and globalization. The trajectory of Arab history across these different periods has been marked by peaks and troughs of greater and lesser sovereignty and independence of action. For to say that the Arab world has been subject to foreign rules does not mean the Arabs have been passive subjects in a unilinear history of decline. Arab history in the modern age has been enormously dynamic, and the Arab peoples are responsible for their successes and failures alike. They have worked with the rules when it suited them, subverted the rules when they got in the way, and suffered the consequences when they crossed the dominant powers of the day. Indeed, the Arabs were always most empowered when there was more than one dominant power to the age. In the colonial era, the Arabs took every opportunity to play the British off the French, as they tried to play the Soviets off the Americans during the Cold War. But with each historic watershed, leading to the fall of the dominant power(s) and the rise of a new world order, the Arabs were driven back to the drawing board until they had mastered the new rules of the age. The moments of transition always heralded a new opening or opportunity, though experience has shown that the impulse of foreign powers to dominate the region becomes more pronounced with each new age.

Modern Arab history begins with the Ottoman conquests of 1516–1517, during which a modern gunpowder army with muskets defeated a medieval army wielding swords. The conquests established Ottoman power across the Arab lands until the end of the First World War. They also represented the beginning of Arab history as played by other people’s rules. Until this point, the Arabs had been ruled from their own great cities—Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo. Under the Ottomans, the Arabs were ruled from distant Istanbul, a city spanning the two continents of Europe and Asia astride the Straits of the Bosporus. The Ottomans ruled the Arabs for four of the past five centuries. Over this expanse of time the empire changed, and the rules changed accordingly. In the first century after the conquest, the Ottoman rules were none too demanding: the Arabs had to recognize the authority of the sultan and respect the laws of both God (sharia, or Islamic law) and the sultan. Non-Muslim minorities were allowed to organize their own affairs, under their own communal leadership and religious laws, in return for paying a poll tax to the state. All in all, most Arabs seemed to view their place in the dominant world empire of the age with equanimity as Muslims in a great Muslim empire. In the eighteenth century, the rules changed significantly. The Ottoman Empire had reached its zenith during the seventeenth century, but in 1699 suffered its first loss of territory—Croatia, Hungary, Transylvania, and Podolia, in the Ukraine—to its European rivals. The cash-strapped empire began to auction both state office and provincial agricultural properties as tax farms to generate revenues. This allowed powerful men in remote provinces to amass vast territories through which they accumulated sufficient wealth and power to challenge the authority of the Ottoman government. Such local lords emerged in the Balkans, in Eastern Anatolia, and across the Arab provinces. In the second half of the eighteenth century a string of such local leaders posed a grave challenge to Ottoman rule in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Damascus, Iraq, and Arabia. By the nineteenth century the Ottomans had initiated a period of major reforms intended to quell the challenges from within the empire and to hold at bay the threats of their European neighbors. This age of reforms gave rise to a new set of rules, reflecting novel ideas of citizenship imported from Europe. The Ottoman reforms tried to establish full equality of rights and responsibilities for all Ottoman subjects—Turks and Arabs alike—in such areas as administration, military service, and taxes. They promoted a new identity, Ottomanism, which sought to transcend the different ethnic and religious divides in Ottoman society. The reforms failed to protect the Ottomans from European encroachment but did allow the empire to reinforce its hold over the Arab provinces, which took on greater importance as nationalism eroded the Ottoman position in the Balkans. Yet, the same ideas that inspired the Ottoman reforms gave rise to new ideas of nation and community, which made some in the Arab world dissatisfied with their position in the Ottoman Empire. They began to chafe against Ottoman rules that increasingly were blamed for the relative backwardness of the Arabs at the start of the twentieth century. Contrasting past greatness with present subordination within an Ottoman Empire that was retreating before stronger European neighbors, many in the Arab world called for reforms within their own society and aspired to Arab independence from the Ottoman world. The fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 seemed to many in the Arab world the threshold of a new age of independence and national greatness. They hoped to resurrect a greater Arab kingdom from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, and they took heart from U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s call for national self-determination as set out in his famous Fourteen Points. They were to be bitterly disappointed, as they found that the new world order would be based on European rather than Wilsonian rules. The British and French used the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to apply the modern state system to the Arab world, with all Arab lands bar central and southern Arabia falling under some form of colonial rule. In Syria and Lebanon, newly emerging from Ottoman rule, the French gave their colonies a republican form of government. The British, in contrast, endowed their Arab possessions in Iraq and Transjordan with the trappings of the Westminster model of constitutional monarchy. Palestine was the exception, where the promise to create a Jewish national home against the opposition of the indigenous population undermined all efforts to form a national government. Each new Arab state was given a national capital, which served as the seat of government. Rulers were pressed to draft constitutions and to create parliaments that were elected by the people. Borders, in many cases quite artificial, were negotiated between neighboring states, often with some acrimony. Many Arab nationalists opposed these measures, which they believed divided and weakened an Arab people that could only regain its rightful status as a respected world power through broader Arab unity. Yet in keeping with the European rules, meaningful political action was confined to the borders of the new Arab states. One of the enduring legacies of the colonial period is the tension between nation-state nationalism (e.g., Egyptian or Iraqi nationalism) and pan-Arab nationalist ideologies. National movements emerged in the first half of the twentieth century within individual colonial states in opposition to foreign rule. No meaningful Arab-wide nationalist movement was possible so long as the Arab world was divided between Britain and France. And by the time the Arab states began to secure their independence from colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s, the divisions between Arab states had become permanent. The problem was that most Arab citizens believed smaller nationalisms based around colonial creations were fundamentally illegitimate. For those who aspired to Arab greatness in the twentieth century, only the broader Arab nationalist movement offered the prospect of achieving the critical mass and unity of purpose necessary to restore the Arabs to their rightful place among the powers of the day. The colonial experience left the Arabs as a community of nations rather than a national community, and the Arabs remain disappointed by the results.