Adam Mestyan

My research project, Modern Arab Kingship, is a comparative social history of Arabic monarchist ideologies and practices between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s in the post-Ottoman Arab polities: Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and the Hijaz/Saudi Arabia. The project examines the loyalist ideas of Arab intellectuals, merchants, landowners, religious scholars, and statesmen (a group I collectively refer to as “notables”) in the age of capitalist colonialism and the Mandate system. In a global comparison with the ideologies of other Eurasian monarchies at the time, Arab monarchism, I argue, was a novel form of elite political ideology that sought to legitimize and historicize de facto political-economic realities of the colonial context. I use modern Arab kingship as a heuristic concept to describe the racialization (Arabization) of monarchical sovereignty in this particular period. The legal and even religious ideas about royal power did not emerge from Muslim theology but were constructed by both Muslim and Christian elites seeking to articulate independence.