Recent developments in Palestinian political, economic, and social life have resulted in greater insecurity and diminishing confidence in Israel s willingness to abide by political agreements or the Palestinian leadership s ability to forge consensus. This volume examines the legacies of the past century, conditions of life in the present, and the possibilities and constraints on prospects for peace and self-determination in the future. These historically grounded essays by leading scholars engage the issues that continue to shape Palestinian society, such as economic development, access to resources, religious transformation, and political movements."

Fernand Braudel (1912-1985), was a leading French historian and author of, among other books, the groundbreaking The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). One of the founders of the Annales School in France, Braudel insisted on treating the Mediterranean region as a whole, irrespective of religious and national divides. Braudel's new historiography rejected political history as the dominant discipline and espoused a 'total history' or a 'history from below' that would tell the story of the vast majority of humanity hitherto excluded from the grand narrative. At the time of the book's appearance, this premise was revolutionary. The contributors to Braudel Revisited assess the impact of Braudel's work on today's academic world, in light of subsequent methodological shifts. Engaging with Braudel's texts as well as with his ideas, the essays in this volume speak to the enduring legacy of his work on the ongoing exploration of early modern history.

Recent developments in Palestinian political, economic, and social life have resulted in greater insecurity and diminishing confidence in Israel s willingness to abide by political agreements or the Palestinian leadership s ability to forge consensus. This volume examines the legacies of the past century, conditions of life in the present, and the possibilities and constraints on prospects for peace and self-determination in the future. These historically grounded essays by leading scholars engage the issues that continue to shape Palestinian society, such as economic development, access to resources, religious transformation, and political movements."

In this original and wide-ranging study, Gabriel Piterberg examines theideology and literature behind the colonization of Palestine, from the latenineteenth century to the present. Exploring Zionism's origins in Central-EasternEuropean nationalism and settler movements, he shows how its texts can beplaced within a wider discourse of western colonization. Revisiting the work ofTheodor Herzl and Gershom Scholem, Anita Shapira and David Ben-Gurion, andbringing to light the writings of lesser-known scholars and thinkersinfluential in the formation of the Zionist myth, Piterberg breaks openprevailing views of Zionism, demonstrating that it was in fact unexceptional,expressing a consciousness and imagination typical of colonial settlermovements. Shaped by European ideological currents and the realities ofcolonial life, Zionism constructed its own story as a unique and impregnableone, in the process excluding the voices of an indigenous people-thePalestinian Arabs.

In the space of six years early in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent such turmoil and trauma--the assassination of the young ruler Osman II, the re-enthronement and subsequent abdication of his mad uncle Mustafa I, for a start--that a scholar pronounced the period's three-day-long dramatic climax "an Ottoman Tragedy." Under Gabriel Piterberg's deft analysis, this period of crisis becomes a historical laboratory for the history of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century--an opportunity to observe the dialectical play between history as an occurrence and experience and history as a recounting of that experience.
Piterberg reconstructs the Ottoman narration of this fraught period from the foundational text, produced in the early 1620s, to the composition of the state narrative at the end of the seventeenth century. His work brings theories of historiography into dialogue with the actual interpretation of Ottoman historical texts, and forces a rethinking of both Ottoman historiography and the Ottoman state in the seventeenth century. A provocative reinterpretation of a major event in Ottoman history, this work reconceives the relation between historiography and history.