"The Origins of Arab Nationalism" contains the most recent revisionist scholarship on the rise of Arab nationalsim that began with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The various contributors, including C. Ernest Down, Mahmoud Haddad, Reeva Simon, and Beth Baron, provide an unusually broad survey of the Arab world at the turn on the century, permitting a comparison of developments in a variety of settings from Syria and Egypt to the Hijaz, Libya, and Iraq.