ReviewsKeith Watenpaugh's work is a seminal contribution to the history of the region and to the larger scholarly universe .... It must be a required part of any sort of reading list on modern Middle Eastern history, and I am sure that it will form an important component of graduate courses on the history of the region. But, perhaps equally significant, Being Modern in the Middle East is a very important contribution to the rank of scholarly studies of the middle class across the world. It adds one more work to a relatively small list of books that can and should be used to illustrate how the experience of modernity and the formation the middle class are both unique to specific regions yet offer a wealth of possibilities for comparative historical scholarship.Sanjay Joshi - Comparative Studies in the Middle East, Africa and South AsiaKeith Watenpaugh's Being Modern in the Middle East is a ground-breaking tour de force.... In the final analysis, what is novel and interesting about this book is that it theoretically engages the intellectual history of the middle class in the Middle East more fully than any previous work. Conceptually, it reconnects three periods (Ottoman revolution, nationalism and colonialism) in the history of the eastern Mediterranean that have been unconvincingly sundered apart within most studies of Middle Eastern history. In the process, Watenpaugh raises pertinent questions ...about several ideological binaries (national/colonial, patriot/collaborator, modernity/tradition) that have come to dominate the history of the Middle East. As such, it is a most valuable contribution not only to the history of the Middle East, but also to the history of modernity and the nonwestern middle classesAkram Fouad Khater -- Social HistoryIt is his insistence on the historically contingent and contextually specific nature of the transition to modernity that makes Watenpaugh's work such a strong contribution to both Middle Eastern social history, and to our understanding of the advent of "modernity" and the development of self-identified and self-fashioned "middle classes" more generally. By establishing local conditions and non-Western agency as determining factors in one of the defining social and cultural transformations of recent world history, Watenpaugh makes an important contribution to revising the dominant Eurocentric paradigm for understanding the formation of the modern world.Nathan C. Godley -- Itinerario