The Damascus Events

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus.

Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority.

But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly - but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital.

This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

©2024 Eugene Rogan (P) 2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • PRAISE FOR THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS: ‘Thrilling, superb, and colourful … truly essential but also truly exciting reading.

    Simon Sebag Montefiore

  • A timely and capacious history… compelling and brilliant.

    Sunday Telegraph

  • Remarkably readable, judicious and well-researched.

    Financial Times

  • PRAISE FOR THE DAMASCUS EVENTS: Compelling and authoritative, powerful in narrative, and filled with new revelations, this book offers a superb account of the 1860 Damascus massacres—much neglected nowadays but central to the creation of the modern Middle East.

    Simon Sebag Montefiore

  • In the hands of the distinguished historian and master storyteller Eugene Rogan, an incident of communal violence in Damascus in 1860 is at once an evocation of the vanished world of the Ottoman empire and an ominous foreshadowing of the communal violence tearing apart the Middle East of today.

    Margaret MacMillan

  • A stunning portrait of the Ottoman Empire and of Damascus during a time of crisis. Absolutely riveting.

    Peter Frankopan

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