Inside the Arab World. Although Field's book is fairly well written, and is certainly an improvement on nothing at all, it offers on the whole a shallow rather than a penetrating look at the Arab world, and the changes which it has undergone in the last two generations, and continues to undergo.
The book is formally divided into two sections. The first eight chapters, collectively called "Failure," combine a summary of modern Arab history with a survey of what Field considers the problems facing the contemporary Arab world. The remaining twelve chapters, called "Reform," deal with the Arabs' various responses to their contemporary situation.
Both the strengths and the weaknesses of book as a whole are aptly encapsulated by Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which summarize the modern history of the Arab world. To Americans, whose picture of the history of the Middle East is likely to begin with the Arab-Israeli wars, with only the haziest knowledge of "Lawrence of Arabia," some summary of the previous colonial period is surely helpful.
Field gives an good, concise account of the complex jockeying for position between the British and the French in the Middle East during and after the First World War. There is a certain flavor of bias toward the British (Field previously wrote for the London Financial Times, and may well be British himself), a bias that expresses itself more in his treatment of the French. He appears to be tolerably objective in recounting the less-than-honest dealings of the British with Arab leaders, and their subsequent efforts to manufacture tame monarchs and to grant "independence" so qualified that it amounted to disguised protectorates.
However, one feels that Field might have devoted a page or two, at least, to the centuries of history that have created Arab society. Arabs, Field says, "are much more conscious of their history than Westerners are of theirs" (p. 8). His remarks on the past of th...