"In this book, Aimee Genell traces the local roots of the post-imperial political order in the former Ottoman Empire through an analysis of the imperial contest over Egypt. The Ottoman Empire had maintained flexible administrative arrangements throughout the empire. Starting in the 1830s, however, the exigencies of the Eastern Question-European intervention in the flagging empires affairs- resulted in the creation of a new type of autonomously-governed, centrally-maintained province. These provinces, Genell argues, became the foundation for the mandate system established in the Middle East after World War I, Egypt being the prime example. Although successive Ottoman governments attempted to curtail local autonomy and to centralize power, the legal-imperial designation of "autonomy" provided an important alternative model for imperial organization among the empires subjects in places like Egypt, Bulgaria, and Mt. Lebanon, especially for ethnic and religious minorities. At the same time, the Ottoman government used autonomy to maintain sovereign control over parts of the empire that European powers attempted to wrest from it from the mid-nineteenth century through the partition of the Arab lands at the end of World War I. The result was the institutionalization of these territorial designations, paving the way for the creation of borders to come.

Using new Ottoman sources and analysis from the perspectives of both legal and international history, Empire by Law remakes the dominant historical narrative that places 1919 as the starting point for the modern Middle East"-- Provided by publisher.