ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the diversity of the research interests of their authors to say nothing of the ethnic, religious, cultural and geographical diversity of the Middle East. It deals with a country with a large history of continuous and highly centralized political authority and identifies the phenomenon of economically little diversified communities in their relationship to an assertive political center. The book presents technology and the international economic order as background factors to its consideration of center-periphery relationship and suggests that the fishing society in Aswan shows clearly that during the Nasser period central political authority was in fact exerted in such a way as to reinforce pre-existing local elite in its dominant position. It also deals with a local urban community of Armenian refugees who settled in Beirut in the twenties and thirties and have since become naturalized Lebanese citizens.
