ABSTRACT
A review of the effects on the Arab lands of incorporation into the Ottoman Empire, free of declinist judgements, demonstrates how greatly changed the Arab territories were in 1800 from what they had been in 1516. Many of these changes resulted from the new imperial context within which the Arab provinces now operated, which allowed for new connections with distant lands that had likewise fallen into the Ottoman orbit. Under the Ottoman aegis, trade between the Arab lands, on the one hand, and Anatolia and the Balkans, on the other, became commonplace; not only goods but occasionally merchants relocated from these regions to the Arab provinces and vice versa. Neo-nationalist historiography also manifests certain pan-Arab influences in its tendency to treat residents of the various Arab provinces as if they shared a tacitly acknowledged common identity which set them in implicit opposition to the non-Arab Ottoman territories.
