ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century relatively few people lived in Middle Eastern cities. By the end, many more had moved into urban centres, overpopulating them and turning many traditional towns into cities. Although, even in 2000, almost half of the population still lived in the countryside, the city’s importance in politics, economics and culture had increased to the point at which the past signifi cance of the countryside was completely sidelined; the city’s prominence greatly exceeded its inhabitants’ share of the overall population. Therefore the city, the seat of the elite in the twentieth century, is present in more than one chapter in this book. Politics, economics and culture relate directly or indirectly to what happened in the urban centres. Nonetheless, the majority of city dwellers were not part of the elite and also deserve a history of their own. And even the urban elite’s politics were not always national and were quite often localized. Whether part of the urban elite or not, city dwellers had their own agenda and aspirations, which sometimes corresponded with, but quite often ran contrary to, the national elite’s point of view.
