ABSTRACT
Hanna Batatu was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1926 and worked during his teenage years for the British Mandate government. He was a Palestinian political scientist and historian of the Middle East. He was educated at Harvard University and wrote extensive social histories of Iraq and Syria. Batatu worked at the American University of Beirut for 20 years from 1962. For most of that time, until a civil war began in 1975, Lebanon was enjoying relative political calm and economic success. The Old Social Classes argues that a struggle between socioeconomic classes was the root cause of Iraq's 1958 revolution. The Old Social Classes is Batatu's history of economic integration, class formation, and revolution in Iraq. Batatu's work also helps to explain how both communism and Arab nationalism influenced Iraqi history. Batatu's account is complex and sensitive to the effects of these movements on different actors inside and outside Iraq, from the military to the working classes to foreign powers.
