The year 1860 was a pivotal one in the Middle East, so pivotal that the great Albert Hourani made it the starting point of his Oxford University course ‘The History of the Modern Middle East’. Of course, to take a single date as a start or end point in history can be arbitrary and misleading – the Oxford Arabic undergraduate course set the end of Arab history at 1258, the year the Mongols destroyed Baghdad, resulting in generations of students believing that Arab history died with the Abbasid Caliphate.

Some might argue that the choice of 1860 was equally misleading. Nothing in history happens in a vacuum and many significant events in Middle Eastern history took place beforehand, including the Crimean War (1853–6), caused in part by competition between France and Russia to be the protector of the Christian holy places in Palestine.

True to Hourani’s legacy, Eugene Rogan, his successor at St Antony’s College, holds to 1860 as the beginning of modern history in Syria and Lebanon. He sees it as the date of the demise of the old Ottoman order in the Middle East, ‘a genocidal moment’ when the majority Muslim