BOOK REVIEWS Title Author(s)/Editor(s) Reviewer The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East Charles Fourier Machinery, Money and the Millennium Neutral Europe between War and Revolution 1917-1923 Das Londoner Biiro Protest und Kontrolle im Dritten Reich Labour Under the Marshall Plan Haim Gerber Jonathan Beecher Gregory Claeys Hans A. Schmitt Willy Buschak Reinhard Mann Anthony Carew Karen Barkey Ahlrich Meyer Royden Harrison Charles Bertrand Wim Bot Tim Mason Kees van der Pijl GERBER, HAIM. The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder (Colorado); Mansell Publishing Ltd, London 1987. vii, 223 pp. £ 26.50. Haim Gerber's The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East represents one of the most recent and commendable attempts at introducing sociological theory into the area of Middle Eastern studies. As such it is an elaborate and sophisticated, complex and yet oversimplified attempt to place the Middle East, especially its Ottoman origins into the theoretical framework offered by Barrington Moore. In his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Moore identified three major routes of modernization, one of which was most likely to occur in vast agrarian empires with huge peasant populations. In such structures, a large peas- antry and a "weak impulse" toward modernization lead, in the long run, to peasant based revolutions and to the concomitant communist states. The Chinese and Russian Empires are prime examples of such developments in the modern world. Although the major socioagrarian empire of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 333-349 Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000009305 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 3.235.21.12, on 24 May 2020 at 03:48:00, subject to the Cambridge