Dr Eugene Rogan, Director of the Middle East Centre, is Faculty Fellow and University Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states in the twentieth century. He is author of Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850-1921 and editor of Outside In: On the margins of the modern Middle East; The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (with Avi Shlaim); Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times (with Alan Bowman); and Village, Steppe and State: The Social Origins of Modern Jordan (with Tariq Tell). He is editor of the new Cambridge University Press book series, The Contemporary Middle East.