Levant is a book of cities.
His publications include histories of Constantinople and nineteenth-century Paris, as well as biographies of Louis XVIII and the Prince de Ligne..
About the Author: Philip Mansel is a historian of France and the Ottoman Empire.
Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.
He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns.
Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons.
He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities\' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned
Alexandria Egyptianized
Beirut lacerated by civil war.
Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age.
Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.
People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality.
In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously.
It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom--Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut--cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.
Levant is a book of cities
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