AUB Press

This volume provides the first comprehensive survey of land tenure in the Middle East over several millennia up to modern times. Its thirty-two papers bring to this theme an interdisciplinary approach and enable the reader to follow the various threads – historical, social, economic, political, legal – related to the evaluation and development of land tenure systems in the Middle East. Land tenure is a vital element in social transformation; it is quite literally the backdrop to history. Where the Middle East is concerned this theme has not received the concentrated and collective treatment it richly deserves. This volume is of great importance to all who are interested in the history, society, economy, and agriculture of the Middle East, and scholars of land tenure in other regions of the world will find in it ample material for comparative interpretation.

​Speeches made at the commencement exercises of the Syrian Protestant College are collected in this volume, from the first in 1870 (five graduates) to the fifty-first in 1920, when the SPC became the AUB. Also included are commentaries on the commencement exercises, as they appeared in prominent contemporary newspapers, and a copy of the first diploma granted by the SPC. This is a valuable resource for all those interested in the history of education in the Middle East and particularly in the history of AUB, the institution that sought to become a link between the society and heritage of the Arabs, and those of the western world.