The Rise and Fall of the Notables Paradigm? Why it Has Taken so Long

For more than six decades, Albert Hourani’s Notables Paradigm has dominated the writing about the history of the Arabic-speaking world in late Ottoman times. It stressed the role of local leaders in shaping that history and assigned to Ottoman rule a marginal place. Although Hourani himself has revised his thesis early on, the original explanation he provided took a hold on the historiography, pushing aside the alternative narrative put together by Ottomanists working on the Arab domains of the Empire. The Ottomanist narrative has grounded mostly urban history in the rise of Ottoman-Local elites across the region, showing how notables were part and parcel of the Ottoman system of government, working from within, shaping it to serve their economic, social, political, legal, and even cultural interests. The household networks and coalitions those notables formed were directly connected to Istanbul and survived the demise of the Ottoman Empire well into the rise of European domination in the Post-Ottoman Mandates period. This essay attempts to explain the strong attachment of Arab and Western historians to the Notables Paradigm, and their resistance to the Ottoman-Arab alternative.