europe mideast

Hardcover. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1st , 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, yellow cloth with gilt stamping, 283 pages. Between 1805 and 1879, Egypt evolved into a modern state with a Western-style military force and a central bureaucracy headed by an elite corps of European-trained officials. Viceroy Muhammad Ali and his successors used this new state apparatus to augment their autocratic power and to profit as intermediaries between Egypt and the capitalist West. This study is invaluable for it's unique and exhaustive research into the structure and foundations of the ruling elite and the process by which modern bureaucracy was built up in Egypt. It also highlights the dangers of rapidly developing a country's material infrastructure using massive outside assistance without adjusting for the destabilizing social changes that are the inevitable result. Clean copy.

Softcover. Wiltshire UK, Gibb Memorial, reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 109 pages with a modern double spread line map, a glossary and a biographical index. The description of his mission to the court of the Shah Tahmasp I of Persia by the Venetian Michele Membre is one of the most informative as well as one of the most individual of the few European accounts of 16th century Persia. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Thames and Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages, Color photos by Ara Guller. Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art. Under Sleyman the Magnificent and his succcessor Selmi II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths, many of them presented and analysed in this book. In his greatest works, he adapted Byzantine and Islamic styles to produce something quite new: a centralized organization of absolute space unhindered by pillars or columns and covered by a soaring dome. An architect of genius in a dynamic new empire expanding into both Asia and Europe, he was a true man of the Renaissance. Clean, bright copy.