The previous chapter focused on the new culture of practical global acculturation that swept across Arab lands and other Ottoman territories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Systems of education and law underwent change and there were intimations of a possibility for political change. There were changes in social life in its most visible manifestations, such as dress, styles of residence, transport and communications, work, and the presence of foreigners. These produced strategic fractures in older socio-cultural structures, and strategic departures that were not fully realised, but were incompletely and unevenly spread in social and geographical terms. This was due to the limitations of the material capacities of Arab societies as well as to foreign pressures. Moribund conservative classes, exemplified by the religious institutions, put up resistance as they fought to defend vested interests and positions held hitherto.

In form, the state was a transitional one. It was neither entirely modern in its institutions and modus operandi nor sultanic. But it did develop in the context of a clear break with its immediate past: an economic break brought by international capitalism that defined backwardness and subordination as a mode of contemporaneity and sought to perpetuate it, and a social break that followed the consequent atrophy of the previous urban and rural forces and relations of production. Some of these that persisted nevertheless were not absorbed in the reconfiguration of new social structures, but continued to exist in parallel. There were, in parallel, cultural changes, most clearly manifest in the retreat of religious culture, albeit with broadening content, to the margins of official state culture and the social centre. This latter relied on scientific impulses of European provenance, on schools and printed periodicals, and new intellectuals. State sponsorship gave an authoritative character to the output of this official culture, in addition to its obvious link to European points of reference that were manifestly and distinctively new as well as powerful. This official culture developed in the folds of disciplines with a technical bent and purpose. It was a child of its time: the nineteenth century with its positivism, optimism, and utilitarianism.