The press occupies a crucial place in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Its interest and significance lies in its importance not only as a medium of representation that a society produces of itself but also of what a society produces for itself. An understanding of its historical development is therefore vital to an appreciation of many processes of political, social and cultural change and of the evolution of public opinion and the debates surrounding social and cultural identities in the Middle East.

The Middle East and North Africa region offers a rich range of materials for a study of the press. In the hundred years from 1850 to 1950 it emerged as a medium of expression and chronicler of political developments punctuated by a record of dynamic contact and conflict within local societies and with European imperialism, initially in the latter nineteenth century and subsequently with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the decolonisation process that immediately followed World War II. During this time intensive, energetic debates were conducted and political struggles waged over the nature of political community, definitions of social classes and the character of cultural identity. The period sees the rise of nationalist movements where the press played a central role in supporting the nationalist cause but also a more complex part in articulating different perspectives on political, cultural and social questions. Essential to an understanding of political history and its representation, the press was also a participant in and subject to political circumstances, at times benefiting from the opportunities offered by free public debate while in other situations being subject to repressive legal regimes. Ultimately, the period ends with formal independence granted across much of the region when a rich tradition of political and cultural contest framed by a context of colonial domination and anticolonial struggle moves to a phase where newly installed national regimes sought to mediate and impose their own agenda on the role of the press. It therefore offers a rich opportunity to explore the press as a forum and an agent in a period of dynamic transformation.