The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Eugene Rogan
Penguin: Allen Lane, £30, 400 pages
On July 9, 1860, Damascus erupted in anti-Christian violence. “The Damascus Events” raged for 19 days and pushed the ancient city, a jewel of the Ottoman empire, into what this work’s author describes as a place “without effective government…reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature”. Months later dogs were still dying in the streets from having eaten the meat of contaminated corpses trapped in the burnt-out ruins.
