This course uses the vantage point of Syria to survey the history of the Ottoman Middle East from the eighteenth century until the stabilization of the post-imperial world at the end of the 1920s. In order to understand the changing nature of what being a Syrian meant throughout these two centuries, we will unravel the social, political, administrative, economic, and intellectual processes that shaped the Syrian identity. In doing so we will ask questions about material conditions of different ways of belonging in the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. As this course will reveal, the interlocutors of this question included rioting craftsmen and Janissaries, Muslim and Christian pilgrims, a local US vice-consul in Damascus, the nomads of the Syrian desert, émigré Syrian critics of the Ottoman Empire, agronomists invested in national economy, men of business as well as those of state and law. We will cover milestone events such as the rule of al-Jazzar in Syria, the occupation of Syria by Mehmed Ali Pasha, the infamous interconfessional massacres of 1860, the Great War and the end of the Ottoman Empire as well as the Great Syrian Revolt against French colonialism. In addition to scholarly texts, the course material will include excerpts in translation from historical texts by Syrians.