In this episode
Host Kate Carpenter is joined by Dr. Daniel Neep to talk about his new book, Syria: A Modern History.
Daniel is a non-resident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and is currently senior editor at the Arab Center Washington DC, a think tank focused on the relationship between the Arab world and the US. Previously, he has worked as a faculty member, researcher, and leader at universities, NGOs, and research centers as he seeks to bridge academic work and institution building. He is the author of a previous book on Syria, as well as many articles and analyses in a wide variety of venues. His new book tells the history of Syria from the 1800s through the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, focusing on how the Syrian people themselves have understood and advocated for their country’s politics, economic relationships and social structures.
Kate and Daniel talked about how his many years steeped in research about the Arab world and Syria went into this book, and how he thought about its structure and purpose. We also talked about some of the quirks of publishing a book in both the US and the UK, including how this one book has two slightly different titles, and about what it’s like to be writing and revising a book when the ending is changing in real time.
Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Daniel Neep’s website
- Daniel Neep, Syria: A Modern History (US version)
- Daniel Neep, A Modern History of Syria (UK version)
- Daniel Neep, Occupying Syria Under the French Mandate
- Arab Center Washington D.C.
- Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt
- Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
- Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter. One of the pleasures of hosting this podcast is that it pushes me to read about subjects, places, and time periods that I might not otherwise have encountered. That was especially the case for today's episode, and I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Daniel Neep to talk about his new book, Syria: A Modern History.
Daniel Neep 0:23
Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Kate Carpenter 0:26
Daniel is a non-resident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, and he's currently senior editor at the Arab Center Washington DC, a think tank focused on the relationship between the Arab world and the US. Previously, he's worked as a faculty member, researcher and leader at universities, NGOs, and research centers as he seeks to bridge academic work and institution building. He's the author of a previous book on Syria, as well as many articles and analyses in a wide variety of venues. His new book tells the history of Syria from the 1800s through the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, focusing on how the Syrian people themselves have understood and advocated for their country's politics, economic relationships, and social structures. I confess that I did not know much at all about Syria's history before reading Daniel's new book, and I am grateful for the education. We talked about how his many years steeped in research about the Arab world and Syria in particular went into this book, and how he thought about the book's structure and purpose. We also talked about some of the quirks of publishing a book in both the US and the UK, including that this one has two slightly different titles. And I was especially eager to learn what it's like to be writing and revising a book when the ending is changing in real time. Enjoy my conversation with Dr Daniel Neep.
Daniel Neep 1:50
Well, my career as a writer. That's not a way in that I've typically, it's not a way I typically think about myself. I think about myself, first and foremost, as as an academic, as an analyst, and writing is ancillary to that function. My writing is very much focused on a particular part of the world. I'm a scholar of the Middle East, in particular Syria, and I write about the history and politics of this region. I do have a more than an analytical interest in the region. I lived in Syria for about five years, several years in my 20s, kind of these formative years my early adulthood. And Syria is a country that I had a very long, that I've had a long personal connection to, that goes beyond the purely intellectual and goes beyond the purely strategic. In terms of my career, I was writing about Syria long before an interest in Syria, long before the civil war, long before the Arab uprisings, before 9/11, so I do have a personal connection to the country, which does sometimes make it difficult to write about. So I think certainly my writing is is characterized even, you know, even to read it might seem kind of distant and analytical, but it always has a concern with how Syrians themselves experience their own country, and the Syrian experience of living through politics. And perhaps under the surface, there's a there is a tension there, as I try and retain my objectivity and make its, my analysis seem as objective as possible, even though there is this undercurrent of a much deeper personal interest in the place.
Kate Carpenter 3:23
Let's talk a little bit about how you do your work, and then we'll get into more details. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Daniel Neep 3:31
I think my writing is done-- it's difficult to generalize about because writing, for me, it's been a very fragmented activity, you know, I've written, you know, this previous book that I've just published took me 10 years to write. But I've been working on it for over 10 years, in fact, and at various points, I've been writing on, you know, in a the living room of a friend's apartment in Beirut, I've been writing, you know, in London, I've been writing at home in the DC area. I've kind of written in libraries, and I've written at a whole bunch of different places. It's just because the necessity of circumstance, I've had to get used to writing in situations where, you know, the context is not ideal, the environment is not ideal. My dream environment for writing is a place that's hidden away from the world when no one is coming in to disturb me. This idea of writing in a cafe I find abhorrent. I need to be in a monk-like solitude, ideally with no one else in the house, looking out of the window at green, greenery, trees and with absolute still and quiet, absolute stillness around me. Of course, those perfect conditions are difficult to find, so I think it's certainly something that has always been a struggle. I think writing in itself--it's a familiar refrain--writing is a struggle, and perhaps my search for the perfect environment has been an attempt to create conditions in in which the perfection of writing might finally become necessary. Of course, it rarely does. Even when you get the perfect conditions, it's still just as hard to put words down on the page. So I do see writing as an internal struggle. It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason, because it's true.
Kate Carpenter 5:19
How do you like to organize your research and writing?
Daniel Neep 5:22
I think the type of research that I do benefits from the fact it is a results from a long term engagement with and long term immersion with a particular set of evidence, particular set of literature. The book that I've just written draws on, draws on over 10 years worth of research, but actually really draws on 25 years, years worth of research. And in that time, I've read material as diverse as newspapers from the 1950s but also military magazines from the 1960s, the officers of, the memoirs of Syrian military officers and former members of the Ba'ath Party, very long, very boring, autobiographical accounts. I've read through French colonial archives, a whole bunch of different sources. So I think for me, research is cumulative. It's incremental, it's gradual, it's very slow, it's very dull, sometimes, particularly these long, five volume memoirs of Syrian military officers of the 1970s and 80s. I've read them so that no one else has to. But it's, there is a picture that emerges through this gradual immersion with the evidence that amounts to something greater than the sum of its parts. You know, if you ask me how directly useful was a particular account by an officer of some, one of the coups that was taking place, or one of the military conspiracies taking place in Syria in the '40s and '50s, probably the marginal value of spending so long reading one of these books in Arabic that I work my way through with a fine tooth comb, what it actually adds to the analysis, often is not very much, but I think gradually, this accumulation of detail really does help you get a better understanding of what's going on, understand how people saw the situation as it existed at the time, and get a better understanding of a historical, social, cultural dynamic which is not my own. Obviously, I'm not Syrian. I grew up in the UK. I come with my own set of assumptions about how things work, but I find that by immersing yourself not just in the narrow detail of the of the topic you're interested in, but getting a much bigger understanding of the picture, I find that is the most, that's the best guarantee, giving you the best chance of reconstructing a sense of what's going on that actually corresponds in some way to the reality.
Kate Carpenter 7:44
How do you keep track of all that accumulation of detail?
Daniel Neep 7:47
Very badly. When I first started doing my research, when I was doing my PhD, when I was doing my research in the archives, and the Syrian archives before the civil war, and in the French archives, there were no, there was no software to help you organize your data, to help you organize your reading. It was a struggle to get the French archivist to give you permission to take pictures of any of the documents. I think we were allowed to take something like 10 images a day. So I had an old digital camera, a digital camera that I used, so, I couldn't rely on that. So I got into the habit early on, of spending hours, of spending days and weeks in the archive, taking notes on the material as I was reading it. So I didn't have the luxury of taking it home with me and going through these endless images. I didn't have the luxury of using a software tool such as Zotero or EndNote, which is wonderful at keeping track of things and doubles with your bibliography record as well. So I think I just got into the habit of organizing things the old school way, on paper, and going, taking copious notes, going through those notes multiple times to try and get a sense of what was going on and how various documents related to other documents, and trying to create this composite picture. So I think again, perhaps this goes back to what I was saying about research, for me being a very slow and incremental process, I've certainly benefited, I think, from, I think my scholarship is the type of work that benefits from that slower paced, accumulative approach to reading and writing.
Kate Carpenter 9:15
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?
Daniel Neep 9:19
That's, uh, that's a difficult question to answer, because I feel that we often begin writing, generally, I certainly don't conform to the standard, oh, you have an idea, then you research it, and then you write it up. Actually, the different stages of research and writing are much more intertwined. Often, at the beginning you will have a, you know, I'm often moved by a kind of a puzzle, a conundrum, something that speaks to me from my own knowledge of the case, that doesn't chime with my understanding of how something works from the broader literature. So I think certainly my my reading and my writing, my thinking is often theoretically driven, but it drives me to look back at the empirical evidence. So sometimes I'm kind of wrestling with a theoretical point before I start to take it in the direction I do with a particular research. It's, it's not a discrete process for me, reading and writing and thinking and theorizing and looking at the evidence. It's, again, it's an iterative process. I go backwards and forwards. So I find it difficult to think, when do I actually have, when does writing begin? Which point of the research process? I mean, does it begin when I write a fellowship proposal? Is that when it begins? Because usually I've started work on that already. You know, even if you, even when you're doing your PhD, you're kind of building on work you've done often during your master's program, and elements of that will kind of overlap and feed into your PhD proposal. So I kind of do see it very much as an organic process, and I think that's possibly true across the humanities and social sciences. We don't have that, do an experiment, write it up approach that I imagine characterizes the natural sciences. Perhaps it doesn't, but I do think it's interesting that we often want to justify our approach, certainly as those of us who work in the social sciences, we often find the need to reference our approach with that classical, natural scientific idea of doing experiment, writing up. So that kind of imagery often haunts us, even though the work we're doing is actually quite different.
Kate Carpenter 11:19
Do you like to maintain a sort of regular cadence of writing? Do you try to write every day or regular intervals? Or does it change over time?
Daniel Neep 11:27
Concentrated bursts? I think is my best approach. I would love to be with those people who can sit down and write 500 words a day every day, or three even 100 words a day every day. I can't do that. I need to block out everything else going on around me, to really immerse myself, not just in the evidence, the argument I'm making, but also in in the language I'm using to make a particular case. And I find that easiest to do in intense bursts. If I can lock myself away for a few hours and get myself into the headspace, get myself into the zone where the words are flowing, which I think is always the challenge for me, that is something that I can't maintain for long, perhaps, if I can do it for a few days, if I do it for a week out of every two or three weeks that I'm doing fantastically because, of course, at different points in our lives there are different demands on different parts of us and different components. And I think that's the ongoing struggle to find, to maintain the space and the stillness to be able to write, given the fact we all live in a world with other people.
Kate Carpenter 12:27
So true. When you approach a large project like this, do you try to outline ahead of time, or do you just plow forward and see what happens?
Daniel Neep 12:34
I think, with this particular project, which is a, it's a narrative history of Syria from the 19th century to the present day, it solved a lot of the problems that I might have in a more obviously theoretically driven piece, given that this is the book unfolds as a chronological narrative, there's a limit to how much I can play around with the order of events. There's some playing around, some thinking about periodization, some thinking about which points connect naturally to the next one in terms of the flow for the reader. But I didn't have to overly plan in advance, and I'm glad that I didn't, I think because, given that the, my writing of the book was very much influenced by unfolding contemporary developments, if I'd have written most of the book in 2016 for example, I would have written it in a context where the Islamic State was spreading across Iraq and Syria, where it had refuted the old colonial borders and was pushing for a restoration of the caliphate. If I had written the book primarily while that was going on, it would have been a book that spoke a lot about borders. It would have been a book, been a book that focused on this idea of colonialism. If I'd have, you know, writing about various parts of the book in light of current events changed the way in which I think about them. You know, there's this whole episode in Syrian history. Syria, for three years, stops being a country and unites with Egypt between 1958 and 1961. It ends terribly. And the way we always read this episode, if you're teaching politics or kind of history of the Middle East, is as the failure of Arab nationalism. Okay, so one attempt to reunite the Arab world, and it doesn't work out, and it shows that the limitations of kind of reunification, that's the story we tell. But I wrote about this episode while Britain was undergoing its Brexit debate, and all of a sudden I started reading this evidence in a new light, because Syrian businessmen at the time when they unified with Egypt, you know, were concerned about there were concerns about immigration, there were concerns that Egyptians, would Egyptian laborers would flood the Syrian market. There were concerns about inflation. There were concerns about all kinds of, you know, economic issues, right? Concerns about the use of the single currency. How would that impact Syria? How would two very different economies unite? And reading in the light of Brexit debates in the UK in 2015, 2016, allowed me to think and highlight those dimensions of this episode, historical episode we typically read in terms of politics, but not economics. And it just made me realize how deeply, of course, how deeply connected these things are, how deeply interconnected they were in a case that we usually, where we usually overlook it. So I think this fact that I was able to not worry too much about the structure of the book, but to think about really the interpretation that I was giving to events and and how I understood them, and as that evolved over time, I think it became a richer book for having done that. If I'd, you know, it allowed a certain natural evolution, I think, which might have been lost if I had a more rigid framework for organizing the book before I'd started writing.
Kate Carpenter 15:52
When you're writing, how do you think about your approach to revision?
Daniel Neep 15:55
I typically try not to, and perhaps that's one of the reasons why I write quite slowly. I like to imagine that the version I'm writing is the final version. You know, when I was writing my PhD, I wrote it with the fact in mind that it was a book, which I hope, not necessarily true, but so the idea being that might minimize any revisions later on. So perhaps I write slowly because of that, but I don't typically write huge amounts, hugely long amounts of draft material, or material that in some way isn't, isn't going to play a role in the end product. I don't write for the sake of it, I think because I'm a slow writer as well. I don't write reams of material purely for the sake of getting something on the page. I mean, we all do these things differently. Typically, the advice, opposite the advice I would often give graduate students when I was teaching, which is, just put something on the page, worry about it later, because I'm not that person. We all work in different ways, I imagine.
Kate Carpenter 16:55
Absolutely. I'm curious about your how your career trajectory has affected your writing. So as I'm reading your biography, you've worked in so many contexts, both academic, but also non governmental organizations and think tanks and other ways. How have those experiences shaped the way you approach writing?
Daniel Neep 17:15
You're right. I've worked in very different domains. I-- and my academic training doesn't necessarily map super directly onto my non academic work. You know, I started my career in think tanks and policy. I'm currently, again, in a think tank position right now. That does not mean my academic work is policy oriented. I think often it's not. I've done work which-- I'm trained as a scholar of politics. I've written a history. I've also written social theory, effectively. And I think perhaps there is, the commonality is that I don't necessarily see myself as purely trained in a single intellectual discipline. I see myself as someone who is interested in ideas, and I tend to chase those ideas wherever they lead me. At some points, those are policy relevant arguments about the latest developments in Syria. You know, I wrote a short piece a few months ago on Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa's meeting with Donald Trump at the White House, which was not super theoretical, but I tried to follow that idea, where it, where it took me. And I think the common feature of my work is that what I'm interested in doing is translating between different domains. I'm interested in the space where political science blends into history, blends into sociology, and what it takes to take ideas across those disciplinary borders. And I think perhaps that goes to my my original training in languages as well. I spent a lot of time thinking about translation. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how ideas work differently in different locations. What it takes to make a good argument for a historian vis a vis a scholar of politics, vis a vis an anthropologist. What it takes to make a good argument in the policy world. And one of the things I've been doing in this current role and previous roles at Brandeis as well, were helping, you know, academics, who are often trained to write and think in a very narrowly defined niche, a very specific set of disciplinary terms or jargon, and what it takes to help them forget that and rewrite their argument for broader readership. Because I think what we should be doing is, not just as academics, but also intellectuals, is writing for people to be able to read, which is something we lose sight of, often in the professional, highly professionalized US academy. And I think that element of concern for translation, concern for making a good argument, a concern for readability and a sensitivity to different conditions. I'm not saying we should dumb everything down at all. I'm very much a big fan of things that only, writing articles that only three people actually think are interesting or understand it, or or it's so dense that other people find it, you know, that's fine. I'm all for doing that in the right place. But I also think we've got to think, what is the argument I'm making, what is the strategic utility of this argument, and what do I need to do to actually gain leverage from making it. So I think that perhaps explains why I've been able to move across different fields which are adjacent, but often that I think need bridging. And I think that's the common thread of much of my work.
Kate Carpenter 20:21
To that question of being read for the work that you're writing, I was curious to know more about--this, this book is your first with a trade press. How was that experience different from publishing with academic presses in the past?
Daniel Neep 20:34
It's different in that you get a different set of comments. As we know, in academic peer review, which is, of course, the gold standard for the production of knowledge, usually gives you a reviewer two who is critical of everything you've ever said in your argument and indignant you didn't cite them. You get very high level comments, of course, which go to the essence of your arguments. But you, what you don't get is the line by line reading that you might get from a good editor in a trade press. And I think this was where I was surprised, because I was expecting a lower level of engagement. Frankly, I was expecting a lower level of engagement from the editors at the trade press, and found quite the opposite. I found someone who was my editor at, Elena, at Penguin in the UK has actually been behind most of the major serious trade history publications that have been published in the UK for 20 years, and is very widely recognized as being a key mover in that field. I kind of hadn't quite realized that. I hadn't realized there was a parallel ecosystem, and this is, this is particularly British thing as well. There is a market for serious, heavyweight academic books that could actually be published with the trade press, very often, er with a university press, often, but there's a wider readership amongst the British public that will actually read the stuff and engage with it. I'm not sure it exists in the same way in the US, but that's a different point. But I found that their level of engagement with my ideas was still there. The concern that there was for intelligibility and flow was much more apparent. And the degree of the degree of speed and accuracy that the editing was undertook was really astonishing. It's a much great-- it's still a slow process. It's never a speedy process, publishing, but it was a much quicker process than working with an academic press, and certainly in terms of supporting the book afterwards, infinitely better than most university presses, I would suspect. But, you know, it's a different argument. It's a different type of beast.
Kate Carpenter 22:37
You know, it's interesting. I talked to a lot of authors whose books are published in both the US and UK and other places too, for that matter. Often they come out first in the US and then are published in the UK. And yours was the opposite, in that it came out first in the UK and later was published in the US. What? What was the process that led to that?
Daniel Neep 22:54
I think the process is purely because, you know, I've been in the US for 13 years, but I'm from the UK. 13 years, yeah, but I'm from the UK, and my initial contract, my book contract, was with Penguin UK, and then the US publisher, secondary to that. Usually it's the other way around. So I think that explains it. Yeah, it's surprising. There are small differences between the markets that I hadn't considered. There is this, my book has a slightly different title in the UK from the one it has in the US. In Syria, in the UK, it's A History of Modern Syria. And then the US, it's Syria: A Modern History, presumably because if the Americans see anything with history first, they can just not read it. They want to know what it's about first. It's Syria: A Modern History, rather than A Modern History of Syria. So, I mean, these are small details. The tit-- the covers are different. The US version has a very nice, it's a beautiful picture of in former housing in the mountains behind Damascus, very beautiful. The UK cover has a yellow, slightly more abstract design, which is intriguing. And people have very strong opinions about which one they prefer. But clearly they've done a lot of thought as to what the norms are in particular markets, and what, even what type of imagery might draw people's eye at bookshops in Boston compared to London. And I find that degree of attention to be to be very reassuring.
Kate Carpenter 24:15
It is fun to look at the differences and think about what they might say about the different reading publics.
Daniel Neep 24:21
Absolutely. And of course, in the in the academic world, we don't care about, we don't judge books by their cover. We're more interested in what's inside them. It doesn't matter in the same way, the title. Hopefully good work will find its way out. People know about it through different networks and so forth, different, again, it's a different species.
Kate Carpenter 24:21
So this is a fairly substantial book from, in terms of scope. And I'm always curious when people are writing big, big idea, big, big scope books, how you decide what will stay in and what will come out? Because, of course, you can't write everything that you know about Syria in one book. How did you think about that as you were working?
Daniel Neep 25:03
I will say the book is probably too long. I would have benefited, I think, from writing a slightly shorter book, but I didn't have the time to so it had to be very long. I only had 15 years or so I was working on it, but I think, and I also didn't think of when I was writing the book, I didn't think of it any differently. To me I was writing a book, and I was writing it without a very you know, I wanted to have the theoretical underpinning secondary. There is theory there, and people who work in my field will pick up on the debates that I'm smuggling in about state formation and state building and so forth. But they're not, I didn't wear it heavily, certainly not compared to my previous book. So I never really saw a distinction to my mind. You know, there was no difference in the level of scholarship that went into the book. The footnotes are there. It's anchored in the footnotes. And I'm so happy, the trade press was very happy for me to keep those because I think that is the real, you know, we want people to know where the evidence came from, if readers want to go off and find it. And you know, frankly, they, the trade press also allowed me to write a much longer book, 180,000 words. I think in the end, you can't get away with that with the university press very often. So I think they gave me scope to write the type of book that I wanted to in terms of what goes in, what doesn't. I think my, I think I did frame the book in light of my own theoretical interests. You know, this is not a general encyclopedic history of Syria. It's not a social history. It's not really a history from below, perhaps a history from within. But, you know, I'm a scholar of the state. What I'm interested in is looking at how the state was built in Syria, how it connected different regions of Syria in different ways during that time, and to look at this kind of uneven development that's taken place within the country, and to think about the inequalities, social and economic inequalities in Syria, how they're mediated by the state, and how those dynamics create a very specific geography of inequality in Syria. So that is, you know, that was always what I wanted to shed light on by writing the book. And that means that, necessarily, there are things I don't talk about. I don't talk about Syrian pop music, I don't talk about the Syrian religious sphere, which is very rich and very complex. I mean, these elements come into the story, certainly, but only into the sense that they are shed light, shedding light on these bigger questions that I'm interested in. So I think the filter was set there fairly early on. I was also interested in highlighting Syrians' own role in developing their own country. And I say this quite openly in the conclusion, in the introduction, excuse me, we've had a lot of books focusing on the, focusing on Syria as kind of being there a chessboard for the grand, great powers, you know, this kind of foreign powers interfering in the country. That's been a consistent part of the country's story for a couple hundred years now. And I don't ignore that, but I don't focus on it. You know, I want to tell the story of what it looks like from within. One of my reviewers, it was reviewed in the Financial Times. And it pointed out that, you know, I don't, I don't mention Lawrence of Arabia when I tell the story of Syria. And apparently, for a Brit this is a great sin, but Lawrence of Arabia is a minor player when you're talking about the revolt against the Ottomans. There's much more going on on the ground. There's this whole politics, you know, that's taking place in Damascus when the revolt comes there and they throw off the Ottomans, and have different elements in society responding to this radically new situation in different ways. So I wanted to get beyond those familiar stories and highlight these internal dynamics. And of course, there's always stories you can leave out and hopefully, but hopefully the footnotes will lead the curious reader to the next level if they want to follow a particular incident to know more about it. Or, you know, I have a couple of footnotes where I explain why I don't give certain stories the space they receive in other accounts. So always go look at the footnotes. As I always tell people, follow the footnotes.
Kate Carpenter 29:03
I want to talk a little bit about evidence and language. You talk in the introduction about, as much as possible, trying to use sources, I'm quoting you here, "written by Syrians, usually in Arabic." And you also have a somewhat amusing note about using Arabic language secondary sources, you remind us that such things exist and should be incorporated. Talk to me about what difference using these sources makes. Why do you find that so important?
Daniel Neep 29:32
So I'll answer there's a second question, but I think we would never ask that question about a scholar working on the US. Of course, if you had a scholar of US history based in, I don't know, China, who was asked the question, What difference does it make if you use sources in English about US history? The idea is absurd. The idea of even asking that question would be absurd when you're thinking about the UK or France. Or the US or Canada, but it's often something that we have to argue, make the case for when we're looking at non western parts of the world. And I think even when you start to unpack that a little bit, it's just clearly, you know, it's clearly ridiculous. It's absolutely crucial. So the difference is, the response is, it doesn't, it's not that it makes a difference. What benefit is there bringing in Arabic sources? What would you have known that you wouldn't otherwise have known? How would you even begin to do it without including these sources? Is the point I want to make, because Syrians do have, there is evidence from Syria about their own history. It's not, it's, it's a complex record. This is where it gets interesting, compared to certain other cases, from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, particularly compared to Latin America, where they have incredible records going back for centuries. You know, they can, there's a type of detail and documentary archival detail. Mexico, for example, I'm envious of because we don't have the same depth of coverage when we look at the Middle East, there are historical reasons for that, of course, but it does mean that the sources are piecemeal. Often, they're often limited. We often don't have insight into various points, historical episodes. The Syrian archives, such as they are, stop at 1963 even when they were accessible, they stop at 1963 when the party comes to power. Nothing is available after that. At the same time, since the regime has fallen, there have been millions and millions of documents from the regime archives, from security forces, from the from the intelligence forces that are, there's actually such an overwhelming amount of material in these archives, even if they were classified and organized, it would take decades to work through it all. So there's questions of what records are kept, which records are accessible, what type of accounts are out there, and then the difficulty of getting to everything means that we have to, I think we have to look at evidence, where and when we find it. And at various points in writing the book, which covers 200 odd years, as I said, I'm using all these very diverse accounts. I'm drawing on Syrian tradition of prison literature to get a sense of what it was like inside some of these jails, security facilities where torture was commonplace in the 70s and 80s. In the 90s, we have a poor, a real paucity of sources for the 90s, bizarrely, but Syrian soap operas are really important. They give you a sense of the changes going on, because Syrian soap operas are not soap operas in that sense, but they're much more like mini series, often comedic, sometimes satirical, increasingly pushing at the red lines of acceptable political discourse in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so they actually serve as a way to get a sense of what are the changes going on in Syrian politics at that time. So you have to be, you know, I draw in a couple of films at various points to get a sense of some of the changes going on in various parts of the country, because there is not a consistent, we can't just go for archives and government records, because they're incomplete. And even if they were complete, they only give you the state's own view of itself. And understanding, part of the aim of the book is trying, in a sense at least, of what the state is doing in different parts of the country, how it's different in rural areas compared to the urban centers and what it means to encounter the state at the periphery. How do, how do Syrian peasants navigate the state, not just the Syrian upper, upper middle class elite? So I think, yeah, the question of these Syrian sources is absolutely vital. And as you said, the, I try as much as possible to draw on Syrian scholars, because there are Syrian historians and there are Syrian scholars who have devoted their lives to studying their own country. And right, obviously, Syrians have something to say about their own country. We don't, well, and we treat those scholars exactly the same as we would any other scholarship. And I think, again, I think generally, the academy is getting better at doing this, but often we treat sources, in the inverted commas, as being purely primary sources, without necessarily devoting the same level of analytical attention to accounts from, in other languages as we do the primary materials which are written in those languages.
Kate Carpenter 34:18
One thing that I think is really interesting about books that go almost to present day is that I have to imagine it must be hard to figure out how to stop them, especially when breaking news continues to happen that might change your understanding. How did you think about where to end this book?
Daniel Neep 34:37
So I finished the book manuscript in 2024 and I reached the point where I had been dragging my heels. I didn't, there wasn't a natural conclusion to the book. It wasn't obvious how to end it. And I dragged my heels. Or also, I'd become a father, and, you know, had two young twins. And you know, there were other things going on at the times that also dragged it out. With the pandemic, as well. So this was a slow process. It's like, oh, I need to write the last chapter and get it done. And I finally got to the point in 2024 and I thought, okay, it's time finish it. And the conventional wisdom at the time was that the Assad regime was there to stay. There had been a stalemate in the, in the civil war for several years, since 2020. It seemed like things were, nothing was, the front line wasn't moving in the conflict, things were relatively stable. And most importantly, Arab and increasingly European governments were talking about and pushing for some kind of pragmatic acceptance of the status quo. Because if the Assad regime was there and it's not going to go, the humanitarian arguments for revising the sanctions and censure that the regime had been under for the previous 13 years were increasingly difficult to ignore. So that's, I ended the book in 2024, sent it off to my publisher, said, I've finally finished, Assad's there to stay. Literally three weeks later, the regime fell, and I was very pleased that the publisher granted me a stay of execution to be able to revise the conclusion, because otherwise the book would have been out of date before it was published, which is the worst possible outcome for a book that's taken that long. So what I was pleased about is, in terms of the book's conception, I ended with the fall of the regime, which was the natural end point. I also was able to write the conclusion of the book at a moment when people, at a moment of, you know, historic optimism and historic jubilation, because Syrians had been fighting the end of the regime for 13 years, and to have this moment of liberation with Syrians for the first time in decades, were actually able to discuss political questions openly was astonishingly powerful. Syrians were able to start talking, finally, in public about what type of constitution they want. Do they want a strong central state? Do they want power devolved to the regions? What type of political economy do they want? Do they want an open to all free market economy bonanza for Western investors, or do they want a much more, an economy that's guided by the needs of the people? All these questions came up, and not only was I able to catch that optimism before it started dissipating, perhaps inevitably, over the course of the last two years, but also in a way that allowed me to highlight the fact that despite the historical novelty of this moment, Syrians had experienced very comparable moments in its modern history whereby the old rules no made no longer made sense. There seemed to be a window of freedom, a window of choice. This kind of critical juncture, a radical indeterminacy, when everything was up for grabs. And this is, contrary to what we might expect, this had happened several times in Syria's history. So even though the the this particular context and the conditions at which these questions were being asked was novel, the actual questions about sovereignty, about authority, about social justice, were questions that Syrians have been wrestling with for generations. So it actually enabled, it was a really fortunate, not just for the Syrian people, it was a fortunate, you know, way in which I could end the book by putting it, putting the contemporary developments into this historical reference points. And that was, after all, the aim of the book. The aim of the book was trying to get away from this very, the short time, the short horizons, the short temporal horizons with which people had been looking at Syria throughout the civil war and say, yes, you need to know a little bit more about it. You need to have more context for thinking about it. So hopefully, the book was able to achieve that.
Kate Carpenter 38:42
Did you have an ideal reader in mind while you were writing?
Daniel Neep 38:45
I did. I think my, but my idea it was, my ideal reader was the general reader, the reader who's intelligent and interested and wants to know more. And I thought, you know, I was explaining this to someone once, and I said, yeah, the type of person who might read Eric Hobsbawm for fun. And they looked at me and said, no one reads him for fun. So my idea of the general reader, perhaps it no longer exists in the world. I, you know, I don't write down to my readers. I try and make things as understandable as possible, but I don't, certainly do not dumb down. Some parts of the book are fairly dense, but the material is dense. I don't want to. I don't, I try not to, I hope I don't insult my readers. I think it's, it's, I've not written an easy, I don't know. It's not a cliff notes guide. You know, it's not a, it's a book that I hope repays rereading, not a quick and easy book. Obviously, at six, 700 pages, it was never going to be. I hope it becomes a reference point. But I also hope it's used in teaching as well. I hope, you know, professors will assign the odd chapter and that it will help shed light on developments. And I think partly the way I organize the chapter and the periodization within the chapters is my attempt to do that. You know, I don't go with the conventional periodization, for example, the whole, I don't have a chapter on the civil war. I have a chapter that goes from 2003 to, I think, 2014 so it talks about the early years of the civil war, but it builds that onto a discussion of the social and economic changes that feed into the outbreak of the civil war. Because if you don't understand that context, you don't understand why Syrians rose up against the regime in 2011 and why they took such terrible risks to go out against the regime, which was brutal. So it's very much geared up to to that kind of approach. It's not a, it's not, it doesn't break break things down into bite sized pieces, but hopefully it gives kind of a more substantial meal intellectually. That's a terrible metaphor. I'm not gonna use that again.
Kate Carpenter 40:44
I want to ask a little bit about your influences. Are there other writers who you like to read as inspirations or models for writing?
Daniel Neep 40:53
I think I did when I was when I was a graduate student. I think that was more present in my mind. You know, I did my PhD in the 2000s so I was very influenced by previous wave of kind of late post colonial studies and colonial history. So people like Tim Mitchell. Tim Mitchell was a, when I was doing my graduate work, Tim Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt, his Rule of Experts had just come out, and this was what blew me away. And I think always, when you read things for the first time, when you encounter certain styles of arguments and styles of thinking, it is influential in you, because you think, wow, this is amazing. But I think certainly over time, influence is more difficult to pin down. I certainly find it very easy to identify works I struggle reading and works I really don't enjoy reading. I don't know if the kind of models are as conscious anymore. I may be thinking more in terms of categories rather than individual authors. And again, this changes depending on the type of work I'm trying to do. I certainly admire the intellectual aspirations of some authors. I mean, some of the things that I really think are impressive now are these big, multi volume accounts of massive scale, historical development, Michael Mann's Sources of interest, The Sources of Social Power, unfolding over four volumes? I'm not sure it's, I think I imagine, admire the scope rather than the writing per se, I think there's a slight difference.
Kate Carpenter 42:18
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Daniel Neep 42:21
Most influential writing advice I've ever gotten. There's different points at different times. You know, I was certainly told by my supervisor, words to the effect of an imperfect yet complete dissertation is better than the one that's perfect but never finished. I think that's, many of us have heard this before, and that's very true. And at a certain point it's good to be told that. I can't, I can't, I'd love to, you know, I think I'm trying to find an aphorism that kind of sums down or distills this wisdom of writing neatly. I don't know if really there is one. I I think, in general, we all benefit from being from from being edited. We all benefit from very critical responses, not just about the ideas, the level of peer review, but actually, the mechanics of, you've got too many words in this sentence. This sentence goes on for three sections. This whole paragraph needs a topic sentence. And one of my, you know, what I've been doing more of in the past few years is editing other people's work. And I think that thinking of writing not just as a craft, but as, it's not a machine-like product. That's not quite right, but it's, it's amazing. The more you read and the more, the more you edit other people's work and comment on it, the more you see the same types of mistake emerging. And that's exactly the same for teaching as well. The more undergraduate papers we edit, the quicker we are. Sorry, grade. I see editing as grading and grading as being very similar processes, but the more feedback you give, right, about telling your students how to write well, it's exactly the feedback we need to get on our own work. So I think this, I think writing advice is it's not advice in the aphorism sense. It's a it's part of a process of, how do you make your prose better? We make our prose better by having other people look at it and striking out words that don't make sense and saying this is difficult to understand. I have no idea what this point means. And this is really long and long winded, and you made this point three paragraphs ago. Having that level of granular engagement with your writing, if you're able to find someone who can do that, that is advice that is a great boon, and all academic writing and non academic writing would benefit from that level of engagement. Writing is often thought of, we think of it as a solitary pursuit, but I think it's not. It has an element of collectiveness there that is not captured by this idea of the writer as the solitary hero in the middle of the night, right, banging on the laptop by candlelight, whatever it is, It is a much more of a team sport, and I think people who realize that probably end up being better writers.
Kate Carpenter 44:49
Well, you have finished and published a very impressive and beautiful book that you worked on for more than a decade. Are you working on something else now?
Daniel Neep 44:59
Well, thank you. Yeah. Um, I always said that after writing this book, I would never again write another book. So of course, that was a few months ago now, so I'm already thinking about the next big project. I haven't, I don't have anything in mind. I have a couple of ideas that I'm floating around and some smaller pieces that I want to work on. I'm taking the opportunity to do some more occasional writing, short form writing, which is quite liberating. I want to write, you know, having written one book for a general readership, the next journal article I want to write will be a much more niche theoretical argument that draws out the ideas underpinning my encounters with Syria, putting it into dialog with theories about state formation, so that will be a very different type of writing. And then thinking about the next big project after that, I think that's, I'm not, not going to rush it, not going to rush it this time. This time might take me 20 years.
Kate Carpenter 45:56
Dr. Daniel Neep, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and being willing to talk about your writing process.
Daniel Neep 46:01
Thank you, Kate. It's been a pleasure.
Kate Carpenter 46:03
Thanks again to Dr. Daniel Neep for joining me on this episode of Drafting the Past, and thanks to you for listening. You'll find links to Daniel's new book, Syria: A Modern History (or A Modern History of Syria, if you prefer) in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support the show, please share it with a friend who might enjoy it too. After all, friends don't let friends write boring history.
