The Arabs in the past five centuries have had much in common with others around the globe. Nationalism, imperialism, revolution, industrialization, rural-urban migration, the struggle for women's rights--all the great themes of human history in the modern age have played out in the Arab world. Westerners, suggests Oxford University Professor Eugene Rogan might have a different understanding of their own history were they to see it through the eyes of Arab men and women who described the times in which they lived.

Eugene Rogan is an American who spent the 1970s in Beirut and Cairo before returning to the United States for graduate school. He studied economics at Columbia and Middle Eastern history at Harvard, where he completed his doctorate in 1991. He has taught the modern history of the Middle East at Oxford since 1991. He is the Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford. His latest book is The Arabs: A History, published in 2009.

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