Middle East Mediterranean Radicalism Ottoman Syria Lebanon Egypt Islam 1860-1914

When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

Middle East Mediterranean Radicalism Ottoman Syria Lebanon Egypt Islam 1860-1914:
$129.99

The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi.

NOTE: We have 75,000 books in our library, almost 10,000 different titles. Odds are we have other copies of this same title in varying conditions, some less expensive, some better condition. We might also have different editions as well (some paperback, some hardcover, oftentimes international editions). If you don’t see what you want, please contact us and ask. We’re happy to send you a summary of the differing conditions and prices we may have for the same title.

DESCRIPTION: Hardcover with dustjacket. Publisher: University of California (2010). Pages: 296. Size: 9 x 6 x 1 inch; 1¼ pounds. In this groundbreaking book, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. She shows that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. In situating the Middle East within the context of world history, Khuri-Makdisi challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. The book demonstrates that these radical trajectories played a fundamental role in shaping societies throughout the world and offers a powerful rethinking of Ottoman intellectual and social history.

CONDITION: NEW. New hardcover w/dustjacket. University of California (2010) 296 pages. Unblemished and pristine in every respect. Pages are clean, crisp, unmarked, unmutilated, tightly bound, unambiguously unread. Satisfaction unconditionally guaranteed. In stock, ready to ship. No disappointments, no excuses. PROMPT SHIPPING! HEAVILY PADDED, DAMAGE-FREE PACKAGING! Meticulous and accurate descriptions! Selling rare and out-of-print ancient history books on-line since 1997. We accept returns for any reason within 14 days! #8440a.

PLEASE SEE DESCRIPTIONS AND IMAGES BELOW FOR DETAILED REVIEWS AND FOR PAGES OF PICTURES FROM INSIDE OF BOOK.

PLEASE SEE PUBLISHER, PROFESSIONAL, AND READER REVIEWS BELOW.

PUBLISHER REVIEWS:

REVIEW: Table of The Late Nineteenth-century World and the Emergence of a Global Radical Culture.

2. The Nah.a, the Press, and the Construction and Dissemination of a Radical Worldview.

3. Theater and Radical Politics in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria 1860–1914.

4. The Construction of Two Radical Networks in Beirut and Alexandria.

5. Workers, Labor Unrest, and the Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Leftist Ideas.

Conclusion: Deprovincializing the Eastern Ilham Khuri-Makdisiis Assistant Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at NorthEastern University.

PROFESSIONAL REVIEWS:

REVIEW: This book establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. The author shows that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. In situating the Middle East within the context of world history, she challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history, as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. The book demonstrates that these radical trajectories played a fundamental role in shaping societies throughout the world, and offers a powerful rethinking of Ottoman intellectual and social history.

REVIEW: “The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism” is the perfect antidote to the deterministic histories that have for so long obscured how the Middle East came to modernity. Khuri-Makdisi rightly argues that it was both more complex and more open to the outside influences than either nationalist historians (who see only the state) or the partisans of the new orientalism (who see only Islam) have been willing to admit. This book has been badly needed for some time. [Edmund Burke III, co-editor of “The Environment and World History”].

REVIEW: Khuri-Makdisi rethinks everything we thought we knew (but did not) about Ottoman intellectual and social history in a truly global context. The social universe that this book opens up for the first time will effect a major shift in the histories of the modern Middle East. [Julia Clancy-Smith, author of “Mediterraneans”].

REVIEW: A dazzling array of published and archival sources in Arabic, Ottoman, Italian, French, and English. [Arab Studies Journal].

REVIEW: Effectively disputes tired and old paradigms…An essential contribution to the literature of the origins of left-wing radicalism. [Fraser Ottanelli in \"European Legacy\"].

REVIEW: The“Nahda”, or Arab Renaissance—which as a historical period (roughly the last third of the nineteenth century) and concept remains largely unrevised and under-theorized—is characterized primarily by the efflorescence of Arabic-language literary activity in several cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levantine port city of Beirut in particular, and is often portrayed as the genesis of Arab nationalism. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi\'s book seeks to recover for the Nahda a now-forgotten “Leftist” component. Critical to understanding her work is her observation that scholarship on thought and ideology in the non-West has often been relegated to fairly simplistic categories, usually subsumed under the rubric of nationalism (and later anti-colonialism). Khuri-Makdisi instead posits that the nuance and range of political action that historians ascribe to the intellectual history of Europe in the same time period should be equally available in the Eastern Mediterranean.

REVIEW: When one considers the rise of radical and leftist movements in the late 19th and early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire as represented by the Eastern Mediterranean probably does not spring to mind. Yet Khuri-Makdisi, argues that three cities – Beirut, Lebanon and Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt – acted as focal points not only for the development of radicalism in the region, but also in its spread throughout the world. After initially examining late 19th century world history and various social and radical movements, as well as various leftist intellectual networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, the author shifts to an analysis that specific institutions played in these movements in the region.

Focusing on separate but synergistic institutions in the three cities, the author demonstrates how newspapers and theaters played a significant role in occurrences of radicalism in the region and among their citizens spread throughout the world. An intervening section on two regional networks, a Mount Lebanon and Beirut group and the Italian Anarchist group in Alexandria, separate the third significant institution that of labor movements and worker unrest’s impact on the spread of global radicalism, primarily within the Eastern Mediterranean.

Primarily relying on al-Muqtataf and al-Hilal, the author argues that not only did these works provide an avenue for socialist/radical ideals to spread within the region, but in other parts of the world as well. She notes that the practice among members of the community reading the articles aloud to the local populace, including illiterates, gave access to the information in the newspapers and provided a greater “readership” than circulation figures would support. Local theaters offered a similar opportunity to expand the movement to the general populace and the elites. Labor unions and unrest served as an alternate institution for expressing socialist and other leftist ideas; the multi-ethnic make-up of the populations of the three cities provided a variety of options of radicalism and socialism within the region.

Although the examination of the role of two significant networks provides some evidence of a reshaping of leftist ideologies, the first network, located in Lebanon provides a stronger case of Syrian/Lebanese involvement in establishing an Eastern Mediterranean form of radicalism. The author argues the Italian Anarchist group, although primarily consisting of Italians, had an impact on various radical organizations within Alexandria; but especially benefitted from the multicultural nature of the city, as well as the fact that the city was “… a major player and participant in the story of globalization and radicalism.

Historiographic assumptions concerning a dearth of leftist and radicalism movements in the region are wrong according to the author. She concludes and demonstrates that “radicalism was alive and well in the three cities.” (p. 165) Throughout the text, she provides multiple instances not only of the spread of radical/socialist/leftist ideology within the region, but also the assimilation and adaptation of these ideologies by the various ideological networks in the region. Furthermore, she argues the diversity of the local populace, i.e. the various Mediterranean peoples such as the Italians, Egyptians, etc. significantly impacted the how these leftist movements were perceived and shaped within the three cities.

Khuri-Makdisi’s book is heavily documented; she uses archival sources from Lebanon and Egypt as well as archival material Italy, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Socialist and radical newspapers and periodicals form a large part of the primary sources used in the work. Furthermore, a large number of other primary and secondary sources have been utilized, with the notes and bibliography running approximately 70 and 20 pages, respectively.

Khuri-Makdisi clearly has targeted her book towards academics who have a fair understanding of social history and radical movements. Individuals, who have a general interest in the field, especially as it relates to the Eastern Mediterranean, will find this work useful. Unfortunately, this book presents a number of potential obstacles to readers who lack either knowledge of the various radical movements or French, as the author assumes the reader already knows many of the specific facts that she discusses, and she provides French quotations without translations. Furthermore, at times the author’s specific grammar and stylistic choices interrupt the flow of the text. This reviewer argues that the author relies too often on parenthetical information within the text, occasionally fails to include the first names of individuals when first mentioned, and is inconsistent in her use of block quotes. Despite these minor flaws, this book is a welcome addition to the study of social and political institutions in the Eastern Mediterranean region from the late 19th to the early 20th century.

REVIEW: In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, a wide variety of radical leftist ideas began circulating among segments of the populations of Eastern Mediterranean cities, especially in Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria, then among the most culturally and politically important cities of the Arab Ottoman world. These ideas, which were selective adaptations of socialist and anarchist principles, included specific calls for social justice, workers’ rights, mass secular education, and anticlericalism, and more broadly a general challenge to the existing social and political order at home and abroad. Those who embraced such ideas expressed them in articles, pamphlets, plays, and popular poetry (in Arabic, but also in Italian, Ottoman Turkish and Greek), in literary salons, and theatres, and during strikes and demonstrations, disseminating radical thought through educational, cultural, and popular institutions. Radicals formed networks that were connected, informationally, politically, and organizationally, to international and internationalist movements and organizations that sought to promote leftist ideas and implement radical projects in various corners of the world. Beyond these formal and official connections lay an entire worldview and way of being-in-the-world, a global radical moment that radical thinkers and activists in the Eastern Mediterranean partook in and helped shape.

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi teaches courses in Middle Eastern history, World history and urban history. She is particularly interested in Mediterranean cities in the late 19th, early 20th centuries and the movements of people and ideas. Her current research focuses on the articulation and dissemination of radical ideas such as socialism and anarchism, in Eastern Mediterranean cities. Specifically, she analyzes the establishment of migrant networks of intellectuals, dramatists and workers, and their roles in the spread of radical ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria. She argues that the presence and activities of such (nominally \'peripheral\') radical networks were central to the making of a globalized world and to the formulation of alternative visions of radicalism.

REVIEW: The era of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Levant, became known as the period of the ‘Nahda’- the Arab renaissance. New ideas flourished and the emergence of Arab nationalism is often attributed to this time and place. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi has written an intellectual history of this period from an angle neglected so far, that of radical-leftist thought. Khuri-Makdisi focuses on three cities: Beirut, Alexandria, and Cairo, which maintained special connections as cosmopolitan centers, and she links the roots of radical movements found in these cities with early globalization.

The narrative challenges previous perceptions that identified radical thought as a European product. As Makdisi shows, it started simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East, and the urban centers of Latin America. She chooses to focus on the Anarchist movement that both competed with Marxism as an international ideology and manifested itself in popular culture. More importantly, anarchism helped give rise to a new social order: the intellectual middle class. Under Sultan Abdul-Hamid II (ruled 1876-1909), the Ottoman Empire witnessed major social and political changes. Makdisi breaks down these changes to smaller components: the international networks that developed under anarchist notions, the development of the press, and the construction of institutions to disseminate anarchist ideas. The contributions of the anarchist movements in this period included mass education, mutual aid societies, and intellectual centers. The theatre, for example, functioned as a “subversive institution” used by the movement to raise general awareness about its international networks. Makdisi points to a play about the anarchist movement in Spain that gained great success in Beirut. She also dedicates part of the story to diaspora communities and their place in the international movement, thanks to the connections they had in their homelands.

Anarchist movements are often regarded as the most radical form of political and social activity; this book, however, reminds readers how significant and mainstream the institutions that they established are. The successful use of interesting and varied sources, the prose, and the engaging story make this book to a worthy read.

REVIEW: Historical studies on leftist, socialist, communist, not to mention anarchist tendencies in Middle Eastern societies are relatively rare. Even today, doing research on groups promoting such ideas remains in various states a politically sensitive matter. More importantly, throughout the twentieth century Arab nationalism has established itself as the dominant political narrative and has in the process weakened any other sociopolitical, emancipatory movements such as socialism or feminism with the argument that they endangered national unity in the fight against imperialism. For recent attempts to challenge the nationalist narrative, see the two books edited by Christoph Schumann: Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean, Leiden 2008; Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East, London 2010. Therefore the present study is to be welcomed for its attempt to extend the history of socialist and anarchist movements in the Eastern Mediterranean to the period before World War I and to correct at the same time the nationalist narrative that ignores such movements.

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Assistant Professor of History at North Eastern University in Boston, sees these groups as part of the Nahda, the movement that established a new, non-traditional, educated class as the intellectual and ideological leaders of Arab society in a changing, historical Environment. The socialist and anarchist tendencies were the radical but not readily acknowledged off-springs of the Nahda. Later historiography saw the Nahda as the direct and exclusive precursor of Arab nationalism.

A major goal of Ilham Khuri-Makdisi is to demonstrate how the radical groups developed, spread and gained force in close connection and exchange with global networks of socialist and anarchist movements before World War I. At the same time she does not lose sight of the local networks stretching between the ‚new‘ cities of Beirut and Alexandria and the rapidly developing Cairo under British occupation.

By analyzing the journals \"al-Hilal\" and \"al-Muqtataf“, Khuri-Makdisi traces the shift of the two most prominent public forums of the Nahda from an antisocialist position to a supportive one. The shift here was not so smooth because both were profoundly engaged in presenting, explaining, defending Darwinism which was not easily blended with socialism.

In a highly original and insightful chapter she speaks about the role of the theater for the radical movements. She provides a short history of this innovation in Arab society and describes how the new educated elite declared the theater „progressive“. The press, and that means again the members of the Nahda, supported the theater as a tool of education, wrote about pieces performed and protested attempts to censor the theater – all issues concerning the press directly, too. Khuri-Makdisi analyzes the theater as a new public space, and as a tool for addressing the masses, especially the illiterate. The stage becomes a further means for informing, teaching, explaining and creating a new world and new world view to the spectators. Far from being seen as subversive, the theater was considered by the municipalities of Alexandria, Beirut and Cairo as a symbol of modern urban life and as such was supported financially by them. The theater\'s role as a pedagogical instrument was not only recognized by the rising bourgeoisie but also by marginal and radical groups. Khuri-Makdisi analyzes the politicization and radicalization of the repertoire to the point of „staging the revolution“ with a play about the Spanish anarchist Ferrer a few days after his execution in October 1909. Khuri-Makdisi discovers for us here a vibrant, multifaceted, engagé and creative theater culture, the historical study of which – with its political and social implications – has been neglected heretofore.

With the help of a network analysis Khuri-Makdisi makes another important point about the radical movements in the region: they were in close contact and intellectual exchange with similar movements all over the world. This is convincingly demonstrated with the help of migration movements. She differentiates between a local migration network of Syro-Lebanese in Egypt, moving mainly between the three cities mentioned above, and the farther emigration to South and North America and other places. All groups remained in close touch with the place of origin, mainly through the Arabic journals originating from Cairo and abroad and through frequent returns of migrants. Of equal importance was the migration to Egypt by Italian workers, familiar with anarchism in Italy. Between all these different places and groups, she argues, there existed a global exchange of ideas and often cooperation; selective adaptation of ideas and methods made for a great variation of what is described as radicalism but also for effective local action such as organizing strikes, evening schools for workers or demonstrations against the church.

Some points in this study could have been more elaborated to the benefit of the whole argument: The role of the Freemasons in the global exchange of ideas is mentioned but clearly got short shrift. The Arabic language issue preoccupied the Nahda in general, creating, as it did, a simplified and standard print language in the permanent search of the largest market for its print products. But what was spoken on stage? Egyptian or Syrian dialect, which were easily comprehensible to specific audiences, or the print language, which must have sounded very artificial? At least in the case of „al-Hilal“ the support for socialism remained extremely weak as long as its founder, Jurji Zaydan, was alive. The change was not really from Darwinism to socialism. Darwinism and Social Darwinism had to share uneasily the pages of \"al-Hilal“ and \"al-Muqtataf“ from the beginning with the educational ideas of the Enlightenment which themselves became later also part and parcel of socialist and anarchist thought, radical or not. The true radicalism of the Nahda lay in its rigorous secularism which made social radicalism and nationalism possible.

But regardless of this critique the book presents highly innovative research in topic as well as methods. Its argumentation is persuasively sourced. Khuri-Makdisi adds an important first chapter to the history of leftist movements in the Eastern Mediterranean, she questions in meaningful ways the standard narrative of Arab nationalism and she argues convincingly the global dimension of the local radical movements. Finally the book is also an essential contribution to the history of the Arabic theater. The book is recommended to all interested in the intellectual and political history of the region in the last phase of the Ottoman Empire.

REVIEW: NorthEastern University’s own Ilham Khuri Makdisi published the groundbreaking work The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 last April, less than a year before the international community rested its gaze on the rapid ideological revolution and protest movement that has swept the region in the last few months. Rereading Khuri-Makdisi’s work in light of the recent mobilization of thought and action in the Middle East and North Africa illuminates trends by which people are motivated to promote alternative social and global visions.

Analogies between this recent Arab revolution and the fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989 or the Iranian Revolution in 1979 are prevalent in media, however often these analyses fall short of drawing fruitful conclusions. Khuri-Makdisi’s revival of the Nahda period (Arab Renaissance) affords the reader another point of comparison in which one can draw conclusions about the platforms though which global ideologies spread, and the circumstances that instigate profound ideological shifts.

Khuri-Makdisi’s work serves as an atlas of socialist and anarchistic movements in the Middle East from 1860-1914, with particular focus on how these “radical” movements were expressed and mobilized by intellectuals, workers, artists, writers and migrants in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria. The book demonstrates how radical groups developed through exchange with global networks of socialists and anarchists, situating these local movements in their global context and thus redefining the period of the Arab Nahda as a global production. The work offers a fresh perspective on late Ottoman social and intellectual history and challenges Eurocentric narratives about radical social movements.[i] It departs from the narrative in which Middle Eastern ‘radical’ thought is principally Islamic in nature, uncovering a more nuanced ideological production and context for the region, rehabilitating an era that has been largely under-examined in the scholarship on the period.

Parallels between the cultivation of thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the present trends are abundant. Khuri-Makdisi’s work showcases intellectuals who rallied to reconceptualize world order through a vision of social justice, largely within socialist or anarchistic frameworks. Calls for political representation, constitutional government, freedom of speech and freedom from the colonialist yoke resounded; echoing today’s revolutionary goals. Non-Western actors found the confidence to reconstruct their social worlds by synthesizing and adapting swiftly globalizing ideologies.

The book’s period of focus was marked largely by a swell in population and urbanization, compounded by a wave in which global communication and information networks swelled with the development of global economies, the construction of the Suez Canal, and the presence of foreign imperial powers. Ideas were spread through the cultivation of new media networks: pamphlets, articles, telegraphs, postal services, literary salons, and the theater; all nascent spaces for the exchange of ideologies.[iii] These practices illuminate the importance of the public sphere in the spread of ideas, also aiding today’s activists in their work through the use of burgeoning social media platforms, the Internet, and the unprecedented dissemination of information in the WikiLeaks release.

Khuri-Makdisi cites this period of globalization beginning in the late nineteenth century as a point where an urban middle class grew in congruence with the spread of education in urban centers. This increase in education acted as one of the stimuli for the blossoming of radical thought in the period under study, as raised expectations for employment were unmatched by labor market realities.[iv] Higher expectations for employment due to an increase in education among Arab youth incited recent radicalization, as told by the story of Mohamad Bouazizi, the Tunisian man who turned to self-immolation to express his frustration as an unemployed university graduate last December. People then and now became increasingly aware of the inequity of the international economic system, working toward a movement of mass politics and calling for political representation, while realizing the state cannot protect its people from the injustice of international capitalism.[v] Khuri-Makdisi cites the spread of migrant labor as a cathartic mechanism for this growth in radicalism in the late-nineteenth century, but noted in a lecture at NorthEastern University in March 2011 that no such release exists as readily in today’s world order.

The narrative ends with the beginning of World War I which comprehensively reworked global social order, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean where the fall of the Ottoman Empire marked the formation of new Arab states, more extensive controls on mobility, and the birth of “Arab Nationalism,” which became one of the dominant ideologies in the region in the early post World War II period. Due to recent popular shifts in the region’s political and ideological focuses, the possibility exists that the early twenty-first century may give way to a similar period of massive restructuring in the regional order.

As a new vision of social order blossoms, due in part to the same factors that allowed for a similar frothing of new and radical ideologies in the late nineteenth century, one can hope that future historians will be as thorough as Khuri-Makdisi in charting this exciting new ideological revival.

READER REVIEWS:

REVIEW: One can\'t avoid lauding the author for taking on such an amazing topic: the rise of radical political ideas and movements in the Levant in Egypt during the half century leading up to World War One, specifically anarchism, in the classical sense. The amount of research done for this work is staggering and impressive.

I always ship books Media Mail in a padded mailer. This book is shipped FOR FREE via USPS INSURED media mail (“book rate”). All domestic shipments and most international shipments will include free USPS Delivery Confirmation (you might be able to update the status of your shipment on-line at the USPS Web Site) and free insurance coverage. A small percentage of international shipments may require an additional fee for tracking and/or delivery confirmation. If you are concerned about a little wear and tear to the book in transit, I would suggest a boxed shipment - it is an extra $1.00. Whether via padded mailer or box, we will give discounts for multiple purchases. International orders are welcome, but shipping costs are substantially higher.

Most international orders cost an additional $12.99 to $33.99 for an insuredshipment in a heavily padded mailer, and typically includes some form of rudimentary tracking and/or delivery confirmation (though for some countries, this is only available at additional cost). There is also a discount program which can cut postage costs by 50% to 75% if you’re buying about half-a-dozen books or more (5 kilos+). Rates and available services vary a bit from country to country. You can email or message me for a shipping cost quote, but I assure you they are as reasonable as USPS rates allow, and if it turns out the rate is too high for your pocketbook, we will cancel the sale at your request. ADDITIONAL PURCHASES do receive a VERY LARGE discount, typically about $5 per book (for each additional book after the first) so as to reward you for the economies of combined shipping/insurance costs. Your purchase will ordinarily be shipped within 48 hours of payment. We package as well as anyone in the business, with lots of protective padding and containers.

All of our shipments are sent via insured mail so as to comply with PayPal requirements. We do NOT recommend uninsured shipments, and expressly disclaim any responsibility for the loss of an uninsured shipment. Unfortunately the contents of parcels are easily “lost” or misdelivered by postal employees – even in the USA. That’s why all of our domestic shipments (and most international) shipments include a USPS delivery confirmation tag; or are trackable or traceable, and all shipments (international and domestic) are insured. We do offer U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail, Registered Mail, and Express Mail for both international and domestic shipments, as well United Parcel Service (UPS) and Federal Express (Fed-Ex). Please ask for a rate quotation. We willaccept whatever paymentmethod you are most comfortable with. If upon receipt of the item you are disappointed for any reason whatever, I offer a no questions asked return policy. Send it back, I will give you a complete refund of the purchase price (less our original shipping costs).

Most of the items I offer come from the collection of a family friend who was active in the field of Archaeology for over forty years. However many of the items also come from purchases I make in Eastern Europe, India, and from the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean/Near East) from various institutions and dealers. Though I have always had an interest in archaeology, my own academic background was in sociology and cultural anthropology. After my retirement however, I found myself drawn to archaeology as well. Aside from my own personal collection, I have made extensive and frequent additions of my own via purchases on (of course), as well as many purchases from both dealers and institutions throughout the world - but especially in the Near East and in Eastern Europe. I spend over half of my year out of the United States, and have spent much of my life either in India or Eastern Europe. In fact much of what we generate on Yahoo, Amazon and goes to support The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, as well as some other worthy institutions in Europe connected with Anthropology and Archaeology.

I acquire some small but interesting collections overseas from time-to-time, and have as well some duplicate items within my own collection which I occasionally decide to part with. Though I have a collection of ancient coins numbering in the tens of thousands, my primary interest is in ancient jewelry. My wife also is an active participant in the \"business\" of antique and ancient jewelry, and is from Russia. I would be happy to provide you with a certificate/guarantee of authenticity for any item you purchase from me. There is a $2 fee for mailing under separate cover. Whenever I am overseas I have made arrangements for purchases to be shipped out via domestic mail. If I am in the field, you may have to wait for a week or two for a COA to arrive via international air mail. But you can be sure your purchase will arrive properly packaged and promptly - even if I am absent. And when I am in a remote field location with merely a notebook computer, at times I am not able to access my email for a day or two, so be patient, I will always respond to every email. Please see our \"ADDITIONAL TERMS OF