Larry Diamond, a former official with the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which governed Iraq in the two years after the ouster of Saddam's Sunni/Ba'thist dictatorship, says: "This is a really bad idea, one that will only feed the image of the US as the occupier, the colonial power.

The thematic chapters--covering themes such as globalization and economic change, modes of production, consolidation of colonial power and centralization of state authority, channels of change and depression and war in the late colonial era--are most interesting, because they attempt to scan broader patterns of social change in the region in more novel ways than the country-based chapters.

Among those who have claimed dominion are the Arabs, who named the two-and-a-half-square-mile rock that creates the strait Gibel Tariq, after the eighth-century general whose military victory paved the way for the taking of Al Andalus; the Spanish, whose fifteenth-century reconquista led to both the rise of a great colonial power and to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews; and the British, who have held possession of the rock and parts of the strait since the early eighteenth century.