Over the past decades, important new perspectives on the modern Middle East have emerged due to new sources and new questions as well as the changing historical context. Old paradigms, rooted in modernization theory and the rise of nationalism in the region, are gradually giving way to more complex understandings grounded in social and cultural history. From a field preoccupied with the state and elite groups, recent studies of the Middle East have begun to incorporate the experiences of nonelite women, workers, peasants, ethnic minorities, and tribespeople. While this evolution is still continuing, already the outlines of a new social history of the region are visible.