Introduction : modernity, class, and the architectures of community -- An eastern Mediterranean city on the eve of revolution -- Being modern in a time of revolution : the revolution of 1908 and the beginnings of middle-class politics (1908-1918) -- Ottoman precedents (I) : journalism, voluntary association, and the "true civilization" of the middle class -- Ottoman precedents (II) : the technologies of the public sphere and the multiple deaths of the Ottoman citizen -- Being modern in a moment of anxiety : the middle class makes sense of a "postwar" world (1918-1924) - historicism, nationalism, and violence -- Rescuing the Arab from history : halab, Orientalist imaginings, Wilsonianism, and early Arabism -- The persistence of empire at the moment of its collapse : Ottoman-Islamic identity and "new men" rebels -- Remembering the great war : allegory, civic virtue, and conservative reaction -- Being modern in an era of colonialism : middle-class modernity and the culture of the French mandate for Syria (1925-1946) -- Deferring to the Aʻyan : the middle class and the politics of notables -- Middle-class fascism and the transformation of civil violence : steel shirts, white badges, and the last Qabaday -- Not quite Syrians : Aleppo's communities of collaboration -- Coda : the incomplete project of middle-class modernity and the paradox of metropolitan desire.