It's a book for a particular reader. It has a title which suggests comparison to the works of Philip Hitti, Bernard Lewis and Albert Hourani (Rogan studied under Hourani), but the focus is different.

Where the earlier works discussed the Arabs back to the time of the Prophet (and sometimes before), Rogan is limiting himself to the last five hundred years, essentially a period of Turkish and then Western domination.

It's a good book for someone looking for historical background in a course like "Making of the Modern Middle East", but it's not nearly so useful if you're trying to understand the history of the Arabs.

As this book opens, the Arabs have been substantially dispossessed of political power-- the sources of Arab and Islamic tradition in pre-Islamic, Umayyad and Abbasid times already long past. For someone new to the subject, it's a bit like arriving at the third act of a play. If you already know what's happened in acts one and two, then you'll find that Rogan is a careful and even handed writer, garnering generally good reviews.

For me -- and my interest extends to cultural history and particularly the Abbasid "Revolution" -- the late starting point means that it misses a lot of what I'm interested in; if you care about Islamic Spain, the fall of Baghdad to Hulegu Khan and the Islamic "Golden Age" . . . those topics are all outside the scope of this book, and so its less interesting.

For that reason, I'd still recommend Hourani first, or Marshall Hodgson's "The Venture of Islam", bearing in mind that neither of those works cover Arabs in the 19, 20th and 21st centuries in the way that Rogan does.

See:

Reviews:

Khatib, Hisham. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, 2010, pp. 466–468., www.jstor.org/stable/23077044.

Harris, Brice. “The Arab World: History, Diplomacy, and Politics.” Middle East Journal, vol. 64, no. 3, 2010, pp. 477–480.

Weiss, Max. International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2012, pp. 565–568., www.jstor.org/stable/23280479