Ever since historians turned their attention to U.S.-sponsored modernization programs, one of their most persistent criticisms has been that intellectuals and policymakers extrapolated from Western European and U.S. experience and applied their findings wherever U.S. foreign policy led. The persistent failures of modernization programs could thus be explained in part by the confrontation between neat models proposed in Ivy League universities and government departments and the much more diverse and complicated reality on the ground. Nathan Citino's marvelous new book, Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, 1945–1957, complicates this narrative. Drawing on an impressive array of sources in Arabic and English, Citino argues that Middle Eastern intellectuals were themselves active agents in defining and implementing modernization. He further undermines the one-directional model by showing how the ideas of some of these intellectuals reverberated back in the United States.
As Citino shows, Arab elites traveled the world looking...