Peter Sluglett has been Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, since 1994; he taught at the University of Durham between 1974 and 1993. His doctoral thesis, published as Britain in Iraq,1914-1932 in 1976, was on the British mandate in Iraq; he is also co-author (with the late Marion Farouk- Sluglett, of Iraq since 1958: from Revolution to Dictatorship (3rd revised edition, 2001). He has just edited a large collective volume on the comparative history of the British and French mandates in the Middle East, and is working on a monograph on the social history of Aleppo between the late nineteenth century and the end of the French mandate.