Hanna Batatu

Who was Hanna Batatu?

Hanna Batatu was a Palestinian American Marxist historian specialising in the history of Iraq and the modern Arab east. His work on Iraq is widely considered the pre-eminent study of modern Iraqi history.

Born in Jerusalem in 1926, Hanna Batatu emigrated to the United States in 1948, the year of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He gained his doctorate at political science in Harvard University in 1960, with a dissertation entitled The Shaykh and the Peasant in Iraq, 1917-1958. From 1962 to 1982 he taught at the American University of Beirut, then from 1982 until his retirement in 1994 at Georgetown University in the United States.

Batatu started studying Iraqi history in the 1950s, taking a particular interest in the revolutionary movements which were then prominent in that country and especially in the Iraqi Communist Party. From the late 1950s on he travelled to Iraq several times, and succeeded in having access to communist political prisoners and secret police files before the revolution of 1958.