Mandate Syria Research Articles

Cultural Imperialism and the American scramble for antiquities in Mandate Syria: 1920–1939

Cultural Imperialism and the American scramble for antiquities in Mandate Syria: 1920–1939

The Contradictory Syrian Presence in Turkey’s Southern Borderlands

The displacement of Syrians into Turkey is approaching its twelfth year, but the conditions of Syrian presence in the country are still fraught with ambivalence. The dramatic changes in migration and border dynamics and the instrumentalization of Syrian migrants in Turkish politics have intensified racially motivated animosity. Yet in border provinces where Syrians are densely concentrated, popular attitudes toward them operate on other axes, which reveal complex entanglements of border politics, migration policies, and citizenship ideologies. This essay describes how these entanglements unfold in the country’s southernmost border province, Hatay, which was controversially annexed from French Mandate Syria in 1939.

From administrative to political order? Global legal history, the organic law, and the constitution of mandate Syria, 1925–1930

AbstractThis article explores the making of the State of Syria after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. I argue that an event-based approach in global legal history offers a useful perspective for studying the transition from imperial to international and national systems. Drawing on new archival research in France and Saudi Arabia, I focus upon the creation of the 1928 Syrian constitution in the League’s mandate to show the administrative framework of political orders. First, I describe the French administrative logic through the story of the international ‘organic law’. Second, I describe the way the organic law necessitated the Syrian political constitution. The constrained constitutional process resulted in a clash and a compromise about a Muslim president between secularist republicans and exiled, Saudi-related Muslim monarchists. Global history can profit from this approach by rethinking decolonization as administrative reorganization and by focusing on dissenting, non-state actors in state-making.

A connected history of eastern Christianity in Syria and Palestine and European cultural diplomacy (1860–1948)

ABSTRACT The special issue critically explores, at a micro and macro level, the structural role and religious, cultural and political interactions of the Greek-Orthodox, Melkite and Syriac communities in late Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine. It seeks to identify archival gaps, and to link the study of the micro-scale level of everyday cultural and religious life to the macro-narratives of global change affecting Christian communities, in a connected perspective, via dynamics of cultural and religious personal and institutional interactions. The Christian communities, both as institutions and lay bodies, are of special interest for the field of Levantine studies, since they were placed at the heart of the local power game, expressing the quest for social emancipation, while also keeping close links with diplomatic actors, colonial institutions, and foreign religious agents. The research presented lies on the idea that the communities in focus were inextricably linked, being actors operating within the same multi-ethnic periphery, having the same legal status, and being in contact to foreign agents, while at the same time politically dependent to the centralized ottoman and mandatory authorities.

From Camel to Truck?

Abstract A conventional view of nomadic tribes is that motorization—the passage from animal to automobile transportation—brought about the transformation and eventually the obliteration of the nomadic pastoralist lifestyle in the long twentieth century. But through the example of nomadic tribes in French mandate Syria, this essay shows that creative appropriation of the automobile actually helped nomadic groups to strengthen their position and to defend their economic and political interests. Automobiles allowed tribal chiefs to experience enhanced mobility, facilitating a faster connection between the bulk of the tribe and the towns. Nomads could thereby reliably sell their livestock and products more easily. Motorcars also presented nomads with a new weapon with which to challenge the technical hegemony commonly associated with colonial power. Consequently, it forced mandate authorities to adapt and transform their own ways of policing and controlling the steppe to counter the pioneering use of cars by armed Bedouins. Last, it enabled tribal chiefs to gain social prestige and, therefore, to assert themselves as ruling elites in the soon-to-be-born independent state. Overall, the Syrian nomads should be seen as pioneers of automobile culture at the start of the global Fordist period, rather than as its victims.

A “Weapon of the Weak”

Abstract In April 1931, boycotts of foreign-owned electricity companies were launched across multiple cities of the Arab Levant under French Mandate. This article argues that the boycotts drew on an established local culture of boycotting that was shaped by the social relations formed under the system of “concessionary imperialism.” These “electric boycotts” took on increased potency in the context of the constrained opportunities for anti-imperial protest under the interwar system. They were part of an oft-forgotten history of nonviolent civil disobedience, overshadowed by more violent expressions of opposition to colonial rule. It is argued that the 1931 and 1936 boycotts were novel for the threat of regional conflagration that they posed, as well as the increased “internationalization” in the framing of their meanings. Gandhism, Communism, and later, Fascism, provided competing poles of reference for anti-imperial activists in French Mandate Syria across the decade of the 1930s.

High-Tech Heritage: Planes, Photography, and the Ancient Past in the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon

The French occupation and governance of mandate Syria and Lebanon after World War I coincided with the rise of aviation as a tool of intelligence gathering. Surveillance from the sky served both military and scientific objectives for the French deployed to the region, and the development of “aerial archaeology” soon captured the fascination of experts and the public. This article examines how aerial archaeology provided a means not just of exerting colonial control through the exercise of scientific collection but also provided a way to remain relevant in the event of an end to formal, territorial empire. “High-tech heritage”—aerial archaeology in this case—became an attractive model for colonial powers in a decolonizing world, offering new techniques for extracting information and for setting the terms of cutting-edge praxis.

МЕНЬШИНСТВО, БОЛЬШИНСТВО И НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВО

This is the Russian translation of chapter 1 "Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-State" in Benjamin Thomas White's 2011 book The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. White demonstrates that minority and majority in their modern meaning are very recent terms that gained prominence sometime around World War I, with the spread of modern nation-states. These concepts were meaningless in the structural imperial situation of multidimensional and uncoordinated diversity that characterized societies of the "old regime." Politically overloaded and analytically misleading in modern societies, "minority" and "majority" are even more meaningless when applied retrospectively to the past.

Nationalism, displacement, and ethnoreligious differentiation in Turkey’s southern borderlands

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, near the Syrian border, this paper examines the shifts in the positioning of ethnoreligious differences vis-a-vis Turkish nationalism over the past decade. Hatay was annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, 16 years after the foundation of the Turkish nation-state, and did not experience the national homogenization that characterized the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in the post-WWI era. Its ensuing ethnoreligious diversity with a population composed of bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish, Christian, Alawi, and Sunni communities characterized the region’s peripheral border status until the new millennium. In this paper, I focus on two major shifts in Turkish politics which reoriented the ethnoreligious identities of these communities. First, I interrogate the short-lived turn to pluralism in mid-2000s to late-2000s when Hatay’s religious diversity gained prominence as an exemplar of Turkish Muslim tolerance. Built on the nostalgia for Ottoman cosmopolitanism against Turkey’s Republican model of nationalism, this regime celebrated the ethnoreligious difference of Hatay’s residents as long as they were identified as representable elements of the nation. I then turn my attention to the emergent ruptures in this discourse of multireligious nationalism with the outbreak of the Syrian War, Turkey’s foreign policy, and the arrival of Syrian refugees in Hatay. In showing how both polities operated within and through rather than replaced the formerly hegemonic understandings of national unity, this paper reveals the constant reworking of national and ethnoreligious identities at the Middle Eastern borderlands.

“Is the Family Waqf a Religious Institution?” Charity, Religion, and Economy in French Mandate Lebanon

This essay analyzes a debate among Muslim jurists in French Mandate Syria and Lebanon around whether the family waqf, a form of charitable endowment dedicated to the founder’s family, is a legitimate form of the waqf and whether it should be abolished. I argue that the new categorization of the family waqf as a deviation from real charitable giving was informed by new conceptions of the economy, religion, and charity. Because the debate was among Muslim legal scholars, it also allows us to examine modern changes in the Islamic legal tradition. I show how the debate displays the use of new scientific styles of reasoning among Muslim jurists in the derivation of rules, thereby transforming the legal tradition without rupturing it.

WHOSEMISAFIRS?NEGOTIATING DIFFERENCE ALONG THE TURKISH–SYRIAN BORDER

AbstractThis article examines the figure of themisafir(guest) as it personifies the combined domains of everyday and institutional hospitality in Hatay, a contested border province annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, and home today to over 400,000 displaced Syrians. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Hatay's administrative capital, Antakya, I focus on the perspectives of the region's bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish and Christian populations about the officialmisafirstatus of the first Syrian arrivals. I argue that the sudden transformation of Syrians from familialmisafirs to governmentalmisafirs in the early days of the Syrian conflict ruptured the hierarchical domains of reciprocity that have historically shaped the cross-border relations between these communities. In this process, Antakya's religious minorities recognized and negotiated the limits of their own residence, difference, and citizenship in Turkey, and invoked the lived practices of hospitality that exist beside but also transcend ethnoreligious and national identities. By examining how historical articulations of religious and national difference along the Turkish–Syrian border are entwined with the figure of themisafirat the interpersonal level, this article contributes to debates on hospitality in scholarship on the Middle East and in migration literature.

Performers or Prostitutes?

AbstractAnalyzing memoirs from the Arab diaspora and Mashriq, colonial archives, interviews, League of Nations reports, and mandate legal literature, this article tracks the circulation and regulation of mobile women engaging in performance and sex work in French Mandate Syria and Lebanon (1921–46). The French metropolitan system of regulated prostitution was imported yet transformed in the mandate region as women performers were sorted into legitimate, if morally suspect, foreign artistes and autochthonous performers defined as prostitutes by decrees and codes. Regional and transnational mobility and the institutionalization of borders by colonial administrations destabilized their own distinctions between foreign and autochthonous, however. Women used these contradictions, overlapping legal frameworks, and artistry to continue to work and limit the extraction of their resources by a variety of institutional actors who nevertheless expected sexual and entertainment services to be afforded to foreign and local men.

Catholic Missionary Education in Early Mandate Syria and Lebanon

This article examines the interaction of Catholic missionary education with the French mandate state in Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s. Taking a short cross-section of the Mandate era, the article argues that Catholic missionaries’ activity in the educational sphere must be considered from a meso-level analysis to complement micro-level focus on school activity and macro-level examination of imperial relations. Such an approach begins by acknowledging the particularity of the Levantine setting, wherein Catholic activity was well embedded into the locale. It also puts into evidence the utility of Catholic educational institutions in the region for the French Mandate state’s priorities. It nevertheless considers the autonomy of these institutions; for instance, the parallel hierarchy that the French Church itself represented, with its independent priorities. Finally, the article considers the significance of inter-imperial rivalry in the Levant leading to these institutions’ empowerment by French mandate authorities.

La Trace de Rome? Aerial Photography and Archaeology in Mandate Syria and Lebanon

In his 1933 book La Trace de Rome dans le désert de Syrie, Antoine Poidebard, the Jesuit missionary, French spy, colonial servant, air force officer, and archaeologist, published 219 aerial photographs of archaeological remnants in the Syrian steppe, which he identified as pertaining to the ancient Roman limes. This article examines Poidebard’s photographic reconfiguration of historical time and geographical space in the context of archaeology and historiography in Mandate Syria and Lebanon. The article argues that, in the absence of the archaeological groundwork that they were allegedly meant to enable, his photographs combined the appeal of a visible past with the promise of that past’s potential future as an object of investigation. In the transitory and politically precarious situation of the Mandate, the rare record constituted by these photographs upheld a projected connection between ancient Roman and modern French civilisation in the geographical region of the Mandate.

The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship

The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria, by Benjamin Thomas White

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria, by Benjamin Thomas White

The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship

The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship

Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Pp. 272. $105.00 cloth, $37.50 paper.

Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Pp. 272. $105.00 cloth, $37.50 paper.

BENJAMIN THOMAS WHITE. The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria.

In his concluding chapter, Benjamin Thomas White states his main argument in a single sentence: “The nation-state form creates the objective conditions in which people begin to consider themselves as minorities and majorities; however, these remain subjective categories” (p. 209). Much of the evidence he musters in this illuminating study convincingly supports his argument. White's focus is on why and when certain communities in Syria during the French Mandate came to be described as minorities, both by Syrians and the French, who governed what White calls a nation-state in formation between 1920 and 1946. Before the Mandate, neither Syrians nor the French used the term “minority,” or “majority,” to describe the ethno-religious composition of Syria. White discovers from a close reading of French sources that the French only adopted the term “minority” in the 1930s, even though post-Mandate historians, as a matter of convenience, labeled certain Syrian communities in the pre-Mandate era as minorities.

Book Review: Europe: The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria

Book Review: Europe: The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria