From Beirut to Berlin (via Geneva): The New International History, Middle East Studies and the League of Nations

Introduction

The global politics of sovereignty that developed after the Cold War, together with the catastrophic United States led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, have furnished international, imperial and diplomatic historians with good, grim reasons to return to the interlocked histories of empire, internationalism and international institutions.¹ A torrent of work on the Geneva based League of Nations (LON) has been one result, alongside writing on the United Nations (UN).² In particular, scholars such as Susan Pedersen, Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga, already well versed in the archives and literature of European empires and their gender and economic politics, have led a systematic reappraisal of internationalism and international institutions after the First World War.³ They brought to this campaign heuristic tools sharpened in the 1990s, in the cultural historiography of empire, and they aimed broadly to understand the League's workings and variety, rather than to reassert its political failures.⁴ The parallel – and often intersecting – rise of historiographies on the modern and contemporary histories of economic development, human rights and humanitarianism, with their frequent attention to the role of international institutions, has further catalysed this renewal.⁵

Meanwhile, in Middle East Studies research has increasingly appeared on the Middle Eastern countries that were ruled as ‘A’ Mandates under the League's aegis from the end of the First World War to roughly the end of the Second World War.⁶ These countries were: British Iraq, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, as well as French Syria and Lebanon – all part of the Mashriq, as the region is often called in Arabic.⁷ As Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan have noted in an important recent edited volume, ‘the trickle of monographs in the 1970s became [thanks in part to the opening of new archives] a steady stream by the 1990s and 2000s’, albeit one that irrigated the literature on Palestine more than that on Syria or Lebanon, and far more than that on Transjordan and Iraq. This work has broadly focused on politics: as Rashid Khalidi remarked in June 2001, in an older edited volume that announced the formation of ‘Mandate Studies’ as a nascent field, ‘we cannot but write history in light of our current preoccupations’.⁸ More specifically, as Arsan and Schayegh observed, the spotlight has fallen consistently on the Mandate states’ interaction with various ‘societal actors’, against the backdrop of the nation state's rise to dominance as a normative political formation. Moreover, this literature in Middle East studies has developed under – and at times against – the influence of the new international history, as well as colonial and imperial studies, and global and transnational historiography.⁹

More recently the centenary of the First World War has unfolded amidst the ongoing revolutions and wars in parts of the Middle East and North Africa. An increasingly global ‘centennial’ historiography of the First World War has rightly placed the Ottoman fronts – including the home fronts – more centrally into wider narratives of the twentieth century's founding conflict. Meanwhile the current flow of refugees towards Europe has further stimulated research on the history of humanitarianism.¹⁰ And of course references to the Sykes-Picot agreement and its legacies have been a staple of media and policy discourse, often in support of schematic, Manichaean arguments and, indeed, as Sara Pursley has noted, often to the exclusion of voices and histories from the region's peoples.¹¹

The books under review here represent a small sample of some of the best recent work in international history and Middle East Studies, and I parse particularly the intersections between the new international and imperial historiography and new work in Middle East Studies. With a view to both de-exceptionalising the history of the Middle East and interrogating the boundaries of Europe as a category of analysis, I argue that for contemporary European historians this historiography has much to offer, notably on the understanding of the First World War, on the nature of European colonial rule and on the history of the economic sphere.

First, then, the focus on the (post-)Ottoman lands of the Mashriq supplies a very direct way to think about the contested chronology of the First World War, and notably the fractured sovereignties and plural territorial logics that characterised the post-war world.¹² Of course historians of East and Central Europe in particular have long interrogated the war's ‘14–18’ chronology and the traditionally Paris-centric geographies of the armistice era, reworking in the process older debates on a ‘thirty years' war’ from 1914–1944 and heavily qualifying the relevance of 1918 as an end point. But the Middle East Mandates, I suggest, provide a useful vantage point and opportunity for comparison.¹³ Denied the (fragile) national sovereignty obtained in the post-Habsburg lands, even as their ‘existence as independent nations’ was ‘provisionally recognized’, the ‘A’ Mandates were forced to incarnate – rather than cross – the threshold of national sovereignty in the ‘Wilsonian moment’. They thus became the privileged targets for racialised and internationalised imperial stabilisation strategies after the First World War.¹⁴ The resulting ‘territorial logics’ of the long armistice years – imperial, international, trans-national, regional, national and local – are thus particularly visible in, though scarcely unique to, the Mashriq. Accordingly, the ‘A Mandates’ throw into relief both those logics’ presence elsewhere – including in Europe – and equally their importance in restating the post-war global hierarchy generally.¹⁵ To put it another way, the radical provisionality of the post-war settlement in the ‘A Mandates’ furnishes useful conceptual tools with which to compare empirically similar dynamics globally, while analytically illuminating the ‘provinciality’ of their European neighbours.¹⁶

Second, the legal and political specificities of the Mandate system complicate our understanding of the structure of European colonial empire at large. For one, the Mandates were short-lived entities and were built on the ‘relatively strong, relatively modern’ foundations of the ‘late Ottoman empire’.¹⁷ They were thus marked by very strong continuities with the modern Ottoman world, continuities manifest in part through the regional articulation of the new Mandate states but that also saturated everyday life.¹⁸ In addition, the League of Nations system's uneven but real internationalisation of state formation in the Mandates – for example through the glare of international publicity or the role of diaspora petitioning – disrupts analytical binaries based on the still current notion of the co-constitution of metropolitan centres and colonial ‘laboratories’ in European empires: what Susan Pedersen criticises as ‘the binary frameworks of imperial history’.¹⁹ At first glance exceptionally transient and atypically international, the ‘A Mandates’ are in fact less an anomaly than a means to recognise the incomplete, variegated and transnationally porous character of European colonial empire in general.

Lastly, the new nationalisation of economic life wrought by the mobilisations of the First World War is now well known.²⁰ But several of these works build usefully on Timothy Mitchell's argument that the interwar colonial world saw a particularly concerted effort to mobilise ‘the economy’ as a delimited sphere of social and political practice. As such, the social and intellectual history of post-war political economy can be given new genealogies and rendered markedly less diffusionist – that is, less informed by the assumption that ideas spread outwards from naturalised origins in Europe – by starting in Beirut, say, rather than Berlin.²¹ Below, after briefly giving a sense of each text to orient the reader, I address these three themes in turn.

Imperial Developments, National Formations and Powerful Talk

Both Susan Pedersen's eagerly-awaited book on the League of Nations and Elizabeth F. Thompson's panoramic work on the politics of constitutional government in the Middle East provide the widest angles amongst the texts under review, as one might expect from scholars with distinguished track records in their respective fields.²² In general terms, Pedersen's text innovates by showing how interwar internationalism took shape institutionally at the League, how it patched up fractured European colonial systems after the First World War and yet how, despite itself, the League incubated political logics that opened the door to a world of nation states. Meanwhile, Thompson delivers a highly effective and engaging rebuke to the presentism and exceptionalism that often mark out narratives of Middle East politics, showing how a long history of political constitutionalism was suffocated by European imperial intervention, mediated by the League, in precisely the same interwar period.

Pedersen addresses the Mandates system as a whole, with a core focus on Geneva as the theatrical ‘stage’ of post-war internationalism and with a global set of case studies in support, based on superb research in the archives of nine countries and those of the League itself. Her core cast are the members of the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), the League body that oversaw the system from Geneva. Emphasising the radical limits of the Mandates system – as the creation of a global power hierarchy dominated by colonial empires and as a body regularly staffed by former colonial officials – she argues that the League nevertheless became, despite the dominance of empire, a system for the creation of norms and the perpetuation of public debates that escaped imperial control. The League, she argues, thereby offered a stage to petitioners and protesters in new ways, helping prepare a world order of nation states: ‘League oversight could not force the mandatory powers to govern mandated territories differently; instead, it obliged them to say they were governing them differently’.²³ It is the political logics opened up by that obligation to talk in new ways that interest Pedersen, and she traces their operation in the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, before weighing the impact of German entry into the League and its crucial assumption of the role of enforcer of PMC oversight and territorial internationalisation, and finally the subsequent withdrawal of the revisionist powers (Germany, Japan, Italy) in the 1930s. This broadly constructivist attention to the political force of discourse and norms helpfully enlarges the understanding of power available to the historian, focusing on ‘what went on’ at the League rather than on ‘what went wrong’. Pedersen offers a deeper understanding of how an international institution, despite its lack of coercive force, could work to channel imperial domination. Her approach has drawn criticism from cultural historians of colonial empire for insufficiently parsing the shifting, racialising cultures of European imperialism that underpinned liberal internationalism, and from Area Studies scholars for underestimating the depth of coercive, imperial violence that liberal internationalism tolerated and justified in the Mandate territories. But although Pedersen includes case studies that detail politics ‘on the ground’ in numerous Mandate territories, relevance in Geneva is her analytical criterion and what allows her to draw a perimeter around her topic. The social and cultural dynamics of London or Damascus are thus beyond the book's main stated concern: the PMC oversight regime and its impact on the evolving international order.²⁴ In this respect, Pedersen's work is well complemented by simultaneous developments in Middle East Studies, even if the methodological frontier between studies of the international, the imperial and the national/anti-colonial remains contested.²⁵

Thompson's book, for instance, surveys the wider Middle East from the 1830s to the present day to argue that universal ideals of justice and efforts to achieve constitutional government have been a mainstay of political thought in the region, and that the revolutions of the ‘Arab Spring’ hardly represent the ‘Middle East's discovery of democracy’.²⁶ Through a series of biographical approaches to key secondary figures in different countries – such as Halide Edib, ‘Turkey's Joan of Arc’ in the post-Ottoman period – Thompson draws extensively on secondary literature to synthesise a longer arc of political thought and mobilisation in the Middle East. Where Pedersen's reach is geographically global but thematically focused on Geneva, Thompson's is regional, focused on exemplary individuals and chronologically longer term. But, crucially, both see a decisive pivot in the years after the First World War, and in the interaction of European imperialism with national movements and the nation state as the rising normative political formation. For Thompson, this was when a tradition of Middle Eastern liberal constitutionalism – for instance the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 – was crushed or subverted by its calamitous interaction with European colonial power, including under PMC oversight.²⁷ The independent Arab monarchy that ruled in Damascus from 1918–1920 was just one instance of this short-lived blooming of a far longer commitment to constitutionalism.²⁸

Norris and Seikaly both concentrate on British Mandate Palestine – by far the most studied of the Mandates, and indeed the case that absorbed most of the PMC's time during the Mandate era (some 17.3 per cent of the PMC meeting minutes).²⁹ Both address the politics of the economy in creative ways, Norris with an emphasis on British colonial strategy for economic development and Seikaly by looking at Palestinian capitalists and specifically at their ideas and practical projects for economic development.

Norris, stepping away from a focus on the politics of religion and nationalism in Mandate Palestine, appraises both the British imperial and Ottoman pre-history of the Mandate, paying due attention to the ideological and material basis for later developments from as early as 1905. He straddles the First World War, emphasising the important strand of Arab and Ottoman political thought that focused on economic development within the nahda – the vibrant intellectual and political renaissance in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. He also notes the keen developmentalism of the late Ottoman state and the importance of its legacies in the subsequent Mandate politics of the economy. The book then deals centrally with case studies focused on the port of Haifa and on the minerals of the Dead Sea, notably potash, showing how British, Palestinian and Zionist figures worked to deploy their ideas on economic development and socio-economic progress more generally. Seikaly for her part tackles the role of capitalist thought and practice among Palestinians confronted by the reality of Zionist settler colonialism and British colonial rule. She shows how Palestinian businessmen and economic, thrifty Palestinian women emerged as the agents and advocates of new economic practices. They strove to make a capitalist future, but in the 1920s and 1930s they also became the targets of British colonial welfare apparatuses that deployed technocratic tools such as calorific ideas of nutrition and indexes of standards of living, before the onset of the Second World War brought a renewed crisis.

Arsan and White, finally, have produced studies of the French Mandate system from different angles and across different chronologies. White takes on the question of the emergence of the categories of minority and majority in French Mandate Syria between the World Wars, deftly showing how the terms came into political operation only very slowly and contingently, nourished by the ‘development of the nation-state form in the mandate period’. He argues that such categories then became crucial interfaces between nationalist politics and the imperial state.³⁰ White shows how the French imperial state identified certain groups in Syria as minorities and not others. He then appraises the impact of this framework on the constitution of territory, in terms of border creation and separatist movements, and on the way the category of ‘minorities’ and ‘majority’ altered both the use of international law and the practice of personal law.

Arsan, finally, studies the Lebanese diaspora in French West Africa across a wider chronology, reaching back to the 1880s and winding up around 1950, but with the interwar years again at the book's core. He is concerned with the interrelationship between diaspora journeys and lives on one hand and the changing status of the Lebanese ‘homeland’ on the other, as it morphed from an Ottoman administrative sub-unit under European surveillance to an expanded, independent nation state after the Second World War, via a quarter century of imperial Mandate rule. Broken into three parts, the book looks first at the motives and routes through which diaspora travel became possible, thanks in part to new and cheaper transport technologies, before turning to the politics and structures of the French imperial system as it influenced economic life for Lebanese migrants in the Mediterranean and on the West African coast. In closing, the book digs down into social and commercial life among the Lebanese of West Africa, using diaspora and settler colonial newspapers in effective combination with imperial administrative documentation to chronicle in anthropological detail the ways they made and spent money, the dynamics of their political engagement with their Eastern Mediterranean point of origin and their polyvalent relationship with the colonial situations of which they were a part.

The Mandates and the First World War

The Paris Peace Conferences – as a diplomatic and political caesura and, latterly, as a longer Wilsonian Moment and as part of an interwar Paris that Michael Goebel has called a ‘clearinghouse of world politics’ – have long been staples of our understanding of the close of the First World War.³¹ Conversely, the books under review here demonstrate how a shift of perspective to the Mandate territories can fruitfully complicate our understanding of the conflict's chronology, dynamics and outcomes. This is as true of the war's beginnings as of its long close.³² For example, as Norris sharply notes, the developmental emphasis in Mandate Palestine on extracting and exporting raw materials was indeed influenced by the unprecedented scale of industrial and social mobilisation the war brought, but it was also ‘a process that occurred all over Ottoman Syria’ before 1914. Moreover, it was a process which, despite rising British ascendancy in the region around 1900, had ‘room for all manner of different participants, all of them products of that particular brand of fin de siècle modernity’.³³

Indeed, the nahda of the pre-war years in the Ottoman world – ‘that heterogeneous movement wherein the nation was to rise up, discard corrupt and out-dated traditions, and realize the triumphant arrival of the modern’, as Seikaly puts it – was a very big tent. It hosted not just literary and political ferment, but also economic theorising and developmental framework-building in journals such as the Palestinian periodical Iqtisadiyyat.³⁴ Seikaly argues convincingly that the nahda’s economic dimensions, with roots in the late nineteenth century, continued across the First World War and well into the Mandate period, as Palestinian capitalists drew on thinkers including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun to articulate ‘a utopic capitalist future in terms of conduct, ethics and territories’.³⁵ White too places a clear emphasis on the legacies and continuities of the pre-war Ottoman politics of community for Mandate era developments. He pays particular attention to the re-appropriation of millet identities – Ottoman-era religious and linguistic minorities that enjoyed formal legal protection as part of a millet system that the Ottomans upgraded notably from 1856, partly in response to European imperial pressure – in the development of a new category of ‘minorities’.³⁶ This dynamic, White shows, continued even into the 1930s, when Christian groups and French officials worked with narratives of continuity to connect Christian and Jewish millets in the Ottoman period to the question of how minority protections might be inserted into any future treaty for Syrian independence. The recycling of the Ottoman millet system of the late nineteenth century thus paradoxically afforded the French authorities a justification for future intervention in a post-Mandate Syrian nation state, much as the British used cultural understandings of the region to justify retaining control over key aspects of Egyptian and Iraqi sovereignty long after their formal independence in 1922 and 1932.³⁷ Plainly, and notwithstanding the very real rupture of formal Ottoman collapse, the Sublime Porte's legacies were omnipresent in the Mandate world.

At the international level, Pedersen's bravura treatment of the founding of the League and of the Permanent Mandates Commission also shows just how long the international legal and institutional framework took to come stumbling into being after the armistice, during the period Thompson calls the ‘gray zone’ of 1918–22.³⁸ By summer 1920, Pedersen observes,

the mandates system was a naked and shivering shadow of its Wilsonian self. Occupiers had been named ‘mandatories’ but not a single mandate text had been agreed nor any oversight apparatus set up. Promises to consult local wishes – much less to build national governments – had been broken and those who contested the new dispensation exiled or crushed.³⁹

If the Mandates Commission emerged at all by 1922, Pedersen shows, it was largely thanks to savvy British bureaucratic entrepreneurs like Sir Eric Drummond, who embedded internationalist principles in the League's organisation, and individuals such as William Rappard, an ursine, canny Swiss jurist who conscripted internationalists and humanitarians in various countries to put pressure on imperial states and allow the Mandates system to take shape in ways that legitimised its founding principles.⁴⁰

In the Ottoman lands, meanwhile, tracing the continuities in her protagonists’ lives through the First World War allows Thompson to emphasise how pivotal the war was politically: if liberal internationalism bumpily took flight in Geneva after 1918, in Aleppo or Jerusalem it appeared in the heavens in the guise of imperial bomber planes, a brute fact that Thompson argues brought liberal constitutionalism into chronic disrepute:

before the war liberal constitutionalism was the hegemonic model of justice. It inspired the broadest political coalitions and it provided the glue amongst would-be rivals. Ottoman defeat in World War I caused the defeat of constitutionalism. The peace treaties negotiated at Paris were seen [by the region's peoples] as a profound betrayal by European powers, who embarked on an aggressive program of colonization in the region.⁴¹

Indeed, as Thompson shows in her chapter on the Turkish activist Halide Edib, whose landmark speech at Sultanahmet in Istanbul in May 1919 was delivered under a sky literally buzzing with British air power, the war brought questions of political-military sovereignty and collective security to the fore, consigning constitutionalism and the emphasis on individual rights to a secondary role.⁴² Edib in that speech, heard over the drone of the planes by some 200,000 people, promised the crowd that ‘one day Wilson's League of Nations would provide an international court of justice to assure every nation its rights. But for now Turks had only the sympathy of other peoples, and their own will to fight’.⁴³

Mandate Rule in Transnational and Diaspora Perspective

Importantly, however, ‘other peoples’ in the first decades of the twentieth century in the Mashriq also included the sizeable Ottoman and post-Ottoman diaspora. This was spread both across the Eastern Mediterranean – as in the dense radical and socialist networks Ilham Khoury-Makdisi has written of – but also in the wider world, for example in the Americas beyond the formal limits of the European empires.⁴⁴ Moreover, their ‘sympathy’ could be channelled through increasingly potent international and transnational vectors, centrally the League but also humanitarian and philanthropic endeavour, or anti-colonial and communist networks.⁴⁵ In their various ways, all of these books respond to such global flows by seeking to problematise the analytical unit of the nation state, whether alone or in a binary relationship to European imperial rule, and to take into account the importance of diaspora, or other trans-imperial and transnational dynamics. To do so they follow agents, human and occasionally non-human, across frontiers within and beyond the region, even as those regional frontiers were redefined and slowly became more politically and socially salient in the post-Ottoman Mashriq.⁴⁶

The result is less to abandon the nation state or nationalism as objects of enquiry and more to enhance our ability to see modes of political separatism as the effect of relational dynamics that emerged through varied sorts of ‘boundary work’, as Fredrik Meiton has lately suggested.⁴⁷ As noted above, the boundaries of the ‘A’ Mandates carried a worldwide resonance, since they incarnated the normative and political global threshold of national sovereignty. Internationalised by the League, explicitly provisional and contingent on developmental criteria, and yet established within European colonial situations, the transnational connections that formed across Mandate boundaries thereby crystallised with particular clarity dynamics that were present but less visible elsewhere – in Europe and Asia but also in the colonial world. Analytically, the Mandates thereby permit new comparisons, for instance between the techno-politics of electrification in Mandate Palestine and the use of ‘a-national and apolitical census’ techniques in Central Europe to create language frontiers as sites for nationalist activism.⁴⁸ Moreover, the often closed analytical loop between imperial metropole and colonial empire is thereby woven with particular obviousness into wider skeins of transnational, trans-imperial and indeed global connection.

An example of the latter point is Arsan's work. Ripe with anthropological and literary nuance, it shows clearly the advantages of a standpoint in diaspora to understand the Eastern Mediterranean in the era of the Mandates, as he develops an account of the Lebanese nation forming in the Mandate period not through a simple model of long-distance, anti-colonial nationalism but instead in ‘the lush, overlapping networks of horizontal and vertical ties between the members of a political community bound together by common [if often frustrated] affection for the land of their birth’.⁴⁹ Arsan's intent, in a field (Middle East Studies) he characterises through its long and enduring focus on discrete national units and by the ‘“assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture”’ is to explore how remissions payments, print and commercial cultures, and the variegated interactions of Mandate citizens and colonial subjects with imperial power all made of the Lebanese diaspora a set of ‘“poachers” who took elements from this place and that to constitute their daily lives’.⁵⁰

For his part, Norris complicates the national framework by stepping away from the conventional focus on Palestinian and Zionist nationalism in the British Mandate in Palestine, to describe both the imperial economic visions and regional spaces that underpinned British rule and the travels and travails of Zionist Jews and Arabs within them. As he points out, to grasp the importance of a port ‘city of the future’ such as Haifa and its reinvention under British rule requires ‘a re-imagining of geographical space’.⁵¹ In a vein similar to Robert S.G. Fletcher's work on the Syrian ‘desert corridor’, Norris complicates the historiography's long focus on the Mandates as discrete proto-national units by showing how Haifa ‘was never viewed by British imperial planners as merely a coastal city in mandatory Palestine.⁵² Rather it was seen as at the western extremity of a much broader band of resource-rich territory that ran out from Palestine's Mediterranean coast, through the north-eastern “arm” of Transjordan and into Iraq.’⁵³ Crucially, such regional spaces – and such visions of the economic future – were not just the creation of imperial power, but also furnished a matrix for the activities of Zionist and Arab protagonists. One example Norris gives is the civil engineer Zvi Richter, who followed – and smudged – the tracks of British colonial development across the wider region, specifically moving to the growing oil town of Abadan in southwest Iran, leaving his Polish wife Fryda behind in Haifa, as part of his career ‘in Palestine’.⁵⁴

Of course, another dynamic in play in Palestine was Zionist migration and settler colonial activity. Seikaly emphasises the exceptional nature of Palestine in this respect, ‘not simply because the colonial government supported one so-called side over another . . . [but] . . . because it was the only case in which the Permanent Mandates Commission endorsed settler colonialism’.⁵⁵ Again, however, this does not lead Seikaly to focus on a territorially delimited account of Palestinian economic thought and practice. Instead she powerfully shows how this exceptionalism was nevertheless woven into significant transnational dynamics, for example in terms of Palestinian capitalists’ visions of an economic resurrection across the wider Arab world, as incarnated in calls for Pan-Arab free trade (hurriya al-tijara) across artificial colonial borders.⁵⁶ Or again, in connection to the technocratic internationalism of the League of Nations, regarding which she notes that the League's ‘determination of daily caloric requirements, may have been global or universal, but only in ways that evidence how those categories constitute and enforce exclusion’.⁵⁷

The same interplay between the trans-national and international circulation of key political categories, visions of the post-Mandate future for these ‘nation-state[s]-in- waiting’ and the local, often exclusionary politics of community is evident in White's elegant discussion of minorities politics in Syria. He shows expertly how the rise of the nation state and nationalism made minorities a vital interface between ‘the external institutional form of the state (a nation-state recognised by other nation-states) and its internal structure (how the state related to its population)’.⁵⁸ White, building on work by Nelida Fuccaro and Sarah D. Shields, shows how concepts in international law, such as the treatment and status of ‘minorities’, which the League had helped to make into part of the qualifying apparatus for full membership in a world of nation states, themselves became a terrain on which political actors competed for success locally. The differing fates of the Sanjak of Alexandretta, which France eventually handed over to Turkey in 1938, prompting the flight of 40,000 Arabs and Armenians, and of the Jazira region in the far northeast of Syria, which remained part of the Syrian nation state, are especially telling here. Indeed, inhabitants of the Jazira, whether ‘“Kurds . . . Muslims, Christians and Jews”’ were given credit – in a discursive piece of nation building by moderate parts of the Syrian press – for becoming ‘sons of the country’ and building up the Syrian nation through their cross-border trading savvy.⁵⁹

The impact of internationalism in Geneva, meanwhile, was felt most obviously in the slow development and formalisation at the PMC of petitioning mechanisms, which opened a fire hydrant of well-publicised protest and complaint about Mandate rule. Some 60 per cent of these petitions, Pedersen notes, in a glance at the role of diaspora petitioning, came from outside the Mandate territories themselves.⁶⁰ And though petitions rarely met success at the hands of a PMC lacking powers to investigate them and unwilling to countenance any that frontally contested the legitimacy of the Mandatory power itself, they vitally offered ‘exposure, contacts, credibility, publicity, voice’ and an entry into ‘global politics . . . a multi-vocal, international arena’ thus making a ‘previously binary relationship – colonizer, colonized’ into a triangular, internationalised one.⁶¹

It is around this evaluation of the agency that the League – an international organisation dominated by imperialists – nevertheless offered to those subaltern and subjected peoples seeking normative statehood and willing and able to make claims on Geneva, that the influential Pedersenian account of international politics at the League is built. Along with work by Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga it has effectively supplanted older accounts that saw the League as a toothless then bypassed failure.⁶² Natasha Wheatley's recent work on Arab and Zionist critiques of the League's international jurisprudence furnishes a good example of how the argument has been extended, as she argues that political actors in Palestine seized on the petitioning process to create: ‘a jurisprudence of the League's colonial jurisdiction written at cross purposes to the system's framers and caretakers'.⁶³

As noted above, criticism of this evaluation of agency and doubts about the real power of the talk and norms generated in Geneva has been forthcoming, partly reflecting methodological differences and varying conceptualisations of power between cultural and political history and partly reflecting boundaries between the fields of international history and Area Studies. In this context, Thompson's work is again worth reading in parallel here, offering as it does deep biographical accounts touching on the wider practice of petitioning in the Mandates and especially documenting the social, associational and party political life from which petitions sprang, and in which petitions represented just one option.⁶⁴ More generally Thompson reminds us of the enduring realities of power along the coloniser–colonised line of this newly internationalised triangle of power. Geneva, in this sense, was both just a telegram away and yet also very distant, a dynamic that is perhaps also a metaphor for the type of historiographical contact that petitioning permits between international historians and historians and Area Studies scholars of the Middle East.⁶⁵ Thompson shows, for example, how Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husayni (1853–1934), named the mayor of Jerusalem by the British in March 1918, led the submission of a petition against Zionism, written in strongly Wilsonian terms, to the British military governor Ronald Storrs in November that year. Thompson notes that Musa Kazim, like many Arabs in early Mandate Palestine, was well used to ‘constitutionalism’ and to the ‘familiar and accepted principle’ of ‘government by consent’ from late Ottoman practice, and therefore ‘acted as though Wilsonian principles might hold. . . . But he would fail to budge the British’.⁶⁶ Petitioning failed in different and differently productive ways politically, in other words, and not always in internationalised fashion before the flashbulbs of the Geneva press pack.

Mandatory Economies?

Musa Kazim also plays a role in Seikaly's account of the intellectual and practical politics of economy among Palestine's Arab population, but an instructively passing one, as she sets aside this archetypal representative of the Arab notability, often taken, she notes, to incarnate the entire Arab elite, and focuses instead on businessmen and economic thinkers, and on the politics of scarcity and development.⁶⁷ This emphasis on economic history – as refurbished methodologically with the help of insights from economic anthropology and actor network theory – is one shared by Arsan and Norris also, showing how non-positivist historical political economy has emerged as an important methodological axis of the new Mandate history.⁶⁸ Seikaly, meanwhile, indebted to scholars such as Antony Anghie, Adam Tooze and Timothy Mitchell, characterises economy in Mandate Palestine as multifarious: ‘the effective management of money, a new culture of saving and spending, a new body of knowledge, and finally an emerging national space that was parallel and linked to the home’.⁶⁹ Hygiene, statistical measures of health and productivity, nutrition and domestic management, Seikaly shows, drawing on a brilliantly inventive range of sources, became techniques of social legibility and imperial governmental calculation, but also tools for social stratification and anti-colonial activism.

Norris too explains carefully how Mandatory economic development, as an ideology of the mastery of nature and the road to progress, often excluded Palestinian Arabs, building on the established pre-First World War ‘Zionist discourse that had already emerged in conversation with British imperialism – that the Jews’ superior ability to develop Palestine would improve the lives of all its inhabitants’.⁷⁰ At the potash works on the Dead Sea, for example, Palestinian Arab legal challenges based on Ottoman economic law, nationalist anti-colonial discourse and attempts by Arab entrepreneurs to carve out a share of the business all coalesced precisely around the constant exclusion of Arabs by British-Zionist development.⁷¹ Arsan, meanwhile, develops an approach to economic life in the Lebanese diaspora in West Africa focused on the social and political textures of commerce and credit, showing how Lebanese traders, much maligned by French settlers as predatory imposters, in fact worked the seasonal rhythms of West African agriculture with consummate skill, but also relied on types of social authority and trust developed in a wider diaspora community built around long-distance relationships to the ‘home’ villages of the Eastern Mediterranean.⁷²

For Pedersen – moving between nuanced case studies of Mandate government in Western Samoa, South-West and East Africa, Mandated New Guinea and the Middle East, while cycling ceaselessly back to Geneva and the dynamics of the League as a platform for publicity and system for the production of international norms – political economy appears notably through the lenses of the commercial ‘open door’ and more broadly in the tension between ‘market’ and ‘command’ economy.⁷³ As she elucidates both in a close discussion of Belgian rule in Rwanda-Burundi (and notably of the use of forced labour), as well as by touching on the destruction of the Syrian silk industry by Japanese competition in the 1930s, the ‘development on the cheap’ model that emerged in most Mandates rested on imperial coercion above all – ‘“free labour” proved as elusive as “free trade”’.⁷⁴ This was especially true after the advent of the Great Depression around 1930, when the League's ‘Open Door’ commercial rules – imposed over the objections of the Mandatory powers but often sabotaged on the ground by them in favour of French or British interests, in a characteristic instance of the blurring of international and colonial economic jurisdiction – made the Mandates a dumping ground for the otherwise increasingly autarkic world economy, provoking still louder demands for independence.⁷⁵ But it was also the case that the decline of Entente hopes for German reparations and the colonial lobbies’ related dreams of imperial mise-en-valeur (economic development) after about 1921 meant that imperial ‘development on the cheap’ was already embedded from early in the Mandate period.⁷⁶ Nor, as Jamie Martin has lately argued, could the League deploy its growing range of economic development tools in the Mandates in the way it could and did in Albania, China or other more sovereign states. In such places, the international institution could more easily position itself in contrast to the agendas of imperial powers, whereas in the Mandates such a differentiation was far harder to achieve or sustain politically.⁷⁷

Moreover, as White also notes in his discussion of French business's approach to a possible independence treaty for Syria in the 1930s, as the Popular Front came to power in France, the League's cementing of international categories of rule, from ‘minority’ to a vision of economic sovereignty based on ‘property rights and contracts’, influenced the ways in which great power influence in the region would be perpetuated or resisted beyond formal independence after the Second World War.⁷⁸ The League Council, for example, sought to sharpen ‘investor confidence’ and stoke ‘investment’ and ‘development’ in the Mandates by embedding in international law the perpetual sanctity, even beyond independence, of contracts made with foreign businesses by the Mandate authorities.⁷⁹ The results in the Mashriq would vary. One outcome, in some respects a revolt against the political reliance of French Mandate rule on old landowning elites in Syria, was the extensive land reform in that country that Thompson describes through Akram al-Hourani's ‘The Land belongs to the Peasant’ campaign in 1951. Quite another was the state-mediated establishment of neighbouring Lebanon – and especially Beirut – as a regional entrepot in the 1950s, which Ziad Abu Rish has recently studied. But everywhere, without foreclosing the political-economic possibilities of national states, Mandate legacies – of personnel, of jurisprudential and concessionary arrangements, of popular expectations – shaped the decades of ‘high independence’ after the Second World War.⁸⁰

Conclusion

Beyond the questions of the First World War, internationalism and transnational diaspora, or the politics of economic development that this review has concentrated on, the Mandate system, as Cyrus Schayegh noted recently, resonates across discrete historiographies. For contemporary European historians it does so notably by offering another way to conceptualise ‘Europe’ as a category of analysis as a whole, as the interwar world started to pivot towards decolonisation and an international order of nation states.⁸¹ Comparisons and connections between the post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman lands are especially ripe for investigation, not least as scholars increasingly re-parse the Habsburg system in its last decades, but research on Western Europe can also benefit, as Tara Zahra has made clear in her comparative work on minorities.⁸² In this respect the way current refugee movements have called into question the multiple frontiers separating, say, Syria and Germany, might productively provoke research into the connections between, say, Lebanon and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s.⁸³

Protagonists at the time were certainly alive to the obviousness of such links. As the Syro–Palestinian Congress, an elite Arab nationalist organisation, put it in an early petition against the Mandates system to the League of Nations in 1921: ‘Independence and admission have been granted to Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, Litonia [sic], Albania and Armenia, which states are neither more developed nor more important than we are’.⁸⁴ As the centenary years of the First World War grind on, historians of contemporary Europe should reflect on this determined assertion of equal importance. We should continue to seek out such connections in the Mandate period, with its mixture of late Ottoman continuities and late imperial ruptures, in order to question both the assumed exceptionalism of the Mashriq's history and the complacent location of normative statehood in the ideas and practices of Europeans.⁸⁵