Incarceration for debt and disobeying new legal norms has been a common tool for capitalists all over the globe. This paper explores the idea of incarceration -- imprisonment as a mode of correcting laboring bodies -- and disciplining capitalism more broadly. While new scholarly literature on capitalism in the Middle East and North Africa lines the pages of recent academic publishing pamphlets, the relationship between the embodiment of labor, incarceration, and changing capitalist practices in the region is still largely absent. This paper argues specifically that the tools and experiences of incarceration were both a product and a cause of changing regional capitalist practices connected to shifting global economic orders. This contribution to the panel on bodies focuses on the most fertile regions of Palestine prior to World War I. Drawing on police records, private company archives, memoirs, and petitions, it argues for incarceration as integral to capitalism in early-20th century Palestine. New corrective institutions and the corresponding growing science of correction was indeed part and parcel of the process of dehumanizing, devaluing, and demoralizing laboring bodies for their exploitation in the service of capital accumulation. My paper begins with the lead up to the global banking crisis of 1907 and the subsequent Young Turk Revolution. These related events on the heels of constitutional and economic shifts in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire brought about significant political and legal changes in Ottoman Palestine. Laws began to strongly favor large landholding capitalists whose continuous accumulation of capital depended on the objectification of laboring bodies and related ongoing primitive accumulation, what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” for another era. In fertile regions around Nazareth and other regions where land was valuable and disputes were common, capitalists insisted on incarcerating peasants for various infractions that were inconvenient to accumulation. Working closely with law enforcement and political leaders with financial stakes in outcomes of land disputes, capitalists imprisoned peasants without charge, called upon debts before the ends of contracts, employed trespassing charges for usufruct holders, and used vague record-keeping rules to accuse peasants of producing forgeries. These facts reveal not only the imprint of capitalist practices where scholars have argued for their absence. But, they also echo what historians have found in other geographical contexts in the global north and south: capitalism (and by extension, class) and the politics of incarceration are inextricably linked.

In the early 20th century, colonial Tunisia’s Gafsa phosphate mines enabled capital-intensive farming in Europe. The French-owned Gafsa Phosphate and Railway Company (CPCFG) exported millions of tons of phosphate rock to European fertilizer factories, making Gafsa the world’s largest phosphate exporter through the end of the 1920s. Combining doctor’s reports, biomedical research papers, and oral histories—and merging approaches from social history, environmental history, and history of science—I argue that 1920s contestations around occupational disease in Gafsa folded the region into global networks of biomedical knowledge, with enduring consequences through the following decades. These biomedical networks were both a cause and a consequence of Gafsa’s integration into global capitalist markets, because they reflected capitalism’s imperative of devaluing colonial labor. The CPCFG’s power to extract profits—from the minerals under Gafsa’s mountains and the labor power of Gafsa’s residents—relied on its ability to define which diseases were “of the workplace” and which ones weren’t. But the survival strategies that Gafsa’s residents developed to cope with pollution and illness emerged from the reality that “the workplace” never fell within distinct boundaries. The CPCFG had to work constantly to claim authority over where “the workplace” ended, and in doing so, it situated Gafsa within transnational circuits of biomedical knowledge. Company doctors and colonial researchers drew on international debates about silicosis in the 1920s and 1930s to imagine phosphate dust as harmless. They used Gafsa as a laboratory to argue that cancer was a disease of Europe, not of the colonies, crafting a modernization theory of disease that still pervades global public health today. Throughout, workers and their families sought to prove that their maladies stemmed from “a known occupational disease,” both co-opting and challenging the existing public health consensus. Their arguments merged biomedical claims with other ways of knowing, both environmentally embedded and embodied. Labor history is global not only because of migration, the transnational left, and the circulation of produced goods, as other scholars of the Middle East and North Africa have shown. Rather, labor’s embodied dynamics also unfolded on a global scale, shaped by contestation among capitalists, doctors, workers, and their families over ways of knowing occupational disease. By viewing histories of labor and public health together, we not only reach a better understanding of the global scales within which capitalism’s cheapening of labor unfolded, but we also gain insight on the colonial-industrial roots of contemporary public health paradigms.

The experience of growing tobacco as a cash crop deeply affected many Palestinian family households and reorganized agrarian life. However, as scholarly literature rarely concentrates on the history of Palestine’s rural society, questions about this reorganization remain unanswered: How did the family conceive of, and divide “work”? How was the “home” reconfigured as it became the site of initial commodity processing for leaf tobacco? How did growing tobacco affect bodies and roles within the family? How were these different from the working conditions of Jewish tobacco growers? How did the state of Israel perceive the labor of Palestinian peasants? And finally, what changed with the shift to wage labor? Drawing on archival sources and oral history interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel who used to cultivate tobacco, this paper examines peasants’ views of the agrarian family household and its economic viability in the twentieth century. It argues that Israeli plans for the Arab agrarian sector were marked by a policy of de-development, through which it aimed at incorporating Arab peasants into the Israeli work force as cheap laborers. Using the language of modernization, progress, and science, this policy delegitimized the collective working body of the household in favor of individual, mostly male, working bodies. Peasant families, who in the past had special words, clothes, tools, and spaces for tobacco, kept them as souvenirs of a time when the family was more than a kinship group. As tobacco cultivation faded away in the 1970s and 1980s after a century of cultivation, the social, cultural, and bodily experiences of growing tobacco within a multigenerational household remained (and still remains) alive in the memories of individuals and families.

Between the preamble to the Constitution of France’s Fifth Republic, and its fourth line, lies a contradiction; while the preamble recognizes "the right to self-determination of peoples," article 24 grants "French citizens living abroad" the right to representation in the National Assembly and in the Senate, and article 34 allows laws (arising from the legislature) to define rules relating to "nationality, status and capacity of persons." When construction workers fell from scaffolding, when tools malfunctioned, when work sites collapsed, what special problems emerged from this relationship between citizenship and nationality (Genova 2004a, 2004b)? My contribution to this panel on the body draws on disability studies under circumstances of imperialism. This study uses historical method, relying on records groups within the National Archives of Algeria, including administrative records of the Direction du travail et de la securité sociale, as well as the office of Travail et affaires sociales, and administrative collection of Statistiques des accidents du travail, during the Plan de Constantine (1955-1960). I analyze data from these files and other documents pertaining to new construction in the city of Constantine during this period using the discourses Douglas Baynton identified governing disability as a privilege of citizenship (2005, 2011). In doing so, I argue that disability in the Fifth Republic functioned as a privilege of civic belonging, extending conversations about “embodiment” in French Algeria (Shepard 2018) to the still unexplored quotidien experiences of labourers.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, construction and the ability to build were among the central material and ideological axes upon which historical developments, national politics, and domination in Israel/Palestine hinged. At the same time, work in the land’s construction industries - including both building construction and the production of building materials - emerged as consistently unsafe. Construction work exposed workers to physical injury, disability, and death at rates which work safety professionals repeatedly categorized as disproportionate to other industries and to the construction industry elsewhere. Construction’s increasing reliance on marginalized populations as its core labor force - placing them rather than others in harm’s way - was instrumental to enabling these consistently hazardous working conditions. This was especially true after the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of Israel in 1948, when the industry’s most dangerous jobs frequently employed racialized and marginalized Palestinian Arabs and Mizrahi Jews. Labor and economic historians, historical sociologists, and political economists have provided ample evidence of the construction industry’s continued significance and of the post-1948 proletarianization of Palestinians and Mizrahim, which ushered many Palestinian and Mizrahi men into construction work, primarily as so-called “unskilled” labor. However, scholars have seldom examined the changing cultural, political, and social impacts of the risk and harm which workers in Palestine/Israel’s construction industry faced. This paper uses memoirs, archival records, press coverage, oral history interviews, and literary and cinematic representations to examine how workers in Israel/Palestine’s construction industry, their families, and their communities experienced dangerous and exploitative work and its tolls, between 1930-1993. It juxtaposes these narrative sources with contemporaneous scientific discourses of occupational hygiene, work safety and risk, whose quantitative and statistical emphases typically ignored such narratives of pain, danger and disability, and glossed over their attendant political significance. Drawing upon works in political ecology, disability studies and the history of pain, the paper shows how divisions of labor in Palestine/Israel served as vehicles of slow violence and population debilitation, on the one hand, and how pain, injury, occupational disease and accidental death shaped the experiences and subjectivities of construction workers, their families, and their communities, on the other. The narratives of pain, risk, injury, and loss which these individuals and communities produced and inspired, I argue, frequently operated outside of, and against the dominant strands of colonial and national politics.