The Syrian constitutional committee decided for a republic in the summer of 1928. Although High Commissioner Henri Ponsot suspended their activity, the republican regime form remained their favored regime type in Syria. Yet this result of the notables’ politics was not as straightforward as it seems. After the violent re-occupation of French Mandate A Syrian territories against the general revolt (Neep, 2012) the French mandatory power decided for a politics of appeasement and normalization in 1926. The first step of this politique d’entente was the dissolution of the Syrian Federation and the making of a constitution in Lebanon. The second step was uniting the statelets of Aleppo and Damascus into a new polity with autonomy for the Alawites and Jabal Druze. However, there was a fundamental question: what kind of regime type would govern the new state? Monarchy or republic? This paper dwells into the monarchical plans advocated between 1926 and 1928 by some Syrian notables, Henri Ponsot (the French High Commissioner), and various interested parties: the Hashemite rulers in Iraq and Transjordan, the new Sa‘ud ruling house, and some unexpected ex-Ottoman aristocrats such as Abbas Hilmi II, ex-khedive of Egypt. Using new archival research and the Arabic press, I explore the assumptions and concepts motivating French officers and Arab elite individuals in their arguments for a monarchy or a republic. I argue that we can detect a French imperial logic of territorial unification which understood monarchy as key for a stable political community. Similar to British examples, this strategy provided an occasion for opportunistic Arab elite individuals to claim representation and a throne. Usually framed as part of endless negotiations for national independence (Khoury, 1987), or as part of pan-Arabism (Porath, 1996) I insert the 1926-1928 monarchical debates in the context of the other Arab monarchies at the time: the Egyptian, Transjordanian and Iraqi monarchies and, foremost, the new rising house of Sa‘ud. The public debates in the Arabic press about the monarchical idea unearth the Arabic-Muslim reinvention of political Islam and the French diplomatic discussions highlight Christian-racist assumptions about political community the late 1920s.

Much scholarly ink has been spilled on the question of border-making in the interwar Middle East, particularly with regard to the mandate system’s carving up of the old Ottoman Arab provinces into separate (though not independent) nation-states and its production of particular forms of colonial citizenship in the process. Considerably less attention has been paid to the ways in which this largely military enforcement of borders also deliberately and knowingly produced citizenship’s opposite, statelessness. This paper investigates how mandatory governments in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon understood the production and meaning of statelessness for refugees, migrants, and longstanding inhabitants alike in these newly designated national spaces. By the time Britain and France occupied their new mandatory possessions in the aftermath of the First World War, it was already clear that refugees would be an important aspect of defining new forms of nation-statehood at the levels of local territoriality, the formation of national citizen bodies, and a new international legal regime that defined, enforced, and defended differentiated levels of political sovereignty. In particular, colonial and internationalist authorities made distinct use of Armenian and Assyrian statelessness to delineate particular visions of nation-statehood in the mandatory territories of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. But non-refugee communities emerged as stateless as well; certain Bedouin tribes, for instance, who were assigned a political status that allowed them to move across new national borders (for instance, between Palestine and Syria) but that restricted their claims to political representation. Above all, by limiting the rights of movement, representation, and political process for Arabs in interwar Palestine, these same mandatory authorities were gradually and deliberately defining Palestinian Arabs in toto as a comparable stateless community, paving the way for the international acceptance of the eventual transformation of Palestinians into stateless refugees. Statelessness represented a useful tool in the arsenal of colonial state-building strategies: it helped to delineate both physical borders and the limits of citizenship, created pools of populations whose rights were permanently up for colonial negotiation and coercion, and provided maneuvering room for the bolstering of some claims to nationhood over others. The production of statelessness was, then, a central aspect of the colonial production of territoriality as the League and the mandatory powers sought to shape a post-Ottoman Middle East to serve their own political, strategic, and material requirements.

By the start of the 20th century, the scientific study of race had extended its influence into both domestic and international policy. For example, global refugee flows changed as eugenics specialists formulated the US Quota Act. Scientific racism was simply a younger cousin of a century-long project to categorize, classify, and label humans—creating a taxonomy of the species as scientists had for so many others. Those “scientific” classifications were on full display as the League of Nations worked to arbitrate borders in post-war Ottoman territories. Territory would be allocated based on identity, consistent with European insistence on the centrality of the nation to modern sovereignty. Nation-states were to be filled with nations, and those nations had to be defined according to modern, scientific principles. Human categories would then determine territorial allocations. This paper will use the League of Nations archives and secondary literature to analyze three episodes in the interwar period in which the League regulated territorial assignments based on (often ambiguous) human classifications. The Greek-Turkish population exchange assumed the existence of two mutually exclusive segments of humanity, while its implementation illustrated the complications inherent in deciding the criteria for division. Assigning Mosul province began as an identity-related process in which territory would go to Turkey or Iraq depending on the affiliation of the majority of its residents. Despite their efforts to scientifically distinguish the two groups, it soon became clear that these categories had little meaning on the ground. The dispute between Turkey and the French government over the district of Alexandretta was similarly to have been decided based on the identities of the majority of its residents, a project that revealed the fluid and multiple identities of its people. European efforts to assign contested territories in former Ottoman lands relied heavily on theoretical notions of the scientific divisions of humanity. Those same theories, of course, were the ones that had provided the underpinnings of European privileges to control those regions in the first place. While the ideologies of scientific taxonomies and racism were proved inadequate and problematic in the Middle East--and even though the project of imposing borders had been predicated on those same theories--the often disastrous new territorial assignments nonetheless succeeded in providing greater European access to the region.

The standard genesis narrative of the modern Middle East is largely uncontested: with the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the British and French imposed artificial borders on the region in the postwar settlement. In the Treaty of Sèvres and subsequent “oversight” of the mandates awarded these two Great Powers, the League of Nations legitimated this neo-colonial reorganization of the post-Ottoman Middle East. The standard narrative focuses almost exclusively on the partitioning of greater Syria and unification of Iraq (with little attention to Anatolia or the Arabian Peninsula and none to Northern Africa). It also focuses almost exclusively on the causal agency of the British and French in introducing and delineating territorialized political units that contravened the aspirations of the local population, a legacy that constitutes the “original sin” at the root of present-day conflicts. This paper challenges this explanation by historicizing the actual processes through which territorialized state space was produced and eventually delineated during a post-1918 long decade extending into the 1930s. Moving beyond the mandates (Iraq, Syria, Palestine), I consider a wider transregional scope that extends from Northern Morocco to the Iranian plateau. In this post-Ottoman greater Middle East, I argue that—rather than being unilaterally imposed by European powers—state-based territorialization was actually driven by anti-colonial warfare waged across the region in the decade following Paris Peace Conference by local challengers seeking to realize their own political visions. This analysis draws on multi-country archival research (including Spanish, Italian, French, and British military and administrative records, and Arabic correspondence and periodicals) to trace how a series of revolts in the mid- to late-1920s—the Rif War in Northern Morocco, the Italo-Sanusi war in Libya, the Great Syrian Revolt, the Shaykh Said and Ararat Kurdish revolts, and the Saudi-Ikhwan expansion in the Arabian Peninsula—forced nascent colonial states (and the Turkish Republic) to both define and enforce territorial boundaries within a still highly fluid postwar political space. This alternative narrative better accounts for how, why, and when the Middle East’s modern political borders were defined. They were not imposed unilaterally but negotiated and produced through violent and complex interactions involving both colonial and local forces.