The corporation has deep historical roots in the Middle East but its contemporary expansion I argue in this presentation has been unprecedented. Joint-stock corporations are now integral to the organization of contemporary urban space and social life throughout the Middle East but they have largely escaped sustained critical scholarly attention. In this presentation, I detail this remarkable contemporary expansion of the joint-stock corporation and its insertion into the processes of urbanization. Today, if you look at the skyline of downtowns throughout the region, in particular in the Gulf, cities like Dubai and Doha, but also in Cairo and Casablanca, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present by the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. I provide an in-depth analysis of the vast increase in the capitalization of the built environment and the associated expansion of the stock markets across the region. I outline my concept of capitalized urbanization that utilizes insights from both old institutional economics and Science and Technology Studies. I argue that through capitalized urbanization corporations build certain futures into the present of the cities of the Middle East foreclosing other possible more progressive forms of social organization. Through this framework, I give a detailed account of the constitution, operations and expansion of three of the most notable real estate joint-stock corporations in the region, Solidere in Lebanon, Emaar from the UAE and the Jabal Omar Development Company in Saudi Arabia. I detail how they have built a certain future, benefitting particular social groups at the expense of others, into the urban present both within the respective state they are registered in and the region more broadly.

During the early part of the nineteenth century, when the modern Middle Eastern corporation was born, it was born masculine. The male members of the newly formed corporations named them to reflect their own family lineages. The companies usually carried the name of the oldest son or closest heir to the family fortune, such as Bustrus and Sons. or Debbas and Nephews. However, behind the scenes, women, in particular widows, held shares in the companies. They traded and managed them and bought and sold them in times of drought or locusts. This paper focuses on these female shareholders. It argues that the females lost shares in the company as the company became increasing divorced from its members – that is, as the company became an abstraction that is depersonalized and dehumanized. Specifically, my paper uses the papers of female members of family companies in the Levant to show how they thought about their own holdings. I show how the Ottoman system of land tenure and shareholding provided a space for these women to be agentic subjects in business dealings, both when they were widowed and often as part of the household. This is in sharp counter distinction to companies in Europe at the time, which were gendered male and made up of men. Through these female holders, I show the gradual, and non-linear process of the formation of the modern limited liability company as a model for business. I draw on their voices to show how they were both complicit in and resistant to the abstraction of the company that crystalized during World War I. Through their papers, I examine the violence that is endemic to the creation of the object company as an entity both made-up of members and existing on its own outside of their kinship relations.

On November 30th 1854, Egypt's viceroy issued a firman (decree) granting his friend M. De Lesseps the exclusive power to form the Suez Canal Company, the world's first 'universal' company, owned by shareholders from different countries. The Company was granted a concession to cut through the Isthmus of Suez, bridge the Mediterranean and Red Sea by means of a maritime canal, and operate the canal for 99-years. A second, more detailed firman was issued in 1856, the ‘financial company’ was formed in Paris shortly afterwards, excavation began in 1859 and ten years (and thousands of perished workers) later, the canal was open for navigation. Notwithstanding its significance however, Sa‘?d Pasha’s concession was not first Ottoman firman stipulating the establishment of a maritime canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Almost three centuries earlier, and shortly after Egypt became an Ottoman province, Sultan Selim II (r. 1566-1574) issued a firman ordering his Egyptian vali to conduct necessary studies for a project that would bridge the Mediterranean and Red Sea by means of a maritime canal. The firman, issued on January 17th, 1573, was soon forgotten with the Sultan’s sudden death a year later. In one sense therefore, Sa‘?d was more fortunate, for unlike the Sultan, his passing did not bring the endeavor to an end. By the time he died in 1863, and despite the absence of Sultanic ratification for his firman, construction was already underway, and he even had a port city (Port-Said) named after him. This paper explores the genealogies of the Suez Canal Company’s founding firman, and examines the shifts in forms of legality that allowed for the rise of the Company

In the sixteenth century, European capital began to penetrate Ottoman territory through the establishment of joint-stock companies and trading houses in several ports and cities around the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout the mercantilist period, the scope and form of this penetration was regulated by a series of bilateral treaties (capitulations) signed between the Sultan and the sovereigns of various European states, who granted charters according corporations the privilege of trading in Ottoman cities where the treaties applied (échelles). Under this system of capitulations, the access of European merchants to Ottoman markets was thus limited by the authority of their own state as well as its diplomatic relations with the Porte. This paper explores how the decline of this regulated system of trade, and its replacement by free trade practices from the late eighteenth century, transformed the social role, institutional structure, and geography of capitalization in Eastern Mediterranean port-cities in the age of the Industrial Revolution. It adopts a comparative approach to examine the role of European companies in shaping social relations in the échelles du Levant, which were subject to the capitulations, and Beirut, which was not. As historians of capitalism in the Ottoman Empire have observed, Beirut’s freedom from the political and legal regulations that constrained capital accumulation in the échelles is critical to explaining the city’s transformation from an insignificant coastal town of 6,000 inhabitants in the 1780s to the most important trading hub of Greater Syria by the 1840s. However, a historical understanding of how the former engendered the latter remains to be developed. This paper seeks to contribute to such an understanding by examining how the regulatory climate of Beirut differed from the échelles, and how this difference mattered for the ways in which capital organised social life in these port-cities. By analysing how the role of capital changed as it transcended the geographic and social limits of the capitulations system, this paper aims to shed light on the relations between the liberalisation of trade, the historical forms of capital accumulation, and the transformation of social relations in commercial cities of the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean.