This panel examines different trajectories and definitions of capitalist development in the global Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the highly innovative literature on the history of capitalism of the past decade effectively defines capitalism as a concept that structured historical inquiry, this literature commonly takes the United States and the Atlantic system as the “epicenter of the political economy of capitalism.” Recent scholarship on the postcolonial world, however, has shown not only that the institutional structures and the ideological apparatus of this epicenter, most notably the plantation as an “exploitative, racial, political-ecological complex,” moved to other parts of the world with ease during this time, but also that the encounter of these structures with local economic and legal practices shaped capitalism’s course for the entire globe.
Focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean during what historians call the “era of global reconstruction,” the papers in this collection probe these encounters, and the impasses, crises, and catastrophes that ensued. Taking the practice of slavery as its point of departure, the first paper looks at how the paradoxical liberal right to freely dispose of one’s property was vernacularized and translated into legal categories in the reform-era Ottoman Empire. The second paper examines the expansion of the frontiers of capitalism in the context of anti-Armenian violence in the late Ottoman Empire. It focuses on the ways in which violence-stricken districts were “reconstructed” by multinational companies and missionaries’ enterprises which connected the new labor relations to changing discourses about gender roles, national survival, and humanitarian help. Scrutinizing the differences between and within the agricultural hinterlands of Nazareth, Haifa, and Jaffa, the third paper highlights the circumstances that contributed to variety in labor relations and land ownership configurations in Palestine in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The fourth paper examines the history of economic concepts and debates around labor, luxury, property, and 'the economic' in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arabic periodicals of the Nahda. The fifth and final paper looks at the global financial crisis of 1907 and the category of “crisis/azmah” in the Egyptian nationalist thought. All in all, this proposed collection situates Middle Eastern capitalist development in its larger global context, while at the same time offering a critique of pervasive Euro-America centered treatments of it.
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Dr. Ceyda Karamursel
In June 1909, when the constitutional amendments were underway at the Ottoman parliament, three deputies presented a formal proposal that the Ottoman constitution—like its equivalents in the globe, they underlined—should include a clause that would ban the sale and purchase of individuals. Their proposal was consequently rejected by the majority of the parliamentarians who staunchly maintained that all Ottomans were already in full possession of their freedom and any violation to that effect was punishable by common/criminal law. The small group of proponents of the addition of the clause thought otherwise, however. For them, not only the imperial palace and the elite households continued to buy slaves for domestic (including sexual) services, but the ongoing sale and purchase of the Armenian and Kurdish peasants (and the extralegal practice of multiple taxation) in the eastern provinces such as Mus, Kozan, and Erzurum gravely injured the liberal constitutional order and its ‘market rendition of the individual.’ It was thus that they insisted to tie the matter to an all-encompassing law rather than the common law, which was ordinarily dismissed by the local elites and the high ranking state officials, let alone the sultan himself.
This proposed (and subsequently dismissed) amendment came at the end of decades-long debates around the slaves’ intrinsically paradoxical status in the ‘era of freedom.’ Tracing these debates in the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, this paper explores the ways in which the Ottoman state, slave-owners and slaves themselves linked the notions of person, thing, and property. More specifically, it seeks to understand how the liberal right to freely dispose of one’s property was understood and translated (or failed to do so) into legal categories and how that shaped capitalist development in the reform-era Ottoman Empire.
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Mr. Yasar Tolga Cora
Why and how did Oriental carpets become one of the most important export sectors– and the one with the largest number of women employees– in the late Ottoman Empire? This paper examines the development of that sector and the encroachment of global capitalism into the late Ottoman Empire following the violence against Armenians in the 1890s and in 1909. It argues that Armenian women and children in the post-violence Armenian communities were incorporated into the global market as a vulnerable, organizationally weak and cost-efficient workforce for the flourishing oriental carpet sector. The paper thus approaches post-violence societies as new environments into which capitalism’s borders expanded where exploited cheap labor was exploited as part of their reconstruction. This expansion came in the form of “disaster capitalism” or “predatory capitalism” in those regions where unregulated markets and exploitation of human and material resources were coupled with a financially and economically weak state, and it created both the material institutions and the discourses for acceptance of the private sector’s role in the recovery of a post-disaster society. As the market began to replace the communal bonds which had been destroyed by the violence, Armenian women’s and children’s exploitation in the form of low wages and long work-hours began to be redeemed as culturally acceptable– and for some it was, in any case, a necessity, as the only means to alleviate their wretched condition and to serve the community. By examining the Armenian press of the period, aid committees’ reports and the documents of carpet firms, the paper will focus on the creation of what David Harvey called “structured coherence” in the violence-stricken Armenian regions where both the material institutions of and the discourses about the market bolstered their community and strove for its solidarity. This paper aims to examine, on the one hand, the history of the most vibrant economic sector of the late Ottoman Empire within the developing field of global capitalism and, on the other hand, will question the dominant narratives of social change in the Middle East by highlighting the role of various non-state and transnational actors.
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Dr. Kristen Alff
Levantine joint-stock companies grew up in an era of intense globalization and industrialization between 1860 and World War I. Enmeshing themselves in the global capitalist market, they became powerful political and economic forces in the Levant and Egypt, as well as in Western Europe. The companies purchased large tracts of land in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria and cultivated the lands in these three regions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. In all three regions they grew cotton, grains, wheat, and other agricultural products for the global market. Although the companies continued to own these lands in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the labor relations and land-tenure configurations on these lands differed over time. Specifically, certain peasants held onto their title deeds as owners of the means of production. This was the case, for instance, in regions outside of Nazareth. Other peasants, such as the inhabitants of Jedro and Majdal outside of Haifa, lost their titles, effectively remaining tenant farmers. In still other cases, the companies turned these peasants into wage-laborers.
This paper will focus on the differences between and within the agricultural hinterlands of Nazareth, Haifa, and Jaffa to highlight the circumstances that contributed to the variety in labor relations and land ownership configurations in Palestine between 1850 and 1914. An investigation of only Levantine companies’ tracts of land in Palestine, provides an opportunity to highlight the factors and forces that contributed to the variation in labor relations during this period. Naturally, the type of commodities grown in these regions and demand for these commodities on the global market influenced the labor regime on that land. Labor scarcity and changing Ottoman policies also played a role. However, my paper takes this argument further by citing much less obvious and previously unexplored factors in regional labor market transformations. First, I will draw on daily correspondences between the company managers and the owners in Beirut and peasant petitions to show how the agency of peasants themselves had an impact on the character of these markets. Second, I will employ private company letters and court records to argue that changing gender norms at the level of the company influenced variations in land and labor regimes in early-twentieth-century Palestine.
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Nader Atassi
In the mid-nineteenth century, a modest private Arabic press was beginning to be established in the Levant. By the 1880s, the center of Arabic publishing moved to Egypt and expanded considerably. A number of new periodicals were being published that covered a wide range of subjects. During the same period, the two hubs of Arabic publishing, Egypt and the Levant, underwent immense economic transformations. In the 1880s, the Arabic scientific periodical Al-Muqtataf published a number of articles on ‘the new science of political economy,’ introducing their audience to ideas from the canon of classical political economy. These early articles considered ‘political economy’ to be a science of self-betterment that counseled frugality and discipline in order to obtain profit. Soon after, other periodicals such as Al-Hilal, Al-Jam'ia, and Al-Manar also began to publish articles on economic theories and local economic developments.
This paper focuses on the history of economic concepts and ideas in Arabic periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through tracing the debates in these periodicals around labor, luxury, property, trade, taxes, and development, I argue that at the beginning of the twentieth century the meaning of the economic shifted away from being a ‘science’ of self-betterment. Writers like Niqula Haddad began to mobilize the concept of ‘the economic’ in these same publications in order to push for a more collectivist politics. Furthermore, I assert that these debates were not unique in the region—rather they were a part of wider debates about economic ideas happening among the community of Ottoman reformists during the turn of the century.
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Dr. Aaron G. Jakes
This paper examines the financial crisis of 1907 as a watershed in nationalist thought about Egypt’s place in the uneven geographies of global capitalism. More specifically, it aims to explain the paradoxical emergence of Theodore Roosevelt, “Teddy the Meddler,” as a critical foil to the British Consul General Sir Eldon Gorst in Egyptian accounts of the social dislocation that ensued from the market crash of that spring.
The first half of the paper offers an account of the 1907 crisis that resituates Egypt as one among a number of major frontiers for the expansion of metropolitan financial networks characteristic of global capitalism in the belle époque. As countless observers at the time were aware, the financial turmoil of 1907 was worldwide in scale. The convulsions that rocked money markets as distant as New York and Alexandria were brought about by economic processes that were not just structurally similar but closely interlinked.
Tracking coverage of the crisis in its early months through the pages of Egypt’s leading Arabic dailies—al-Liwa’, al-Jaridah, al-Ahram, al-Mu’ayyad, al-Muqattam, and al-Zahir—the paper’s second part identifies a series of gradual but significant shifts in nationalist conceptions of the independence they demanded from British rule. On the one hand, the manifest hardship that the crisis unleashed gave the lie to the occupation’s economistic discourse of material improvement and public benefit. As a potent new keyword for the nationalist movement, “crisis” now provided a comparative diagnostic for the peculiar character of Egypt’s pseudo-colonial state, a state that had demurred in the face of widespread social upheaval and left the public unnecessarily vulnerable to the fluctuations of modern finance. On the other hand, the crisis revealed the extent to which even the lowliest of Egyptian farmers had come to depend on flows of foreign capital, as much as water, to sustain their very existence. As the repercussions of the crisis continued to spread, it became ever more difficult to identify the particular agents responsible for such diffuse misfortunes.
While furnishing a new normative basis upon which to claim independence, the crisis laid bare the deepening entanglements between forms of political and economic domination in a capitalist world and thus reframed the question of what it might mean to live differently after British rule.
