This paper focuses on the British military occupation of the area known as Ottoman Palestine, from the conquest of Jerusalem in December 1917 to the establishment in July 1920 of a British colonial civil administration. The discussion adopts a threefold approach. First, it will provide some overall context to British decision-making processes during these two and a half years of military occupation. Against that background, the paper then examines specific policies developed by the occupying forces to provide agricultural credit and revitalize a market in land transactions. Not only did land and agriculture constitute the basis of livelihood for the vast majority of Palestine’s population, it also underlay the political tensions with the Zionist movement: for Zionism, land acquisition in Palestine was key to building the homeland which had just been promised by Britain by the terms of the November 1917 Balfour Declaration. The paper concludes with three overall observations about the significance of the period of occupation for a broader understanding of the history of Palestine. First, the central, if disputed, role played by prevailing Ottoman institutions during the military occupation forces a reconsideration of the Ottoman legacy: Ottoman laws and practices were clearly more resilient and effective than popular images of the Ottoman Empire as the historic ‘sick man of Europe’ allow. Second, that, although efforts to conflate the making of British land policies with the directives of Zionism have long been a staple of the extant literature, it is actually rather difficult to find the key to the military occupation’s land-policy making process in a monolithic and overpowering impulse to build a Jewish national home. Third, that the profound transformations experienced by the international system in the early twentieth century, as legitimized by both Britain’s recognition of the pre-war Hague conventions and of wartime Wilsonian notions of a ‘sacred trust’ - often referred to as ‘the spirit of the age’ - forced British officers on the ground to align their policies with prevailing practices which the majority population, or at the very least the political and economic leaders among them, were accustomed. The hope was to build some minimal public backing and a certain level of legitimacy, but it proved an impossible task. In addition to panels on the Palestinian Israeli conflict, this individual paper could fit with the following thematic panels: military occupations; British colonial administration; Ottoman imperial legacy; land and property rights.

Guy Geltner, the historian of cities and medicine, in his study of medieval urban Italian health regulatory bodies pushes the historian to question how we view the totality of methods that those in power used to create, manage and discipline a healthy city. He terms these multiplicity of systems, healthscaping. It is a term that I believe is helpful to understand the various ways in which the state, the Suez Canal Company and local health officials used the tools at hand to police employees, residents, and travelers along the Suez Canal. This paper will look at the different institutions, individuals, and officials involved in the processes to create healthy cities, in Port Sa‘īd, Isma‘iliyya and Suez. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which urban/public spaces, as well as the built environment were managed and engineered as part of a project of healthscaping at the Suez Canal. Institutions like hospitals and quarantine sites were engineered to serve the needs of the towns and canal company, and included modern sanitation technology as part of their design. Additionally, they were spaces where individuals and the natural environment were disciplined, in order to regulate the health of the towns and residents. By examining the hospitals, as well as other sites of socio-medical discipling we can form a better idea about the larger health project along the Suez Canal. This paper uses the colonial company archive of the Suez Canal Company to interrogate the schematics, photography, and the plans. The colonial archive is used because of its extensive material, but also due to the lack of access and paucity of sources elsewhere.

On May 15, 1947, The United Nations General Assembly created a committee to investigate and propose solutions to what they called "the problem of Palestine." This United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), made up of representatives from eleven different countries, spent three activity-packed months in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. Yet by the end of their journey, the members of UNSCOP were divided. Two solutions were recommended instead of one: a proposal for partitioning Palestine supported by the majority, and a proposal to create a shared federal state supported by a minority. One clear authority in the minority proposal was delegate Sir Abdur Rahman, the representative from India. Sir Rahman's own country was undergoing a bloody partition that same summer contributed to his opposition to partitioning Palestine. However, his warnings were repeatedly dismissed. Despite Sir Rahman's involvement in two of the most important partitions of the mid-20th century and his prescient warnings regarding the dangers of partition, most scholars of Palestinian history who focus on the 1947 UNSCOP plan have ignored both his contributions and significance in establishing not just parallels, but connections, between the Palestinian and Indian partitions. The few works that do cover Sir Rahman often do so within a foreign policy framework rather than examining his contributions to UNSCOP, simplifying Sir Rahman's stance as pro-Arab or focusing on the genealogy of Israeli political relations with India and Pakistan. My paper instead centers Sir Rahman's viewpoint within a story of Palestinian partition, drawing on original oral history interviews conducted with members of Sir Rahman's family, historical newspaper coverage of UNSCOP's journey in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and UN digital archives of UNSCOP proceedings. It paints a picture of the march towards Palestine's partition from the perspective of an anti-partition intellectual. It argues that understanding Sir Rahman's connection to the partition of India is crucial to understanding what helped precipitate the main ideological divergences between the UNSCOP majority and minority recommendations for Palestine. Ultimately, by tracing the UNSCOP story through Sir Abdur Rahman, this paper will support the growing body of literature that assesses the logic and consequences of partitions across the British Empire, placing Palestinian history in a comparative framework. Centering Sir Rahman's prudent lack of faith in partition also highlights the way that "Third World" historical actors' critiques can provide historians with new ways for understanding international and colonial policy.

A great many myths surround the historical development of U.S.-Iranian relations, not least of which is common perception of W. Morgan Shuster, a 34-year-old lawyer, banker, and civil servant from Washington, D.C., as an unlikely hero in the Iranian struggle for democracy and sovereignty at the dawn of the 20th century. This paper aims to deflate, or at the very least contextualize, this perception, instead revealing the hierarchical and colonial assumptions latent in Shuster’s financial reform efforts in Iran, where he served as Treasurer-General in 1911. Contracted by the Iranian government in December 1910, in the midst of the ongoing Constitutional Revolution, Shuster and his small team of American administrators arrived in May of the following year and quickly gained de facto control over the entire Iranian financial administration until forced to resign in December (primarily on account of the imperial machinations of Britain and Russia). Not unlike Howard Baskerville, the American Presbyterian missionary teacher who died defending Tabriz as a constitutionalist volunteer in 1909, Shuster’s actions during these eight months are often held up as a noble counterpoint to the “tragic” later dimensions of U.S. involvement in Iran due to his vocal opposition to foreign encroachments on Iranian sovereignty and for his passionate support for the Iranian constitutional movement. Many of these assessments derive from the favorable accounts of Shuster in the memoirs, letters, and other reflections of his Iranian contemporaries, including those of such renowned statesmen as Hassan Taqizadeh, ‘Abd Allah Mostowfi, and Qavam al-Saltaneh. No doubt Shuster’s own best-selling narrative of the mission, sensationally titled "The Strangling of Persia", has also contributed to this unvarnished image of his Iranian endeavours, presenting the mission’s raison d’être as essentially the benevolent extension of Progressive American practices of fiscal administration to a grateful, underdeveloped nation. Cutting across such narratives both past and present, this paper brings to bear a unique array of recently uncovered archival materials in order to reevaluate Shuster’s activities: including his wife’s letters from Tehran to her family in Kentucky as well as records of the New York financial house clandestinely underwriting the mission. This diverse, highly personalized source base will reveal both the ambiguity of Shuster’s true purposes in Iran and the embeddedness of his financial mission within wider circuits of American empire during the early 20th century.