The historiography of the Syrian Desert—which covers parts of present-day Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—generally considers this desert region as one that separates as much as it connects different territories. In the late Ottoman period, merchant caravans, Bedouins, pilgrims and other travellers regularly crossed the desert. Relying on these existing social and infrastructural networks, travellers made their way across the desert in greater numbers in the interwar period due to the spread of motorized transport. While a growing number of scholars have paid attention to regional patterns of mobility in the interwar Middle East, the development of a region-wide motor transport infrastructure remains understudied. This paper traces the beginnings of the Baghdad-Damascus route by examining the various components of the new transport system: automobiles, roads and tracks, transport companies, and government support. In doing so, it attempts to examine the co-production of technology, (imperial) politics, and geography. In the opinion of contemporary observers and actors, the opening of the Baghdad-Damascus motor route was a ‘conquest of the desert’, whose success they attributed to the rationality and commercial ability of the ‘pioneers’ of motor transport as well as to modern technology. This narrative overlooks the many ways in which desert topography played a part in the development of transdesert transport services in the 1920s. In contrast, I argue that the topographical features of the Syrian Desert (re)shaped the various components of the infrastructural system as well as the interests of the French and British Mandate powers in the region First, the paper seeks to demonstrate that the desert surface affected the transport infrastructure: the type of vehicle, the route, the type of traffic carried by road operators, and the material structure. In doing so, the paper does not seek to give in to the narrative that the desert ‘resisted’ its ‘conquest’ by the automobile, but to show how the various actors adapted to the topographical constraints, accommodated them, and even developed new forms of automobility. Second, the paper examines the ways in which the topography of the region played a role in the Franco-British relationship in the Eastern Mediterranean. As a trans-imperial or trans-Mandate route, the Baghdad-Damascus motor route offers a privileged site for examining cases of cooperation and rivalry between them.

Built between 1927 and 1938 to connect the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf via Tehran, the Trans-Iranian Railway is often associated with the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-41) and his nation-building project. However, it was during the Allied occupation of Iran (1941-45) that rail transport capacity drastically increased as the Allied forces expanded the railway system to transport lend-lease materials to the Soviet Union. Concurrently, the Allies restricted civilian use of Iran’s highways to prioritize wartime needs. These developments during the early 1940s shifted travel routes and created a situation in which Iranian travelers relied heavily on the Trans-Iranian Railway for vacation, tourism, and pilgrimage. Particularly remarkable was the surge of pilgrimage traffic not only to Qom but also to holy cities outside of Iran such as Najaf, Karbala, and Mecca by Shi’i travelers who combined rail transport with boats, cars, and caravans. This study examines how these travelers experienced measures that regulated the flow of movement by Iranian and Iraqi state authorities as they tried to visit the holy cities. Iranian historiography views transborder movement primarily through the anxieties expressed in Tehran-centered nationalist discourse, giving scant attention to travelers’ experience of such movement. Yet, the case of the Trans-Iranian Railway in the 1940s deserves attention because it illustrates how a purportedly national infrastructural project facilitated the formation of an informal transnational infrastructural network, producing possibilities for multi-scalar spatial movement for travelers. Using the Iranian press, memoirs, and American and British archival materials, this paper suggests that mobilities produced by the Trans-Iranian Railway were conducive to both a heterogeneous national community and transnational possibilities. Iranian pilgrims shared the experience of traveling in the crowded railway space, being stuck in border towns, taking advantage of the human smuggling rings to cross borders, and facing various forms of discriminations on account of being Shi’is/Iranians. Moreover, they shared the same transnational infrastructural network with communists who traveled between Moscow and Baghdad via Tehran and Khorramshahr. Such shared experience of movement left room for travelers to become not only Iranians but also Khuzestanis, Shi’is, communists, or possibly all of these at the same time.

In the early 1880s, Ottoman modernizers dreamed of implementing an intrusive governing structure in the interior lands of southern Syria and the northern Hijaz, in the expansive region bordered by the settlements of Karak in the west, Jawf in the east and al-Ula in the south. This arid landscape had been under Ottoman sovereignty since the sixteenth century, but the imperial administration had not attempted to govern it as landed property. This paper considers the role of the tent-dwelling Bedouin inhabitants of this region in Ottoman attempts to create an intrusive administrative framework for taxation, policing and infrastructural development in a global historical context. Among expansive contiguous empires in the late nineteenth century, including the American and Russian, Ottoman attempts to more intrusively govern “empty lands” inhabited by populations they categorized as economically underproductive were hardly unique. In the American West, like in the Syrian interior, increased federal control over interior spaces was to come with railroad construction. From this global perspective, I argue that the particularity of the Syrian interior lay in the active role of its tent-dwelling populations in the transformation of the landscape. Ottoman officials’ hopes for extracting revenue from and developing the arid interior regions of southern Syria and northern Arabia rested on successful reform and administration of the livestock tax, a process that closely involved tent-dwelling individuals with local connections. At the same time, the Syrian interior was becoming a borderland, with administrators anxious about the British occupation of Egypt and the consolidation of the Wahhabi and Rashidi emirates in the Arabian Peninsula. Using archival records and politically-engaged Nabati poetry, I argue that the transformation of the Syrian interior into a borderland space granted tent-dwellers further leverage with Ottoman officials, who were painfully aware of the active attempts of their new neighbors to gain tent dwellers' political sympathies and tax revenues. The paper follows the story of the Bani Sakhr community, whose prominence in Ottoman administration dates to their salaried involvement in the pilgrimage route in the early modern period. The partnership between Bani Sakhr elites and Ottoman officials was most directly contested by the construction of the Hijaz railway, which cut directly through lands the Bani Sakhr claimed. The paper shows that the Bani Sakhr’s ability to use their historical ties with the Ottoman administration to maintain political privilege set the stage for their territorial dominance in the twentieth century.

After the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the late 1920s and early 1930s marked a period of consolidation for the newly established nation-states in the Middle East. The introduction of state administration in the desert borderlands and the reinforcement of state borders went along with the tighter regulation of Bedouin tribes and of their cross-border mobility in particular. At the same time, the region was affected by a severe drought, dealing a heavy blow to the Bedouin economy. Scholarship has often analyzed droughts in terms of their one-sided effect on the socio-economic foundations of pastoral communities. The drought of the interwar years has been studied primarily in terms of its contribution to the economic decline of Bedouin tribes. The lack of water and pastures led to heavy losses of livestock. At the same time, emerging border regimes and growing interventionist state politics into tribal affairs restricted Bedouins’ mobility and their ability to compensate for losses by raiding wealthier tribes. By examining the cross-border mobility of Bedouin tribes between Iraq and Syria, this paper, however, provides a more complex picture of the interplay between tribes, states, and ecological factors. Recent scholarship has challenged the seeming contradiction between Bedouin mobility and state control over territory and instead showed their interdependence. Rather than curtailing mobility of tribes, state authorities sought to monitor and channel their cross-border movement. Yet, droughts disrupted patterns of Bedouin mobility, created conflicts over water and grazing land, and thus posed a risk to states in their pursuit of security and control over the borderlands. This paper argues that ecological challenges played as crucial a role as other socio-economic and political factors in determining the course of state-tribal relations and border-making processes in the Middle East during the interwar period. In doing so, it not only considers how the material realities of climate and environment shaped imperial policing of tribes but also how droughts were perceived and used by different actors to assert their own interests. While state authorities exploited the effects of droughts to consolidate state power and reinforce state borders, tribesmen could use periods of drought to demand tax exemptions and cross-border grazing rights. The paper thus ultimately also highlights the role of Bedouin tribes as well as of non-human actors in the formation of the nation-state in the Middle East.