From 1900 to 1940, southern Iraq transitioned from being an Ottoman province, to a British Mandate, and finally to the independent Kingdom of Iraq. During this period Ottoman, British, and Iraqi officials often documented smuggling operations along the porous boundaries of southern Iraq’s desert land borders, marshlands, and river networks. Incorporating primary sources from archives such as the British India Office Records (IOR) and the Ottoman-era Svoboda Diaries in conjunction with current scholarship, this paper entitled “Smuggling Under Sovereignties” argues that the three successive governments administering southern Iraq responded to both real and imagined smuggling operations to extend imperialist and nationalist policies over the “frontier”. To defend this claim, “Smuggling Under Sovereignties” details how smuggling adapted chronologically as Iraq changed administrative hands. Many publications focus on smuggling under each of the three regimes respectively, but there is no current scholarship on the change over time in governmental responses to smuggling in the first half of 20th century Iraq. Under the Ottoman and Mandate periods, recorded smuggling operations are more feared by the imperial authorities than an actual threat to their assets in the region. Despite many of the smuggling operations under these two governments existing primarily in the imagination of imperial administrators, officials allocated substantial resources to uncover and eradicate such illicit activities through policy and political agents. Smuggling later increased when Iraq became independent, which became a justification for the complete annexation of Kuwait. Within each of the three periods, this paper analyzes the extent to which smuggling occurred, the ways governments attempted to control their borderlands, and how officials conceptualized the problem of smuggling. Together with Ottoman and British archival sources on illegal trading, “Smuggling Under Sovereignties” incorporates analyses of the southern Iraqi “frontier” by Frederick Anscombe and Peter Sluglett as well as publications on smuggling under imperial administrations by Eric Tagliacozzo, Mehmet Kilic, and Kate Boehme. This research also engages with the debate between the authors Amar Farooqi and Claude Markovits over whether smuggling under imperial regimes is a form of active resistance or is simply a result of indigenous populations exploiting “leaks” in administrative oversight. In the case of southern Iraq, smugglers were engaged with both. “Smuggling under Sovereignties” explores the complex relationship between networks of smugglers undermining imposed regulations and consequential governmental efforts to strengthen control of their border territories.

This paper will demonstrate that the Arabian Peninsula was viewed as a critical site of anticolonial resistance in the eyes of Nahḍawī intellectuals. It will argue for a new spatial interpretation of three well-known Nahḍawī intellectuals: Amīn al-Rīḥānī, a Lebanese-American poet and literary critic, Rashīd Riḍā, a Cairo-based journalist and Islamic theorist, and Shakīb Arslān, a pan-Islamist activist based at the League of Nations in Geneva. These three litérateurs had regular interactions with the intellectual life of the Arabian Peninsula. They each made frequent trips to the Arabian Peninsula, kept in regular contact with local intellectuals in Riyadh, Mecca, Sana‘a, and Kuwait City, and wrote extensively about peninsular culture and politics. They wrote hundreds of letters, poems, personal memoirs, and newspaper articles detailing their views and experiences interacting with this understudied region. Their corpora show that there was a much wider transnational flow of Nahḍa people and ideas beyond the so-called “Cairo–Beirut axis.” With most of the Arab lands under brutal colonial occupation, Nahḍawīs perceived the Arabian Peninsula to be the last remaining vestige of non-colonized Arab space, and they consequently sought to create a parallel non-colonized intellectual space to buttress this territory’s independence. By showing that the Arabian Peninsula held a critical position on the cognitive map of the Nahḍa, this paper will seek to cause a shift in the territorial orientation of Nahḍa studies, leading to a better understanding of the sociology of the Nahḍa. It also seeks to contribute to a wider conversation about the mobility of ideas, notions of autochthony, and exilic knowledge production, building on Said’s concept of “traveling theory.” At the same time, this research continues the important work of de-provincializing the Arabian Peninsula within the field of Middle Eastern studies by highlighting its position as a key node of intellectual and cultural exchange.

Egypt’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has had immense consequences for Egypt’s economic, social, and religious development. This paper deepens our understanding of the enduring Egyptian-Saudi entanglement by exploring its origins in the political partnership between the al-Sadat regime and the Saudi monarchy in the 1970s. It argues that the two countries’ deep connections were a deliberate construct of a small group of counterrevolutionary Saudi and Egyptian elites seeking to reverse the legacies of Nasserism and remake Middle Eastern regional politics. These elites set in motion a larger set of economic and transnational exchanges. The paper examines recently declassified US and British consultations with Saudi and Egyptian leaders alongside Arabic-language Egyptian memoirs, including those of Sadat’s emissaries to the Arab Gulf monarchies. In their conversations with senior American and British officials, members of the Saudi royal family made explicit their ambitious goals to remake Egypt's economy and society along counterrevolutionary and anti-communist lines and to reorient Egypt away from the Soviet Union. Saudi officials employed subsidies and economic integration to achieve these goals. The paper shows how a small network of Saudi and Egyptian political and business elites designed the Egyptian policy of Infitah (or the Open Door) to facilitate the flow of Saudi and Gulf Arab capital into Egypt. Saudi leaders leveraged their financial subsidies to push Sadat toward specific economic, religious, and foreign policies that reversed the legacies of Nasserism and revolutionary Arab Socialism. As Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia (somewhat prematurely) boasted to the US Ambassador in 1973, “Saudi influence had been brought to bear to encourage the elimination of the last vestiges of Nasserism in the Egyptian economy.” Sadat, in turn, viewed Saudi Arabia as a source of subsidies and a bridge to the US. In implementing infitah, he hoped to realign Egypt’s economy with the US and Western Europe. In practice, his policies instead bound Egypt in relations of dependency with Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing Gulf monarchies. The deep legacies of the Saudi-Egyptian entanglement manifested themselves after 2011, when Saudi Arabia supported Egyptian elites aiming to overturn the country's revolution. This paper clarifies that the Saudi state’s support for the Egyptian counterrevolution was consciously engrained in the Egypt-Saudi partnership from its point of origin in the 1970s.