The League of Nations' Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children received annual reports from its member states and their colonial or mandatory possessions. In 1924/5 and 1931/2, two traveling commissions visited dozens of cities around the world and mapped the movement of women for prostitution, and states' policies to curtail it. Indeed, the abduction of unsuspecting girls for prostitution was marginal to the Committee's deliberations, which came to discuss and explore the migration of prostitutes across national borders, and travels of pimps who facilitated such migration. Those "undesirables", and states' ability to protect themselves from them, became the focus of discussion and exploration. The proposed paper examines the Committee's reports from the Middle East and North Africa, and traces patterns of movement of pimps and prostitutes, within, to and from the region. It also examines measures taken by states and colonial or mandatory powers to restrict and control this movement; and then the creative means which those "undesirables" had devised to smuggle themselves to and from Istanbul, Beirut, Alexandria, Port Said, Tangier and more. I take the entire region, rather than individual countries, as my unit of analysis in order to examine new ways in which national borders and border crossing were being conceived of, maintained and challenged. I also examine here how interwar global processes affected life choices of prostitutes and pimps across the Mediterranean and beyond.

Under the supervision of the League of Nation, the nascent international community undertook, in the Interwar years, to promote a normative agenda on individual « bad » behaviours. That agenda focused on the control or prohibition of such traffics as opium and other narcotics, liquor, and obscene publications. The fate of these policies was diverse. Obscene publications remained a minor concern. The League was very wary of dealing with alcohol trade, a very divisive issue among its members ; its only outlet was in the African and Pacific mandates, whose charters highlighted the harmful character of spirits on so-called « backward », indigenous societies, and made it compulsory for the mandatory powers to set up ad hoc policies. Yet the prohibition of the traffic of opium and narcotics developped into a fully-fledged international policy, with special effects in the Middle East. The purpose of the paper is to question the transformation of a normativity, based on diverse sanitary and moral concerns, into an international policy and its enactment in the Middle East. Who were the activists and lobbyists favouring drug prohibition ? What kind of normative discourses did they produce to justify that policy ? Whom were they connected around and with within the League ? What were the effects of the internationalization of drug policies within the individual mandates ? What kind of expertise does it produce, on a local level and in Geneva ? While the focus of drug control was on the main producer countries, its concern with the Middle Eastern mandates is of interest for a range of reasons. First, these mandates were under scrutiny as producers of hemp, and as for Iraq, as a possible way for opium from Persia, an important producer, to Europe. Second, the charter of the different mandates included special attention, on the part of the mandatory powers, on the traffic of narcotics. Hence, the Permanent Mandate Commission, where the mandatory reports on that and other issues were discussed on a yearly basis, became a site for the discussion on procedures of control and expertise on prohibition. Lastly, the mandates were a matter of special interests for all kinds of social, colonial and moral reformers in the aftermath of World War I, who lobbied the League on the issue of narcotics. Thus, the prohibition of narcotics offers enlightening insights into the setting up of international governance, that is at work in the Middle East to this day.

This paper focuses on a long-running and understudied Egyptian economic institution, namely, the beer industry. While the presence of a well-developed beer industry in a predominantly Muslim country alone is noteworthy, it is the consistent profitability of this industry despite the vicissitudes of the Egyptian economic development that has made it truly remarkable. Relying heavily on archival material, including documents in Cairo’s Dar al-Watha’iq, this paper tracks the development of the beer industry in Egypt from 1898, when Belgian entrepreneurs started the Pyramid and Crown Breweries; to the 1950s, when the Egyptian government nationalized the two companies and re-named the conglomeration al-Ahram (The Pyramid) Brewing Company; and up to 2003, when the Dutch company Heineken purchased a controlling share in the recently privatized al-Ahram Beverage Company. Although the beer industry has undergone some significant reconfigurations during its century-long history, the uninterrupted production of Stella Beer, Egypt’s most popular brand, has obscured these changes to the general public. Its yellow star label is one of the most potent and recognizable Egyptian brands both in Egypt and abroad, and has achieved a brand-product association that any major corporation would envy. This paper pays special attention to the inner workings of the al-Ahram brewery and its interaction with the government as the company clumsily transitioned from private ownership to government control and then back to privatization. At the same time, this paper provides a snapshot of the varied social composition of the company’s leadership and shows that this venture featured the energetic participation of Egyptian Muslims and Christians as well as foreigners.