‘Xenophobia’ is seldom discussed in historical contexts preceding the 1930s. However, the term was used to describe certain ‘tendencies’ and ‘attitudes’ in former Ottoman domains in the 1920s, and there were crucial socio-economic contexts to these descriptions. In the memoranda they sent to their capitals, European (mainly French and British) statesmen attached the label ‘xenophobic’ to the employment-related measures taken by the Ankara government in particular, while Turkish authorities considered these administrative and legal measures necessary for Turks to ‘enter within the closed doors of foreign firms’ in Turkey. Similar tensions unfolded in the League of Nations Mandates in present-day Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, albeit in the context of different power relations between European statesmen and Arab authorities. This paper offers a comparative analysis of these tensions and the public debates relevant to them. It focuses on politics of employment as a particularly useful lens to examine ‘xenophobia’ at the intersections of broader questions about governance and post-war economic revival in the Middle East in the 1920s. The discussion relies primarily on state correspondence (internal and diplomatic; located in archives in Nantes, Paris, London, Ankara and Istanbul) and publications in the press (mainly in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic). It examines the creation of new credentials for employment in state institutions as well as employment-related expectations of states from foreign firms. It discusses official and informal credentials for employment, by analyzing laws, regulations and cadre commissions as well as strategies former Ottomans used in their petitions to secure employment under new regimes. The paper stresses that while it is not difficult to find evidence for prejudicial discrimination in former Ottoman lands in the 1920s, European descriptions of ‘xenophobia’ also reflected frustration with ‘obstacles’ to capitalist penetration of ‘backward, irrational’ economies by ‘the civilized West.’ Attention is drawn to links between specific practices of social engineering and how the memory of Capitulations (often defined as legal and commercial ‘privileges to foreigners’) operated in different post-Ottoman regimes. By examining politics of employment in post-Ottoman Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, the paper sheds new light on conditions of access to modern military, bureaucratic and economic institutions in these countries in the 1920s. It argues that a nuanced understanding of these conditions is key to developing meaningful responses to the question of what distinguished an ‘independent’ country from those placed under European trusteeship after World War I.

Although mainstream Ottomanists argued that the Armenian communities in western part of the Empire were exempted from the deportations of 1915-1916, Ottoman port city of Smyrna was not a safe haven during the war years. The outbreak of the First World War gave Ottoman governors-general the opportunity to attain dictatorial powers, and in case of necessity, take preventive measures over the residents in their realms of authority. Rahmî Bey of Aydin province was one of the forerunners of these governors who exercised considerable autonomy in the pursuit of his own political agenda and personal interests. In spite of the fact that he had close ties with the Unionist triumvirate and enjoyed Unionist networks in previous years, Ottoman participation in the war on the German side prompted the disagreement between the Unionist leaders and the pro-British governor-general. In the first decade of the 20th century, Aram Hamparzum (alias Kamparsomian), an Ottoman Armenian fig merchant, appeared as the rival of “Smyrna Fig Packers” Ltd., a British firm. Despite he ceded his business to the British company by contract in 1911, he continued to work figs on his own account in opposition to the company, with the encouragement of Rahmî Bey. When the war broke out in 1914, Hamparzum, aided by H. Giraud, also a Levantine merchant, created fictitious boom on the market through selling their shares in the company. Contrary to traditional historiography of the Ottoman economy, Hamparzum case reveals that non-Muslim Ottoman merchants found themselves more often in direct competition than in co-operation with European merchants thanks to their social and commercial networks. His case shows that non-Muslim merchants continued to dominate the local market in the temporary shelter of Smyrna, though the Central Office of the CUP employed economic measures to liquidate the non-Muslim bourgeoisie, and the Armenians were sent to the brutal death marches toward the Syrian Desert in the spring of 1915. Nonetheless, after the Great Fire of Smyrna in September 1922 and the subsequent population exchange following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, the Ottoman Christian communities in the city were wiped out by ethnic violence. Shortly after the end of the war, the first Economic Congress of Turkey was convened in modern-day Izmir between 17 February and 4 March 1923, and the venue of this congress was Hamparzum’s fig warehouses located along the inner quay.

For more than 100 years now, Bank Misr has been considered an epitome of Egyptian economic nationalism, and a marker of Egypt’s success in its fight for economic independence. Founded in 1920 by Egyptian entrepreneur Talaat Harb, the bank continues to hold its place in collective imaginaries as the embodiment of the spirit of independence that is often linked to the 1919 uprisings. In contrast to this revering depiction, this paper argues that such success was structurally limited as dependence on cotton exports, lack of industrial diversification and the imperial dominance over the local market persisted. Moreover, this limited success came at a high human cost and generated only limited positive outcomes for subalterns' wellbeing. This was evident in the appalling working conditions within Harb’s factories, the persistent crackdown on the labour movement, widespread child labour and abuse of landless peasants, amongst other things. This is not to deny that the economic nationalism of the early 20th century, including Bank Misr’s projects, carried a degree of defiance to the imperialist structure and contributed to industrial infrastructure of the Egyptian economy as well as witnesses a period of growing productivity. Rather, this paper explores the lifeworlds of this economic nationalism and interrogates its meaning for the subalterns The paper draws primarily on archival materials of different sorts, including campaign advertisements, both national and British newspaper articles, opinion pieces, as well as diaries of officials, laborers and autobiographies of national bourgeoisie and 1919 opposition leaders, all of which help me reconstruct the nationalistic and class imaginaries of the Egyptian bourgeoisie in the early 20th century. It builds on these, utilizing a neo-Gramscian approach and concepts such as consent and historic bloc, to suggest that the economic nationalism model, presented as the solution for the independence and welfare of the Egyptian society, was a political-economic project of the nascent Egyptian bourgeoisie that attempted to seize the historical moment of 1919 and utilize its unfolding moments to further buttress its economic gains through enforcing its economic project.

In recent years, studies of the great depression shifted from seeing it as a Western crisis to understanding it as global despair with local implications. Studies concentrating on the middle east have yet paid special attention to the social and political conditions that allowed the depression to happen and that were fostered as a result of it. As for Egypt, studies of the early 1930s often employ the wider frame of "the interwar period" for their discussion. With the economic crisis almost in the background, too little attention has been given to the ways the crisis affected the process of state-building that began after the partial independence granted in 1922. State intervention in food supply operation provides a case study for examining the crisis management strategies implemented by the government and their wider social implications. Official reports and data reveal that the agricultural subsidies and the flour regulations promoted by the government resulted eventually in an increase in state revenues but not in greater social relief. During the great depression, food supply and subsidies were introduced by Ismail Sidqi's government in explicit and implicit ways not only as a measure of social benevolence but also to demonstrate governmentality and increase control over the local population. I discuss not only the actual policies but reveal the social conditions that enabled it. I argue that we need to pay closer attention to the harsh economic reality of the early 1930s, to the global political changes, to local sociological movements, and to Sidqi's personal ambitions. The above resulted in ideological readiness among the Egyptian officials and many of the educated middle class (Effendiya) for deeper state intervention which stood in contrast to the liberal economic mindset of the local society during the 1920s. Changes in the Effendi social perspective are demonstrated by analyzing periodicals and contemporary newspapers which were the main arena for social debates. The paper uses the example of food subsidies to promote a discussion regarding strategies taken by local governments to face the global economic crisis. The Egyptian economic policies represent an active and original attitude to these global problems and add another layer to the narrative of the great depression as a global phenomenon with local and regional implications. Through the example of food subsidy, I call for a better conceptualization of the great depression in Egypt and the middle east.

Emblazoned on the front page of the January 14, 1945 issue of Ja'far Pishevari’s daily newspaper Azhir read an ominous warning: “Azerbaijanis! Gilanis! Shirazis! Isfahanis! And all the residents of Mazandaran and every other province of Iran! Be aware that all your parliamentary representatives with the exception of but a few are only thinking of filling their own pockets. Some, like Saqatoleslami and Sartip Zadeh have even reduced themselves to the base rank of dealers for Dr. Millspaugh!” Granted extraordinary powers over the financial levers of the Iranian state in 1942, Dr. Arthur C. Millspaugh would coordinate the work of several dozen American economic advisors in Iran until the ignominious termination of his mission in early 1945. In so doing, Millspaugh would land in the crosshairs of popular Iranian nationalist and leftist publications like Azhir due to ongoing food shortages and hyperinflation brought about by the joint British-Soviet-American occupation of the country. While much of the historiography on the Iranian experience of the Second World War has focused on parliamentary infighting in Tehran and rise of the Tudeh party in the wake of the Allied occupation, this paper turns to the overlooked provincial concerns alluded to in Pishevari’s editorial proclamation, illustrating how policy planning directives from Millspaugh and the Ministry of Finance in Tehran were received, acted upon, and contested on the ground. Employing a diverse range of sources – including the personal papers of Millspaugh’s team members, declassified records from the Censorship Branch of the U.S. Army’s Persian Gulf Command, as well as published debates in the Iranian press and Majlis – the paper demonstrates how American provincial agents under the auspices of the Millspaugh mission collaborated and clashed with local elites in orchestrating a range of policies aimed at developing the Iranian economy: from distributing millet seed to sharecropping farmers in Mazandaran to deregulating the trucking industry in Ahwaz. In examining these and other local instantiations of American development policy, the paper thereby brings to light the transnational dimensions of 20th century Iranian regional history while also helping to de-center an overweening emphasis on the central state in broader analyses of historical developmental processes.