I will contribute to the theoretical intervention of the panel by offering findings of my research on the Syrian company in political economic and legal contexts of the late-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Companies based in Beirut between 1830 and 1930 evolved from small partnerships with 3-10 family members to limited liability corporations with public shares distributed among hundreds of strangers. Scholars suggest this shift was delayed compared to Western European examples. S Ağır, C Artunç (2021), for instance, attribute this delay to the Ottoman state's late adoption of the French Commercial Code (1807) to comprise the Ottoman Commercial Code of 1850 (Kanunnâme-yi Ticaret) and the reluctancy of non-Muslim commercial actors with extraterritorial rights to pressure the Empire to make legal shifts to accommodate limited liability. Based on a feminist reading of Beirut-based companies’ papers, I argue that limited liability in the Ottoman Eastern-Mediterranean was only delayed if one approaches the company through the strict binaries of its own twentieth-century organizing logic -- private/public, traditional/modern, and formal/informal. But members of Levantine limited liability companies held specific conceptions of the LLC based on their experiences in Ottoman and global contexts before these logics were even naturalized. I make four related arguments about the company that will help root the roundtable's theoretical discussions in empirical ground. First, I argue that the Beirut-based limited liability companies (whether Muslim or non-Muslim) formed out of partnerships traced back to eighteenth-century Ottoman shareholding practices. These partnerships eventually grew into sophisticated limited liability companies in the early-twentieth century due to changes in landed property rights in the mid-nineteenth century. Second, in opposition to scholars who criticize the Ottoman empire for its lack of state-sanctioned, legal avenues for formally limiting liability (Kuran 2010), I argue that the Beirut-based companies approached risk in the mid-nineteenth century from within the framework of Ottoman social relations and Islamic legal repertoires. Beirut-based companies effectively managed risk through tools available and paths of least resistance: cousin marriages, futures management, and waqf creation on agricultural land. Finally, I show how shifting gender roles among Christian families in Beirut were inextricable from changing conceptions of the company, value, and private/pubic divisions. Together, the companies' efforts placed the Beirut-based firms in a position to dominate and influence production, trade, and manufacturing on a global scale.

In the course of the khedivial regime’s desperate scramble to avoid bankruptcy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Egyptian government ceded all formal, proprietary claims to the revenues generated by the Suez Canal to foreign investors. In 1875, Khedive Isma‘il sold all of Egypt’s 44% stake in the shares of the Suez Canal Company to the British Treasury, which would thereafter remain the single largest shareholder in the Canal. Five years later, the Egyptian government would also sell off its concessionary right to 15% of the Canal Company’s profits to a French joint-stock venture formed to harvest those revenues for its shareholders. For the better part of the next three decades, even as other forms of imperial wealth extraction became a major focus of Egypt’s burgeoning anti-colonial movement, the revenues of the Suez Canal did not figure prominently in critical assessments of the country’s economic predicament. Only in 1909 did the Canal re-emerge as an object of nationalist aspirations. The occasion for this shift was the bitter, year-long struggle over a proposal, jointly mooted by the British Consul-General Eldon Gorst and the directors of the Suez Canal, to extend the Company’s concession by another 40 years—from 1968 to 2008—in exchange for what amounted to a loan to the Egyptian government. It was in this moment that critics of the proposed deal first articulated what would in the decades that followed become a deeply resonant normative claim to the Suez Canal as a form of “national wealth.” On this conception, the coerced employment of Egyptian peasant labor through the institution of corvée had constituted the waterway as a form of collective property in a way that could supersede any contractual agreement with the Company. Although this conception of the Canal as Egyptian patrimony would long outlast the Ottoman Empire, its earliest articulations would likewise rest on an assertion that the Canal Company’s concession violated the Sultan’s sovereignty. Using the example of these debates about the Suez Canal, this contribution to the roundtable will consider the multiple contestations of concessionary rights and corporate property that ultimately, decades later, provided the normative basis for the wave of nationalizations that occurred across the Middle East in the 1950s.

In this roundtable, I will question standard economic categories through which histories of money, markets and commodities in nineteenth-century Egypt have hitherto been written. More specifically, I will ask what kinds of epistemic rearrangements had to take place in order for money, markets and commodities to become part of the progressive history of the production of capital. I will also ask what these rearrangements meant for existing Ottoman-Egyptian and Islamic categories through which wealth was organized and understood. Histories of capitalism presuppose a progressive narrative of the spread and intensification of capitalist activity in the world market, a market that incorporated large swathes of the world into its financial structures and sets of priorities. Yet, these histories can be considered complete only if we exclude processes that do not conform to the economic frameworks these histories adopt. But if such processes indeed existed, what did they consist of? Is it possible to conceive of money, markets and commodities without subsuming them into the organising categories, frameworks and colonial imperatives of capitalism? Can we think of “the good” in nineteenth-century Egypt without subsuming it into some kind of commodity? More fundamentally, what would an agrarian –– not industrial –– theory of money look like? What are the implications of such theory for our understanding of money, markets and relations of exchange mediated through commodities? To answer these questions, I will discuss forms of agrarian credit in Lower Egypt in the nineteenth century. While Egyptian agrarian markets extensively relied on credit and the circulation of goods, “the good” in these markets was premised on a cyclical –– not progressive –– temporal order and an Islamic understanding of prosperity. Egyptian peasants were not mere producers of raw materials which they simply exchanged for currency or exported to the “world market.” Rather, peasants participated in rural markets and exchanged goods that were underwritten by an epistemic field in which Islamic categories of wealth and abundance were still meaningful.

Following the long history of a family waqf in Beirut from its foundation in 1854 up to this day via a family collection, oral history, and ethnography, this intervention rethinks the “ownership model of property,” which makes the world appear as clearly delimited, individually owned parcels. Taken for granted in the Lebanese constitution that enshrines “the right of private property,” the ownership model reproduces Blackstone’s formulation of property as the “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of the rights of any other individual in the Universe.” Such models of property differ starkly from the multiplicity of claims that exist on property, both contemporary and Ottoman, as waqfs illustrate. The founder of the waqf of Sitt al-ʿEish dedicated the proceeds of a garden to his daughter and her heirs, while stipulating a yearly stipend paid in bread for Qurʾanic recitation to a named reciter. In the waqf deed, the founder allowed his daughter to build whatever she pleased on the land, and it would be her own. She gave long lease rights to her husband, who built a few structures on the land, and then in turn dedicated them to his own children, and in their absence to his brothers and sisters. Here we have a parcel where claims on the land and the structures on it are distributed among different waqfs and beneficaries. Furthermore, a Quranic reciter has also claims to his stipend, where God remains the official owner of the land and the structures. With the French Mandate and the attempt to both limit waqf and instill a modern property regime following the ownership model, legislation allowed and even forced the consolidation of property rights. The paper will follow the way these modern notions and the legislation that brought them forward reconfigured the waqf of Sitt al-ʿEish. Highlighting the continued struggles over rights to “surface” among and between heirs, the Directorate General of Islamic Waqfs, and developers, the story demonstrates the persistence of different understandings of property within a private property regime. The intervention then draws out some of the consequences of such entwinement and continuities for the ownership model and assumptions about private property regimes.