This paper explores connections among debt, technology, and popular sovereignty through a critical moment in the history of Lebanon's Litani river. In 1955, the parliament concluded a loan agreement with the World Bank to fund the Litani project, a series of dams and tunnels that created new connections among the rural Biqa', South Lebanon, and the capital. When construction completed in 1965, the Litani infrastructure produced electricity for Beirut consumption and extracted water from rural, predominantly Shi'a areas. But that same year, members of South Lebanon's landowning elite successfully petitioned parliament to redistribute the Litani waters. I argue these petitions succeeded due to two of the project's key effects. First, the Litani could no longer serve the purposes for which it had been designed. This was not because the technology functioned poorly, but because the future that the World Bank calculated in 1955 never came into being. The Bank predicated their designs on projections for Beirut's kilowatt-hour market between 1955-1965 and openly exerted power over the Lebanese state through their debt in order to realize these predictions. However, their influence could not regulate changes in urban demand and the decentralized network of power providers. When the second Litani power plant came online in 1965, the market the World Bank had struggled to create simply did not exist. Second, I argue that while in the 1950s the Lebanese state was conspicuously absent from rural South Lebanon, the Litani project made the state conspicuously present. The infrastructure materialized pre-existing inequalities between the capital and hinterland, providing a visible shared injustice against which rural communities mobilized into larger political formulations that challenged the state. The government and landowning elite sought to curtail the politicization of Southern communities by redistributing the Litani's waters. But as these efforts floundered, the equitable redistribution of the Litani became a critical object of contention in the emerging conflict between the movement lead by Musa al-Sadr and the older elites.

This paper looks at US agrarian reform theory as it influenced land settlement projects in Transjordan and Iraq from the 1930s into the 1950s, focusing on the production of the "independent" farmer as a "family" farmer. Rather than accept the conceptual interchangeability of these terms, the paper considers the work that was done through their very conflation, exploring how "dependent" male peasants, nomads, and refugees were transformed into "independent" farmers not only by granting them individual titles to land but also, and just as importantly, by producing their authority over often newly defined "families." As a key aspect of producing independent family farms, development experts launched home economics interventions into the lives of rural women with the aim of making nuclear families responsible for their own subsistence and thereby keeping their members from migrating to urban areas. An early instance of this work was carried out by the Near East Foundation in Transjordan during the 1930s; similar projects were implemented in Iraq after World War II. While some postwar international development organizations, such as FAO, would argue for "model villages" as the basis for rural development projects, US Point Four experts continued to push for settlement models of isolated family farms, despite the widely known ecological and social failures of the first settlements based on such models. The paper will use this controversy as a lens for exploring the persistence of certain familial imaginaries to US Cold War modernization and agrarian reform theory, bringing family and gender studies into conversation with critical scholarship on environmental and development history, a conversation that for these decades is almost nonexistent.

This paper explores public debates and popular mobilizations around the question of development in early post-colonial Lebanon (1943-1955). These years were particularly contentious as various elite and popular groups sought to realize their particular visions for the post-war and post-colonial political economy. Within this context, "development" was neither a concept nor an objective within the exclusive purview of state elites, the business community, and international experts. Rather, it was a contested term that individuals and groups from various classes, regions, and political affiliations deployed and sought to impose their definition of. This paper therefore focuses on the ways in which political parties, labor unions, women's organizations, and ad-hoc formations were important sites for the articulation, circulation, and contestation of ideas of development in early independence Lebanon. Exploring competing visions of development in early independence Lebanon offers insight into a number of questions. For example, what were the range of visions that existed with respect to the question of development? Alternatively, what were the various premises and assumptions-economic or ethical or otherwise-upon which these visions were articulated? Furthermore, how might the fault lines in the debate about development challenge our assumptions about the nature of politics, identity, and collective action in Lebanon? This paper will therefore narrate and analyze the specific ideas of development and mobilizations around those ideas. At the same time, it seeks to move beyond abstract conceptions and theoretical debates, to reveal the substance of these ideas in relation to contemporaneous realities such as unemployment, high cost of living, low quality of public services, and rural neglect. This is paper is based on an analysis of variety of primary sources, including pamphlets, newspapers, books, letters, memoirs, consular reports, and development assessments. It locates Lebanon in both a historical and comparative perspective vis-à-vis the post-war period and the broader contexts of decolonization and modernization. While it draws on the insights of critical development studies, political economy, and social as well as cultural history, it takes off from an often ignored-if not exceptionalized-case study of post-colonial development in the Middle East and North Africa: Lebanon.

The history of desert development has focused on prospecting and extraction of resources (oil and water; Jones, Desert Kingdom), irrigation to bring new lands into cultivation to meet the demands of growing populations (“making the desert bloom” or the expansion of arable land; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley), or technological advances such as solar power (Hare and Kressel, The Desert Experience in Israel). These approaches accord a central role to scientific expertise as it developed or was imported into the Middle East. Date palm cultivation offers, however, a more global and complex story of “development.” A keystone and iconic plant of the Middle East grown with a distinctive reproductive regime, the Phoenix dactylifera L. and techniques of its cultivation were actively exported at the turn of the twentieth century (1880-1930s) to develop a commercial industry of date cultivation in the United States (Arizona and California) and Mexico with an exchange of scientific information designed to transform this agricultural resource into “green wealth.” In a 1934 edition of the Scientific Monthly, Walter Swingle promoted these “new crops for the American Sahara.” The date palm work helped to establish the contours of the broader project of using the Middle Eastern desert as a laboratory for agriculture under heat stress or drought and later, global climate change and desertification (Diallo 2003). Date palms have provided “food, shade, and shelter” to desert inhabitants, transforming arid environments into lush microclimates for agriculture (Diallo 2003; Nasrallah 2011). This paper examines the history of research on date palm biology and cultivation as well as efforts that structured its elevation into a focal plant for botanical research. Drawing on a long series of scientific studies of the date palm, histories of the institutional locations of date palm research and biotechnology in the Middle East (e.g., the Date Palm Research Center at the College of Agriculture and Food Science at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia), state documents, policies, ethnographic accounts, and the press, this paper argues that a new development discourse about desert expertise emerged from date palm research and its export from the region. Like other locally developed practices that allow for life beyond “the aridity line” or the desert threshold (Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline), date palm trees expanded desert development into international and regional markets and conflicts and ultimately led to new demarcations of climatic zones.