This paper explores the struggles around the predominantly French-owned Sharikat Kahruba’ Bayrut (Société Électricité de Beyrouth – EDB). On the eve of independence, the EDB operated both electric current and tramlines in Beirut, as it owned the exclusive rights to develop and operate the city’s electricity and tramway systems. The pricing, quality of service, and ownership structure of public utilities—such as those the EDB provided—were a contentious issue in the period shortly after independence. This dynamic had important antecedents in the late Ottoman and French mandate period. However, the context of independence infused the issue with an entirely new set of stakes, norms, and institutions. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the ways in which public utilities constituted one of the central arenas of the struggles over the organization of the political economy of early independence Lebanon. It does so by tracing popular and elite mobilizations around the EDB, their intersections and divergences, as well as the institutional and normative contexts within which they played out. These struggles first resulted in direct state intervention to lower the prices of electric utility rates (1952), and subsequently the nationalization of the EDB (1954). The analysis is developed through a close of reading of press reports, ministerial documents, company memos, development treatises, and oral history interviews. It highlights the intersection between two movements that emerged in the early independence period: a bottom-up mobilization around the issue of public utilities and a top-down opposition to the presidency of Bishara al-Khoury. The ultimate outcome of this intersection was the nationalization of one of the largest foreign companies operating in Lebanon at the time. This outcome itself stands in contrast to what is the eventual consolidation of an open, laissez faire, service-based economy in Lebanon—otherwise referred to as “Merchant Republic.” The narrative of these mobilizations and their outcomes disrupts the assumed separation between “the political” and “the economic.” It also highlights particular norms and repertoires that were drawn from a broader array of circulating notions about statecraft, economic development, and the role of various social groups. Finally, the narrative identifies the expanding role of state institutions in the “economic affairs” of post-colonial Lebanon and the everyday lives of its citizens. In this sense, the story of the EDB can serve to complicate otherwise linear and tautological narratives of both state-led and private sector-led economic development.

On June 9, 1949, a brawl occurred in the Beirut neighborhood of Gemayzeh between two popular organizations: the Kata’ib and Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). While the night began with a Kata’ib event at Café Gemayzeh, it ended with the destruction of the SSNP’s newspaper office. How this conflict arose is unknown, but what followed is clear: a government-led crackdown on the SSNP, a call for revolution by its leader Antoun Saadeh, and his eventual execution in Damascus. Some scholars argue that the brawl was a Kata’ib-government conspiracy. Others claim it was a spontaneous clash. In either narrative, scholars use Gemayzeh and its aftermath to characterize Lebanon’s early state-building efforts. Like other incidents, the state attempted to assert control with help from its external allies. While this scholarly approach situates Lebanon in its global context, it fails to locate this incident within the history of Beirut’s popular organizations. This paper argues that the Gemayzeh incident was representative of a broader conflict among popular organizations over physical space—neighborhoods and street corners—and imaginary space—zones of identity solidification—across the Mandate and early Independence periods. This paper employs unused primary sources, including announcements, pictures and event reports of popular organizations, and government decrees criminalizing these groups. It does such to explore organizational practices throughout the 1930s-1950s, and how they represented space-claiming attempts. Whether occupying a field for strength training or promoting a lecture, these organizations were creating places, real and imagined, for their existence. Furthermore, as Beirut’s urban space was saturated with various socio-political groupings, popular organizations created distinction through ideologies and symbols to stay relevant among the popular classes. Slogans and flags were on streets and storefronts, linking group identity to space. And as state officials policed these spaces, groups crafted alliances and attacked rivals to survive Beirut’s socio-political field. Collectively, these sources and approach highlight the intersection of state-building efforts and struggles between popular organizations, which was exhibited during the Gemayzeh incident. While claims of conspiracy or spontaneity are too narrow, the Kata’ib took the opportunity to dominate this space. Theoretically, an investigation of space-claiming practices leading to the Gemayzeh incident captures the utility of Bourdieu’s “distinction” and Lefebvre’s “social space” in analyzing contentious public events. Finally, by painting the incident as part of a battle over people and space in contention with the state incorporates Lebanon into the study of mass politics in the post-WWII Middle East.

In 1945, the Soviet government announced its support for the repatriation campaign to “return” the Armenian Diaspora to its homeland, the Soviet Republic of Armenia. 30,000 Armenians renounced their Lebanese citizenship and relocated to the USSR. Facilitated by the Lebanese and Soviet governments, the Lebanese Arabic and Armenian press outlets celebrated and covered the departure of “caravans” from the port of Qarantina, Lebanon. This paper explores the coverage of this population transfer as published in the Armenian and Arabic press in Lebanon from 1945-1948. While all four Armenian daily newspapers of different political orientations initially supported Armenian repatriation, by 1947 their editorial content exposed a rift that amplified the different imaginations of how Armenians, as legally recognized Lebanese citizens, practiced Armenian national belonging in Lebanon. Armenian newspapers (along with their associated political parties) that opposed the repatriation stressed the supremacy of Lebanese citizenship and linked the continued presence of the Armenian population to the triumph of the newly independent Lebanese nation-state. Meanwhile, those Armenian groups that continued to champion Soviet Armenia as their rightful homeland simultaneously constructed Armenians as foreigners and temporary inhabitants of Lebanon. The main Arabic daily, an-Nahar, while not engaging in this intra-Armenian debate, also treated Armenians as expendable citizens, celebrating their “final” homecoming. Analyzing the assumptions and frame of reference of these various treatments of the Armenian repatriation in the press allows for the examination of how the multi-lingual—including the marginal language—press debated and fashioned Armenian and Lebanese national belonging in the early years of Lebanese independence. The exclusion of the Armenian repatriation program from the historiography of Lebanon characterizes the larger dearth of explorations into the role of marginal populations in the articulation and practice of citizenship and national belonging in the country. The debates deployed in the press demonstrate that the concepts of citizenship and homeland, which the extant historiography assumes were fixed, were extremely fluid during this period. Such fluidity can only be attended to by moving beyond an exclusive concern with the formal sectarian-confessional political system. The Armenian and Arabic Lebanese press constitute a rich set of primary sources through which we can follow discussions and debates among the “Lebanese” regarding the assumptions and practices of both citizenship as well as national belonging in relations to the Armenian community.

Historical scholarship on the Shiʿa of Lebanon has largely focused on the mandate period, the 1960s and 70s lead-up to the civil war, or the post-war period. This paper argues that the neglected early independence period (1943-1950s) featured important shifts in the way the Shiʿa of south Lebanon conceptualized their place in the Lebanese nation-state, both as members of a sect and as citizens of the state. Despite the official recognition of the Shi‘i sect in 1926, the vast majority of the Shi‘i population remained politically and economically marginalized for some time. Such marginalization was facilitated by the fact that the Shi‘a primarily resided in the country’s peripheral south. Featuring the largest illiteracy rate among the various sects, and the fewest schools serving its members, education was viewed as a key indication of the marginalization of the Shi‘a in Lebanon. However, and contrary to existing narratives, organized and institutional attempts to address their marginalization preceded the emergence of Musa al-Sadr and his associated social movement of the 1960s. This paper explores the context, motivations, practices, and assumptions concerning educational reform as a means of integrating the Shiʿa of south Lebanon into the broader national project during the early independence period. In particular, this paper narrates and analyzes the development of the Jaʿfariyya schools in Tyre. First created in 1938, the Jaʿfariyya school system had by 1948 established co-educational secondary schools that aimed to serve Shiʿi students throughout the south. Through a close reading of administrative and curriculum records drawn from the Jaʿfariyya archive, this paper locates the school system’s initiatives/reforms within a broader bottom-up effort to integrate the southern periphery into the new Lebanese nation-state. The stakes and effectiveness of these reforms were debated in the Shiʿi journal al-ʿIrfan. Thus this paper also examines the various education-related articles and editorials of al-ʿIrfan, including its republication of speeches by Jaʿfariyya administrators. Through examining the case of the Jaʿfariyya school, this paper sheds light on a hitherto understudied period in both the history of Lebanon and that of its Shi‘i community. It does so through examining bottom-up efforts at better integrating the periphery into the Lebanese nation-state, as both a form of identification as well as a set of institutional bureaucracies. In doing so, it challenges Beirut-centric narratives of educational development as well as Maronite-Sunni-centric histories of state formation.