This project examines the history of the Aramco-affiliated Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) in Lebanon from 1950 to 1975 using technopolitics as a theoretical lens to understand labor activism and post-colonial nationalism. It focuses on public debates about the oil pipeline’s implications for Lebanon’s future and discourse about Tapline as a sign of technological modernity, Tapline’s attempt to “uplift” Lebanese workers through the inculcation of technical skills and modern comportment, and labor activism by Lebanese Tapline employees attempting to overturn a hierarchy of labor in which local workers were subsidiary to foreign managers. I argue that Tapline supported the status quo of Lebanon as a commercially-oriented “merchant republic,” while simultaneously representing the possibility of radical change and creating vulnerabilities in Lebanon’s energy regime exploitable by petroleum workers seeking to change the terms of their labor. This research has three main goals. First, it set out to follow the research program proposed by Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy and evaluate the political implications of Lebanon’s dependence upon petroleum and its accompanying infrastructure, while devoting greater attention to discourse and the particular social orders oil companies, states, and workers sought to build. Second, it seeks to correct for the excessive thematic emphasis of sectarianism and accompanying chronological emphasis of the 1975-1990 civil war in the study of Lebanon’s post-independence history. Finally, it aims to increase scholarly attention to the history of energy in the Levant, which has been almost entirely ignored despite the historical and increasing contemporary importance of energy politics in that region. This project makes extensive use of Lebanese press sources obtained from the newspaper archive at the American University of Beirut. including especially articles from al-Nahar, al-Anba’, al-Nida’, and al-‘Amal, to ascertain how various Lebanese factions construed Tapline’s political implications. A large body of documents produced by or for Tapline, including files recently recovered from the company’s defunct offices in Beirut, will help reveal its strategies for managing its labor force and Lebanese public opinion. Documents from the office of the Tapline Laborers’ Syndicate and interviews with that union’s former president offer an intimate glimpse into that union’s inner workings and discursive strategies. Finally, US government documents including declassified CIA reports and leaked diplomatic cables offer information divulged by Tapline and Aramco employees to the US government not available elsewhere.

This paper will explore how early Lebanese nationalists constructed landscapes to signify an inclusive national ideal. I employ an environmental-historical analysis to consider how Lebanese industrialists and French Mandatory and commercial tourism operations contributed to the isolation and management of natural spaces in the service of a national environmental imaginary. This investigation focuses on the work of the New Phoenicians Charles Corm, Michel Chiha, and Jacques Tabet. These intellectuals and industrialists believed that modern Lebanese subjects were the direct descendants of the Phoenician empire. They argued for this identity with reference to an enchanted relationship with the Lebanese landscape, whose mountains and valleys ensured biological continuity. In 1920, these men formed the Touring-Club de Syrie et du Liban (TCSL), dedicated to the promotion of the tourism industry, the construction of roads, and protection and preservation of natural and archaeological sites. The TCSL operated in concert with many other tourism commissions and commercial enterprises in Lebanon and France. These organizations promoted tourism as a national activity, and touristic spaces as sites of national pilgrimage. However, the nation they articulated was fundamentally exclusive on class and linguistic boundaries. The tourism industry appealed to a European and Europeanized elite. This appeal was constructed through the projection of an image of “sameness” with France. This projection emphasized both Christian and Roman patrimony in the Levant and the environmental “sameness” of forested hills, reminiscent of southern France. Spaces that were well-known to readers of European travel literature, such as the Bcharré cedars and Baalbek, were made newly accessible to the urban elite and foreign tourists through the establishment of roads and a commercial tourism infrastructure. Simultaneously, new legal and material management practices made these spaces newly inaccessible to those rural inhabitants who had formerly lived or worked within them. My paper will consider the construction of this normative imaginary of Lebanese national space and argue that this environmental epistemology was violently exclusive. The process is ongoing, evident today in the painstaking reconstruction of Beirut’s Nejme square. This area is a symbol of the city and the country’s rehabilitation following the civil war, and it is wrapped in razor wire, managed and protected by the heavily-armed soldiers of Solidere.

According to Kamal Rebeiz, the late mukhtar of Ras Beirut, “even the sun in Ras Beirut is different!” Perhaps outrageous, Rebeiz’s claim to Ras Beirut’s distinction is a familiar one among its oldest inhabitants. To many this western-most extension of the city is synonymous with the American University of Beirut (AUB) founded by American missionaries in 1866. In turn, Ras Beirut’s association with unparalleled tolerance, diversity, and cosmopolitanism is credited to AUB’s long presence there. But the mainly Orthodox Christian and Sunni Muslim community of Ras Beirut insist that their ta‘ayush, or coexistence, is the bedrock of Ras Beirut’s exceptionalism setting it apart from other parts of Beirut, of Lebanon, and of the region. Indeed, they claim that their history of timeless coexistence is what persuaded missionaries to choose Ras Beirut as the College’s site in the first place. While no missionary records substantiate this claim and Ras Beiruti memories “resist correction by others,” it is the very fallibility of these recollections, as Alessandro Portelli suggests, that reveals deeper meanings and provides invaluable insights into “the interests of the tellers, and the dreams and desires beneath them.” Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of memory studies and oral history in the writings of Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs, Susan Crane, Barbara Misztal, and Portelli, this paper examines the recurrence of local claims to Ras Beirut’s exceptionalism in stories which describe a mourned past. Based on published and unpublished memoirs and extensive oral histories conducted over the past four years with members of Ras Beirut’s oldest generation, this paper sheds light on an intangible heritage that “would otherwise be lost both mentally and materially” (Crane). Far from being dismissed as an older generation’s futile longing, these stories insist on local agency in the making of Ras Beirut and represent its primacy in challenging, however subtly, the missionary “discovery” of Ras Beirut, on the one hand, and any association with the sectarianism of the Lebanese Civil War on the other. By repetition and self-perpetuation, Ras Beirut stories of exceptionalism, or narratives of coexistence, affirm a past remembered in common to accord unity to an older generation’s sense of dislocation in the post-war present. Told individually, they represent a collective memory whereby “the individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory”(Halbwachs) and transform the intangibility of the Ras Beirut’s past into a tangible “repository of peoples’ memory” (Misztal).

Most historians who have written on French colonial urbanization have presented the creation of the Étoile Square in Beirut as an example of military planning that stamped a French ‘Haussmannian’ model onto the city’s urban fabric. More recently, others have offered contingencies and historicized explanations. In their attempt to approach the topic from the side of the colonized—as opposed to the colonizer—they have emphasized social and political aspects tied to the resistance of local communities and their adaptation of the original plan. However, both this literature only presents a somewhat superficial and limiting reading that fails to assess the project in terms of its planning aspects. This study provides a more nuanced and complicated story of the creation of the square, challenging colonial literature and existing interpretations which tend to see the radial plan and the ‘étoile’ as the unequivocal imprint of French military planning in Beirut. Looking at the tradition of radial planning in Europe, particularly in France, this study argues that the radial plan has a long history of transformation in which it has lost its military association before its nineteenth-century application in Paris and, a century later, in colonial contexts like Beirut. The paper will first demonstrate that, because of the shift in focus towards creating straight thoroughfares and street intersections which organize and facilitate traffic, the radial plan employed by Haussmann in nineteenth-century Paris was a traffic node that is only secondarily an urban square. It has ceased to be an archetype of an urban square that typified an ideal Renaissance model with a dominant center as the common panoptical viewpoint from which single-point perspectives branched out for controlling the urban landscape. Subsequently, the paper will discuss how the Étoile plan in Beirut did not follow a comprehensive model, à la Haussmann. Examining the planners’ background and the way of integrating the star-shaped plan in its urban context, the paper will demonstrate how the planning methods implemented in Beirut by Frères Danger coincide more with Pierre Patte and Marc-Antoine Laugier’s ideas of urban embellishment that have guided piecemeal interventions in eighteenth-century Paris than with Haussmann’s larger and more comprehensive procedures.

This paper takes a close look at the promotional prints issued by the newly formed National Council for Tourism in 1960s Lebanon. It unpacks the discursive and aesthetic implications of visual culture by historically examining the tourism prints through two intersecting frameworks, that of modernity in its global cultural dimension in conjunction with that of nation building. Lebanon, as expressed in the texts and images of brochures and posters issued by the Tourism Council, is represented as part of a Mediterranean geography where modern leisure practices and historic sites of ancient civilizations are given central stage. My analysis relates this first to the modernizing agenda of the state and its desire to position Lebanon on the global map of emerging mass tourism, particularly the one flourishing on the European side of the Mediterranean basin from the French Riviera all the way to the Greek islands. I discuss how the Tourism Council sought to substitute a preexisting imaginary of Lebanon as a regional mountain summer resort with the modernity of Mediterranean seascapes. At the outset, this approach could be situated within a modernizing framework of the Lebanese state that looked towards the West for a tourism model to emulate. However, the lens of global modernity gets complicated once Lebanon’s political history, its creation as a nation-state and ensuing national identity politics are brought to the fore. I hence move to critically interrogate the politics of a Mediterranean geography of belonging, especially in light of its antagonistic relation to contemporary politics of Arab nationalism. My study traces the purported Mediterranean geography back to a dominant imaginary of Lebanon expressed in the discourses of the country’s most influential nationalists. I argue that Lebanon’s 1960s–70s tourism prints, as mass mediated modern artifacts of visual culture, contributed to the discursive formation of a Lebanese subjectivity premised on separatism from the Arab context. The prints circulated an imaginary of Lebanese cosmopolitanism that endorsed a Westernized character of the nation and its people, validating as such popular myths around Beirut, Lebanon’s capital city, as the ‘Paris of the East’.

By the end of the First World War and the advancement of French mandated rule in 1920, Lebanon was experiencing various economic, political and social changes. The most seminal change was the creation of the state of Greater Lebanon announced on September 1, 1920. Inhabitants of Lebanon had become citizens of a newly found nation-state while simultaneously placed under a new and fundamentally different imperial order. As they struggled to define their citizenship and their own political, economic and social order, Lebanese citizens engaged in debating various intellectual and ideological concepts. Class, and particularly the working class, was one of the main categories being debated, defined, and redefined. In a society of increasing politicization and expanding industrialization, a burgeoning communist movement emerged. Within this movement, intellectuals sought to dominate a definition of the working class and assumed the representation of this class and the masses. Concentrating on the press, leftist periodicals, and Party documents, this paper contends that a discourse on the working class was constructed in Mandate Lebanon within the communist intellectual circles and the Communist Party that was characterized by relations of power between the intellectuals and the workers. I argue that the discourse by which unequal relations were created was based on binary oppositions and organized along gender lines of masculinity and femininity. The discourse borrowed from local as well as global themes, which in turn allowed an overlap between categories of class, gender, colonialism, and capitalism. Through this discourse, the communist movement produced a system of knowledge in which the working class was gendered. It is the inequality of these gendered relations that created an unstable and unequal civic order that continued to be contested in the post-colonial era. Sectarian differences have been used to explain state formation in Mandate Lebanon and the persistent of inequalities in the post-colonial era. This paper offers an alternative reading of Lebanese history by focusing on class and gender as the major elements upon which the hierarchy of power was constructed.