This paper argues that the American University of Beirut (AUB), itself representative of a number of affiliated American colleges in the Middle East, served as a node for the redistribution of intellectuals, white collar workers, politicians, and teachers across a region that was devastated by the Great War and in the process of building successor states from the defunct Ottoman Empire. It finds, contrary to conventional narratives about the growth of American power in the region, that influential factions within the US government and socio-economic elites thought of the Middle East as a potential imperial territory and sought to expand American power in the region through the development of education, among other strategies. The administrators and many of the teachers at the college were committed to rebuilding and “rehabilitating” the Middle East by spreading the ideology of liberal internationalism and creating inroads into the economic and political infrastructure there. They sought to use education and the redistribution of graduates to achieve these goals while circumventing the United States’ official foreign policy of isolationism during the interwar period. Graduates from AUB and other American colleges took up positions in nascent state institutions or settled in urban centers as members of the middle and upper middle class. The results of this attempt to make economic and ideological inroads into a region that was officially dominated by the British and French empires were mixed. Many graduates quickly deviated from the orthodoxy of what they were taught at such colleges. Students tended to repurpose liberal internationalism to suit their own specific needs, and a great many actively engaged in anti-imperial and even anti-American politics on campus and in their new positions post-graduation. At the same time, graduates still bought into the logic of internationalism, liberal capitalism, and, ironically, opposition to European imperialism, all of which greatly benefited the growth of American hegemony in the Middle East. I will use official college newspapers and student published magazines produced at AUB, as well as the records of the Near East Colleges Association (the confederation of American colleges in the Middle East) to discuss how ideology was disseminated to and then adapted by graduates. I will also use the college’s exhaustive alumni directory and the various departmental alumni newsletters to examine the effect that the migration and distribution of graduates had on nation-state building across the Middle East.

Abstract Turkey in the early republican era was marked by significant changes to its demographic composition as well as to its economy due to internal and external displacement of ethnic and religious communities. One of these population displacements in this period, is the “Greco-Turkish Population Exchange”. Although there is an extensive literature on the exchange itself and its social and political impact, scholars overlook its economic dimension and tend to narrate the economic aspect of the exchange only based on its impact on the domestic economies of the countries involved. However, economic activities in certain cash-crops, particularly tobacco, were long been part of the global market and needs to be evaluated under global conditions with all involved parties. Turkish tobacco trade network involved the United States, Britain, and France. The uprooting of tobacco cultivators with the exchange consequently would affect domestic economies of Turkey and Greece as well as the parties involved in the established global tobacco trade. Little known is that the population exchange and its economic impact on tobacco cultivation and trade created a major concern among major powers and Turkey. Besides official meetings during Lausanne Conference also private meetings were held to ensure the as little as disturbed continuation of the tobacco trade. In accordance, this article argues and provides empirical evidence that not only domestic dynamics were effective in the pattern of settlement but also global capitalistic relations imposed a certain pattern of settlement. Utilizing Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry State Archives and American National Archives in Washington D.C., this research investigates tobacco cultivation/trade and settlement policies as a result of global commercial interests.

WHEN NEIGHBORS BECOME AGGRESSORS: LOCAL TENSIONS AND THE ROLE OF CIVILIANS IN THE EXPULSION OF JEWS FROM THRACE IN 1934 Approximately a decade after the foundation of Turkish Republic, thousands of Jews were forced to migrate from Thrace as a result of increasing Turkish nationalist fervor in the region. Although it was not the Turkish state that initiated the expulsion of Jews, it did not take any tangible steps to stop the attacks toward Jews. Relatively few studies focusing on this incident explained this silence of the Turkish state with reference to the Turkification policies, which either aimed to assimilate the non-Turkish citizens or to exile them altogether in various ways. In other words, they established a direct link between the state-sponsored Turkification policies and the expulsion of Jews even though the aggressors were composed of civilian people in Thrace. Given that the Turkification policies have been underway since—at least—the foundation of the Republic in 1923, the aforementioned accounts not only dismiss the temporal and spatial conditions of the period but also portray the civilian aggressors as passive subjects who were simply manipulated by the state. Analyzing local newspapers, memoirs, petitions as well as the provincial congress reports of CHP (Republican People’s Party), this research places its emphasis on the local tensions, scrutinizing the intersection of these tensions with the global and national developments during 1930s. It demonstrates that at a time when the agricultural production faced a swift decline in Thrace as a result of the Great Depression, the state-controlled Agricultural Bank was unable to respond to the local demands in Thrace for opening new banks as well as providing financial support and credits to sustain agricultural production. Under these circumstances, Turkish-Muslim producers scapegoated Jewish money lenders for providing them credits with high-interest rates, assuming that Jewish creditors posed a threat to the sustainability of the production. Disturbed by the possibility of a further breakdown in the economy, the Turkish state apparently paid close attention to the voices of local producers, turning a blind eye to the aggressors whose attacks towards Jews complied with the nationalist agenda of the Turkish state.

The end of the First World War set in motion new International legal concepts, which were mobilized in the post-war political competition between the former Ottoman Empire and the victorious western powers. The questions of nationality, citizenship, minority groups, and refugee status became especially acute and sensitive in International peace conferences and as a part of renewed nation-building projects. At the same time, the experiments with new categorizations, identities, and regimes created a powerful political tool that affected the lives of many displaced people located in the Ottoman lands. Particularly, the newly coined International definition of a refugee was used by both: by political actors in their competition, as well as by migrants adopting different ways for their survival strategies. Thus, my research traces the process of acquisition of refugee thinking by Russian migrants in Istanbul and the environs in the context of the political and socioeconomic dynamics of the period. Russian expatriates were always present in the Ottoman Empire: entrepreneurs, relatives, pilgrims, prisoners of wars and exiles. The perception about these people varied according to time, place and situation. However, the post-war circumstances and the new influx of Russian migrants to the Middle East led to a significant rethinking of the status and images of Russians in the Ottoman lands. Thus, national interests made the Ottoman and later Republican administration apply refugee status to those Russians not fitting their nation-building projects primarily in order to have a legal reason to expel them from the county. On the other hand, the Allies occupying Istanbul conditioned and limited their humanitarian aid by certain criteria and expectations from the Russian migrants to eliminate the potential threat from a big and organized community, as well as to diminish their responsibility for these migrants. However, the refugee regimes applied toward Russians either by the Allies or by the Ottomans were always challenged by people from below. They could reject the refugee status preferring self-governing communities, adopt it for socioeconomic benefits, or manipulate it otherwise for achieving mobility. The refugeezation process was always characterized by a constant struggle between personal and formal, belonging and exclusion, diversity and homogenization. Nevertheless, whatever the motivations and results of this struggle were, willingly or not, Russian migrants in the Ottoman lands were exposed to a refugee thinking, and thus, their previous identities gradually and inevitably had been transformed. The research utilizes diaries, newspapers, visual materials, and official records.