The Levant War between Mehemet Ali and the Sublime Porte was one of the central “enigmas” that haunted European diplomats in 1839 (FO, 407/6). It propelled the question of sovereignty in the Levant front and center. European diplomats tried to understand why the army of Mehemet Ali attacked its Ottoman co-patriots. Was this a rebellion, a personal feud between rulers, an insurrection or an attempt by Mehemet Ali to become sovereign? Rather than focus on Mehemet Ali and his personal designs to attain rulership of Egypt for his house, this paper tackles the problematic of Ottoman sovereignty in 1831-41 differently. It sidesteps the conventional focus on the rulers of Egypt and the Sublime Porte and looks at its soldiers of war: the European, Levantine, Cairene and Beiruti fighters. Instead of seeing sovereignty as an exclusive and Bodinian framework between two rivaling ruler (Grimm, 2009; Fahmy, 1997; Marsot 1984) – Mehemet Ali and Sultan Mahmud II – who command unrivaled power in their domains, it looks at sovereignty on the ground between Emirs, Naval Captains, army conscripts and European diplomats. Specifically, it tracks how rivaling soldiers fought under different flags and negotiated their capture and submission to new rulers. Thus, it locates sovereignty as a diffuse and interlocking problematic that was multilayered and negotiated as opposed to sovereignty belonging to the realm of rulers and treaties. First, this paper surveys Mehemet Ali’s designs to invade the Levant in 1831 to reign in runaway conscripts. It then analyzes the claim that Egyptian conscripts were given refuge in the Levant to avoid conscription in the province of Egypt (Toledano, 1990). Subsequently it confronts the question of conscription in the Levant, and the mode of government Mehemet Ali adopted in 1833 that uprooted several of these borderland communities away from their homes. Finally, it closes with the Levant Crisis of 1839-41 and tracks the question of the Levantine conscripts and Beiruti prisoners of war who returned to Alexandria with the army of Ibrahim Pasha against their will in 1840. Thus it demonstrates how the Levant was a porous borderland prior to 1831 that did not follow a national model of Bodinian sovereignty, which was tied to the monopoly on power in a defined territory. Rather, it followed a negotiated Ottoman form of belonging, in which power was devolved to local rulers in exchange for recognition, which was upended by the diktat of war.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change within the Ottoman Empire, particularly for the Empire’s millet communities. Like many other imperial subjects, Orthodox Christians under the jurisdiction of the See of Antioch began to renegotiate their relationship with the Sublime Porte in the wake of broader structural changes wrought by Tanzimat reforms and the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The histories of Egypt and the Levant are often disentangled during this period, particularly after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, but this paper argues that transnational intellectual and social networks of Levantine journalists, intellectuals, and literati who migrated to Egypt and collaborated with their compatriots back in Bilad al-Sham nevertheless reshaped the underlying social contract between the Ottoman state and its subjects. This paper builds on a wealth of scholarship about the intellectual import of Nah?a thinkers by exploring the nexus of ideas and actual communal reforms, and by excavating the intellectual connections and social networks that spanned the Eastern Mediterranean particularly within the Antiochian Orthodox Christian community. Drawing on a variety of Arabic newspapers from Egypt and the Levant, as well as memoirs and church records, this study examines three key areas in which transnational networks of Orthodox intellectuals and social reformers worked to redefine the position of the Antiochian Orthodox community within the Levant: education, communal welfare, and ecclesial representation. Buoyed by modernist discourses on the importance of a scientific education – especially from Levantine-owned Egyptian newspapers – coupled with perceived threats from foreign missionary institutions, Antiochian Orthodox Christians established schools throughout Bilad al-Sham, along with organizations designed to regulate and promote Orthodox schools. Similarly, borrowing on an amalgamation of bourgeoise taste, western social theories of upward mobility, and the integration of the Eastern Mediterranean into a global system of capitalism, Orthodox reformers also stressed the importance of social welfare organizations in the face of insufficient state investment. Finally, it turns to the Arabization of the Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate in 1898-1899, which ousted the ethnically-Greek Patriarch Spyridon and replaced him with the first Arab Patriarch of Antioch in over 170 years. This move, I argue, relied on new notions on the importance of responsive communal representation cultivated by Antiochians living both in the Levant and Egypt, and highlights the importance of an Arab intellectual and social history that transcends borders and divergent arrangements of state sovereignty.