1. War, State, and Markets in the Middle East

The Political Economy of World Wars I and II

2. Guns, Gold, and Grain

War and Food Supply in the Making of Transjordan

Tariq Tell

In 1924, a “commentator on Middle Eastern affairs” who wrote under the pseudonym Xenophon, remarked that “of all the provinces of the vast Turkish empire left disorganized at the end of the World War, there was none so abandoned as that part of Arabia now known as Transjordania.” Transjordan had evolved from the wreckage of World War I, conjured up by Churchill and Lawrence in 1921 as part and parcel of the division of the Fertile Crescent between Britain and France. Yet if war, in a literal sense, made modern Jordan, the relationship between war making and state making along the desert marches of southern Syria was quite different from that envisaged by Charles Tilly. Once the “Great Arab Revolt” launched by Hussein ibn ‘Ali, the sharif of Mecca, spilled over from the Hijaz in July 1917, tribes as well as states waged war and the power of the Ottoman state receded. By December 1918 the revolt had undermined the Ottoman order and ensured that an upsurge of tribalism, rather than an increase in “stateness,” was Transjordan’s legacy from the war to end all wars.

If the war years did little to build a Jordanian state, they did much to cement the claims of Hussein and his sons to leadership of the nascent Arab Movement. The Arabist pretensions of the Hashemites have in turn ensured that Jordan’s official historians chronicle the transition from Ottoman rule in patriotic terms.^[1] Hussein’s revolt is seen as the culmination of the Arab Awakening, and its march on Damascus is viewed through a nationalist lens. Typically, it is argued that Transjordanians gave spontaneous and absolute loyalty to the Hashemites, that most of them “actively supported the revolt,” and that by enlisting in its ranks in the “thousands” they were “a major factor in the successful outcome of the revolt.”^[2] The “Arab Movement” is assigned a crucial role in the creation of Transjordan. If the country’s borders were fixed by bargaining by the Great Powers after the war, “its national character was preserved by Arab effort.”^[3]

The aftermath of World War I did much, however, to devalue the claims of Hashemite Arabism. Hussein launched his uprising with British prompting, yet the end of the war saw Britain reneging on the promise of Arab independence held out by Hussein’s famous correspondence with MacMahon. Britain’s “perfidy” and the accommodation of the sharif’s sons ‘Abdallah and Faisal to its tutelage after 1921 has cast doubt on the credentials of the revolt. Arab radicals came to condemn its imperial provenance and to see it as a reactionary affair representing narrow and dynastic interests that in practice delivered the Fertile Crescent to colonial rule.^[4] Sympathetic historians argue that to give credit to the Transjordanian tribes for the success of the revolt is a “historical blunder.” Instead the tribespeople “abided by decisions of their shaykhs, who usually joined hands with the side that offered them the more profitable terms. . . . Neither the ordinary bedouin nor his shaykh were able to appreciate the wider meaning of events and the historical significance of the Arab revolt.”^[5]

Contending views of the transition from Ottoman rule remain central to ideological politics in contemporary Jordan.^[6] Yet neither the Hashemite historians nor their protagonists provide an adequate understanding of Arabism as an ideology, of early Arab nationalism as a social movement, or of how the context of war conditioned the course of Hussein’s revolt. The politics of Arabism are portrayed as an affair of notables and nationalists, with a corresponding neglect of non-elites and rural actors.^[7] The Arab Movement is imbued with “an immutable and singular identity,” wherein Arab nationalism, rather than being reinvented or diversely imagined by different social groups, is spontaneously recovered and diffused among the population at large by the conjuncture of Turkish oppression and Sharifian example.^[8] As a result, narratives of the revolt impose an unwarranted coherence on what was always a multilayered and conflictual movement and give scant attention to the motives of the tribesmen who served as its foot soldiers, or to the social and material forces that led them to rally to the Sharifian cause.

This chapter seeks to recover the contingent and contested qualities of the revolt through a microhistorical focus on the local dynamics through which war making shaped the trajectory of Transjordanian state formation. In the account presented here, it is precisely the social and economic conditions of war, local strategies, and material incentives, rather than the high politics of British treachery and Hashemite ambition, that hold center stage. It was, in particular, variation in the extent to which social groups (tribes) were vulnerable to hunger as a result of wartime shortages that shaped patterns of participation in the revolt. Tribes whose food security was at risk were responsive to the material incentives provided by the leaders of the revolt in exchange for their commitment to participate. Where food security was less vulnerable to wartime conditions, and where Ottoman forces controlled the markets on which tribal units depended for their subsistence, tribal leaders displayed a greater reluctance to join forces with the anti-Ottoman campaign of Sharif Hussein and his associates. In other words, it was the material incentives or disincentives associated with a political commitment to the anti-Ottoman campaign of Hussein—not the ideological claims of notables and nationalists—that led tribes to participate in the revolt or withhold their support.

East of the Jordan River, these factors were played out in the context of a revitalized Ottoman administration that had been consolidating its hold on Transjordan since the mid-nineteenth century, co-opting or importing local proxies, and greatly expanding the local presence of the Ottoman state.^[9] The contours of this resurgent order were obscured from contemporaries like “Xenophon” by the destructive legacy of the war years and concealed from more recent commentators by an Arabist historiography that for too long dismissed or distorted the significance of four centuries of Ottoman rule.

Tribe and State in Transjordan Under the Ottomans

In broad terms, the history of Ottoman Transjordan confirms the veracity of Zeine’s comment that “the Arabs up to the reign of Abdul Hamid (1876–1908) suffered not from too much Turkish government but from too little.”^[10] Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Ottoman intrusion into this dusty corner of Bilad al-Sham did not go beyond ensuring the safe passage of the annual Hajj caravan. Ottoman officials appeared in the country in significant numbers only during the twenty or so days it took the pilgrimage to traverse the distance between southern Syria and the borders of the Hijaz. Such imperial influence as existed at other times was exercised by the local proxies of Ottoman governors or by tax collectors in their intermittent forays from Damascus and other towns of southern Syria.

In the absence of routinized central authority, Transjordan was dominated by a local order, “a social, economic and cultural fusion of nomads and peasants” created by the interaction of bedouin and villager along the frontier of settlement in southeastern Syria.^[11] Although southern Syria’s location at the periphery of imperial control has thrown a veil of ignorance over many aspects of the local order, tribal histories, anthropological work, and recent writings on the extension of “the frontier of settlement” allow the construction of a provisional picture of a tribalized society that lacked significant urban centers and was dominated by parochial loyalties and the ideology of segmentary kinship.^[12]

The population divided broadly into bedouin (literally, dwellers of the steppe, or badia) and cultivators, or fallaheen. Local sources list the bedouin by tribal affiliation but also refer to them generically as al-‘arab or sukkan al-khiyyam, the tent dwellers. Apart from their mode of residence, the bedouin were a heterogeneous group ranging from camel nomads who drove their flocks eastward to winter in the Wadi Sirhan and Jabal Tubayq, to more sedentary tribes who combined sheepherding with scattered cultivation.^[13] The general pattern was for the more mobile camel-herding tribes—various factions of the ‘Anayza and the Bani Sakhr in the north and center of Transjordan, the ‘Adwan in Balqa, and the Huwaytat in the south—to dominate the more sedentary ones. An annual tribute, khuwwa (literally, brotherhood payment), was exacted from the weaker tribes in return for protection against raiding (ghazuw). For the more powerful bedouin tribes, such as the Bani Sakhr and the Ruwalla (or the Harb, Billi, and Bani ‘Attiyyah further south and in the Hijaz), this was supplemented by the levying of protection money (surrah) from the Ottoman authorities in return for the safe passage of the Hajj caravan, which also formed the main market for the bedouins’ camels.

The bedouin also collected khuwwa from the fallaheen. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the double burden of Ottoman taxation and the exactions of the bedouin restricted sedentary cultivation to the hills of ‘Ajlun and the town of al-Salt in al-Balqa. While the cultivators dwelt in stone villages and caves rather than tents, they were everywhere tribal. In ‘Ajlun the villagers were organized into subdistricts (nahiyyats), each headed by the locality’s most powerful clan: the Shraydah in Kura, the ‘Utum and al-Farayhat in ‘Ajlun and al-Mi‘radh, the Khasawnah and Nusayrat in Bani ‘Ubayd, the ‘Azzam in al-Wustiyyah, the ‘Abaydat in Bani Kananah, the Rusan in al-Saru, and the Zu‘bi tariqah (Sufi religious order) in Ramtha. The people of al-Salt, al-Saltiyyah, presented a united front to outsiders but divided internally into two major tribal factions: al-Akrad headed by the ‘Arabiyyat clan, and al-Harah headed by the ‘Awamlah.^[14]

Where influential shaykhs or shaykhly clans could harness their tribal followings to gain control of local tax collection or to monopolize the escort of the annual Hajj caravan, chiefdoms emerged—notably under the Shraydah in Kura, the Majali in Karak, the Adwan and Bani Sakhr al-Fayez clan in Balqa—to fill the vacuum left by the absence of effective Ottoman control.^[15] However, only the Ruwalla of the great camel-herding tribes of the Syrian Desert passed through Transjordan, and the power of the local chiefs remained limited in comparison to the larger tribal emirates of northern Arabia. As a result the local order in Transjordan remained weak and fragmented, subject to the ebb and flow of actions by contending power centers outside its borders—on the one hand, the Wahhabi and Rashidi emirates in the Arabian interior, and on the other, the Ottoman pashas or quasi-autonomous tax farmers in Damascus, Acre, and Sidon.

It was the second set of influential groups that began to gain the upper hand after the middle of the nineteenth century with the arrival in Transjordan of the centralizing influences of the tanzimat. Between 1851 and 1893, a direct Ottoman presence was established in forts and outposts stretching from Irbid to Aqaba, and an armed expedition in 1867 compelled the submission of the Balqa bedouin, collected unpaid taxes, and ended the extraction of khuwwa from the villagers. After 1870, Ottoman authority was reinforced by the arrival of settlers loyal to the new order. Caucasian refugees were implanted along the frontiers of settlement in ‘Ajlun and the Balqa, and Turcoman villages were established at Lajjun and al-Hummar. As imperial authority consolidated itself, merchants and migrants from Damascus and Palestine flocked to Irbid and al-Salt, and their enterprise turned Circassian villages like Amman and Jarash into significant market towns.

The integration of Transjordan into the grain export trade of the Syrian interior provided the economic foundations of the new order. Consular sources report wheat coming to Jerusalem from beyond the Jordan River as early as 1850, and by 1860 grain farming had led to the emergence of a distinct landowning elite among the Fayez clan of the Bani Sakhr.^[16] The upward trend in wheat prices between 1840 and the end of the Crimean war boom, and the dwindling number of pilgrims using the overland route to Mecca, may have been the main forces encouraging the growth of grain farming before the establishment of direct Ottoman control. The return of the Ottoman state provided an additional (if indirect) boost to grain farming. The collection of tax arrears in al-Salt created excess demand for liquidity and, therefore, an opportunity for merchants to accumulate capital through money lending. Merchants and money lenders anxious to integrate grain production and trade invested the proceeds of usury in land, consolidating great estates and thereby cementing the transition to commercial agriculture in the Balqa.

Commercialization brought rapid growth in agricultural production and exports. By 1894 the newly created sanjaq of Ma‘an (which included the districts of al-Balqa and al-Karak) was exporting some 12 million francs worth of agricultural goods, including wheat, barley, and livestock products such as samn (ghee). Further north, ‘Ajlun was integrated into the export agriculture of the Hawran. By 1901, there were a million acres under cereal cultivation in the district, and over 3 million bushels were exported from the area. In all, ‘Ajlun’s production amounted to over one-third of the Hawran’s combined grain harvest.^[17]

It is possible to document a flow of land transfers in the area north of the Mujib (Moab) valley from the 1880s onward—in particular the communal pastures of the bedouin—from the indigenous tribespeople to merchants and settlers. Moneylenders and bureaucrats acquired large estates in the Balqa, the Jordan Valley, and the environs of Irbid. However, how much land the indigenous tribespeople lost is unclear. The 1880s also saw the emergence of the “bedouin plantation village”—land registered in the names of influential shaykhs and farmed by Egyptian and Palestinian sharecroppers.^[18] Both the Balqa and ‘Ajlun witnessed “indigenous” movements of colonization that kept land in tribal hands. Madaba and a number of villages in the environs of al-Salt were settled by local Christians in the 1870s, and a section of the Khasawna clan took possession of al-Nu‘ayma after being forced from their homes by the Christians of al-Husn.

On the available evidence it seems that the extension of the Ottoman frontier in northern Transjordan generated a dual system—with commercial estates and settler villages existing uneasily alongside indigenous tribes.^[19] The tensions in the system were apparent in tax revolts and in inter- and intratribal feuding that did not die down until the 1880s. However, overt resistance to the new order subsided in the following decades as the infrastructure of Ottoman power in Transjordan was completed with the registration of land and property, and with the building of a communication network that culminated in the passage of the Hijaz Railway through the country in 1906.

Transjordan Between Ottomanism and Arabism

The Ottoman order in north and central Transjordan seemed secure by the first decade of the twentieth century. A permanent Ottoman presence had been established in ‘Ajlun and Balqa for two generations or more. It was now buttressed by the construction of the Hijaz Railway, by a dense network of roads and telegraphs, and by merchants and migrants loyal to the Ottoman state. The old tribal order survived at the local and village level, whether in the form of customary land tenures—which persisted despite registration in the Ottoman tapu—or an enduring loyalty to tribe and clan.^[20] Nevertheless, both the cultivators and bedouin were enmeshed in the grain export economy of southern Syria. The economic surplus this generated funded the Ottoman administration and allowed an embryonic elite to emerge from the bedouin aristocracy and the larger merchant landowners.^[21] Whether as members of town councils or as local district officers (qaimmaqam), the new tribal landlords acted as proxies for Ottoman rule.

South of the Mujib, direct Ottoman rule was both more recent and less secure. The Ottomans had to maintain the surrah to prevent the bedouin from attacking the Hijaz Railway.^[22] With the exception of a small Turcoman presence at Lajjun and the temporary inflow of Damascenes into Ma‘an during the construction of the railway, Ottoman rule lacked the reliable auxiliaries available further north in settlements such as Amman or Jarash. Except on the Karak plateau, the agricultural surplus was meagre, and even here it was used to supply the surrounding bedouin rather than for export. The town’s merchants—for the most part migrants from Damascus and Hebron—were little more than shopkeepers and never attained the wealth or status of their counterparts in al-Salt.

Therefore the local order was largely intact in southern Transjordan when the accession of the Young Turks in 1908 brought new efforts to centralize the Ottoman state. Having subjugated the Jabal Druze in the summer and fall of 1910, an Ottoman force under Sami Pasha al-Faruqi moved south to impose conscription and disarm the population in ‘Ajlun. While al-Faruqi’s troops faced little resistance north of the Mujib line, attempts to impose the same measures in Karak brought protests, pleas, and petitions from the local shaykhs. When these failed to move the authorities, a bloody uprising broke out in Karak that spread to Tafila and led to bedouin attacks on some of the stations on the Hijaz Railway. The revolt was led by the Majali, whose paramount shaykh, Qadr, fed the Karakis’ fears of conscription and disarmament and played on rumors that the Young Turk–led Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) intended to suspend payments to the bedouin along the Hijaz Railway.

The Karak revolt was eventually suppressed and its ringleaders imprisoned. However, al-Karak’s cause was taken up by the Arabist press in Damascus and in the Ottoman parliament, where Arab feeling was on the rise in reaction to the Turkifying policies of the CUP and where Tawfiq al-Majali, the town’s deputy to the Ottoman mab‘uthan (Ottoman parliament), moved in nationalist circles. Together with the participation of the surrounding tribes in sympathetic attacks on the railway, this has led some historians to interpret the Karak revolt in nationalist terms or to see in it a precursor of the Great Arab Revolt of 1916.^[23] However, contemporary Arabists were for the most part separated by a considerable social and political gulf from the rebels of al-Karak. While the former were urban nationalists who sought a larger share in the Ottoman polity, the Karakis seemed wholly opposed to it. Their victims during the uprising were the town’s merchants, the hapless census teams, and such representatives of the Ottoman order as failed to find sanctuary in Karak’s citadel.^[24]

The Karak revolt is better seen as the dying spasm of the local order, a doomed attempt of a tribal system to defend itself against an encroaching state. The Ottoman hold on the district was rapidly reestablished, and the Karakis for the most part remained loyal Ottomanists throughout the subsequent years of war and revolt. At least at the grassroots level, a similar antipathy to centralization marked the events leading to the Arab Revolt in the Hijaz in 1916. As was the case in Karak, a local elite manipulated tribal resistance to Ottomanism for its own ends. Hijazi localism, rather than Arab nationalism as understood in Damascus or Beirut, was the defining feature of Arabian politics between 1908 and 1916.

The Origins of the Arab Revolt: Ottomanism Versus Localism in the Hijaz

The late Ottoman Hijaz was an unlikely crucible for Arabism. The province was among the most backward in the Ottoman Empire. Its cities, steeped in ancient privilege and religious superstition, lacked the adversarial press, Arabist notables, and educated middle class that were the hallmarks of early Arab nationalism in Greater Syria or Iraq.^[25] The Hashemite rulers of Mecca were at best late converts to Arabism and had as late as 1911 defied the weight of Arabist opinion by aiding the Young Turks’ suppression of the Idrisi’s rebellion in ‘Asir. In launching his revolt in 1916, the sharif of Mecca appealed to educated Hijazi opinion in traditional rather than Arabist terms. Hussein’s proclamations, and the articles and editorials of his mouthpiece Al-Qibla, accused the “atheistic” CUP of tampering with the Islamic legitimacy of the Ottoman state and called for the preservation of the ancient privileges of the Hijaz.^[26]

Formed in a part of the Ottoman Empire “that was not at all nationalistic,” Hussein’s revolt therefore marked an “ironic beginning” to the Arab Movement. However, if Arabist doctrine had few converts in the Hijaz, the inhabitants of the province, whether townspeople or bedouin, were united in their hostility to the centralizing bent of Ottoman reform. Until 1916, local resistance found tangible expression in tax riots in the towns, as well as in bedouin opposition to the extension of the Hijaz Railway and the threat this posed to the surrah they received to protect the pilgrimage. By 1908 the opposition of the tribes had escalated to the point of a general tribal revolt that required six thousand troops for its suppression. Scattered attacks on the railway continued after the Young Turks came to power in 1908, and partial peace was maintained between 1909 and 1914 only by the prompt payment of subsidies to the Bani ‘Attiyyah, Harb, and Billi tribes and by the fortification of the railway’s main stations and watering points.^[27]

The Hashemites shared the bedouins’ antipathy to Ottoman centralization. While publicly welcoming the Hijaz Railway, the incumbent clan of the Dhawi ‘Awn privately feared that it would provide Istanbul with the means to curtail their power in Mecca. The arrival of the Hijaz Railway in Medina in 1908 had proven to be a means for the consolidation of the Ottomans’ grip on the district. Medina and its environs were detached from the Hijaz vilayet and made into a separate mutasarrifiyyah (Ottoman subgovernate); and although bedouin affairs continued to be administered by a representative of the sharif of Mecca, it was the writ of the Ministry of the Interior and the local branch of the CUP that prevailed within the city walls.

The Young Turk revolution coincided with Hussein ibn ‘Ali’s accession to power in December 1908, and the confusion following the fall of Abdul Hamid allowed Hussein to consolidate his grip on Mecca. But within a year of his appointment, he had come into conflict with the CUP over the extension of the railway southward from Medina. Tensions with the Young Turks continued to escalate until 1914, when the latter began to promote the claims of a rival clan, the Dhawi Zayd, whose leader ‘Ali Haydar professed support for the railway’s extension to Mecca.^[28] The outbreak of war brought matters to a head. It was the discovery of a Unionist plot to unseat him in January 1915 that seems to have convinced Hussein of the need to seek outside support in order to preserve his family’s position as autonomous rulers of the Hijaz.^[29]

The realities of wartime Arabia dictated that Hussein turn to Great Britain, whose chief representative in Egypt, Lord Kitchener, had already rebuffed an approach from ‘Abdullah in 1914. As occupiers of Egypt, the Hijaz’s traditional source of grain and subsidy, the British had considerable influence over the rulers of Mecca. Cairo’s leverage was increased once Turkey joined the Central Powers and a naval blockade was imposed on the Red Sea and the trade routes into Kuwait. Moreover, the outbreak of war encouraged the British to conclude treaties with rival Arabian princes who could potentially threaten Hussein’s hold on the Hijaz. The latter included the Idrisi ruler of ‘Asir, whose followers had invaded Hashemite territory in 1915, and Ibn Sa‘ud, who had been in conflict with Hussein over the oasis of Khurma since 1910. British support promised to secure the Hijaz against these regional rivals, as well as provide the means to combat the intrigues of the Young Turks in Mecca.

Conducted by divergent power centers with competing interests, Britain’s wartime strategy in Arabia was, however, at best complex and most often confused. Grand strategists in Whitehall, aware of the need to conciliate the competing actors of the “Eastern Question” became more cognizant of the limits of British power and of the rival ambitions of Russia and France. The government of India, which occupied Aden and had responsibility for the Persian Gulf, favored the manipulation of local princes in order to pave the way for direct colonial control over Mesopotamia. Its “men on the spot”—Shakespeare until his untimely death in 1915, and H. St. John Philby—preferred to put their faith in Ibn Sa‘ud as the coming power in Arabia. As a result, it was only gradually that the Sharifian inclinations of Lord Kitchener and his protégés in Cairo and Khartoum began to influence imperial policy. In contrast to India, Cairo argued that Arabism could be harnessed to the imperial purpose and (no doubt more fancifully) that an alliance with a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad such as the Sharif Hussein could provide an antidote to the Ottoman call to jihad.^[30]

In pursuit of these aims, the Arab Bureau in Cairo reinitiated contacts with the Hashemites. In the course of the famous “Hussein-MacMahon” correspondence that ensued, the sharif agreed to take up arms in support of the Allied war effort against the Turks. In return, Britain undertook to support Arab independence within boundaries broadly circumscribed by its secret agreement with France (the Sykes-Picot Agreement). The question of the compatibility of the two sets of undertakings has long exercised historians but need not detain us here. The most balanced assessments conclude that a pledge of Arab independence was given, but that it was not incompatible with Britain’s undertakings with the French.^[31] Under the pressure of events, both the sharif and Britain chose to defer their differences until the postwar settlement, the contours of which were impossible to predict in 1916.

It seems clear, however, that the local politics of the Hijaz and Hussein’s dynastic ambitions, rather than Arabist sentiment, guided his preparations for the revolt. Rather than marking the culmination of the Arab Awakening, “it makes better sense to view the revolt as the death rattle of the traditional Ottoman order, the last gasp of a repetitive cycle of tension and struggle between Istanbul and the provincial elite.”^[32] Conservative in its aims and traditional in its content, Hussein’s uprising marked an unlikely beginning for a new state system in the Arab east.

The Course of the Arab Revolt (I): The War in the Hijaz

It was nonetheless Hussein’s negotiations with the British in Cairo that brought the Arabist dimension of the revolt to the fore. Once the decision to break with Istanbul was made, the language of Arabism provided a useful tool for conducting a dialogue with a European power imbued with nineteenth-century notions of national self determination. Once the correspondence with MacMahon raised the possibility of Sharifian rule in Syria and Iraq, Arabism also offered a basis for legitimizing a new realm outside the traditional confines of Hashemite influence.^[33] In the autumn of 1915 Faisal had already found support among Damascene notables and the secret societies active there, and the uprising in the Hijaz was initially planned in concert with a similar movement in Syria headed by members of the Arabist movement al-Fatat. The latter continued to play a useful role as propagandists and Hashemite emissaries once the revolt was launched.^[34]

Arabism was also a means of recruiting the core of a regular army from former Ottoman officers. Members of al ‘Ahd, an Arabist secret society that drew its following from Arab officers (in particular Iraqis) in the Ottoman army, were especially prominent in what came to be known as the “National Arab Army.” The Ahd’s acknowledged leader, ‘Aziz ‘Ali al-Masri, was briefly (and also unhappily) Hussein’s chief of staff, and Iraqi officers led the Arab forces that took part in the battles around Ma’an and Tafila in 1918.^[35] However, men like Ja‘far al ‘Askari and Nuri al-Sai‘d were the exceptions rather than the rule among the Arabs serving in the Ottoman cause. Only a fraction of Ottoman deserters and a small minority of prisoners of war joined the Arab forces. On the whole, the nationalist officers kept to training and operational tasks in the Hijaz or in the forward base established in Aqaba after 1917.^[36] The bulk of the Hashemite army consisted of bedouin irregulars who functioned as guerrillas on Allenby’s “eastern flank” as he advanced into Palestine.

The bedouin irregulars stamped the Arab Movement with a tribal character. This ensured that whatever the motives of its instigators, the form and content of the Arab Revolt reproduced traditional patterns of political change in the rural hinterlands of the Middle East.^[37] A protean Arab sentiment, for the most part in the form of ethnic pride in being Arab, was certainly in evidence among the tribespeople.^[38] However, the ideas of the Damascene secret societies meant no more to the rank and file of Hussein’s following than they did to the tribespeople of al-Karak. In the Hijaz during World War I, the bedouin, in the words of T. E. Lawrence, “were fighting to get rid of an empire, not to win it.”^[39]

The forces of the revolt failed to take Medina, which held out until January 1919, and instead progressed northward toward Damascus by the creation of a “ladder” of tribal allies along the western edge of the Arabian plateau. Guns, grain, and gold, made available by a British subsidy that ran to £125,000 per month, were the means by which the ladder was fashioned.^[40] Where material incentives failed, the threat posed by the Hashemite advance was often enough to elicit a tribe’s submission.^[41] The two forms of cooperation made for an unstable relationship with the tribes. Some defected once the Hashemite army moved on or once payments ceased. In the areas liberated from the Turks, Hashemite authority was patrimonial. A Council of Ministers was established at Mecca, but actual power was wielded by the staff of the Hashemite princes waging the campaign. Their agents—most often recruited from their own relatives, the eight-hundred-strong network of ashraf—were dispersed among the tribes, where they mediated local disputes and enforced Hussein’s writ in cooperation with local notables according to the norms of tribal practice.

Wartime food shortages and the disruption of food supplies through the blockade of the Hijazi coast and the Indian Army’s control of trade routes into Kuwait held the key to the Hashemite advance. Contemporaries such as Ranzi, the Austrian consul in Damascus, saw clearly that the revolt “was not only the making of the dismissed Amir [Hussein],” but traced its cause to the “the food crisis of the tribes.” The latter was in turn attributed to “woefully insufficient” deliveries of food, particularly grain, from Syria and Palestine. Together with the closure of the sea route, the shortage of grain left the Hijazi tribes “in dire straits and therefore dependent on the goodwill of the English.”^[42]

In the first phase of the revolt, therefore, it was British subsidy as much as Sharifian prestige that enforced Hussein’s leadership. Moreover, it was the threat of famine, induced by naval blockade and the disruption of food supplies to the Hijaz, that allowed the sharif to channel local solidarities and rally the bedouin.^[43] Otherwise, the Hashemites’ patrimonial methods failed to weld their following into a coherent national movement. Beyond the pecuniary ties forged by British gold, the only ideological element that joined the Hashemites to their local supporters was a common antipathy to Ottoman centralization. Hussein manipulated the bedouins’ interest in autonomy for dynastic ends, and only adopted the rhetoric of Arabism once the fortunes of war opened new vistas for himself and his sons in the Fertile Crescent. The trajectory of the Arab Revolt meant that in the spring of 1917 it was the tribes of Transjordan that held the key to the glittering prospects promised by MacMahon, and the occupation of Wajh by Faisal in February 1917 opened the way for their induction into the revolt.

The Course of the Arab Revolt (II): The War in Transjordan, July 1917–September 1918

In southern Syria as in the Hijaz, the outbreak of war and the Allied naval blockade inflicted bitter hardship on the population. The memoirs of ‘Awdah al-Qusus record that the blockade brought shortages of sugar, rice, and kerosene, and that the choking off of imports “raised the price of cloth tenfold.” Matters were exacerbated by Ottoman requisitions. Draconian measures were envisaged that would leave cultivators with a minimal supply of seed and a meagre daily ration of three hundred grams of wheat per person. At the same time, grain, camels, and horses were purchased at unfavorable prices and with a paper currency that devalued rapidly in the face of wartime inflation.^[44] An additional burden was imposed by the general mobilization decreed by the Porte, threatening to conscript all men of military age.^[45]

A cycle of inclement weather and environmental disaster added to the burdens of war. Until the 1917–18 season, the war years were marked by drought and harvest failure. In 1914, al-Karak and southern Syria suffered an infestation of locusts “that destroyed all fruit trees and crops despite the governments best efforts to combat the plague.”^[46] The decline of cereal production was accelerated by the drain of seed, men, and, above all, draft animals to the war effort. Even in the face of soaring food prices, the result was a steady fall in the surplus marketed through official channels and a contraction of the area of grain cultivation.^[47] The greed of speculators and misguided attempts by the authorities to corner the grain market brought famine to the towns and coastal provinces of Syria by the winter of 1915–16.^[48]

Hunger and the exactions of the Ottoman war regime were the most likely cause of the deep well of Arabist sentiment revealed by T. E. Lawrence’s reconnaissance of the Hawran and Transjordan in May and June 1917.^[49] By then, most of the northern bedouin had established links with the Sharifian forces ensconced at Wajh under Faisal, and the Arabist party in Damascus counted such tribal shaykhs as Nuri al-Sha‘alan of the Ruwalla; his son Nawwaf, “the most advanced thinker in the desert”; and Talal al-Fayez and his son Mashhur of the Bani Sakhr as adherents.^[50] However, of all the Transjordanian bedouin, it was only a dissident section of the Huwaytat—in effect ‘Awdah abu Tayeh and his Jazi followers—who openly declared support for the revolt in 1917. ‘Awdah, together with individual tribesmen from the Shararat, the Sirhan, and the Ruwalla, was recruited into the Hashemite confederacy between February and July of 1917, and he spearheaded the advance through the Wadi Sirhan, which took Aqaba on the 6th of July 1917.^[51]

The occupation of Aqaba provided a base for expansion into southern Syria, and Arab forces under Zayd, the youngest of Hussein’s sons, occupied Wadi Musa and Tafila with the support of local villagers in the autumn of 1917.^[52] However, Zayd found himself overextended in trying to take al-Shawbak, where the Hishah forest had become a vital source of lumber for the Hijaz Railway, and Ma’an held out in the face of repeated Arab assaults until the end of the war.^[53] North of the Wadi al-Hasa, al-Karak, where “Sami Pasha’s energetic action in 1910 ha[d] not faded from popular memory,” remained firmly in the Ottoman orbit throughout the war.^[54]

Two British incursions were mounted across the Jordan with the aim of establishing Faisal in central Transjordan in the spring of 1918. The first “Transjordan raid,” launched in late March, briefly occupied al-Salt, but failed to take Amman. Outfought and out-thought by the Turks, the army was forced to retire across the Jordan on April 2. The second Transjordan raid (April 30–May 4, 1918) was compromised by poor intelligence and the failure of promised support from the Bani Sakhr to materialize. The failure of the two raids dealt a severe blow to British prestige—and consequently to the credibility of the Arab Movement. Moreover, Allenby’s forces were weakened further by the withdrawal of men and material to meet the Ludendorf offensives on the Western Front.^[55] As a result, the forces of the revolt made little progress north of the al-Hasa divide until the defeat of the Central Powers, and until Allenby’s victory at Megiddo brought about a general Turkish collapse in the closing stages of the war.

By September 1918, when hostilities in Transjordan ceased, the northern tribes had played a relatively minor role in the revolt. While sections of the Ruwalla were involved in “minor disturbances” in the vicinity of Dera‘a as early as October 1916, the tribe as a whole extended only passive support to the Hashemites before May 1918.^[56] Both Nawwaf and Nuri continued to receive Turkish subsidies while enriching themselves from the contraband trade.^[57] The latter shifted decisively to the Sharifian side only after his camp at Azraq was bombed by the Turks in June 1918.^[58] The Bani Sakhr appear to have hedged. The paramount shaykh of the tribe, Fawwaz al-Fayiz, refused to supply camels for the Turkish attack on the Suez Canal in 1915 and signaled his allegiance to Faisal in January 1917.^[59] However, his brother Mithqal recruited three hundred men to the Turkish cause, and Fawwaz himself attempted to deliver Lawrence to the Ottoman authorities in Zizya in June 1917.^[60]

By agreement with Jamal Pasha, absolute ruler of Syria during the war, the tribes of al-Karak were exempted from conscription in return for supplying auxiliaries to the Ottoman forces operating in their vicinity. Reinforced by Ottoman cavalry and bedouin from the Bani Sakhr, the Matalqa Huwaytat, and the Ruwalla, al-Karak’s shaykhs raised five hundred horsemen for an attack on the forces of the revolt in July 1917. While the bedouin held back at the crucial moment, the Karakis engaged the Sharifians in a three-hour battle at Kuwayra, looting five hundred sheep in the process.^[61] The Turks found it necessary to exile a number of Christian notables from al-Karak (as well as from the related tribes of Madaba) in the latter half of the war.^[62] However, the loyalties of the Majali and prominent shaykhs such as Husayn al-Tarawnah remained Ottoman until the fall of Damascus.^[63]

In al-Balqa, the ‘Adwan and their tribal followers supported the Turkish cause. The memoirs of Fritz von Papen, then with the Fourth Army, record that the Ottomans “maintained excellent relations with . . . the nearby Arab tribes whose sheikhs often visited Es Salt to make their obeisances.” Al-Balqa’s Christians, however, were consistent sympathizers of the revolt throughout the war. After the first Transjordan raid occupied al-Salt, the town’s Christians (as well as tribal allies and supporters from the faction known as the Harah) chose to evacuate the district alongside the retreating British.^[64] By contrast, Transjordan’s Circassian minority under Mirza Pasha Wasfi was active in support of the Turks.^[65] Circassians in Wadi al-Sir fired upon British forces during the second Transjordan raid, and a “tribal brawl” broke out between their kinsmen in Suwayleh and Salti Christians during the first Allied incursion.^[66]

From the perspective of the Hashemite historians, the stalling of the northward progress of the revolt until the last stages of the war is surprising. No doubt there is some truth to their contention that the Turks played on local differences and went out of their way to conciliate local shaykhs and notables. In Karak the Ottomans fanned a feud between the Christian clan of al-Halasa and the Yusuf section of the Majali. The latter’s shaykh, Rafayfan al-Majali, who had succeeded Qadr as the most influential figure in the district, was made an Ottoman mutasarrif after the Ottoman garrison withdrew in the fall of 1918.^[67] Once the Sykes-Picot Agreement was made public by the victorious revolutionaries in Russia, the Turks also played effectively on fears that Allied victory would bring rule by Christian powers and cast doubt on the motives of the Hashemites.^[68] Finally the shaykhs of the Bani Sakhr and the ‘Adwan, as well as less significant figures among the Ruwalla, were recipients of Turkish honors and subsidies that kept them from openly siding with the sharif.^[69]

Nevertheless, an alternative explanation for the passivity of the tribes is needed, particularly as honor and subsidy were also available from the Sharifian side. The sanction of Ottoman repression must have been of key importance in the first phase of the war in Transjordan. The Turkish hold on Transjordan had been reinforced since 1914 by the presence of the Ottoman Fourth Army, which had its supply center at Jiza some forty kilometers south of Amman. Together with the mobility bestowed by the Hijaz Railway, this allowed the Ottomans to police the Balqa and reinforce their hold on al-Karak and Ma‘an at the first sign of trouble. In the summer and autumn of 1917 both Faisal and Lawrence were reluctant to push on into the Balqa and ‘Ajlun for fear that Turkish retribution would fall on defenseless villages should an uprising prove premature.

The Bani Sakhr, as the second Transjordan raid illustrated, would have been the logical choice to form the next rung of the Hashemite ladder after the capture of ‘Aqaba. However, the concentration of Ottoman forces in the western part of the tribe’s dirah (tribal territory) placed severe constraints on its room to maneuver. While “unassailable” in the steppe east of the Hijaz Railway, the Sukhur faced “retribution . . . once the summer droughts force[d] them back into the pastures west of the railway.” Moreover, their estates at Jiza, Dulaylah, Natl, and elsewhere along the Hijaz Railway added to the tribes’ vulnerability, enabling the Turks, in the words of a British intelligence report, “to put a further turn on the screw” by denying them summer provisions and threatening the incomes of their shaykhs.^[70]

The plight of the Bani Sakhr illustrates the fact that, in contrast to the Hijaz, the logistics of food supply in the north Arabian desert (Badiyat al-Sham) worked against the revolt. An Arab Bureau report in the winter of 1917 argued that the various components of the great ‘Anaza tribal confederation that held the key to the revolt’s success in Syria (the Dhana Muslim—Ruwalla, Muhallaf, and Wald ‘Ali on the Shami side of Syrian Desert, and the Amarat to the east) would not join the revolt while the Ottomans controlled the settled areas and, therefore, the markets on which they relied for subsistence. Even the most powerful of the northern bedouin, Nuri al-Sha‘lan of the Ruwalla, would “not fight openly for the Sharif until his tribe of over 70,000 souls is secure, not only of arms, but of food.”^[71]

Moreover, the last year of war, when Allenby was well established in Jerusalem and could counterbalance Turkish power, brought ample rain. According to contemporary reports, the bumper harvests that resulted left “the bulk of the rural population in (the) grain producing districts of inland Syria . . . with enough grain in the summer of 1918.”^[72] With Ottoman resources stretched by the confrontation with Allenby and the need to supply Ma‘an, it is likely that cultivators in Transjordan were able to evade requisitioning agents and accumulate the grain surpluses documented by Damascene observers in the Jabal Druze. This was almost certainly true of those bedouin landlords who could harvest their crop and then follow their kinsmen into the steppe east of the Hijaz Railway, where the grain could be exchanged for contraband or Sharifian gold.^[73] As the grain flowed south to provision the forces of the revolt in Aqaba, Transjordanians could gain access to the guns and gold the revolt traded in without the risk of actually participating.

Once the minorities are excepted, the pattern of participation in the revolt in Transjordan seems to be of scattered initiatives in support of the Sharifian cause north of the Hasa divide, with collective action in its favor being confined to the Huwaytat and the villagers in the environs of Tafila and Wadi Musa. Variations in the power and reach of the Ottoman state and—as was the case in Hijaz—the incidence of food shortage and hunger best explain overt support for the Arab Movement. In the grain-deficient south, where the hold of the Ottoman state was both recent and unsure, the specter of hunger drove sections of the Huwaytat into the arms of Faisal. From al-Karak northward, the presence of the Fourth Army was a deterrent to opportunistic action in favor of the revolt before 1918. By then a good harvest and slackening Ottoman impositions may have left a surplus of grain in the hands of cultivators. Both fallah and bedouin could afford to straddle the fence until Faisal’s victory appeared inevitable.^[74]

War’s Aftermath: Faisal’s Rule and the Resurgence of the Local Order

Faisal’s reign in Damascus lasted twenty-two months (October 1918–July 1920) and was initiated by his father annexing Ma’an and Aqaba to the Hijaz.^[75] From the beginning, his fledgling government faced almost insuperable problems. Allied forces occupied much of Syria as part of three Occupied Enemy Territory Administrations (OETAs). France’s control of OETA North in particular threatened to choke the landlocked interior under Faisal’s control. The economy of Syria was in any case devastated by war. Agricultural production and distribution was severely disrupted, and the towns and coastal areas were close to famine from hoarding, speculation, and graft. The monetary system was in a state of near collapse due to the devaluation of the Turkish lire in the first months of the new regime. The road and railway system had been damaged during the war, and transport was almost at a standstill.^[76]

In the midst of the postwar chaos, Anglo-French policy moved fitfully toward implementing the Sykes-Picot Agreement. By 1920 the French interpretation of Sykes-Picot had prevailed, and British forces withdrew from the Syrian interior. Faisal was unable to head off a French occupation of Damascus after the formal division of Syria between the powers at St. Remo in April 1920. Proclaimed king by the Syrian Congress in March 1920, he was forced to abandon his capital four months later as the French army of the Levant under General Gouraud advanced upon it from Beirut. Faisal moved to Haifa and thence to Europe to pursue his cause by diplomatic means. Many of his supporters in the Istiqlal Party fled Damascus for neighboring Arab countries after an engagement with the French at Maysalun. The greater part of these exiles established themselves in Amman, which was rapidly turned into the center of resistance to the French.

Transjordan dissolved into tribal strife as Ottoman rule collapsed. Contemporary accounts speak of the educated and the propertied fleeing the country, while crowds burned the land registries and tax offices in an effort to rid themselves of fiscal obligation or debt.^[77] The situation deteriorated further under Faisal. Although local shaykhs and “petty notables” from Ma‘an, ‘Ajlun, and al-Salt took part in Damascene politics, the unified Faisalite administration established in Amman wielded little effective power. The gendarmerie were underpaid and inadequate, and most of Transjordan’s inhabitants refused to pay tax. In al-Salt, the population drove out officials charged with conducting a census and registering the population for conscription.^[78] Even before the withdrawal of the British from OETA East in December 1919, bedouin raiding resumed. The Bani Sakhr attacked farms belonging to Salti Christians between Madaba and Amman, and the Balqa tribes began to demand restoration of the land allocated by the Ottomans to the Circassians.^[79]

On the eve of the French occupation of Damascus, the instability in Transjordan threatened to spill over into Palestine. The sedentary clans of Bani Kananah—perhaps encouraged by members of the Istiqlal native to the Hawran, including such radical nationalists as Ahmad Muraywid and Ali Khulqi (the latter a native of Irbid)—raided Jewish settlements in Galilee. The raiders engaged British forces at Samakh and suffered a number of casualties as RAF planes strafed them on their way back across the Jordan. Kayed al-Ubaydat, the paramount shaykh of the nahiyah (the lowest level of the Ottoman provincial hierarchy) was among the dead.^[80] The Samakh raid seemed to confirm Allenby’s fears that abandonment of OETA East would leave Palestine’s right flank “in the air, threatened by all the Druze and bedouin tribes.”^[81] Herbert Samuel, who was high commissioner in Jerusalem and cautiously sympathetic to Zionist pleading, now called for the occupation of Transjordan west of the Hijaz Railway.^[82]

Samuel’s advice was at first resisted by Whitehall, which was fearful of the cost of occupying Transjordan. However, the fall of Faisal brought renewed interest in the country. The area lay astride the lines of communication between Mesopotamia and the British base along the Suez Canal, and France’s occupation of Damascus prompted the fear of a further move southward to cut the land corridor with Iraq.^[83] Therefore the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, recommended an “inexpensive solution,” whereby requiring a token presence east of the Jordan would be used to keep the area in the British sphere.^[84] In August 1920, a day after Faisal’s departure for Europe, Samuel convened a meeting of shaykhs and notables from al-Karak and al-Balqa at al-Salt and informed them that Transjordan was to be placed under a British mandate. However, the inhabitants were to form their own administrations in each of the Salt, Karak, and ‘Ajlun districts, subject to the advice of British political officers responsible to the high commissioner in Jerusalem.^[85]

Regional animosities prevented representatives from ‘Ajlun from attending the meeting with Samuel. Therefore the message was relayed to them by a Major Somerset (later Lord Raglan) at a meeting in Um Qais on September 2.^[86] Istiqlalists, including Muraywid and Khulqi, attended the Um Qais meeting, and their presence injected a more radical tone into the proceedings. The assembled shaykhs demanded that Somerset accept a series of nationalistic demands, including the incorporation of parts of the Hauran north of the Yarmouk into the government of ‘Ajlun’s jurisdiction, the unification of the three local governments under a single ruler, a British (as opposed to a French) mandate over Syria, and above all a guarantee that Transjordan would be excluded from Zionist colonization. Somerset was forced to sign a “treaty” incorporating these provisions (the so called Treaty of Um Qais) before proceeding to Irbid.^[87]

In any event, the government of ‘Ajlun formed at Irbid proved unable even to rule the qaza (Ottoman district). Friction with the al-Kura soon became apparent, whose paramount shaykh, Klayb al Shraydah, was not represented on the governing council formed in Irbid. Within a week, a separate government of Kura had been established, with Dir Abu Sa‘id as its capital. Following the example of Kura, the dominant clans in four of ‘Ajlun’s nahiyyats (Jabal ‘Ajlun, al-Wustiyya, al-Mi‘radh, and Jarash) established autonomous administrations.^[88] The most notable event in ‘Ajlun at the time had a tribal rather than an Arabist coloring. The villagers of Ramtha—then still under titular French control as part of the Hawran—repelled a bedouin raid on the district, inflicting a severe defeat upon the Bani Sakhr.^[89]

Farther south, an elected council was established at al-Salt to rule the district alongside the head of government, Mazhar Raslan (a native of Homs who had served as governor of the same district under Faisal). The ‘Adwan were represented on the council, but the Bani Sakhr boycotted its proceedings in favor of a rival government established at Amman by Mithqal al-Fayiz’s Damascene brother-in-law, Sa‘id Khayr. As a result the Balqa also divided along tribal lines.^[90] A council similar to Salt’s was established in Karak under Majali leadership. As was the case elsewhere, its procedures remained tribal and it failed to pay its gendarmerie or impose taxation on the district’s tribes. Despite the best efforts of Alec Kirkbride, the British advisor, the grandly named “government of Mo’ab,” lapsed into internecine tribal conflict and an acrimonious rivalry with Tafilah to its south across the Hasa divide.^[91]

The pattern throughout Transjordan at the end of Faisal’s rule was of a resurgent local order and a renewal of the tribal particularisms on which it was based. The only effective steps toward stabilizing the country were taken by the British. One of the political officers dispatched by Samuel, Captain Brunton, formed a regular body of cavalry and machine gunners in Amman. The new force had the explicit aim of curbing bedouin raids upon the settled population and was initially recruited from the Circassians settled by the Ottomans for the same purpose.^[92] In October 1920 the force successfully collected taxes from Sahab and imposed peace after tribal strife in Madaba.^[93] Shortly afterward it was taken over and expanded by Frederick Peake into the new “Reserve Force” which was to be the nucleus of the future Jordanian army.^[94] By the time of its formation, however, the arrival of the Amir Abdullah in Ma’an had eclipsed the local governments and set in motion the events that eventually created a separate entity called Transjordan.

Conclusion

The years of war and revolt that marked the end of Ottoman rule in southern Syria provide ample support for Charles Tilly’s contention that war places unusual demands on rural actors.^[95] In Transjordan, however, as elsewhere along the desert marches of the Ottoman Empire, the nature of the local order was such that the results of war making were more in keeping with the ideas of Ibn Khaldun than with the sociology of state making in the West. In Western Europe, war imposed new burdens on a more or less “captured” peasantry, extending the extractive capacity of the state as well as its fiscal resources and, in the long run, promoting centralization and state building. In southern Syria and the Hijaz, the onset of war diverted men and material to the frontiers or deployed them along extended lines of communication. At the same time, external subsidy, in the form of British guns and gold, gave tribal actors the means to wage war on the state and to weaken and eventually undermine the “infrastructural power” of the imperial center.

Viewed through the lens of war and famine rather than the rival histories of Arabism, material incentives, rather than Sharifian prestige, determined the course of Hussein’s revolt. The Ottoman entry into the war brought naval blockade and the disruption of food imports in Syria and the Hijaz. The exact impact of these shifts in supply varied with the pattern of development in the late Ottoman period, but in grain-deficient regions like the Hijaz and southern Transjordan, tribes such as the Huwaytat were left more exposed than the more self-sufficient tribespeople north of the Mujib line. The looming threat of hunger provided a lever that the Hashemites and their British allies used to co-opt the southern bedouin and construct the northern rungs of a ladder of tribal allies that took Aqaba in July 1917. However, Transjordanians from al-Karak northward, where grain supplies were more secure and the Ottoman presence more forbidding, preferred to straddle the fence until the last months of the war, and it was Allenby’s victory and the Turkish collapse, rather than the forces of the revolt, that carried Faisal into Damascus in 1918.

In Transjordan, as in the Hijaz, guns, gold, and grain, rather than the appeal of Hashemite nationalism, determined the course of the Arab Revolt and its aftermath. Since Transjordanians were largely tribal and for the most part illiterate, their view of the revolt is exceedingly difficult to determine. Nonetheless it may be surmised that the Transjordanians shared the Hijazi bedouins’ ethnic pride and, by 1916 at least, their hostility to the rule of the CUP in Istanbul. National sentiment may be discerned in the actions of individual shaykhs like ‘Awdah abu Tayeh and in the friendly reception T. E. Lawrence received on his reconnaissance of the Hawran in 1917. During the Faisalite period, a broad Arabist current became apparent in Transjordan, not least in the anti-Zionist form that motivated the raiders of Samakh and the participants in the Um Qais meeting. During the war years, however, Arabism remained latent. Tribesmen for the most part evaded or avoided the state and only took up arms when the Ottoman order weakened and there were good prospects for material gain or pecuniary reward.

In form and content, Hussein’s Arab Revolt was essentially a Khaldunian movement. In the words of Albert Hourani, it was “almost the last instance of a recurring process in the history of the region before modern technology transformed the world.”^[96] The world of Ibn Khaldun had, however, changed by the time World War I broke out, and local actors—whether tribesmen or Hashemite—could no longer challenge the Ottoman order on their own. To rise against the Porte, the sharif of Mecca needed external—and in the wartime Hijaz, inevitably British—support. As a result, the power of the movement he launched “was not its own but borrowed from a more powerful patron which in the end . . . abandoned it.”^[97] Having entered Damascus, his armies could not hold its citadel. In Transjordan this meant that the years of war and revolt brought a transition to localism rather than to Arabism.

Notes

3. The Climax and Crisis of the Colonial Welfare State in Syria and Lebanon during World War II

Elizabeth Thompson

The first and most profound effect of World War II on Syria and Lebanon was fear—fear of famine. “In early September 1939 we were preparing for the new school year when the airwaves carried terror to our souls, pounding us all day with news reports of the Second World War,” recalled a Lebanese schoolteacher. “In the next few days, I saw acute pain rise in the breasts of the generation that had lived through the catastrophe of the First War. . . . Work stopped, and business dwindled as a wave of profound pessimism engulfed the country.”^[1] The famine of World War I had killed as many as five hundred thousand Lebanese and Syrians. With blockades and poor harvests, fear of its morbid return reigned for the first three years of World War II, fueling riots, hunger marches, and opposition movements.

Déjà vu struck rulers as well as the ruled. General Georges Catroux, the leader of the Free French forces in the Levant who claimed rule of Syria and Lebanon in 1941, recalled his earlier term of service in these countries after the last war. As in 1918, the French were outnumbered by British troops and competed with them for prestige and power, through the delivery of foodstuffs and aid. In 1941 as in 1920, Catroux faced the task of imposing French rule on a hostile population. And as he did so, he recognized many familiar faces among French sympathizers and the nationalist opposition.

But Syrians and Lebanese confronted war and French rule in a manner radically different from twenty years before. Most salient was the emergence of new mass movements organized by political parties, labor unions, religious groups, and women. These movements aimed most of their demands at the government—for political freedom, decent wages, and full education and health care. While women in World War I typically had suffered alone, portrayed in numerous photographs as lone mothers dying of hunger with their children, women entered World War II armed with charitable, educational, and political organizations that would mount incessant protests claiming not only their right to bread but their political rights and right to national independence. While men in the last war had been drafted into the Ottoman army and sent far from home, in this war they were not mobilized. They too entered the war with highly organized movements that would demand government intervention on behalf of workers, families, and business.

And the French position had radically changed since the last war. In 1918, the French had sought to aggrandize their empire; in 1941, they struggled to reconquer it, to take it back from the Vichy government and fend off encroaching German occupation. In June 1941, Syria and Lebanon were the first major territories outside of Africa that the Free French reclaimed by force, a year after Charles de Gaulle founded the movement in London and a scattering of colonies. The Free French were still weak because of their small numbers, and they had had to rely on overwhelming British support in the Syrian campaign. Moreover, they were still either unknown or suspect in the eyes of most French, and they sought desperately to justify their claim to represent true France. Syria and Lebanon were thus to become Free France’s “city on a hill.” There, Catroux sought to realize the ideals the Gaullist movement claimed were authentically French (and absent in the Vichy regime): republicanism, honor, and a fighting spirit. Free France had little materiel and only “moral capital” with which to recapture the prestige of being a Great Power.^[2]

The combination of these three wartime phenomena—fear, social solidarity, and French weakness—produced a critical political opening for change in the relations between the mandatory state and society. This change has been described mainly in terms of how Syria and Lebanon achieved independence during wartime. In 1943 the nationalist opposition won elections, and in 1944 it took over the reins of the states’ most essential services. In these accounts, independence was the start of a new era, as the organization of national governments touched off a boom in spending and a mobilization of new political interests.^[3]

In many of these standard histories, however, a subnarrative exists on the broader nature of the mass mobilization that occurred in both countries, beginning in the 1930s, which suggests that the nature of the war’s political opening was more complex than a simple confrontation over independence. While bourgeois nationalists demanding independence were the most prominent among 1930s opposition movements, they had allied with, and depended upon, other social groups who were virtually excluded from the halls of parliament and French negotiating tables: workers, women, Muslim leaders, and minorities. These groups sought more than independence: they demanded reform of the regime and inclusion in the civic order, the norms and institutions that shape state-society interaction. By the mid-1930s, pressure from these groups brought bargaining over the extension of social rights and state services to the center of politics, establishing the basic outlines of a colonial welfare state.^[4] However, by 1939 this bargaining had reached a stalemate, as bourgeois nationalists elected to parliaments balked at guaranteeing the right to welfare, and as the French suspended all politics at the outbreak of war.

The political opening created by wartime conditions did not merely strengthen opposition to the French but also altered the prewar pattern of political bargaining and, consequently, the trajectory of state formation at independence. The changes occurred in two phases. In the early years of the war, welfare not only expanded but its colonial attributes were also challenged. Between 1941 and 1943, social mobilization and French weakness combined to establish welfare as a right, not as a gift of paternalistic colonial rulers. Also the state committed itself to delivering benefits directly to citizens, challenging the colonial privileges of the bourgeoisie. In the second phase, from 1943 to 1946, spending on key social services like education and public health boomed, reaching levels never attained under the French. However, the 1943 election of nationalist elites and achievement of partial independence shifted the terms of bargaining once again. With the French out of their way, ruling nationalists faced less pressure to cede to the demands of the social movements, frustrating aspirations of those who sought revolution along with independence.

The war thus brought the colonial welfare state both to a climax and to a crisis. Wartime conditions had strengthened both the nationalists and the social movements but had also transformed their relationship. While in the 1930s the social movements were weakly organized, dependent allies of the nationalists, they became by war’s end powerful rivals who wielded significant influence over the urban masses. The civic order polarized anew around the fate of the colonial welfare state. Nationalists sought to defuse the crisis in divergent ways: Syria adopted a more etatist approach to social policy, Lebanon a more liberal one. Each of these policies was rooted in the hybrid attributes of the colonial welfare state, which had relied heavily on a mix of public and private institutions.^[5]

In sum, a focus on mobilization around social rights suggests that the war not only inaugurated a new era of independence but amplified and polarized prewar debates about the state’s obligations to its citizens. The welfare model is useful not only in tracing the trajectory of state formation from French rule to independence but also in placing Syria and Lebanon in a comparative historical context. The linkage between war and the rise of the welfare state has been explored mainly in the context of industrialized countries. These studies commonly observe that wars accelerate the expansion of welfare states.^[6] The Syrian and Lebanese cases challenge such a unilinear model, in that wartime expansion of their welfare state was halted late in the war. Study of welfarism in a colonial context, both in its similarities to and departures from Western European cases, is a potentially valuable contribution to the revisionist literature on welfare states.

Prewar Origins of a Colonial Welfare State

In the years 1920 to 1945 the intimate matters of the Syrian and Lebanese household became the target of sustained and intense public scrutiny: how much food families could buy; whether they were giving their babies sterile milk; how clean mothers kept their homes; how much time families allowed for their children’s education; whether mothers or children should be permitted to work; and whether fathers should be the sole breadwinners. These and similar issues were debated at political club meetings, labor union rallies, ladies’ charity socials, and feminist conferences, and in newspapers, cafes, and government offices.

Such public discussion had arisen before World War I, in the context of Ottoman reform and the need for social progress to safeguard the empire. But after 1918, the arena for debate was widened and utterly transformed by three new factors: prolonged social dislocation after the war, the construction of sovereign nation-states from former Ottoman provinces, and foreign occupation. Newly organized states hurried war relief to citizens to justify their rule: While Faysal’s Syrian government heralded health relief and the building of schools as a new era of progress and liberation for the Arab peoples, the French in Lebanon hurried to deliver relief in the name of their civilizing mission. The French used their war relief to win the award of Syria and Lebanon as French mandates by the League of Nations in 1922. Social services would remain a cornerstone of French claims to rule.

By 1939, the mandatory states had committed themselves to a variety of social policies that struck deeper into society than the Ottomans ever had. But the transformation was not merely one of degree: the spirit of that commitment had begun to change. Whereas in the immediate postwar years the state had provided relief in the spirit of exceptional charity by a Great Power toward what it perceived as a backward society, by the 1930s Syrian and Lebanese citizens were demanding state services as a right. Social policy came to be formulated not in French bureaus but in what may be termed the civic order, the arena of interaction between the state and nonstate spheres that shapes public life.^[7] The key components of the prewar civic order were, first, the formal, centralized state apparatus built by the French; second, the state’s mediating networks of local collaborators and agents; and third, the state’s clients and engaged opposition, who mobilized to extract more benefits from, and win greater participation in, government.

The French ruled Syria and Lebanon from their headquarters in an Ottoman palace in Beirut. The two countries were in practice Siamese twins, joined by a common, centralized administration, the French High Commissariat. The commissariat employed roughly one-third of all French officials in the territories and wielded complete control over the hefty Common Interests budget, mostly derived from customs dues. Its 1928 budget amounted to about 10 million £LS (Syrian and Lebanese liras), compared to the budget of 19 million £LS that year for all local governments.^[8] In addition to customs duties, the High Commissariat disbursed extrabudgetary sums allocated directly from Paris to pay for administrative and military costs and to subsidize quasi-public French hospitals and schools, averaging an additional 14 million £LS per year before the war.^[9]

The High Commissariat built its local administration by recruiting the remnants of Ottoman bureaucracy willing to serve them, and by establishing alliances and clienteles with the most conservative, pliable, and Francophile elements they could find. In Lebanon, the French quickly replanted the hundreds of French missionaries ousted by the Ottomans during the war, and cultivated the Maronite Church, with which the French had long historical ties. They also cultivated the urban bourgeoisie in Beirut with the award of contracts and trade opportunities. In Syria, the French had little previous loyalty and a far more organized opposition to confront. They cultivated a clientele of mostly rural notables—landowners, tribal chiefs, sympathetic religious patriarchs, and minorities. In contrast to their policy in Lebanon, they sought to isolate and disarm the urban bourgeoisie, which mounted stiff nationalist opposition to the mandatory regime. In both countries, French collaborators became agents and mediators between the central state and the populace.

The third component of the civic order, nonstate actors, was a highly varied group. It consisted of both recipients of state services and opponents to the regime. In the 1920s, the state clients who mobilized most vigorously were workers employed by foreign concessionary companies and consumers of the public utilities that these companies ran, who organized strikes and boycotts, respectively, to protest unfair labor practices and utility rates. In addition, opposition newspapers and women’s charities mounted campaigns for more stringent public health protections. This fledgling civic order was besieged in these years by those who opposed its very existence. Syrian notables and tribal leaders organized armed resistance against the French, culminating in the massive revolt of 1925–27, which was begun by the Druze and then spread to major cities.

Two factors—one political, the other economic—transformed the civic order from an arena defined in the 1920s by patronage and military repression to an arena animated primarily by demands for political and social rights in the 1930s. Political change resulted both from the Syrian rebels’ defeat and from the League of Nations’ requirement that a constitution and elected government be installed in the mandates. With force and persuasion, the French imposed constitutions in Lebanon in 1926 and in Syria in 1930, and conducted carefully orchestrated elections of handpicked favorites soon afterward. This process provoked the organization of political opposition among Lebanese Sunnis seeking unity with Syria and among Syrian nationalists opposed to French rule altogether. In Syria, the unification of nationalists into a loose federation called the National Bloc was a watershed, marking a transition from armed, military opposition to political means of opposition. Lebanese Sunnis gradually abandoned their policy of abstention from politics as well. By the mid-1930s, rudimentary political parties would open offices in major cities of Syria and Lebanon and recruit thousands of followers, particularly among students.

The economic factors that transformed the civic order were complex, and can be only summarized here. From the mid-nineteenth century, new classes of urban elites arose around the twin pillars of landownership and ties to the Ottoman bureaucracy. An urban middle class emerged shortly before World War I as a political force through the establishment of political, cultural, and sporting clubs. These were largely professional men, often poorer relations of the elite notable families: doctors, engineers, lawyers, and journalists. Bourgeois women’s charities and cultural clubs also emerged as more women attended schools. At the same time government reform and dislocation of the local economy, as the region was drawn into the world economy, transformed the working populations of the cities. By the early 1930s, workers-only labor unions emerged out of former guilds in transport, printing, and public works sectors. With petitions, rallies, and strikes, they confronted both the bourgeoisie and the state as their employers, demanding higher pay and better work conditions.

In sum, the civic order took shape in the 1930s as a triangle of relationships between the French state, collaborating mediators, and their clients and opposition. Virtually excluded from the civic order were the subalterns of mediating elites, such as peasants, children, most women, and the urban poor who were not recruited by active opposition groups. The structure of the civic order influenced the strategies of the three groups as they jostled for power. The supreme power of the High Commissariat made it the dominant player. The division of elites into collaborationist and nationalist camps produced a politics of intense bargaining for political allies and influence. As a result, the French, the mediators, and the nationalist opposition vied with one another for influence over the larger but weaker groups among the urban masses, particularly organized workers, women, and religious groups.

While independence was the most prominent issue to animate the civic order, social policy was also a central terrain of debate, one at first cultivated by the French themselves. Social policy was, from the earliest years of occupation, privileged as a top priority among French officials. The high commissioner played the role as chief relief officer in the days following the Allied occupation in 1918 and retained centralized control of social services in his offices in Beirut, via a partially privatized patronage system. Christian charities (mostly French) administered a large proportion of health services in conjunction with a skeletal public health department. They also ran a large number of schools. As Catroux would later claim during the war, these supposedly private schools, hospitals, and clinics were actually semipublic agencies, as they depended for their very existence on subsidies from the High Commissariat.^[10]

Emergency aid and self-justifying beneficence bestowed upon a populace do not, however, create a welfare state. It was only in the 1930s that popular demand for a sustained state role in social affairs was organized by various actors: civil servants, Syrian and Lebanese philanthropists, nationalists seeking a broader political base among lower classes, labor unions, the Communist Party, and women’s organizations. Social services were claimed by these groups as a matter of right, in the course of massive strikes and demonstrations between 1934 and 1939; these were fueled first by economic depression and the dismissal of parliaments and boosted in 1936 by sympathies with the Arab revolt in Palestine and by rising expectations, with the reinstatement of national governments and the resumption of treaty negotiations.

Social rights were by no means, in the minds of agitators, the principal goal. Under nationalist leadership, the protests were framed primarily in terms of demands for self-government and independence from French rule. Workers’, women’s, and parents’ grievances were used to support arguments that the French had violated the terms of the mandate: with economic policies that inhibited growth, industrial development, and employment; with chronic shortages of schools; and with low levels of health care. Many of these grievances were sent by petition to the League of Nations in Geneva, as proof that the French had betrayed the terms of the mandate charter awarded by the League, and so ought to withdraw.

In response, French strategy sought to convert challenges based on political claims into bargains over social rights. The willingness of the state to bargain over social rights was enhanced in the mid-1930s by the election of the left-leaning Popular Front government in France. However, idealism was not likely the main impulse to bargain. By introducing social policy initiatives, the French were able to exploit the ambiguity latent in the opposition’s demands. For even as the groups rejected the very fact of French rule, they continued to demand more state intervention, not less, in social affairs. Amid criticisms of the emphasis on French language in schools, there were constant calls for more state schools. Amid criticism of industrial policy favoring concessions to French firms, there were calls for state support of a national economy and for state protection of workers. The French responded in piecemeal fashion to these specific grievances and sidestepped fundamental challenges to their rule. To complaints about the lack of schools, they funded more schools. To complaints about poor safety regulations, they stepped up inspections. To complaints about unemployment, they created jobs. In sum, the French responded to the mid-1930s challenges by augmenting their long-standing policy of paternalistic social spending.

In the process, the French were forced to expand their skeletal system of social services well beyond what they had understood to be their commitment when the mandate was assigned. The transformed civic order thus planted the roots of a colonial welfare state. Basic financial and legal commitments won from the state further nurtured the notion of citizens’ social rights. Workers’, parents’, and mothers’ claims to those rights were incorporated into nationalist ideology (if not practice) and into the language of government officials themselves. A closer look at the main branches of social policy—public health, education, and labor protection—will illustrate how the process of political bargaining extended state commitments to welfare.

Public Health

Beginning in the 1920s, women’s groups and newspaper columnists badgered the French to increase funding for public health and speed responses to epidemics. Pressure was also exerted in the international arena, where doubt was cast on public health statistics reported to the League of Nations. In response, the state built a basic, if rudimentary, system of hospitals and clinics from virtually nothing after the war. By 1939, there were about one hundred hospitals, clinics, orphanages, and asylums, both public and private (the French ones subsidized by the state). Local state public health departments were reorganized and their staff of inspectors enlarged and empowered with stricter regulations on food vendors, restaurants, schools, and other public places. The high commissioner’s budget for public hygiene and assistance averaged in the 1930s about 500,000 £LS, rising from 2.0 percent to 2.6 percent of combined global budgets for Syria and Lebanon between 1929 and 1938, a time when most departments’ budgets were slashed. In addition, hundreds of thousands more liras were spent through the early 1930s on relief to refugees, particularly Armenians and Assyrians. More important for our purposes was the growing public sentiment that state-subsidized health care was a right, not a gift from the state. Writing in the quasi-official journal Dimashq in 1940, Dr. Joseph Aractingi, who had headed the public health administration in Syria since the early 1920s, stated that sound hygiene laws were “the right of the Syrian people.”^[11]

Education

The number of schools and students in all territories under French mandate—state and private—roughly doubled in the fifteen years prior to the war, totaling 2,554 schools with about 280,000 students in 1938, compared to 1,590 schools with 126,000 students in 1924. As in public health, the delivery of publicly funded benefits was channeled through both public and private institutions. Of the 280,000 students in 1938, only 92,000 were in state schools. Another 55,000 attended the semipublic French schools that were closely regulated and heavily financed by the High Commissariat. And 120,000 students attended local private schools run by Muslim and Christian groups.^[12]

And as with public health, pressure to expand state educational services came from the population and, in turn, from the League of Nations. In the mid-1930s, thousands of students each year were being turned away because there was no room in existing state schools. Nationalists demanded universal education as not just a social right but a political right, claiming that an educated citizenry is a precondition of democracy. Parents’ groups, particularly among urban Muslims, sent dozens of complaints to the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission. The French defended their policy by claiming that drops in state revenue during the depression prevented the hiring of new teachers, and that localities had failed to contribute their required portions of funds for the construction of schools, required by existing law dating from the Ottoman era.^[13]

The pressure apparently had some effect. In 1938, the French used extrabudgetary funding to open twenty-eight new government schools in Lebanon, the first new schools in years.^[14] Moreover, as with public health spending, education spending rose throughout the 1930s, when the depression was forcing deep cuts in administrative and public works budgets. Education spending in all of the Levant states rose from 4.6 percent of global budgets (1.4 million £LS) in 1929 to 8.6 percent (2.4 million £LS) in 1938.^[15] The figure rises to 9.2 percent if subsidies to French missionary schools are included.^[16]

Labor

State involvement in labor issues took three main forms: job creation, labor regulations and protections, and cost-of-living allowances. Labor unions’ strikes and demonstrations against unemployment pressured the state to adopt a major job-creation program in 1933. High Commissioner Damien de Martel inaugurated a public works program to combat unemployment, with a budget of 10 million £LS, and ordered a further study to develop import substitution industries. Funding for workers’ technical education was also increased, and, after the franc was devalued in 1936–37, De Martel introduced cost-of-living wage increases for civil servants, including teachers.

The unions also called for safer workplaces and for social security. Under pressure as well from the International Labor Organization, the High Commissariat decreed laws on industrial hygiene and the protection of working women and children in 1935 and 1936. Unions heralded the laws as a first step toward comprehensive labor laws protecting workers against long hours and accidents. Between 1936 and 1939, the unions united into (illegal) federations to pressure the reinstated parliaments into adopting such labor codes, which would include unemployment and work accident pensions, minimum wage standards, and the legalization of their federations. Syrian and Lebanese unions, as well as leaders of the women’s movement, explicitly invoked as a model contemporary events in France, where in 1935–36 democratic socialists and Communists joined labor unions to agitate for substantial new state intervention in economy and society, and to bring the Popular Front to power.^[17] By 1937 workers won virtual state recognition of their right to organize against their employers.^[18] The proposed labor codes, however, foundered in parliaments dominated by the bourgeois owners of businesses that employed the union members.^[19]

With the establishment of rudimentary social rights to health, education, and job security, in the form of both legal protection and fiscal commitments from the state, the cornerstone of a colonial welfare state had been laid. The growing acceptance of the notion of social rights in Syria and Lebanon mirrored contemporary developments in 1930s France and Britain. The term “welfare state” itself had become current in Britain by the late 1930s, while in France the foundations of “l’état providence” were laid with universal unemployment insurance laws in 1928 and 1930. The etatism of the era spread internationally the idea that citizens should claim from the state a commitment to improving their welfare.

However, the nature of state commitments by 1939 was limited. Only under external pressure did the state formulate benefits in terms of legal right, in the exceptional case of the 1934–35 protective labor laws. Even as the French government increased education spending, it continued to claim that it was not the state’s obligation to do so. Although the language of rights was increasingly employed, it was more a political ploy than a description of institutionalized reality. Second, there was a profound reluctance on the part of nationalist elites to make good on demands for social rights. The parliaments they controlled after 1936 refused to adopt labor codes and made no significant allocations of funds for education or health. The level of state commitment may be compared those made by the British and French states to their own citizens prior to World War I, when the first legislative guarantees and financial entitlements were established.

Moreover, the way in which services were delivered and funded was distinctly colonial. In stark contrast to the situation in metropolitan France, social welfare in Syria and Lebanon was not primarily funded through taxes on the middle and upper classes. Syrian and Lebanese elites resisted taxation, especially by a foreign ruler, and constituted such a thin layer of the population in their unindustrialized societies that potential revenues were limited anyway. Social spending in the mandates was financed, as a result, primarily through the High Commissariat, via Common Interests’ customs revenues and subsidies from Paris. The colonial welfare state was, at its origin, a stopgap measure designed to forestall demands for independence, not the product of an evolutionary social contract binding state and society through a commitment to higher taxes.

Another distinctively colonial feature of Syrian and Lebanese welfare was the mediated delivery of what were largely state-funded services. In diverting political grievances into social claims, the French turned to their post–World War I legacy of paternalistic social spending, which was funneled preeminently through the loyal constituencies they had cultivated: rural landlords and tribal chiefs, missionaries, indigenous religious leaders. These elites were the civilian pillars of French rule. They were cultivated with the award of power over other citizens and with financial support. As the French were pressured into expanding social policy, these elites became important vehicles not only of political control but also for the delivery of social services. The French in a sense could kill two birds with one stone: the need both to award power to mediators and to appease demands for social rights. In addition, mediators were often bargains. Nuns in French schools, for example, did not require full salaries.

The corollary of mediated state services was a hierarchical bias in benefits, which tended to favor the urban bourgeoisie, landowners, Christians (particularly in Lebanon), and males more than peasants, workers, Muslims, and women. European welfare states were closely tied to states’ needs for healthy, literate military recruits, and needs to pacify growing numbers of industrialized urban workers. These conditions did not hold in Syria and Lebanon, where the indigenously recruited Troupes spéciales were not used for foreign wars, and where the urban workforce remained a small percentage of the population. On the other hand, as we have seen, the state did need to appease urban middle classes and elites who could potentially lead an armed rebellion, as Syrians had done in 1925–27. Elites were not only taxed lightly but enjoyed disproportionate use of public services. They were the main clients of state-funded hospitals and French institutions of higher education. Even oppositional nationalists sent their children to state-subsidized schools like the Maristes’ lycée in Damascus and the Jesuit St. Joseph’s University in Beirut. Conversely, school shortages afflicted rural and Muslim areas most, while state labor policy continued to discourage unionization of workers against their employers and landlords. And existing law not only permitted lower pay for women workers but sanctioned their exclusion or marginalization in higher education, teaching, the civil service, and industry. Mediation and hierarchy of benefits contrasted with European welfarism, which aimed to level differences through the direct delivery of universal benefits to citizens. Welfare remained in Syria and Lebanon a privilege, not a right.

By late 1938, the bargaining process that had produced the colonial welfare state reached a critical juncture. Workers and women sought a far more radical transformation of state duties and citizens’ rights than had so far been attained in the emergent colonial welfare state. In late 1938, frustrated Syrian unions sent an ultimatum to parliament, threatening a general strike unless it passed the proposed labor code. Women’s unions, too, showed impatience with their alliance with nationalists, as the nationalist governments continued to ignore their calls for women’s suffrage, increased employment of women in the civil service, and reforms in personal status law.

But in 1938 workers and women lacked the power to pressure the governments into adopting a more egalitarian, rights-based social policy. Ruling nationalists refused such reforms, in part due to their self-interest—as employers, fathers, and husbands of workers and women—and in part because of the greater pressure they felt from conservative religious interests that had a stake in mediated government. Syrian Islamic groups contributed in the winter of 1938–39 to the unrest that brought down the National Bloc government, with protests against reforms in the personal status code that would have virtually permitted civil marriages for the first time and appeared to undermine the historical priority of Islam among religions. Meanwhile Christian groups in Lebanon, including French Jesuits, staunchly defended their position as mediators in the colonial welfare system, standing in opposition to parents who sought the reallocation of funds from private to public schools and preaching against personal status reforms that would undermine patriarchal families. And the French, who in the Popular Front years were sympathetic to social demands and popular participation in government, withdrew their support as conservative governments took power in Paris. In late 1938 they replaced De Martel with a conservative high commissioner, Gabriel Puaux, who established close ties with religious patriarchs and voiced his preference for installing a monarchy in Syria.

The juncture turned to crisis when the independence treaties approved by the Syrian and Lebanese parliaments were flatly rejected by the French parliament. Labor strikes and mass street demonstrations brought down the iron hand of Puaux, who suspended the parliaments and constitutions of both governments in the months before the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. The struggle over the colonial welfare state was frozen in place for the next two years.

Realization of a Colonial Welfare State, 1941–43

High Commissioner Gabriel Puaux boasted that it was “easy to govern” in the first year of the war, as his hundred thousand French troops “inspired everyone to respect France’s wishes.”^[20] Puaux wielded, in addition to this big stick, a carrot of 50 million francs sent from Paris to ensure imports of necessary goods and to stanch unemployment by reviving De Martel’s public works program. However, Puaux did not revive De Martel’s bargaining policies. Labor leaders who mounted strikes to protest low wages and layoffs were arrested, as was most of the Communist leadership, by January 1940. The civic order of the 1930s was stilled as it had been in the early 1920s, under martial law and military repression.

The war’s second year would not be so calm. The June 1940 occupation of France and inauguration of Vichy rule in Syria and Lebanon aggravated conditions beyond endurance. Funds from France were cut, as was vital trade. The British instituted a shipping blockade, shut off the oil flow from Iraq to Tripoli’s refinery, and closed borders to important markets in Iraq and Palestine. To cope with these stresses, Puaux laid the foundations of a state-led wartime economy, while using Vichy rhetoric to discipline an anxious population. In a speech on August 30, 1940, he called on youth to “calm down” and to espouse their duties of “discipline and work,” just as the state would do. He directed the High Commissariat to plan planting of sugar beets and rice and to impose a state monopoly on the transport of necessities to ensure supplies to Mount Lebanon and the rural poor. The Tripoli oil refinery was refitted to process remaining oil stockpiles. Yet shortages and inflation continued, igniting sporadic protests. In November, Puaux decreed harsh penalties for hoarding and black marketeering. The pillar of French claims to rule, its guarantee of welfare, was crumbling, and Puaux lamented, “The inhabitants [of the Levant] had been accustomed by us, perhaps too quickly, to consider the Republic as a wet nurse with an inexhaustible breast.”^[21]

The bottom fell out of Puaux’s tenuous social order upon the arrival of his successor, the pro-Vichy General Henri Dentz, in December 1940. More than fifty thousand workers were unemployed in Damascus alone, and breadlines grew long. The cost of living had doubled since the war’s start, without comparable pay raises. The first hunger marches took place in January 1941, in Damascus and Aleppo. In February, the Syrian nationalist leader Shukri Quwwatli seized leadership of protests against unemployment, high prices, and shortages, and organized a shopkeepers’ strike that spread to all of Syria’s major cities. In the face of French tanks and mass arrests, the strikes spread to Lebanon’s cities in March, some of them organized by the few labor leaders not yet jailed. Nationalist leaders used the threat of continued strikes to oust Vichy’s puppet governments and lower bread prices. In April 1941, Dentz dismissed the Puaux-era Councils of Directors. Khalid al-Azm, the new Syrian head of state, promised immediate public works jobs, welfare for youth, an ambitious public health program, and increased supplies of food. In May, bakers were forced to reduce the price of bread. Social pressure and Vichy’s lack of funds had forced the state back to the bargaining table.

Two months later the Vichy government fell to Free French and British invaders. The Free French were even weaker in resources than Vichy had been. Not only did they not enjoy subsidies from the metropole, but their rule coincided with the deepest economic slump of the war, plunging state tax revenues to new lows. They were thus forced not only to bargain but also to adopt a positively liberal policy in order to establish their rule. Under Georges Catroux, from July 1941 to June 1943, the Free French reinstated much of the civic order of late 1930s, with its three-way structure, bargaining strategies, and familiar players.

This proved to be no simple return to the past, however. As political prisoners were released and opposition groups permitted to reform, they attracted more followers than ever among those suffering from wartime hardships. Fearing rebellion during wartime, the French were forced to cater to social demands as never before. They compensated for their lack of funds by taking significant steps toward the direct delivery of state welfare benefits, bypassing colonial mediators, and toward the institutionalization of social rights through legislation. In early 1943, bargaining would reach a new pitch, as the French and their nationalist opponents sought to sway the loyalties of the urban masses in anticipation of the long-delayed parliamentary elections. As a result, the period of Free French rule brought the colonial welfare state to a new climax.

Catroux had no choice but to promise a return to the democratic liberties and colonial beneficence that had been cast aside by Vichy. The Free French were making a barely legal and desperately absurd claim to rule in the Levant, as they still occupied only a few minor colonies and commanded only a few thousand troops. Their claim to the mandate was doubly jeopardized by Vichy’s abandonment of neutrality for collaboration with the Germans, perceived by many as a renunciation of their membership in the League of Nations. Finally, they did not enjoy the confidence of their British and American allies. The Free French had therefore to base their claim to represent true France on antifascist, democratic principles. To rally the population, the government also had to promise war relief. And so on June 8, Catroux dropped flyers from airplanes proclaiming promises to abolish the mandate, establish independence, and reopen trade within the British-occupied regions of the Middle East: “it is not to repress your freedom but to assure it, to chase Hitler’s forces from Syria and make your rights, and those of France, respected.”^[22] The Vichy rhetoric of “duty” was replaced by claims to social and political rights.

In reorganizing the state and civic order, Catroux made explicit reference to policies of the leftist Popular Front between 1936 and 1938, now constructed in Free French ideology as a golden age before disaster. The independence treaties negotiated then would be revived, and as soon as wartime conditions permitted, elections for parliament would be held. Catroux even considered reinstating the governments dismissed by Vichy-collaborator Puaux in 1939. Under pressure from de Gaulle, however, Catroux postponed such a return as too risky to French interests: democratic symbols would be subordinated to the preservation of empire.^[23]

The Free French were too weak in 1941 to control a return to the combative parliamentary politics of the 1930s. They lacked critical funds and staff. Fully one-third of top French bureaucrats and all but 2,500 troops had opted to return with Dentz to Vichy France. The Free French would not fully replenish their civil and military ranks in Syria and Lebanon until 1943. And their tentacles of support among nonstate mediating bodies were attenuated, as most French missionaries were pro-Vichy: Catroux exiled the Jesuit rector of St. Joseph University, Père Chanteur, to Cairo for continuing to lead his students in prayers for Marshal Pétain. In addition, Free France enjoyed no subsidies from Paris with which to rebuild such support. Neither could the High Commissariat rely on customs duties to finance itself, as wartime trade was to remain severely restricted under the guidance of the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC), run by the British and Americans. Indeed, the period of Free French rule was the most impoverished of the war, as total state spending sank, in real terms adjusted for inflation, to roughly half of 1939 levels.

So Catroux reneged on his promise of independence and instead announced a transition period of conditional independence in autumn 1941, wherein he granted more autonomy to local governments and appointed longtime conservative collaborators to head the states: Shaykh Taj al-Din in Syria, and Alfred Naccache in Lebanon. Catroux also maintained the tight control of the High Commissariat (renamed the Délégation générale) over the military, police, and vital Common Interests administration, which included not only the sizable customs revenues but the foreign concessions that owned and managed much of the Levant’s public utilities and transport, the tobacco monopoly, and the Tripoli oil refinery.

However, revived opposition movements mushroomed as soon as Catroux announced conditional independence in autumn 1941. In Lebanon, the prewar rivalry between Bishara al-Khuri and Emile Eddé would solidify into opposing parties. In Syria, the bourgeois National Bloc/rural landowner cleavage reemerged, as the Bloc attacked the latter associated with Shaykh Taj’s government. Labor federations and the Communist Party in both countries would gain unprecedented strength by late 1943, with revived campaigns for the long-sought labor code and for pay raises. Syrian and Lebanese feminists, too, reignited their prewar women’s unions in a more independent spirit, distancing themselves slightly from their nationalist allies by demonstrating behind their own banners. Syrian Islamic groups, before the war scattered in various cities under individual personalities, would unite by 1945 into a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Inflation and food shortages immediately engaged the reconstituted civic order. The years 1941–42 were the darkest days of wartime hardship. The summer harvest of 1941 was poor, and both public panic and government alarm rose: “Fearing a famine like that of 1917–1918, all of Mount Lebanon speaks of protests and demonstrations,” French police reported on September 9.^[24] Ten days later, similar reports came from Aleppo and Damascus. Food prices soared far beyond wage raises (the cost of food rose 450 percent and the general cost of living rose about 300 percent between January 1939 and January 1943).^[25] Infant mortality, a primary indicator of public health, peaked throughout the Middle East in 1942.^[26]

The threat of popular revolt was taken extremely seriously by the weakened French. Urban populations, those with the greatest capacity to unsettle the fragile Free French regime, were hit hardest. The 1942 crop would also be poor, and despite MESC food shipments, fear of famine would not subside until the bountiful harvest in June 1943.^[27] Hunger marches began as early as September 1941 and peaked in the summer of 1942 and again in the spring of 1943, in all major cities. Communists, labor unions, and nationalists took credit for organizing them, but the prominence of women in French police reports about the marches is also striking: Women appear to have led at least ten demonstrations in Beirut and Aleppo during the summer of 1942 alone. Aleppo was shut down in early June 1942, and hundreds of women marched to the governorate building, shouting “We want bread!” and “Death to Governor Nabih Martini!” In Beirut, a Muslim woman started a demonstration in May 1943 after officials at city hall dismissed her complaint about poor distribution of flour. She returned to her quarter and led a crowd toward the city center, forcing shops to close and demanding lower prices and larger rations.^[28]

Thousands of workers also staged increasingly disruptive strikes. French police recorded major strikes in nearly every month of 1942 and 1943, especially among textile and public sector workers seeking wage raises to match inflation. While Vichy-era unemployment diminished in 1942, as British military demand fueled the creation of thirty thousand jobs, wages remained extremely low. Wages would rise by 1943 at only half the rate of inflation. Workers also protested import-export bans of cotton and silk, which curtailed production.^[29] With each month, the size and number of labor unions grew, and labor federations began to coordinate united actions not just against employers but targeting the state as well.

Thus two issues dominated politics between 1941 and 1943: bread supplies and workers’ wages. The French, their appointed heads of state, and nationalist opposition leaders each in turn sought to exploit mass unrest over food shortages and rising prices. These inter-elite rivalries would shape government policy, producing a variety of legal and financial commitments that amounted to the awarding of new rights to a broader array of social groups.

Catroux took the initiative in the late summer of 1941, when he established a new department in his cabinet called the “Section sociale.” By September, the Section began producing numerous social studies and legislative proposals to ameliorate the condition of workers and to offset the hardships of inflation. Their intent, as in French strategy of the 1930s, was to diffuse calls by opposition nationalists for immediate independence and to sway the loyalties of urban masses toward French allies in government. The section’s proposals would result in important legislation granting workers and families unprecedented rights to security and benefits.^[30]

Catroux similarly sought to exploit the bread issue. In April 1942 he established a Wheat Office (Office du blé) under the auspices of the Common Interests administration to impose a state monopoly on grain supplies and assure the delivery of surplus Syrian grain to Lebanon, which depended on Syria for half of its needs. His intent was to make the (French) state the primary and direct provider of this most essential foodstuff. But he was thwarted in this effort by Sir Edward Spears, the British minister to the Levant, who sought to assure MESC (that is, British) control, and by Shaykh Taj, who asserted Syrian control. The parties negotiated to create a new, joint commission to oversee grain collections and distribution, which was eventually named the Office des céréales panifiables (Cereals Office).^[31]

The bread-supply issue was most prominent in Syrian politics because Syria was the main producer of grain. In the summer of 1942 the Cereals Office attempted its first collections of grain, but landowners and peasants balked at state-set grain prices and hid the grain from Cereals Office collectors. Catroux saw an opportunity to recoup French prestige by using French troops to extract the grain by force, thereby bypassing landowning intermediaries. However, Spears checked Catroux’s plan. In August 1942, Spears approached the prime minister, Husni al-Barazi, a large landowner from Hama, and arranged to hold landlords responsible for the collection of grains on their lands, under threat of deportation if they did not produce the grain. At least thirteen landlords were deported and collections increased. However, landowners in both Syria and Lebanon were greatly compensated for their compliance, and emerged from the war tremendously enriched by MESC schemes to increase local production. Peasants, on the other hand, would not reap similar rewards, and lived at subsistence levels.^[32]

The establishment of direct state benefits did, however, proceed on the other end of the bread chain: distribution to urban consumers. The Syrian head of state, Shaykh Taj al-Din, known for his fiery populism in speeches, carved his own wedge of prestige by introducing a system of subsidies to the urban masses. He sold grain for less than the Cereals Office paid for it, at a cost of 8–10 million £LS per year. The deficit was covered by instituting a two-tiered pricing system, wherein the middle class paid more for grain and sugar to offset the discount offered to lower classes. Shaykh Taj also built a coalition of merchants, among whom he tolerated war profiteers and the rural Alawi and Druze minorities. In so doing, however, he plunged the state into debt and opened it to charges of corruption.^[33]

The nationalist opposition mounted an offensive against Shaykh Taj’s conservative coalition beginning in late 1942, upon the return of the National Bloc’s leader, Shukri Quwwatli, from exile. The Bloc took over leadership of hunger marches from unions, women, and others and coordinated a sustained campaign against the alleged corruption of Prime Minister Barazi, ousting him in December 1942. The next month, Shaykh Taj died, and his funeral, significantly, drew sympathetic crowds into the streets. Following Taj’s lead, his successor Jamal al-Ulshi raised the price of bread paid by the urban middle class from 8 to 8.5 piasters per kilo and proposed a new income tax, claiming the need to finance bread subsidies to the poor.^[34] In early February, the Bloc organized students and merchants in a five-day strike to protest the increase, accusing Ulshi of pocketing the new revenues. The Bloc continued to provoke protests through March, expanding its complaints to include opposition to sending grain to Lebanon. Catroux, fearing Spears’s growing ties with the Bloc, dismissed Ulshi on the pretext of disobedience.^[35] Quwwatli and the nationalists had successfully exploited the bread issue to discredit their main opposition in the upcoming elections, but at the cost of more firmly allying their cause with middle-class interests against those of the poor.

Syrian bread politics had repercussions in Lebanon, where Catroux also failed to turn bread into political gold. Lebanese hunger marchers, alarmed by the National Bloc’s calls to stop grain exports, demanded bread subsidies like those instituted by Shaykh Taj in Syria. Through his control of the Cereals Office and Common Interests, Catroux sought to position himself as defender of Lebanese interests. But he gained little ground, for Bishara al-Khuri and his Constitutional Bloc pounded Catroux’s head of state, Alfred Naccache, for ineffectual government.

Catroux exploited the wage issue to better profit, especially in Lebanon. He used it first as a means of securing the loyalty of the underpaid bureaucracy, still laden with pro-Vichy sentiment, and then in an attempt to sway the urban masses toward supporting his conservative allies as the summer 1943 elections approached. Labor unions acted quickly to steal Catroux’s initiative and pushed state wage policies far beyond their original intent. The result was to position the state for the first time as the legal protector of all workers. In contrast to the stalemate of the late 1930s, when nationalist parliaments in both countries refused to enact labor laws, the state now aligned itself with workers against the bourgeoisie.

Legislation began with Catroux’s decrees in October and November 1941 to increase cost-of-living allowances for civil servants and establish a minimum wage for all workers in public sector enterprises in both Syria and Lebanon. Lebanese unions immediately threatened a general strike unless pay raises were extended to the private sector. The Lebanese government issued such a law in December but suspended implementation when employers objected. Unions mounted a series of strikes, which crested in a general upheaval in March 1942. Seven unions combined in a joint committee to advance their cause. An August 1942 law finally granted private sector workers a smaller pay increase, one that fell well below real inflation rates. Also in 1942, the Délégation générale enacted rent control laws and established a Labor and Artisanate Office subsidized by de Gaulle to promote local wool spinning and other industries.^[36] In October 1942 the Lebanese government decreed family allowances for married civil servants; and the unions again demanded their extension to all workers.^[37]

In May 1943, three months before elections, the Délégation générale and Lebanese government promulgated an omnibus wage law, which guaranteed all workers in commerce and industry increases in minimum wages, family allowances, and cost-of-living allowances.^[38] The law also decreed equal pay and benefits for men and women who performed similar work.^[39] The Free French had vowed to reverse Vichy policy and advance a liberal position in defense of women’s work. At the time the omnibus wage law was decreed, they publicized a showcase munitions complex called De Gaulle Park in the press, featuring one hundred Lebanese women in white laboratory coats manufacturing truck parts.^[40] But while women who worked in factories and for the civil service stood to gain from the labor legislation, the laws did not affect the many more women homeworkers who sewed clothing to substitute for wartime cuts in clothing imports.

Also in May 1943, the Lebanese state promulgated a second landmark law, modeled on an 1898 French law, that guaranteed work-accident insurance in the public sector and a variety of heavy industries deemed essential to the public interest.^[41] It required employers in mining, construction, transport, electric, and other industries to pay injured workers a daily pension during recovery, or permanently in cases where they could not return to work. In the case of death, the worker’s family would receive an indemnity. The law also required first-aid care facilities in the workplace. A third and final 1943 labor law established the Service des affaires sociales in Lebanon to help conciliate labor disputes.^[42] It was based on a 1909 Ottoman law on strikes that had never been implemented, but which had required government mediation. And like the Délégation générale’s Section sociale, the Service was to study labor issues and prepare legislative proposals. In addition, it was to undertake assistance to workers for the protection of children, prisoners, and families.

These new labor laws unleashed strikes throughout Lebanon during May and June and for months to come, as employers resisted workers’ demands to implement their provisions. Workers fought tooth and nail, factory by factory, to claim their rights from employers. Workers also sought government intervention to enforce their new rights. In June 1943, the government intervened on behalf of striking tailors, who then obtained a 30 percent raise. Workers at a stocking factory, wool factory, and tobacco plant also sent representatives to the government seeking protection, but obtained only partial compliance in October 1943.^[43] The government’s apparent laxity in enforcing the new labor laws may have been due at first to a time lag in setting up the regulatory apparatus. However, it also reflected the politics behind the laws’ promulgation. The work-accident and omnibus wage laws were decreed in Lebanon in the fervor of the 1943 election campaign by Eyub Tabet, the conservative interim president and stiff opponent of the nationalist opposition, the Constitutional Bloc. As the Constitutional Bloc represented a large portion of the commercial-industrial bourgeoisie, the intent of these decrees was clearly to sway workers’ support away from the nationalists. Workers would find that after the August elections, the new Constitutional Bloc government was reluctant to enforce the labor laws.

The wage issue in Syria was not exploited as vigorously by the ruling elite faction, in part because the National Bloc had already destroyed its conservative opposition by May 1943. In November 1942, Shaykh Taj al-Din issued two decrees guaranteeing severance pay and setting minimum wage standards, the latter in compliance with Catroux’s 1941 decree. Cost-of-living laws were also issued, although they covered only civil servants. The decrees may be read, like Shaykh Taj’s two-tiered bread policy, as part of his effort to woo the urban workers away from the National Bloc. Moreover, the laws were primarily designed to appeal to workers in large industries, many of which were owned by members of the National Bloc. They significantly exempted constituencies loyal to Shaykh Taj: landlords with agricultural workers, employers of domestic servants, and artisanal and family businesses did not have to comply with the new wage and severance standards.^[44] Like their Lebanese counterparts, Syrian workers staged numerous strikes in Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus to extend the labor laws, but to less effect. This was likely because the outcome of the elections had been virtually decided with Ulshi’s dismissal in March. Ata al-Ayyubi, the elderly interim chief of state, was on good terms with many National Bloc leaders.^[45]

On the eve of the summer 1943 elections, the colonial welfare state ruled by the Free French had not only been rebuilt from the “scorched earth” Catroux said he found after Vichy’s departure, but significantly transformed. The state had assumed new financial commitments to the population at large, in the form of bread subsidies, and new guarantees of legal protection for workers, in the form of minimum wages, family allowances, equal pay for men and women, cost-of-living increases, and severance pay. Despite their limitations and often self-serving origins, the new labor laws armed workers with unprecedented rights. These laws positioned the state as the primary guarantor of families’ economic welfare in a way undreamed of in the 1930s. The change was made possible only by the peculiar circumstances of the war that had transformed the civic order and the roles that the French and the urban masses played in it. The masses were far more organized, and the French needed their support, and feared revolt, more than before. The laws and subsidies represented, finally, a clean break from France’s former colonial paternalism and a true commitment of the state to social welfare.

The nationalists, meanwhile, had been pushed to show their allegiance to their own bourgeois interests, which drove a wedge in the cross-class nationalist coalitions of the 1930s. The Communist Party and Islamic groups both positioned themselves as the true defenders of the poor; their memberships soared in this period. Because of this split, and growing food supplies, the Free French no longer feared revolt by the spring of 1943. Also by that time, they had secured a government base in reconquered Algiers. Catroux felt confident enough to call elections for the following summer, although his boss, Charles de Gaulle, was uncomfortable with the extent of bargaining required: “I came to think his desire to charm and his leaning toward conciliation did not always answer to the kind of sword play which was imposed upon him.”^[46]

It is well-known that the nationalists won the 1943 elections; it was, however, neither a resounding victory nor a referendum against state welfarism. Nationalist candidates won through their manipulation of a two-stage electoral system designed in the 1920s to favor rural and urban elites over unknown and poorer candidates. The list system promoted patronage politics of personal clienteles, and it disadvantaged formal political parties.^[47] Voter turnout tells the story. Most of the urban masses did not vote in the summer 1943 elections (turnout was as low as 33 percent in major Syrian cities and 25 percent in Beirut). Nationalists won their biggest majorities in the countryside, where peasants were corralled to vote for local notables—except, significantly around Hama, where Akram Hawrani won a seat in parliament on promises of land reform. The nationalist Constitutional Bloc actually lost in Beirut to its Francophile opposition. And a significant number of urbanites voted for Communist candidates. The Communist Party, through its organizing of hunger marches and labor unions, had won the reputation of defender of the poor. The joint Syrian-Lebanese party fielded six candidates on a platform of workers’ rights, democracy, and independence, while several more sympathizers ran independently. Procommunist candidates earned forty thousand votes in all of Syria and Lebanon, and nearly 12 percent of all votes cast in Lebanon alone, a show of promising strength, although they failed to win a parliamentary seat.^[48]

The nationalist victory would nonetheless transform the civic order for a second time during the war. The new governments’ disinterest in social bargaining was made immediately clear. In Lebanon, President Bishara al-Khuri, a Maronite Christian, and Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh, a Sunni Muslim, cemented their victories with a pact that would unite a significant portion of the Muslim and Christian landowning bourgeoisie. In October 1943, workers petitioned the Lebanese government to enforce the neglected May 1943 labor laws and to increase subsidies, schooling, and protections for workers and their families. In response, Sulh merely called on workers to cooperate with their bosses in the national interest.^[49] Similarly, Khuri dismissed petitions from women for the right to vote. In Syria, President Shukri Quwwatli, a landowner and industrialist himself, would bring the National Bloc’s urban, Sunni, and bourgeois constituency closer to their erstwhile rivals, rural elites, in face of growing challenges from Communists and Islamists. As in Lebanon, Quwwatli’s government urged the population to withhold their demands until the war was done and full independence achieved.

The year 1943 was, then, another turning point in the evolution of the colonial welfare state. Would workers, women, and others succeed in expanding their social and political rights and the scope of direct state benefits? Or would they confront the same resistance from national governments as in 1938–39?

National Governments and the Legacy of Colonial Welfare, 1944–46

Catroux left the Levant to take up a position with the Free French government newly established in Algiers in June 1943. With him departed the brief and final effort to reignite French prestige through bargaining over social policy. His successor, Jean Helleu, showed little interest in such a project and instead engaged in brute efforts to promote French cronies and to withhold power from the recently elected Syrian and Lebanese governments. Upon these governments’ reasonable and expected demand to revise their constitutions, Helleu stonewalled. To their demands to acquire control of the police, military, and Common Interests, he turned a deaf ear. Helleu’s intractability only raised the ante. When in November the Lebanese parliament proceeded unilaterally to amend the country’s constitution, expunging references to the mandate, Helleu staged a coup; arrested President Bishara al-Khuri, Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh, and other cabinet officials; and precipitated the biggest political crisis of the war. Thirteen days of protest began on November 10 with crowds tearing down pictures of Charles de Gaulle from public walls.

Allied pressure forced the French not only to reinstate the Lebanese government but also to relinquish their civilian powers in both countries. On January 1, 1944, the French transferred to the national governments the main pillar of their rule: the Common Interests administration. By the end of 1944, the only important institutions still left in French hands were their own army, the Troupes spéciales (the locally recruited military), and the Serail building, French headquarters since World War I. Journalists, women’s leaders, labor organizers, and politicians alike heralded the dawn of a new era, wherein imperialist obstacles to social and economic progress were finally cleared.

There was no instant revolution, however. In the years 1944–46, the civic order was decolonized with ambiguous implications for the colonial welfare state. On the one hand, major players in the civic order continued to follow strategies set in the 1930s. Labor unions, Communists, and feminists continued to make demands in the belief that the key to equality and social well-being lay in extending state regulation and benefits. Islamists and the Maronite Church intensified their critique of direct state intervention in society. Nationalists in both countries continued to appeal for cross-class unity with calls for full independence, in 1945 mounting campaigns to claim control of the Troupes spéciales and to oust French troops.

On the other hand, decolonization transformed the triangulated structure of the civic order that had produced the colonial welfare state. First, nationalists now filled the shoes of the French, occupying the state apparatus and controlling the ranks of state mediators. Withdrawal of the French removed the rationale for a split between nationalist and collaborationist elites that had fueled their rivalry for mass loyalty and social bargaining. Second, nationalist rulers were insulated from social pressure in a way the French had not been: the British had strongly backed them against the French, and as long as their troops remained on Syrian and Lebanese soil, pressure from highly mobilized labor unions, Communists, Islamists, and feminists could not seriously threaten the new regimes. Third, the states were administratively weakened in 1944, as less experienced Syrians and Lebanese replaced the ubiquitous French advisors throughout the bureaucracy. Links between the state and many of its quasi-public mediating agencies were broken: French schools, hospitals, and concessionary companies that had delivered a large portion of state-subsidized services were now clearly private agents of a foreign country. Both states focused less on promoting social change, and more on internal administrative, fiscal, and judicial reform, particularly on abolishing inefficient dual French and Arabic procedures. Fourth, as result of the above, the state’s opposition, once a cross-class coalition, now distinctly represented those groups marginalized or excluded from power—workers, women, and Islamists—and they were more frustrated and disgruntled than ever.

The polarization of class interests altered political bargaining strategies. The former strategy of French rulers, who employed social policy to divert calls for independence, had no place in this civic order. Indeed, at times the nationalist rulers would reverse the French tactic, using the need for full independence as a reason to postpone fulfillment of social demands. The opposition, no longer bound to elites by the cause of independence, now amplified their own demands. In Syria, the opposition was now split between two powerful movements: secularist Communists who looked to the state to guarantee social rights, and Islamic groups that defined social rights in terms of limitations on the state. In Lebanon, a powerful federation of labor unions coordinated protests across the country. While bread was now plentiful, inflation still depressed most families’ standard of living. In both countries, women’s unions launched all-out suffrage drives, uninhibited by their former deference to nationalists’ insistence on independence first. Fearful especially of the Communists, Syrian and Lebanese nationalist elites responded by forming closer alliances with the very conservatives they once opposed, especially religious interests.

In the years 1944–46, ruling nationalists’ efforts to reduce tensions in the civic order would modify the colonial welfare state but not alter its basic attributes. First, the states responded to demands to expand welfare with two major social policy initiatives: expansion of public education and adoption of comprehensive labor codes. Initial efforts were made, too, to finance social services through taxation, now that extrabudgetary subsidies from Paris had disappeared. Social spending, particularly on education, expanded rapidly. However, as will be shown below, no substantial new initiatives in welfare spending were undertaken, and the proportion of state budgets devoted to health and education would remain at levels characteristic of the colonial welfare state. Second, in keeping with past practice, mediation of services and rights continued. But it took new forms, marking a divergence in the state formation of the two countries. While Syria adopted etatist and corporatist policies, Lebanon adopted liberal ones. In sum, while the states were no longer colonial, they retained the low funding of social services, mediated structure, and obstacles to direct access to rights and privileges associated with the colonial welfare state. This limited response produced a precarious balance of forces that would inform the politics of both countries in postwar years.

The states’ major new legal commitment to enhanced social rights was the passage of comprehensive labor codes. In January 1944, Lebanese labor unions united in a general federation and demanded credit for mobilizing many of the thousands of protesters in November 1943. They petitioned the government to recompense them for their national service by reducing inflation and reviving the 1930s labor code proposals. Unions in both countries brought far greater strength to bear on the issue than they had five years before: Wartime industries had swelled their ranks and Communist party membership ballooned on the heels of Red Army victories. Membership in unions is estimated at fifty thousand, and in the Communist party ten thousand, by war’s end.^[50] In 1944–45, the unions and Communists staged continuous strikes, demonstrations, and conferences with parliamentary representatives, and finally achieved the passage of labor codes in both countries in 1946. The labor codes formally legalized workers-only unions and the right to strike (except in the public sector). They also instituted demands made since the 1930s, including eight-hour workdays; overtime, sickness, and severance pay; retirement pensions; vacations; and the reinforcement of rights already won, like the minimum wage and work-accident protection.^[51]

Women, too, campaigned for new rights on the basis of their contributions to the independence struggle. By 1944, the Syrian and Lebanese women’s unions had achieved a much higher profile than in 1939. The Lebanese women’s union capitalized on the mass mobilization of women over bread supplies to organize prominent demonstrations by hundreds of women in November 1943. The union used that momentum to stage a successful boycott of Beirut markets in 1944, forcing merchants to reduce food prices. Both the Syrian and Lebanese women’s unions positioned women as defenders of the family, supporting campaigns to win family allowances, to fight corruption in rationing programs, and to increase vigilance against epidemics. Women workers also mobilized in labor unions and the growing women’s wing of the Communist Party, which explicitly linked women’s work to claims for rights as full-fledged citizens. Imilie Faris Ibrahim, a prominent Lebanese Communist and feminist, argued in an article published in December 1943 that women deserved the vote because they worked hard for the good of the country at factory jobs and in the fields.^[52] At the end of 1944, the two women’s unions sent delegates to the highly publicized Arab Women’s Conference in Cairo, which called on Arab governments to grant women the vote, hire women for government posts, and expand girls’ education and welfare for poor women and children. They also demanded that states adopt newer interpretations of Islamic law on personal status that granted women more rights in marriage, divorce, and child custody.^[53]

Because of their ties to the powerful labor movement, women did win new rights in the labor codes, to equal pay, paid maternity leave, and severance pay if they quit their jobs to marry. They also won state commitment to girls’ education because it fit with nationalists’ ideas about the need to educate mothers for social progress.

However, women’s grassroots support was much weaker than that of labor, and they would fail to gain the political and civil rights that were so necessary to furthering their welfare. Even though leaders of the women’s movement were relatives of powerful nationalists, they could not compete with an opponent that posed a greater potential threat to nationalist rule: religious groups mobilized vigorously against the women’s movement. In Lebanon, Catholics and Maronites held conferences calling on women to respect their traditional domestic roles and give up their jobs. The Lebanese parliament killed proposals in 1943 and 1946 to grant limited suffrage to educated women. In Syria, Islamist groups protested Muslim women’s increasing presence in public and against reforms of personal status laws. Islamists had allied with Shukri al-Quwwatli in the 1943 elections, and expected a payback. When Quwwatli did not block social mixing of men and women, protests led to violent clashes. Islamist pressure, however, made the government reluctant to move on women’s reforms. When delegates returned from the Cairo women’s conference, they met ridicule in the press and condescension from government officials. In sum, women’s nationalist allies in both countries let them down after independence.^[54] Women would not fully attain the vote until the 1950s and would never achieve the personal status reforms they sought.

Education was a less inflammatory issue and so became the second major initiative taken in social policy, although not without intense bargaining. Universal education had, as we have seen, long been claimed by nationalists as both a political and social right of citizens in a democracy. Between 1944 and 1946, the Lebanese state opened nearly 150 new schools, raising enrollment from 30,000 to 41,000. In 1943–1945, Syria opened 30 new state schools, also adding about 10,000 students to state rolls.^[55] The Syrian state went beyond expansion of the mandate system: the education advisor Sati al-Husri, who had designed the Iraqi school system, revamped the national school curriculum to standardize and Arabize it. In a nod to the demands of women and labor, al-Husri’s guidelines also called for equal educational opportunity for boys and girls and for more technical schools, although these were long-term goals not fulfilled during the war. Education would become the strongest pillar of postwar social policy in Syria. The number of state schools and students enrolled in them would quadruple in the fifteen years following the war, twice the rate of expansion under the French between 1924 and 1938.

The Lebanese did not expand or reform state education to the same extent. They did little to alter the state system’s French-style curriculum or the balance between public and private schools, limiting reform to a 1946 law stiffening the state’s regulation of foreign and private schools. In 1945, only 21 percent of Lebanese students attended state schools, compared to 58 percent of Syrian students, and the gap would grow after the war. One reason for the differing policy was the legacy of a century of educational policy. Ottoman reforms had supplanted Islamic schools while permitting foreign and Christian schools to flourish. The French had, as we have seen, encouraged Christian institutions and relatively neglected state schools with their Muslim majorities. So while Syrian Islamists had long ago lost a firm foothold in education, weakening their quest to assert greater control over education, their Christian counterparts in Lebanon were in a much stronger position to protect their mediating role in educational affairs.

New financial commitments to citizens’ welfare resembled patterns in legal commitments: they tended to amplify rather than modify colonial welfare policy. While their scope was initially restricted by the wartime economy, beginning in 1946 state spending in all areas boomed. The most significant factor was the availability of new sources of revenue: customs duties that had once flowed to the French, and income taxes, both of which would grow rapidly once wartime restrictions on trade were lifted. Syria had adopted an income tax in 1942; Lebanon adopted a war profits tax in 1942 and an income tax in 1944. The income taxes replaced Ottoman temettu taxes, which had been levied only on certain professions, with general levies. Direct tax revenues jumped by nearly 40 percent in Syria and 50 percent in Lebanon from 1945 to 1946, signaling the transition from wartime trade restrictions. These revenues would more than quadruple in Lebanon and more than double in Syria, in real terms, between 1944 and 1951.^[56] A third potential source of revenue was loans: between 1947 and 1951 the Syrian state would run deficits, a fiscal tool shunned by the French, who in the prewar years remained committed to balanced budgets.

Both the Syrian and Lebanese governments heralded expanded budgets, particularly in public works and education. Figures 1 and 2 show that by 1945 state budgets had nearly recovered from devastating wartime cuts: spending rebounded to 1939 levels, totaling about 30 million £LS for both states and the Common Interests budget, when adjusted for inflation. The trough in wartime spending during World War II, shown in figure 1, reflected mainly the precipitous drop in customs revenues to the Common Interests budget controlled by the Délégation générale. From 1944, the steep rise in state budgets reflected the reprise of trade and the transfer of Common Interests revenues to the states. The Common Interests, once the mainstay of the common administration binding the two countries, would be formally abolished in 1950, when Syria and Lebanon dissolved their customs union.

The years 1944–1945 were also a honeymoon period, allowing for higher rates of social investment. Inflation increases leveled off after rising steeply each year since 1939, and the cost of living would actually begin to fall in 1946. Nominal increases in budget allocations, therefore, from this point onward did more than merely compensate for inflation (see fig. 2). Second, the states did not yet face prohibitive military costs, which they would after the French withdrawal in 1946. As a result, spending on health and education reached unprecedented highs before the war’s end. In 1945, Syria’s spending on health and education totaled 2.8 million £LS (adjusted for inflation to 1939 levels), higher than the previous peak of 2.3 million in 1939. Likewise, Lebanon’s budgets for health and education, totaling 934,000 £LS (adjusted to 1939 prices), surpassed its 1939 peak of 781,000 (figure 3). Public works spending showed the same patterns.

Postwar spending skyrocketed: By 1951, global spending by both Syria and Lebanon dwarfed the highest levels of spending attained in the mandate period, at about 106 million £LS, adjusted for inflation.^[57] By 1951, health and education spending had increased, in real terms, eight times over 1943 levels in Syria; six times in Lebanon. The major portion of new government spending, however, covered new military and administrative costs. By 1950–51, 44.4 percent of Syria’s budget was allocated to the Ministry of Defense, up from .10 percent in 1944 and 16.5 percent in 1945.^[58] Lebanon’s defense spending rose from virtually nothing to 20 percent of the ordinary budget in the same period.^[59] As figure 1 suggests, the postwar spending boom substantively incorporated into state budgets for the first time the extrabudgetary military spending of the French through 1940, and of the Allies during World War II.

Did postwar economic expansion fuel the long-sought expansion of the colonial welfare state? Increases in postwar social spending were real, but they remained within ranges familiar in the colonial welfare state. Between 1944 and 1951, Lebanon’s education budget grew from 2.6 million £LS to 9.8 million £LS (when adjusted for inflation, from 484,000 to 2.5 million in 1939 £LS); but as a percentage of overall spending in the ordinary budget, it grew only from 8.9 to 10.8 percent. Syria’s education budget in the same period grew from 9.8 to 46.8 million £LS (1.8 million to 12.2 million in 1939 £LS), an increase from 16.4 to 17.6 percent of state spending. Figure 4 shows that the percentage of combined state spending on education and public health in the two states peaked in 1943 and 1944 and then leveled off in the 1950s, at just under 20 percent in Syria and 13–15 percent in Lebanon in 1951. These levels were slightly above those of the 1930s, but not dramatically so. Similarly, public works spending in Syria ballooned from 9.6 percent of the state budget to 25 percent between 1943 and 1947, but then fell back to 7.3 percent in 1950–51, slightly lower than the prewar average.^[60]

More important, while there was a quantitative expansion in social spending, there was no qualitative expansion. Public health and education remained the sole major areas of social spending into the 1950s. In Syria the supply budget, which encompassed subsidies for food rations, dwindled after the war. The Social Affairs budget disappeared in 1944. A new budget line for the Ministry of Labor was established in 1948, following the adoption of the labor code, to finance mediation and subsidize union services. But the ministry’s expenditures remained quite low: 279,000 £S in 1949, rising to 836,000 £S in 1957, less than 1 percent of the state’s budget. In Lebanon, cost-of-living subsidies disappeared. And while a Ministry of Social Affairs was established in 1952, its budget barely reached 3 million £L, just over 1 percent of total spending, in the 1950s. A Ministry of Finance official noted in 1961 that Lebanon’s only real social services remained health and education: “Not only is the relative expenditure on social services low in Lebanon but also the standard of service is very poor.” He lamented that Lebanon had not followed the example of Sweden, where in 1957 spending on social services had represented 41 percent of state expenditures, compared to Lebanon’s 17 percent and Syria’s 21 percent. The difference was due not to levels of spending on health and education but to the lack of social security and cost-of-living allowances. The official blamed the tax system set up at the end of the war for taxing the wealthy only lightly, thus providing only 11 percent of state revenues by 1957.^[61]

In sum, aside from Syria’s massive investment in education, there was no permanent reapportionment of state funding to welfare, either in the later years of the war or afterward. As before, legal and financial benefits to workers remained limited, women remained excluded, and elites continued to enjoy a disproportionate share of state largesse. Substantial public works investments and allocations to ministries of economy and agriculture may have promised long-term benefits to all, but they profited bourgeois merchants and industrialists first. Income taxes were levied mostly on poorer wage earners. Unions and the two Communist parties vigorously opposed the new income taxes as regressive violations of the rights of lower classes.^[62] And financial commitments that might have reinforced new legal rights of workers were neglected. The labor codes provided for old age, sickness, and accident pensions, but neither state allocated funds for them. Moreover, the codes excluded other social security benefits demanded by workers, such as low-cost health care. Feminists’ calls for a comprehensive welfare system for poor women and children went unheeded along with their other demands.

The Syrian state did formalize support for women and workers by establishing official umbrella organizations. The Syrian General Union of Workers’ Syndicates was created in 1948 to oversee implementation of the labor code. The Syrian Women’s Union combined the dozens of women’s organizations active in the country, and by 1946 published an official women’s magazine. The official unions were modestly funded, and appear to have served more as regulatory and policing bodies than as vehicles of social support. They each usurped the powers of the grassroots-organized national labor federation and Syrian women’s union. Their intent appears to have been corporatist, binding these groups to state patrons and so blunting their opposition.^[63]

The Lebanese state also repressed the labor movement, but its methods were less etatist. While the Service des affaires sociales, established by the French in 1943 to mediate labor disputes, languished, the 1946 labor code was viewed by critics as primarily a policing instrument. Membership and activities of labor unions were highly controlled. Passage of the code coincided with a government anti-Communist campaign, and in 1948 the Communist Party would be outlawed. Although it would continue to operate illegally, the Lebanese party would not play the political role that it had in the 1943 elections or that the Syrian party would in the postwar period. No official women’s union was established in Lebanon, but the preindependence women’s union remained firmly in the grasp of women from prominent nationalist families and devoted largely to charity works.

From 1944 onward, Syrians and Lebanese both struggled over the extent of state intervention in social and economic affairs. Differences of opinion and interest were deeply rooted in the hybrid legacy of the colonial welfare state, which, as we have seen, combined direct state intervention with mediated and privatized agencies. While the war had vastly increased state controls to the benefit of many, powerful private interests also resisted a permanent extension of the public sector and state welfare. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine fully the postwar conflicts over the issue, a general observation on the linkage of variant outcomes in Syria and Lebanon may be advanced.^[64] It comes as no surprise that Lebanon would follow a nonstatist, liberal approach to social policy, given the much higher degree of privatization in education and health care in the period of French rule. Syria, on the other hand, had not had nearly the same density of missionary activity and had built much stronger state education and health systems before the war. As a consequence, antistatist interests were much weaker in colonial Syria. Moreover, Syrian nationalists, to a greater degree than their Lebanese counterparts, had centered their ideology on the need to capture the state in order to advance social progress. This ideology reflected the Syrian bourgeoisie’s bases of wealth in agriculture and industry, which required state subsidies. The strongest wing of the Lebanese bourgeoisie was commercial, and it saw greater profit in laissez-faire policies.

While Syria pursued a stronger commitment to state welfarism, both countries retained essential features of the mandate-era civic order and colonial welfare state until well after the war’s end. The principal players remained, and bargaining over social policy continued to inform political conflicts. Mediated delivery of social services also continued, whether through corporatist state bodies or privatized organization, as did basic patterns of spending on health education and public workers that were biased toward elites and against women, workers, and peasants.

While World War II was heralded in Europe as the springboard of full-fledged welfarism, the war appears to have had a more somber effect in Syria and Lebanon.^[65] Most evidently the reason lay in the precarious economic basis of the colonial welfare state, where social spending had been covered disproportionately through French subsidies rather than through taxes on the middle class and elites. Industrialized Europe, aided by the Marshall Plan, was simply in a stronger position to raise vast revenues and redistribute national income. Nationalists in government reasonably argued that Syria and Lebanon had first to broaden investment in production in order to generate levels of wealth that might fund expanded welfare. Groups mobilized after the war to demand welfare were also stronger. European veterans could demand a payback for the sacrifices their governments required of them in wartime. In Syria and Lebanon, males had not only not been recruited to military service, but the French rulers who had demanded wartime sacrifices of the civilian population had departed. Social demands had their biggest impact in Syria and Lebanon during the war, not afterward, as a disgruntled, unconscripted male population organized national, grassroots movements. Civilian social mobilization in protest of wartime policies must be distinguished from military mobilization in wartime when we examine the impact of wartime mobilization on state expansion.

We must also account for the effect of wartime decolonization, in contrast to European experience. The linkage between war and state expansion was decoupled in the colonial context. While the war effort bloated states in Europe and North America, state expansion in Syria and Lebanon was primarily within administrative, military, and economic organs controlled by the French and British, organs that they would take with them when they departed. The withdrawal of the MESC and Allied military forces left an institutional vacuum in 1945–46, one that was not fully reconstituted until the 1950s.^[66] The departure of the French High Commissariat, which had been the primary agent of social policy under the French, left a more enduring vacuum with profound consequences for welfare.

The legacy of wartime expansion was thus selectively nurtured, and so cannot be explained solely via the particular structural constraints of less industrialized, colonized countries. Indeed, the choices made in expanding the postwar states owed much to the politics of social spending during the previous decade. As we have seen, varying strengths of statist and privatist interests determined that Lebanon would choose to fill the social policy vacuum only minimally, whereas Syria devoted much larger resources to rebuilding the welfare state. Also, the fact that the states did not allocate increased revenues to the poor cannot simply be explained away as the result of lack of means. While we have seen that the states’ capacity to fund social investment rose sharply at the war’s end, we must also take account of how funds were actually spent: investment in postwar development mirrored prewar and wartime policies that had funneled crucial subsidies and economic privileges to elites and left workers greatly impoverished by inflation. And we must also view spending patterns in the context of contemporaneous legal commitments to social rights, where state policies explicitly sought to limit their extension to workers, women, and peasants in a context of class polarization induced by the war and independence.

In sum, while the war undoubtedly fueled the general postwar expansion of the states, it also generated a transformation in the nature of the states. By 1939, social groups and state policy had converged around a politics of social rights poised to produce a colonial welfare state. In 1946, the now-independent states began to steer politics away from rights-based welfarism, toward liberalism and corporatism. The war may be said to have triggered, in its first phase, the realization of a colonial welfare state, and in its later years, a crisis of that state, as newly empowered and polarized forces conflicted over social policy and the expansion of rights and state services. While the colonial welfare state’s initial expansion mirrored trends in Europe, the subsequent leveling off of social spending (as a percentage of total spending) stood in contrast. This contradictory effect of the war on the welfare state resulted from the conditions specific to colonial rule and decolonization.

Contrary to top-down arguments about the effect of war on welfare states, grassroots social mobilization was, as we have seen, the primary motor of institutionalizing the colonial welfare state during World War II. Both nationalist elites and the French reacted to, and then sought to exploit, the mobilization of workers and women in strikes, demonstrations, and hunger marches. The preeminent goal of the MESC and rationing programs in Syria and Lebanon was to stanch incipient revolt. Catroux immediately founded the Section sociale to study and propose ways of alleviating social stress, with the goal of securing Free French rule and preserving empire. Nationalist politicians assumed leadership of protests well after they had begun, and forged alliances with women’s and labor leaders in the independence struggle, with the goal of capturing control of the state.

Furthermore, the shape of the colonial welfare state was determined more by the relative strengths of the various grassroots interests than by the design of state social engineers. Hence, highly mobilized, urban, industrial workers obtained minimum wage guarantees, family allowances, and cost-of-living increases, while nonunionized peasants, domestic servants, and women homeworkers did not. The smaller and mainly bourgeois women’s unions were unable to bring the same pressure on governments to grant women the vote. And finally, powerful mediating bodies like religious groups, landowners, and industrialists were able to maintain subsidies and privileges granted by the colonial welfare state and to block direct access to rights and state benefits by their subalterns.

Future scholarship may profitably explore further the place of Syria and Lebanon, and possibly other colonies, within the broad spectrum of welfare regime types developed in recent scholarship. This revisionist literature has undermined unilinear models of the welfare state as the unique product of industrialization and as a wholesale shift from liberal, laissez-faire public policy that assigned individuals responsibility for risk to state assumption of collective social insurance involving the expansion of the state apparatus and disbursement of vast sums of entitlement spending.^[67] A historical variety of processes is now understood to have produced diverse outcomes in differing countries: “There never was one view of how social justice was to be achieved any more than there was one route by which to achieve effective democratic governance.”^[68] In France and Germany, for example, top-down reforms and statist policies prevailed, while in Britain and the United States grassroots mobilization and nonstate initiatives informed early welfare developments. Among the latter, not only did industrialized workers and veterans mobilize for welfare protections, but women played important roles both in applying pressure on states and in designing programs.^[69] Some states relied heavily on private agencies and market regulations and incentives to address the needs of the poor, while others built overarching public administrations to deliver services directly.^[70] Working definitions of the welfare state have as a result been scaled back and become more flexible. As two early revisionists defined it, the welfare state is simply “the predictable delivery of publicly funded benefits to people without imposing systemic degradations and restrictions upon them.”^[71] Broadly speaking, welfarism is a system that supersedes the boundary of the state, that may include both public and private agencies, and that takes shape through negotiations between rulers and ruled over social rights.^[72]

While virtually all of this recent scholarship has concerned industrialized countries, we have seen that colonies like Syria and Lebanon shared some of these characteristics in process and outcome. Syrians and Lebanese mobilized first in the 1930s, an etatist era in which the belief in the state’s unique responsibility and capability to advance social progress was nearly universal. Their programs imitated liberal models emphasizing social rights and democratic equalities. The mix of private and public agencies delivering social services that resulted from the bargaining process was not in itself atypical within the spectrum of emergent welfare regimes, although the origin of that mix in colonial practices of rule was distinctive.

Finally, among the more compelling aspects of the evolution of welfare state, apparent in the Syrian and Lebanese cases, is their malleability. We have seen how World War II stretched and reshaped the Syrian and Lebanese states, altering the direction of social policy and institutions. The American case demonstrated a similar ability to shift direction. As Theda Skocpol has argued, two distinct welfare regimes followed one upon the other, roughly divided by World War I. A maternalist welfare state emerged out of the system of veterans’ pensions established after the Civil War, only to give way to a new configuration focused on the welfare of male industrial workers in the 1930s.^[73] Similar to the American case, the phases of Syrian and Lebanese welfare policy were conditioned by the politics inherent in a variable civic order, one first transformed with the end of armed rebellion in the late 1920s, and then again during World War II, with the accelerated polarization of classes and the accession of the elite nationalist opposition to power. Wars do not simply, or always, accelerate previous trends in (welfare) state formation, but may instead alter their trajectory.

Notes

4. War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism

Explaining State-Market Relations in the Postwar Middle East

Robert Vitalis and Steven Heydemann

For much of this century, but especially in the past two decades, sociologists, economists, historians, and political scientists have found productive and stimulating common ground in exploring the effects of war on processes of state formation and economy building in Europe. Their efforts have helped clarify the connections between war making and the processes through which large-scale political and economic institutions are constructed. Yet these findings have been largely ignored by scholars interested in explaining similar processes in the postcolonial states of the developing world.^[1] The reasons for this lack of interest are not hard to discern. As Charles Tilly rightly stresses, there is little reason to think that the processes underlying the emergence of modern states in Europe will “provide an adequate explanation of the formation, survival, or growth” of late-developing states in the Third World.^[2] The emergence of such states into a fully consolidated state system and a highly structured global economy presents daunting challenges to those who would draw on early modern Europe to explain postcolonial processes of state making or the construction of economic institutions.

Among the most powerful distinctions between early and late processes of state and market formation is the extent to which state forms and regulatory practices in much of the Third World have been shaped by the experience of colonialism. Indeed, for the first half of the twentieth century Middle Eastern peoples experienced full-scale war not as a national-state-defining enterprise of the sort Tilly so famously describes but as a manifestation of imperialism directed by outsiders. For local power holders in the Middle East, the experiences of World Wars I and II were heavily mediated by the dynamics of colonial domination and nationalist resistance. And theorists of late development have concluded that this reality weakens or even severs the causal link between war making and state formation in a decisive way. Because war making was not undertaken by local actors, shifts in state capacity, the emergence of new state institutional configurations, and the reorganization of state-society relations are seen as later processes—consequences of the transition from colonialism to “postcolonialism” rather than the experience of the World Wars.

As a result, the macrohistorical effects of war on processes of state and economy building in Europe seem to offer an unpromising starting point for theorizing about the relationship among war, states, and markets in the developing world.^[3] The profound gaps separating western Europe from the peripheral states of the mid-twentieth century would appear to require such conceptual stretching that the results would hardly justify the effort.^[4] Tilly’s caution against adopting a grand teleology of state building has been widely noted in subsequent research, as have Gershenkron’s efforts to delineate the distinctive trajectories of late developers. Reactions against the “conceptual hegemony” of Europe have led scholars of the developing world to focus, appropriately, on disentangling local processes from their embeddedness in Europe, whether as prototype or as archetype.

Yet in the absence of theoretical frameworks that illuminate the effects of World Wars I and II on processes of state and economy building in the developing world, our understanding of these processes cannot be considered complete. Theories of state and market formation in the developing world that overlook the effects of these conflicts, especially World War II, seriously underestimate the weight of external variables in explaining the global shift among late developers from market-based to statist developmental strategies in the postwar period. Such theories neglect the causal weight of wartime interventions in constructing the frameworks for postwar import substitution industrialization (ISI), even while ISI is often viewed as a consequence of postcolonial economic nationalism and, later, decolonization in Africa and Asia. They overlook the importance of wartime regulatory norms in facilitating the shift from non- or even antidemocratic forms of market liberalism to statist, often authoritarian forms of populism in much of the Third World.^[5]

This chapter examines the experience of World War II and its effects on state-market relations in one part of the developing world, the Middle East, with a focus on Egypt and Syria. Careful attention to the wartime political economy and the new forms of foreign intervention that were its hallmark move us toward an “adequate explanation” of how institutional arrangements for governing the economy first arose in places like Egypt and Syria. In the process, we are able to think critically about various forms of postdependency theorizing and interpretation in historical-comparative political economy. Our work challenges in particular a pronounced domestic bias in existing accounts of state institutional formation in the Middle East, evident in the tendency now to downplay the causal effects of external factors in the making of markets and states on the periphery and to assume that institutions emerge in relative isolation from the international system. But we also take issue with a second and more interesting sociological approach to the question of how to explain the global diffusion of particular models of state formation and repertoires of state intervention. By and large, scholars such as Meyer and McNeely, who emphasize the convergence of political units within the postwar international system around a limited number of state forms, have neglected two critical concerns. They have not provided adequate explanations of mechanisms and agency through which models of state management are installed, adapted, and consolidated.^[6] And in emphasizing states as isomorphic at a high level of organizational abstraction, they overlook the profound variation that exists within particular state forms—such as import-substituting models of development—and thus cannot account for the diversity of outcomes that even similar models generate. Our chapter addresses both of these issues.

Explaining State-Market Relations in the Middle East

European responses to the economic and administrative demands of World War II had profound implications for domestic processes of state formation and for the organization of state-market relations in the Middle East. Specifically, during World War II distinctive norms concerning appropriate strategies of state intervention were exported throughout much of the Middle East as a result of regulatory regimes established by Allied agencies. These norms were grounded in the Keynesian views of economic intervention and management held by leading British and to a lesser extent American officials of wartime regulatory agencies in the Middle East.^[7] They reflected, as well, the lessons learned by British officials through their roles in the design of economic regulatory agencies in England during World War I.^[8] With vast authority to organize economic activity, Allied regulators forcefully imposed their administrative and managerial norms throughout the region. The institutional consequences that followed the diffusion of these norms reached across the Middle East but were especially important in Egypt and the Levant (Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan).^[9] They became elements in the regulatory repertoires of local governments and thus influenced in significant ways the postwar, postcolonial trajectories of state building, state intervention, and state-market relations that later came to define the political economies of these states.^[10]

We focus on the prewar, wartime, and immediate postwar experiences of economic regulation and economic institution building in two cases: Egypt and Syria.^[11] We first offer a general argument for wartime economic regulations as a critical juncture in the organization of state-market relations in the Middle East. We then review how Allied forces organized wartime regulatory regimes in the region. In the third section of the chapter we examine in detail the role of the single most important Allied regulatory institution, the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC), which we view as the central mechanism behind the diffusion of Keynesian notions of economic planning into the Middle East. We then turn to a more detailed account of the impact of MESC regulatory regimes in four key areas—agricultural production, trade regulation, taxation, and labor—emphasizing how certain kinds of MESC intervention became the object of bargaining between local and Allied officials, while others did not. Finally, we demonstrate the effects of wartime regulation on the emergence of postwar political economies in Egypt and Syria, tracking the legacies of wartime experiences in shaping postwar patterns of state-market relations in the two countries.

Why Syria and Egypt as cases? In part, this choice reflects the biases of our previous research.^[12] Yet the choice is not entirely path-dependent. Egypt and Syria represent broadly different instances of wartime regulatory experience. Egypt was the focal point of Britain’s Middle East interests during the war, the headquarters of Allied regulatory institutions, and a prominent site for both the emerging presence of the United States in the Middle East and the negotiation of Britain’s gradual, reluctant postwar disengagement from the region. Syria, governed by France under a League of Nations mandate, was much less central to the Allies’ strategic interests. British policy in Syria and Lebanon was driven principally by a concern to ensure that France honor its commitment to grant these states their independence, and to minimize economic disruptions that might encourage the spread of Axis influence among populations whose commitment to the Allies was, at best, contingent.^[13] In Egypt, wartime regulatory regimes were administered directly by the Middle East Supply Centre; in Syria and Lebanon, however, MESC operated under the auspices of the Spears Mission, an organization established by Britain to oversee the whole of its wartime relationship with Lebanon and Syria—military and political, as well as economic. The Mission was headquartered in Beirut rather than Damascus, and the force of its presence in Syria was thus circumscribed both by the role of French mandatory authorities and by its distance from the center of Syrian political life.^[14]

Despite these differences, however, the institutional and political-economic consequences of wartime economic regulations in these two cases were broadly similar. In both cases, Allied interventions exhibited a distinctive pattern in the extent to which they influenced domestic practices of economic management. These interventions largely succeeded in restructuring the organization of agricultural production and food supply; had more limited but still considerable success in shaping the management of foreign trade and promoting the development of import-substituting local industries; and attempted, with little success, to persuade the Syrian and Egyptian governments to shift from indirect to direct forms of taxation as a response to the dramatic increases in money supply (and inflation) that followed the war-driven influx of Allied resources.

Labor management, on the other hand, permits a different take on the role of MESC, shedding light on the indirect consequences of wartime economic regulation, and in this instance the experiences of Syria and Egypt were quite varied. In Egypt, the war created significant new demand for labor and promoted new forms of labor mobilization. Yet the regulation of labor was not a high priority for MESC, whose officials were more concerned with limiting unemployment caused by wartime fluctuations in demand. With the end of the war, the threat of large-scale unemployment in Egypt helped drive the postwar expansion of large public works projects and the formation of a substantial public sector. In Syria, on the other hand, wartime demand for labor was more limited and new forms of labor mobilization (the press gang) ended shortly thereafter, with few clearly discernible effects on state policy toward Syrian workers.^[15] In both Egypt and Syria, postwar governments would dramatically expand the scope of state intervention over the affairs of labor, imposing corporatist forms of interest representation on workers in both countries during the 1950s and 1960s. In this area, too, Middle East practices reflect the diffusion of global norms of interest organization, but outcomes cannot be explained by the styles of intervention introduced during World War II.

In both Egypt and Syria, therefore, World War II stands out as the crucial missing piece in the historical puzzle of the emerging statist alternative to the colonial-watchman economies that had been constructed over the previous half century. The uneven pattern of Allied intervention noted above represents a critical juncture in the postwar development of domestic political economies in both countries. Despite the broad differences in their starting points, the converging vectors of Syrian and Egyptian transitions from more liberal to more statist and populist developmental projects in the postwar period can be traced back to their wartime regulatory experiences.

The significance of the war—as a shock that punctured the more liberal regulatory equilibrium of the prewar era—was not that it helped usher the region from lower to higher levels of state intervention. After all, the rise of statism characterizes the reorganization of political economies throughout the developing world between 1945 and 1960, and it is entirely reasonable to suppose that, even without the war, statist development strategies would have taken hold in the Middle East. The more important question, for which the experience of the war holds the answer, is why this transition took the form it did in our two cases. Why was it, for example, that in Egypt and Syria the public sector dominated the rise of import substitution industrialization (ISI), while in Latin American cases the private sector took the lead in the consolidation of ISI?^[16] Why did state elites in postwar Syria and Egypt perceive of state regulation and state management of the economy as appropriate solutions to some of the urgent problems associated with the construction of postcolonial economies but not others? Why did certain kinds of regulatory practices and institutional capacities become prominent in these states, such as a high propensity to regulate agricultural production and foreign trade, but a low propensity to impose direct taxes on citizens?

What shaped these patterns of intervention? The answer is quite straightforward: Allied preferences and the balance of Allied versus local command of critical resources. The two core interests of the Western powers were to ensure the supply of Western armies and to minimize the impact on import-dependent Middle Eastern populations of the disruptions in global trade that resulted from the requisitioning of global shipping capacity by the military. These two imperatives threw up nearly overwhelming administrative challenges but placed an urgent premium on resolving two problems: feeding local populations and making sure that local economies did not impose demands on global shipping capacity. Driven by these concerns, Allied administrators were prepared to permit the lowest levels of local discretion in the areas of food supply and trade management. And because the Allies controlled ships and thus held the fate of local populations in their hands, they had the power to impose their preferences in these areas.

At the same time, Allied regulators recognized the potential for social instability associated with war-driven shifts in local economies, notably the inflation caused by military spending in countries with limited access to goods. As a result, MESC officials concerned themselves with broader questions of macroeconomic management, but their efforts in this regard were less unilateral. Implementation of economic policies was contingent on local administrative capacities and local political circumstances. As a result, local governments exercised more discretion in the strategies they adopted to manage the money supply. Almost invariably, these took the form of indirect taxation rather than the politically more demanding forms of direct taxation urged by Allied officials.

In short, in these areas as in many others, wartime regulatory changes did not just promote the transition from market liberalism to statism. They shifted Middle East political economies onto a distinctive path, constructing a singular, if flexible, template for how statism would become organized. The Allied regulators, who directed the day-to-day work of wartime economic coordination, built new regulatory agencies, supervised the management of local economies, and negotiated economic policies with local officials, were acting as the microchannels through which a powerful set of Keynesian ideas about the efficacy of state economic management were filtered into the region. If state elites in Egypt and Syria were not themselves steeped in the techniques of demand management, they were nonetheless heavily influenced by the “Keynesian-esque” regulatory environment that Allied bureaucrats created, one in which state intervention easily acquired legitimacy as a solution to problems of economic development.^[17]

Allied regulators not only made intervention more accessible as a strategy, they also offered up specific institutional mechanisms (such as price control boards, state purchasing agencies, agricultural production committees, and import oversight commissions) that Syrian and Egyptian officials could appropriate, make use of in devising economic policies, and then absorb into the bureaucratic apparatus of their postwar states.^[18] In adopting Allied regulatory practices, local officials lowered the costs of constructing institutions for the management of postcolonial economies. But they also privileged the formation of state capacities in those areas most heavily subject to MESC regulatory intervention while neglecting others, notably the capacity to impose direct taxes on citizens. Just as important, local officials helped fix a pattern of state-market relations in which interventionist norms became deeply and pervasively embedded as the organizing principles of postcolonial economic policy in these two states.

As we suggest above, however, the processes through which interventionist norms were transmitted, received, adapted, and transformed belie any simplistic notion of passive local governments acquiescing to the dictates of colonial or postcolonial powers. Instead, Allied bureaucrats and local officials engaged in explicit processes of bargaining over the design of regulatory regimes. And despite the presumption of stringent Allied control, local officials often carried the day. The practices of economic management that resulted from this bargaining were just as firmly embedded in local political and economic dynamics—and in the politics of nationalism and anticolonialism—as they were in Allied strategic and administrative concerns. The result was a set of policies and institutional outcomes that bore the clear imprint of their origins in Allied regulatory agencies, and in the administrative norms that prevailed among British wartime economic planners, but that also reflected the contours of local political struggles and the organization of domestic social conflicts. During the war, but even more so in subsequent years, regulatory regimes were adapted, exploited, and transformed in the context of domestic struggles over the role of the state and the scope of legitimate state intervention in the economy.

In short, what World War II helps us explain is not the move from market-liberal to interventionist political economies in general, but the specific institutional and regulatory form this movement took.^[19] The outcome of wartime regulatory innovation was to articulate a pattern of state-market relations that was far removed from the economic liberalism of the prewar era. Moreover, this pattern reflected norms of economic management that helped legitimate and make possible the populist, redistributive, and aggressively state-managed economies of Syria and Egypt in subsequent decades after the war.^[20] There is little question that this pattern had certain features in common with the later developmental strategies of postcolonial states elsewhere. Yet the wide variation among late developers in terms of their postwar economic trajectories—including huge discrepancies in performance, inward versus outward orientation, and even in their responsiveness or resistance to the current wave of economic liberalization—suggests that differences within this broad pattern are critical to understanding how it is that what often appears to us as a coherent developmental model can produce such widely differing political and economic outcomes.

State and Market before the War

It is broadly true to say that before the Colonial Welfare and Development Act of 1940, Colonial Governments acknowledged little responsibility for economic affairs. Nor was there any great tradition of state interference in industry or commerce in the non-colonial countries, India, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, where much the same attitude persisted.

To understand and assess our claims about the effects of wartime regulatory regimes, it is important we resist the almost inevitable tendency to exaggerate the coherence of colonial governance or to impose contemporary intellectual images of “the state” on the past. For example, analysts generally credit the British occupation with a successful administrative revolution inside Egypt’s ministries. Elizabeth Thompson details in her chapter in this volume the extent to which popular mobilization prompted French colonial officials to expand state administration within Syria during the interwar period. Yet until the 1930s British colonial administrators in Egypt received no formal or specialized training, and the ideal of the generalist who improvised solutions to whatever problems arose in the field was well entrenched among those who ran the empire.^[21] Nor were the policies of French administrators in Syria driven by a vision of how to transform the Syrian state into a mirror image of the French bureaucracy. Although the colonial presence altered the regulatory environment in both countries, Egypt and Syria nonetheless arrived at the moment of World War II with economies subject to low levels of state intervention and to forms of intervention that were largely market enhancing.

In Egypt, the British colonial project was essentially Africa’s first experience with structural adjustment. The debts incurred by Muhammad ‘Ali and his descendants had led by the 1870s to the takeover of the Egyptian treasury, the imposition of an austerity regime, rebellion by those made to pay, and ultimately British armed intervention and occupation. As today, structural adjustment went hand in hand with a quite literal “privatization” campaign that turned over ownership and control of vast royal lands and industries to private investors.^[22]

In the realms of production and distribution, British imperialists oversaw the reconstruction and extension of the system of Nile control works under the authority of the public works ministry, one of the earliest organizations serving to create the (shaky) effect of a modern administrative state. But this effort was the limit of intervention for authorities who were charged with facilitating debt repatriation under prevailing Victorian norms. In the three decades preceding the occupation, Egypt’s hastening pace of incorporation on the then “frontier” of the world economy followed a kind of “Klondike-on-the-Nile” model. Unlike what occurred in other parts of Africa, investors had found power and transport ventures attractive, and British officials continued to support a model of privately dominated and privately initiated economic development. There was little government oversight or regulation of these domains, as we have come to understand such notions. Alexandria was a virtual enclave, and the cotton trade that fueled the city’s rapid (and of course unregulated) growth was run, like the city itself, by its leading families and firms. Building was also essentially unregulated, and the “old” city of Cairo was rapidly ringed by enclaves of its own: Zamalak, Bulaq al-Dakrur, Heliopolis, and Ma‘adi. Public services were contracted out to concessionaires, at a price, generally paid by consumers. Oligopoly emerged as the market-controlling institution of choice by the narrow stratum that occupied the commanding heights. And twenty-five years after the British occupation in 1882, there was still no ministry charged with governing agriculture, the country’s leading sector.

By World War I, both Egyptian nationalist factions and the leaders of the expatriate business community were demanding that government do more to support local enterprise. When Egyptian investors in particular in the 1920s successfully obtained subsidies and other guarantees for their investments, they were not cautiously laying the groundwork of etatism but instead desperately trying to catch up with the networks of British colonial officials, foreign financiers, and local interlocutors that had monopolized rent circuits over the previous three decades of industry- and economy-building. They shared with these competitors a broad understanding of the proper roles of government as an investment subsidizer and guarantor (distributor) of first resort but a regulator only of last resort. Any hint of a redistributive role, however, particularly one that challenged the existing balance of claims or rights with respect to property, was portrayed as foreign contamination of deep-rooted cultural norms.

These points are usefully summarized in John Waterbury’s reminder: “We should not forget that it was a very limited state. No Keynes or FDR [or, we might add, Stalin or Attaturk] burst upon the Egyptian scene in the 1930s to deal with the economic crisis.”^[23] World War II in fact appears to have arrested a new, mid-to-late-1930s “liberalizing” wave in the tariff regime. And if there even existed a significant cadre of officials, Egyptian or non-Egyptian, in the decade or two before 1939 intent on transforming the regulatory powers of the state, the task would have been formidable. Landlords and capitalists both had to be dragged from a Victorian past to an etatist future.^[24]

If the war thus propelled Egypt into the new Keynesian world order, foreigners engineered the shift. Egypt served as the central command post for the entire Middle Eastern theater, and the harbor at Alexandria became the main base for the British Mediterranean fleet. Allied authorities, backed by swelling ranks of foreign soldiers and civilians and the creation of a virtual shadow government in Cairo, seized control of the economy’s commanding heights for the duration of hostilities. Most local producers and consumers could exercise little direct influence over basic institutions of the wartime state’s economic apparatus. Martin W. Wilmington, the semiofficial historian of the Middle East Supply Centre—effectively the country’s, if not the region’s, first “superministry” of the economy—argues that its top officials purposely tried to design strategies for maintaining the facade of government sovereignty given “nationalist sensibilities.” They hoped to “preclude the impression that the British government was usurping governmental powers in the capital of a foreign country where its troops were quartered as allies, not occupiers.”^[25]

Syria’s trajectory marked a different path to a similar end. First, of course, when France was formalizing direct control over Damascus and environs in the 1920s, under the terms of the League of Nations mandate, the British were just beginning the transfer of power to an independent Egyptian government. More crucially for our argument, however, is that in the 1920s the French state was initiating a particular type of “development” (la mise en valeur) project throughout the empire in support of neomercantilism at home.^[26] French mandatory officials pursued policies that were thus typically “late” colonial in character. France assumed control of Syria’s monetary system; linked Syria’s currency to the French franc; exported to the metropole responsibility for macroeconomic policy; held local governments responsible for the costs of maintaining French forces in the country; controlled all major sources of public revenue; and, despite League of Nations prohibitions to the contrary, systematically privileged French investment and economic activity in the country.^[27]

Institutionally, French authorities greatly enlarged the bureaucratic and regulatory machinery of the post-Ottoman Syrian state, notably in those areas related to the collection of revenues and the maintenance of (French) security. Yet French-dominated institutions functioned, by and large, as a system of exclusion. They operated as a “dual structure” in which the French High Commission and its staff in the field “exercised an almost unlimited influence over the local administration and political life.”^[28] The growth of French intervention in the Syrian economy and the establishment or expansion of foreign-owned monopolies in such areas as communications and rail transport thus reflected the intent of mandate officials to maximize their capacity for extraction rather than any kind of statist development project on the part of a Syrian national or business elite. Writing in the 1950s, Syrian economist Edmund Asfour stressed that “the French mandatory government did not try . . . to hurry the pace or affect the pattern of economic development in the long-run interest of the country. There was no place in the central state budget for significant expenditure on development projects. . . . Trade and banking policy was designed to encourage trade with France and further strictly the ends of the French commercial empire, often to the detriment of valid Syrian interests. Industries were not given assistance or protection and in fact grew very little, while agriculture, the mainstay of the economy, was generally neglected.”^[29]

France’s policy of repeatedly reorganizing Syria’s borders and creating autonomous substates based on ethnic or religious identity further fragmented administration and the formation of a national economy. In March 1942, therefore, when Major General Sir Edward Spears arrived in Beirut as England’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary for the Levant States the organization of Syria’s political economy had been profoundly influenced by two decades of French rule and the impact of economic policies intended to subordinate Syria’s economy to French economic priorities. Indeed, expressions of Syrian economic nationalism that various political factions deployed against the French clearly associated “statism” with the mandate—in the form of intrusive and unjust state regulation that harmed the economic interests of the elites who dominated the nationalist movements.^[30] Like their Egyptian counterparts, however, Syrian business elites were disturbed less by the emerging liberal (as opposed to democratic) economic order than they were by their exclusion from it.^[31] Resistance to French rule during the war often led Syrian political elites to embrace interventionist policies put forward by British officials from the Spears Mission, partly to ensure Syrian representation in questions of economic governance that French officials were less inclined to grant.^[32] In this way, nationalist politics led quite directly to the integration of Allied regulatory norms into Syrian administrative practices.

In both Egypt and Syria, therefore, colonial management of local economies in the prewar period had produced limited and highly selective state regulatory capacity. In both cases, colonial officials operated with a liberal economic framework but used state intervention to secure their own economic advantage. Neither colonial nor local elites viewed the state as an instrument of development, seeing it rather as an instrument for generating and directing the flow of resources within economies in which the private sector remained the dominant actors. Both sought the consolidation of liberal rather than democratic or redistributive patterns of state-market relations. Under these conditions, capitalists and landed elites in Syria and Egypt struggled not to overturn the existing regulatory order, but to expand its boundaries in ways that would permit them to enjoy its full benefits. In both cases, it was World War II that decisively altered the scope and intensity of state regulation of the economy, replacing the liberal prewar organization of state-market relations with more interventionist regimes. Initially, this shift greatly expanded the economic opportunities available to local elites, who dominated the institutions that managed access to rents in the postwar period. Later, however, these institutions were used to undermine economic liberalism, and became the tools through which a new generation of populist political leaders would accomplish the marginalization of the nationalist elites of the prewar and wartime period.

Debating Regulation: the Genesis of Wartime Intervention

For capitalists and landowners in Egypt and Syria, World War II marked a critical turning point. Wartime exigencies led to the creation of regulatory bureaucracies and normative frameworks that would become increasingly central to the dynamics of postcolonial state building. Interventionist practices defined a set of norms that legitimated state control of the private sector and linked the fortunes of capitalists and landlords, both political and economic, to the actions and policies of the state. In so doing, wartime regulatory regimes contributed in substantive ways to the creation of a distinctive sense of how states function and how they relate to business.^[33] They boosted local industry and gave rise to market-protecting import substitution policies that altered the relationship of local economies to global markets. Not least important, they also helped to develop the institutional and bureaucratic capacities that made it possible for new cadres of state officials to carry out their designated functions. In various domains—the creation of official statistical bureaus, the training of bureaucrats, the introduction of domestic price controls, the creation of credit facilities, the deepening of import-substituting patterns of industrialization, and the establishment of government monopsonies over agricultural produce—the contours of postwar, postcolonial state forms and practices were shaped by the regulatory regimes introduced during World War II.

One recent explanation for the shift from market-oriented to statist political economies focuses on the difficulties associated with the formation of market-supporting institutions.^[34] In this view, state elites adopt interventionist strategies of economic management only after they have been undermined in their efforts to build the institutional frameworks needed to support a national market. The rise of intervention is thus explained as a fallback strategy on the part of state elites frustrated by the demands of market building.

As the historical record makes clear, however, the new patterns of state intervention and the postcolonial development strategies that resulted from wartime economic transformations cannot be interpreted as an embrace of statist approaches on the part of local politicians and Allied bureaucrats frustrated by the unwillingness of local capitalists to play a developmental role, or by the difficulties of creating national markets. Rather, state intervention was organized around an explicit and durable division of labor between states and markets, with open debates surrounding each decision to permit the encroachment of the former on the latter. Neither the Allied officials directing the regulatory regimes introduced during the war, nor the local officials who were mostly responsible for implementing them, viewed state intervention as an uncontested good. Their principal concerns were not the difficulties of creating and sustaining national markets, which had become more consolidated in Egypt during the interwar period than in Syria. Rather, administrators struggled with the demands of managing a system of state controls, the problems of reengineering economies to meet social needs, and the political difficulties that seemed certain to follow the introduction of sweeping economic regulations.

Getting the prices right, ensuring adequate supplies of trained administrators, enhancing bureaucratic capacity, and negotiating the political implications of regulation and intervention: these were the issues that shaped the design of regulatory regimes in the Middle East during World War II. Allied officials were not driven by apprehensions about the capacity of states to create and sustain market mechanisms but by their determination to respond to the immediate social and military needs arising from the exigencies of war. And they tended to view intervention as a temporary response to emergency conditions. Indeed, they expressed their concerns about the possibly corrosive effects of expanded state intervention on the functioning of capitalism in the Middle East that echoed debates then under way in Europe and the United States.^[35]

Such concerns emerged quite clearly at, for example, a regional conference convened in August 1943 by the Middle East Supply Centre to discuss issues of food rationing and distribution. E. M. H. Lloyd, then-economic advisor to the British minister of state in Cairo and chair of the conference, opened the meeting with comments that evoked the mix of caution, regret, and hesitation that accompanied the expansion of state intervention throughout the Middle East as a result of the war:

There is no easy solution to the problem we are to discuss at the Conference. Government control is always unpopular. It requires a sufficient and reasonably competent staff; and above all it needs to win general acceptance and a fair measure of support from traders who have to be controlled. In no country is it wholly satisfactory. In Britain I can only claim that it is a good deal more satisfactory than in the last war. Indeed, conditions in the United Kingdom in 1916 and 1917 resembled in some ways those now prevailing in the Middle East—widespread profiteering and natural hesitation on the part of Government to launch out on the uncharted and perilous waters of State interference.

These considerations make it all the more remarkable that Middle East governments should have attempted to do as much as they have done. We all know that rationing and control of distribution can never be 100 percent perfect; but if the need is sufficiently great, there is some force in the view that even an imperfect attempt at rationing and control is better than doing nothing.^[36]

Reluctance to risk the perils of state interference captures quite accurately the initial response of local governments to the policy recommendations of Allied officials. Aware that their governments lacked the bureaucratic capacity or institutional strength to adopt a wide-ranging regulatory role, Middle Eastern leaders exhibited something of the hesitation identified by Weir and Skocpol on the part of politicians asked to consider policy options to which their state structures were incapable of responding.^[37]

Yet administrative concerns tell only a small part of the story. By and large, domestic political considerations were as powerful a predictor of local responses to wartime regulation as state institutional configurations and capacities. Such considerations heavily influenced the character of the negotiations among Allied and local officials over the scope and implementation of regulatory policies, and thus had a significant influence on the nature of regulatory regimes, the kinds of solutions that were adopted to resolve particular problems, and the kinds of administrative instruments created to implement them.^[38] As we indicated above, Allied officials were more heavy-handed in imposing controls in some areas (agricultural supply and pricing) than in others (taxation), but in every case shifts in regulation provided the impetus for domestic political conflicts.

In responding to price inflation resulting from wartime expenditures, for example, Allied officials worked to persuade regional governments to apply “remedial” policies “on orthodox lines,” that is, “higher taxation, loan issues, savings campaigns, control of prices and distribution, and rationing.”^[39] Yet in reviewing various ways to soak up excess purchasing power, local officials exhibited deep reluctance to introduce taxation schemes, for both administrative and political reasons. Allied pleas to do so “fell on deaf ears.” Instead, local governments exhibited a “greater readiness [to] control prices and distribution and to enforce rationing,” as well as to rely on indirect taxes.^[40] Doubting their capacity to tax and lacking the political will to ensure compliance, local governments negotiated a form of state intervention that was more consistent with their particular capacities and political circumstances—with lasting effects on the political economies of these states. Throughout the region, mechanisms to control prices and distribution were much more fully developed in the postwar period than those associated with taxation, and were consistently relied upon as a central feature of postwar economic development strategies.

In general, therefore, the scope of wartime regulations, their manner of implementation, and their effectiveness were influenced by a range of domestic factors, both political and economic. These included local institutional capacity; local economic conditions; whether a particular state or territory was independent, a colony or former colony, or ruled by a European power under the auspices of a U.N. mandate; whether Britain or France was the mandatory power in a given territory; and the pattern of nationalist politics in a particular state. Regulatory regimes also differed depending on whether the object of regulation was a commodity deemed critical for the sustenance of citizens, such as wheat, which was tightly controlled across the region and governed by a rather consistent set of policies, or a product regarded as less essential to the maintenance of daily life.

Just as important, regulatory policies emerged through a rather consistent pattern of trial and error in which reliance on markets was replaced by state intervention in specific and delimited instances when private traders and merchants sought to maximize their own profits (whether by hoarding or otherwise) rather than respond to local needs. Whether such instances constituted broad-based evidence of market failure or provided justification for more elaborate regulatory regimes was a hotly debated topic at the time. Yet these debates indicate that the control and regulation of markets were viewed as much more daunting tasks than their creation or maintenance. Thus, even as regulatory regimes expanded throughout the course of the war, and even as local governments overcame their earlier objections to such regimes and began to appropriate them to serve local political and economic aims, Syrian and Egyptian political and business elites continued to see the private sector as pivotal to the economic development of Middle Eastern states.

As this summary suggests, the making of wartime regulatory regimes in Syria and Egypt was a highly interactive and dynamic process, engaging local and Allied officials in ongoing negotiations about fundamental issues of state policy, state structure, and state-market relations. In turn, these negotiations were influenced by a broad range of factors, from the Keynesian preferences of Allied regulators and the political ambitions of nationalist governments in the region to the lobbying efforts of American exporters in Washington. They also had far-ranging consequences for the postwar structure of the political economies of the region.

As the war progressed, regulations became consolidated. Syrian and Egyptian leaders came to view regulatory policies as highly effective mechanisms for extracting resources from society. Similarly, they learned that the institutions created to implement these policies offered important bases of political power and patronage.^[41] As the end of the war approached and pressure began to grow for the removal of wartime regulatory agencies—pressures originating not only among private sectors within the region but also and importantly among exporters based in the United States and Europe who had long complained about wartime restrictions on their business activities in the Middle East—Allied regulators in the region began negotiations with governments within the region about how, or whether, to dismantle the regulatory institutions put in place just years or months earlier.^[42] In Syria and Egypt, the withdrawal of Allied involvement did not provide a justification for state shrinking; just the opposite. Local governments independently decided to sustain the regulatory regimes initiated at the urging of the Allies, and to incorporate regulatory institutions into their expanding state structures. As one observer of the time noted with regard to import-licensing regimes, to take just one case, “It was left to Middle Eastern Governments to retain what portions of their import-licensing system they desired—most in fact retained completely powers which they found most valuable as a means of financial control.”^[43]

The appropriation by Middle Eastern governments of wartime regulatory agencies and practices occurred on a fairly broad basis, underscoring the linkages between these regulatory regimes and the postwar economic structures of the region. It is important to emphasize, however, that the integration of wartime regimes into postwar state structures cannot be seen as a comprehensive, seamless process that explains fully the formation of contemporary economic structures across the Middle East. We have noted that business and political elites in postwar Lebanon colluded to roll back wartime regulations. And we have emphasized that the transmission of regulatory norms was highly selective. A number of policy outcomes considered crucial by Allied officials were essentially ignored by local governments, and little trace of them remains. Most important among these was the sense among Allied bureaucrats of the compelling value of regional economic integration, and the powerful benefits of building comparative advantage on a regional rather than a state level.^[44] The sense of disappointment on their part that integration was an early casualty of the postwar peace was tangible.^[45] Tracing this process of selective transmission, its wartime trajectory, and its legacy for the postwar political economies of the region requires a more focused review of policy making in specific cases. We take up this task in the following sections of the chapter, focusing on how wartime regulatory regimes altered the existing arrangement of state-market relations that had characterized the Egyptian and Syrian political economies during the interwar period.

The Rise of the Middle East Supply Centre

Many factors influenced the patterns and trajectories of wartime economic regulation, but the circumstances that led Allied authorities to intervene can be traced directly to a particular event: a shortage of shipping. With the onset of war and the extension of fighting into North Africa, Britain’s transport requirements confronted the need to enlarge and then supply its forces in the Middle East. This difficult task became even more complicated after 1940 with the fall of France, Italy’s entry into the war, and the resulting loss to British forces of Europe’s Mediterranean coastline. As Wilmington notes, “Overnight the link between the Desert Army and the arsenals of Britain and the United States had been lengthened from 5,000 miles to 12,000 miles and more.”^[46] German submarine attacks, competition for scarce shipping space between civilian and military cargoes, and disorganization at overburdened ports all compounded the difficulty of ensuring the provision of essential military supplies to Allied forces in the Middle East.

Stricter management of shipping and massive reductions of nonmilitary trade seemed the only solutions to the shipping crisis of 1940. Yet civilian shipping requirements could not easily be subordinated to military needs. Middle East states imported considerable quantities of essential foodstuffs and manufactured goods. These items represented an estimated 6 million tons of imports during peacetime, a level of trade requiring almost 100 percent of peacetime shipping capacity in the region.^[47] Dramatic reductions in civilian imports without corresponding efforts to increase local production and improve local systems of distribution would have threatened food supplies and endangered the health, if not the survival, of local populations. In Syria and Lebanon, memories of the widespread starvation resulting from the Allied blockades of World War I had provoked considerable hoarding, along with “one of the most spirited import sprees the region had known” as soon as war seemed imminent.^[48] The shipping crisis also threatened export-dependent sectors of Middle Eastern economies, as access to peacetime export markets was disrupted.^[49] Moreover, nationalist and colonial politics interacted with strategic and economic concerns. British leaders were determined to avoid political instability that might follow economic adversity and thereby create openings for Axis advances in the region and bolster the more radical of the nationalist forces they confronted.

These considerations reinforced a growing British recognition—developed through a protracted process of intrabureaucratic wrangling among numerous ministries and other government agencies in England—that a wartime shipping regime could succeed only if accompanied by a regionwide plan to reduce its potentially disruptive effects. Some agency would have to coordinate agricultural production and distribution, substitute local manufactured goods for imported products, and supervise civilian trade to ensure that only essential imports were permitted to occupy scarce shipping space. Long-term strategic factors worked alongside the shipping crisis to produce a distinctive strategy for wartime economic mobilization in the Middle East, a strategy designed to insulate the populations of the region from the economic consequences of the war by expanding and coordinating local production as well as local capacities for economic management. Though intended to resolve the immediate issue of the shipping crisis in ways that would not undermine the position of Allied powers in the region, this strategy had far-ranging consequences for the Middle Eastern states whose economies were to be reorganized to accommodate the loss of imports.

British authorities did not underestimate the magnitude of the task they faced. Wilmington emphasizes that neither Middle Eastern governments nor the colonial powers had prepared for the challenges of coordinating the economies of the region:

Nowhere was there a master plan of war economics, nowhere a central agency endowed with power and plenipotentiaries to set the pace for a regional alignment of consumption and production. There was no general scheme of rationing . . . [, no] remotely adequate scheme of commodity allocation to industry anywhere. Few price controls and no schemes for the allocation of labor were in effect. No drastic measures for the stretching of supplies . . . had been enacted. Few steps had been taken to convert land to food production. No important campaigns against inflation had been launched. Only feeble warnings and deterrents had been addressed to the hoarder and the profiteer, and no drastically effective regimes of import control had appeared.^[50]

As impressive as Wilmington’s record of Allied unpreparedness might be, it is nonetheless incomplete. It overlooks the fact that there was little coordination among colonial powers as to how to respond to the administrative gaps he identifies. It also neglects to point out that competition among France, Britain, and the United States over the terms of wartime economic management—an extension of their larger economic competition in the region— sured that inter-Allied bargaining and conflict would define how the Allies responded to the demands of managing the economies of a region larger than the United States.^[51]

As a major step toward creating the infrastructure needed to manage a wartime shipping regime, British authorities established the Middle East Supply Centre in April 1941. The Centre was created as a civilian office based in Cairo, operating under the auspices of the British Ministry of Shipping. Initially, the mandate of MESC was rather narrowly framed, focusing on collection of data needed to assign priorities to various civilian imports and thus determine the allocation of cargo space for civilian goods. MESC was created as an advisory body without executive power to enforce its recommendations.^[52] Yet even this apparently modest assignment implied an extraordinary range of tasks, and the executive power of MESC soon grew to match. As defined by W. W. Elliott, an administrator attached to the Spears Mission, the functions of MESC were:

To develop local production of essential food and materials in the Middle East through the co-operation of individual Middle Eastern governments. . . .

To ensure that the demand for imports of civilian goods and equipment to the Middle Eastern countries was restricted to essentials; and to ensure that these essential needs were, in fact met. . . .

To assist Middle Eastern governments in the administration of services and in the control of distribution so that the imports which did arrive were used to the best purpose. . . .

To provide a Centre for the exchange of information on problems of agriculture and industrial production, transport, distribution, and economics generally; and to make available technical experts to advise on these problems.^[53]

It would be hard to exaggerate the degree of intervention needed to achieve these goals. Simply to determine whether a particular food item was essential, for example, meant knowing how much of it was produced within the region and where; what local consumption levels were (implying a need for accurate demographic data in a region where rates of census avoidance were high); what kinds of replacements or substitutes could be found; how much it would cost to deliver them; what the effects would be of diverting crop production from one part of the region to another; and, not least, making sure that sufficient funds and credit were available to ensure that local alternatives could be purchased at one point for resale at another. For manufactured goods, allocation of shipping space required calculations of a similar complexity. As MESC expanded beyond its advisory role to become more active in the implementation of import-reduction schemes, its tasks became even more intricate; its reach extended into virtually every aspect of Middle Eastern economic life.

To carry out the range of tasks expected of the Supply Centre would have proven daunting under virtually any circumstances, and MESC experienced any number of growing pains. Its operations were hampered at the outset not only by the enormity of its role but by interagency rivalries; a lack of cooperation from military services concerned with preserving their autonomy in the allocation of shipping space; and the absence of coordination with U.S. authorities, the other major supplier of shipping to the region and not yet a participant in MESC. From its inception, Free French officials, including Charles de Gaulle himself, strenuously lobbied the British for inclusion in MESC, arguing that France’s role in Syria and Lebanon demanded that it be given an equal voice in MESC. Already chafing at what they took to be de Gaulle’s presumptions about the scope of his authority, this was a prerogative the British were determined not to extend.^[54]

Despite this inauspicious beginning, by its second year of work and until it was dissolved in 1945 MESC exercised an extraordinary role in the management of regional economies. In summer 1942 MESC became a joint Anglo-American operation, and the United States was increasingly willing to rely on MESC recommendations to guide the civilian component of its lend-lease program in the region. The Supply Centre had established its reputation within Allied governments and agencies as an accurate provider of information needed to make decisions concerning the priority of shipments of goods throughout the Middle East. Within the span of a few years, MESC operations reduced the flow of imports shipped into the region from 6 million tons to about 1 1/2 million tons. Its staff had put in place regionwide import-control programs that largely determined what kinds and what amounts of foreign-made goods were available on local markets. It had become a leading direct importer of essential commodities such as pharmaceuticals, tires, grain, meat, and cooking oils. It regulated regional distribution networks, directed census-taking efforts, encouraged the development of local production in ways that influenced postwar industrialization patterns, and managed programs to eradicate locusts and other threats to agricultural production and public health.

As might be expected of an operation on this scale, MESC activities were highly controversial, generating strong reactions, both positive and negative, from a variety of directions. American and British exporters criticized the intervention of MESC in their trading relationships with Middle East customers. Local businesspeople lodged similar complaints. Both groups pursued vigorous lobbying efforts to undermine MESC’s authority and deregulate shipping. Governments and businesspeople in the region disparaged MESC’s authority to review and prioritize their import requests. They also resented MESC’s intervention into local markets as field officers worked to coordinate regional supplies with local demands. These were not by any means trivial concerns.

Perhaps more significant, MESC’s regulatory role cut deeply into prewar economic and political arrangements, redirecting the trajectory of local economies and thus reshaping relations among various political and economic groups at the domestic level. This process proceeded differently in Egypt and Syria, though it moved the political economies of these states in similar directions. Crucially, MESC activities were guided by a notion of the state as the agent of social equity, a clear and critical departure from the elitist market liberalism, if not laissez faire attitude, that shaped processes of state building before the war. Social justice as a responsibility of the state was a central principle underlying the work of the Supply Centre. Through its efforts this perspective became integrated into local perceptions concerning the appropriate purposes of the state in ways that profoundly altered the trajectories of postwar state formation. The Supply Centre took over agricultural production and distribution to ensure not only that food would be available in adequate measure but that it would be available at the same price and quality to every Syrian or Lebanese. It introduced rationing schemes to ensure that access to critical goods would be guided by some notion of equity in distribution.^[55] It undertook censuses of local populations in part to ensure fairness in the allocation of scarce resources. It bought grain directly from peasants at above fair market rates, producing substantial improvements in their standard of living.^[56] And officials of the Centre explicitly contrasted their efficient and rational approach to governance with what they characterized as the corruption and inefficiency of local politicians—sentiments that were typically phrased in the best traditions of colonial paternalism, if not outright racism.^[57] Through these explicit commitments to the state as the agent of social equity, the Centre highlighted and deepened tensions in the core of the state project in the Middle East, making explicit the contradictions between the antipopulist market liberalism that formed the elites’ vision of the state and an emerging vision of the state as the agent of redistribution and social equity that was articulated by reformist intellectuals and politicians as well as by labor unions. The Centre thus helped to frame deep social conflicts that would be resolved only with the demise of nationalist elites and their replacement by populist systems of rule in the decades after the war.

In the following sections of this chapter we review the dynamics through which the political economy of wartime regulation took shape in Egypt and Syria in three distinct arenas: agricultural production and supply, foreign trade, and taxation. We end with a brief assessment of labor regulation, a domain that was shaped to a far lesser extent by wartime intervention, even while new war-driven patterns of labor mobilization fed the larger move toward more statist developmental strategies, especially in Egypt.

Regulating Agricultural Production and Supply

From the outset of the war, Allied officials feared the consequences of wartime shipping disruptions on Middle East food supplies among local populations and struggled to balance the equally urgent need to provide for both civilian and military consumption. Allied assessments of regional food production identified inefficiencies in the distribution of food across the region: surpluses in one country were not available to redress shortages in a neighboring state, typically due to a simple lack of adequate transport. These studies found a reliance on imports in countries that showed the potential to be self-sufficient, and underscored the widespread use of practices deemed threatening to the stability of large urban areas: the hoarding of crops by villagers and of basic commodities by urban dwellers, price gouging by urban merchants, and smuggling of crops to areas outside the control of Allied forces (especially from Syria to Turkey). When combined with the volatility of harvests due to natural fluctuations in rainfall, and restrictions on the export of scarce goods from the United Kingdom to the Middle East, the conditions encountered by MESC officials when they set up shop in the region in mid-1941 were nothing short of dire.

In Syria and Lebanon, in particular, mass famine was a real possibility, and this threat led MESC officials operating within the Spears Mission to adopt a particularly heavy-handed approach to the management of agricultural production and supply. During its first season of operation, hoarding and speculating had led to severe grain shortages. The initial response of MESC staff was to flood the markets with low-priced wheat. More than one hundred thousand tons of wheat originally destined for Europe was diverted to the Levant “to induce speculators and hoarders to unload their stocks.”^[58] But as Spears admitted, “The absorptive capacity of the hoarders was underestimated.” Imported wheat was bought up as soon as it hit local markets, and prices immediately returned to their speculative levels.^[59]

In the face of this failure, MESC staff in the Levant abandoned market-based methods of price management and moved to impose a thorough control regime that governed the entire grain economy of Syria and Lebanon, bringing with it a raft of regulatory and interventionist practices that rapidly became consolidated within local state structures. To oversee this effort, the Spears Mission created an agency known as the Wheat and Cereals Office (also called the Office des céréales panifiables, or OCP), which included representatives from Syria, Lebanon, France, and England.^[60] The inclusion of local representatives had implications that reached well beyond a challenge to French authority. This step made Syrian and Lebanese bureaucrats responsible for the regulation of their own agricultural economies, socialized them into the administrative culture of the Spears Mission, and provided training in the management of large-scale regulatory enterprises—expertise that technocrats such as ‘Izzat Tarabulsi, one of several Syrians appointed to MESC agencies, later placed at the disposal of the postwar Syrian state.

Under OCP auspices, a centralized system of grain collection, transport, processing, and distribution was created, prefiguring the apparatus of food control that developed in independent Syria. Its tasks included everything from acquiring the foreign exchange needed to purchase grains, to equipping the OCP with trucks, sacks, and weighing equipment. The OCP became the monopsony purchaser of Syrian wheat, with prices fixed by MESC economists. To ensure compliance with directives that restricted the sale of wheat to the OCP, it created a dense network of village and district level committees to determine local grain requirements and develop estimates of grain production. Even the transport of wheat required a license in an effort to curtail smuggling.

As might be expected, the politics of managing Syria’s food supply were hugely contentious. Damascus was a site of particular unrest.^[61] Riots and protests were commonplace as MESC officials struggled to determine how much wheat Damascus really needed. Rumors abounded that MESC was skimming Syrian grain for British troops. Mobs collected outside bakeries whose owners sold bread made from adulterated flour. Absentee landowners and grain dealers, whose profits were threatened by OCP’s practice of direct cash purchases of wheat from peasants, encouraged noncompliance with OCP collection efforts.

To cope with these circumstances the OCP gradually expanded its reach, essentially nationalizing a number of bakeries and nine flour mills. Spears induced Syria’s prime minister Husni al-Barazi to become a local advocate of grain collection. Barazi traveled throughout Syria with an OCP delegation, urging landowners and peasants to sell their wheat. Implicit in his pleas was the threat of coercive collection by French forces if they did not comply. Soon, “knowledge of the risk involved in flouting the authority of the O.C.P. . . . percolated to the remotest corners of Syria,” and it was able to buy wheat at the rate of three thousand tons per day.^[62]

Alongside this enormous administrative apparatus, MESC constructed an entirely new bureaucracy for the collection of demographic and agricultural data. From the outset, MESC officials recognized that the work of the OCP would founder without adequate census information, of which only the most rudimentary was then available. They believed, accurately, that existing population counts dramatically overstated urban populations, to the detriment of the countryside. Local committees were unwilling or unable to direct new population counts. Early efforts to manage grain distribution in Lebanon through a system of ration cards had proven ineffective (Spears claimed that the prime minister of Lebanon held seventy-three ration cards). In response, OCP staff created a statistical agency (Bureau de statistiques et de liaison), with the mandate to undertake nationwide census counts and detailed crop estimates in Syria and Lebanon.

These were to be the first “modern” censuses in the history of the Levant, and they proved no less contentious than any other aspect of this enterprise. In spring 1942, separate censuses were conducted throughout Syria and Lebanon, with urban areas placed under curfew to ensure an accurate count. As Spears recalled, “The O.C.P. census of the Syrian towns produced some astonishing results. Damascus and Aleppo, taken together, revealed an overestimate of 96,000 souls, and Deir ez Zor proved to have a population of only 28,000 instead of 65,000. When it was learnt in Homs that a census was soon to be made by British and French officers under curfew conditions, panic-stricken householders immediately registered 5,000 new deaths at the municipal office; even excluding this sudden decrease, the new figures were 18 per cent. lower than those of the previous census.”^[63] Counting was accompanied by the formal registration of households to permit the implementation of a food-rationing scheme—information that was later used in Syria to revise lists of eligible voters.

With new population figures in hand, wheat provisions to Damascus were cut. Rioting broke out to pressure the Syrian government to increase the city’s allocation. An OCP decision to reduce the “ration of the wealthier classes [in Damascus] . . . to the level prevailing elsewhere” also prompted riots in March 1942. As with other aspects of the food supply program, popular mobilization against intervention led MESC not to cut back, but to broaden its role. With the Syrian government unwilling to assume responsibility for an unpopular rationing system, the role of the Bureau de statistiques et de liaison “evolved first from liaison into supervision and [then became] one of direct control” of the entire wheat distribution scheme.^[64]

By the time Spears wrote his memorandum to the Foreign Office in June 1943, he was able to claim that the OCP’s efforts had been a resounding success. He took credit for averting famine and for giving Syria and Lebanon “a taste of honest and efficient administration which were conditions totally unknown there.” He expressed his hope that local governments would eventually develop an “attachment to the scheme.”^[65] In Syria, the government certainly did.

“Wars pass,” wrote Guy Hunter, a historian of MESC, “but economic problems do not.”^[66] Syrian politicians were no less concerned than officials of the Spears Mission about the imperative necessity to ensure food security, especially for highly mobilized urban populations. Following the war, the OCP was absorbed into the Syrian bureaucracy, as were several other agencies created by MESC to manage food production and supply. For a short period, a small number of British technical experts stayed on, but over time the functions of OCP agencies were absorbed into a range of ministries, from the Ministry of Economy to the Ministries of Agriculture and Supply, and managed entirely by Syrians. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and quite apart from their flawed and halfhearted attempts at agrarian reform, the Syrian governments of this period steadily broadened the role of the state in the agricultural economy, retaining many of the regulatory regimes first introduced by the OCP. These included price controls, marketing controls, and oversight of food distribution.^[67] The statistical and data collection capacities created by the Bureau de statistiques et de liaison supported the production of Syria’s Al-majmu‘a al-ih‘saiya (annual statistical abstract), published first by the Ministry of Economy and later by the Ministry of Planning. In general, and without exaggerating the extent to which later practices grew directly out of Syria’s wartime experience, it is clear that Syria’s postwar capacity to manage the agrarian sector has critical links to the role of MESC in the construction of a pervasive program of agrarian regulation during the war.

In Egypt, entrenched patterns of agricultural production posed two distinct and related problems for economic administrators: how to meet the increased need for food production and how to minimize the adverse effects of a drastic decline in fertilizer imports. The Egyptian economy was built around estate production of cotton for export on the world market. Unlike during World War I, however, when producers and merchants reaped the windfalls from rising wartime demand for their goods, world cotton market prices began a precipitous decline early in 1940 that indeed rocked the foundations of the political economy.^[68] Following protracted negotiations through the late spring and summer, which were bound up with the British Embassy’s intervention to remove one government presumed insufficiently loyal and secure the cooperation of a successor, British authorities agreed in August 1940 to purchase the entire domestic cotton crop.^[69] Producers planted their fields in anticipation of even greater windfalls, but in 1941 British authorities drove a harder bargain, linking its support to a system of invasive regulation of cotton production and marketing.^[70]

In this case, the wartime administration invented many of the arrangements that have since come to stand for etatism in Egyptian agriculture, including a strict currency exchange control regime, the closing of the first cotton futures market in the world, and the conversion of the state to monopsonist.^[71] According to Richards, these unprecedented policy changes contributed to undermining the one-hundred-year-old ‘izba system of estate production. From the time of the war, large landowners turned increasingly to renting out their estates for cash.^[72] The cornerstone of this new and transforming regulatory regime was a series of laws controlling cotton production by forcing growers to alter their regular pattern of crop rotation and fixing upper limits on the percentage of lands that could be planted with the traditional cash crop. Wartime officials combined these restrictions with cash incentives to farmers who shifted additional acreage to food production.

These regulations succeeded in shrinking the cultivated acreage to 50 percent of the prewar level, and, for the duration of the war, cotton trickled to rather than flooded the market.^[73] Officials continued this regime after the war, relaxing controls very briefly in 1950 before reinstating them one year later. The result was a shift in agricultural output over time, including increases in rice, sugarcane, fruits and vegetables, and the introduction of wholly new crops such as flax, jute, and sugar beet cultivation under the guidance of MESC.^[74] But, as is widely noted about the intervention, the massive shift out of cotton and into staple grains—wheat, barley, millet, and maize—was able only to offset the steep fall in yields caused by the virtual cutoff of fertilizer shipments.^[75] And the increased rate of exploitation to make up for food imports exhausted soil resources.^[76] In Egypt as in Syria, therefore, agricultural inputs and outputs were subjected to an increasing degree of control, until governments had taken over purchase and distribution of most key commodities, including fertilizers, wheat and other grains, sugar, tea, coffee, and cooking oil.^[77] And as in Syria, the spillover effects of these regulatory innovations into postwar Egyptian food policies are clearly visible.

The Regulation of Foreign Trade: Centralization, Coordination, and State-Led Isi

The scale of MESC’s role in the regulation of trade was similar to the extent of its role in the management of agriculture. Controlling the flow of goods into and out of the Middle East was the raison d’être of the Middle East Supply Centre, making the regulation of domestic trade its principal task. Moreover, its control over access to shipping was complete, giving MESC officials extraordinary leverage in their negotiations over trade with Syrian and Egyptian representatives, whose economies were heavily import-dependent. As in the case of agriculture, the implications of regulating trade encompassed an enormous range of economic activities, leading MESC officials to become deeply engaged in the restructuring of a wide array of domestic economic arrangements and in the development of significant new forms of state capacity.

Three specific factors helped determine how economic arrangements were restructured and what specific forms of state capacity were produced through the intervention of the Supply Centre. First, MESC was above all an agency of economic coordination, evaluating and prioritizing the import requirements of some fifteen states and territories, reconciling these needs against available shipping space, communicating with government agencies in Washington and London and with private vendors to supply essential goods—but only essential goods. To make these determinations in any reasonable fashion required the construction of a centralized, regionwide trade management apparatus, including local agencies that mediated between MESC and domestic business interests. The specific mechanism MESC adopted to regulate trade flows was a system of import licensing. To allocate licenses, governments provided MESC with data detailing import requirements for a six-month period (later annually), for everything from “heavy machinery to razor blades.”^[78] This represented a level of data collection that vastly exceeded the prewar capacity of local governments and demanded considerable expansion in their collection of basic economic information. And because MESC worked with local representatives and governments to attach priorities to specific requests, the import licensing scheme made private enterprise highly dependent on government mediation, shifting the balance of public-private power in matters of economic decision making. In Syria, these issues were especially acute because by 1941, “the volume of imports [had sunk] to a lower proportion of the pre-war level than it [had] in any other Middle East country.”^[79]

Second, MESC’s role in regulating foreign trade became a channel for imposing direct state control over domestic economies on the part of local governments, but here too this happened in ways that favored the development of quite distinctive state capacities. Once again, the participation of local bureaucrats in trade regulation—though poorly trained and in short supply—helped transfer administrative norms from MESC to local bureaucracies. And once again, MESC policies were heavily influenced by a view of the state as the mechanism for ensuring that economic outcomes would be socially just (and therefore politically justifiable in the West). As Hunter writes:

Undoubtedly the most effective controls were in the rationing and price control of essentials, and here the partly effective control of M.E.S.C. over the distribution of imported goods and the governmental control of grain through the Wheat Collection Schemes were of outstanding importance. M.E.S.C. was able to make it a condition of supply that scarce essentials should be fairly distributed at controlled prices. In taking this attitude it was fair to insist that the British and American publics were not prepared to go short of supplies and to risk their sailors and ships in order to put enormous profits into the hands of Middle East black-marketeers. In the distribution of tires, cotton textiles, and some medical supplies, M.E.S.C. rigidly insisted that the receiving Government should establish a satisfactory scheme for distribution according to need and essential use before supplies were released.^[80]

In Syria and Lebanon, the regulation of essential goods gave rise to no less than eight separate advisory boards. These included a Joint Supply Council, on which Syrians and Lebanese were the only representatives and which was responsible for approving import and export forwarded by the other boards.^[81] The authority of these boards was considerable, and their work quickly expanded beyond mediating between MESC and local business to encompass the control of domestic production in critical areas. The extent to which this new role cast the state as supervisor rather than ally of the private sector, and the resistance of private capitalists to this shift, was amply demonstrated by the intense opposition of mill owners and textile merchants in Aleppo and Damascus to a proposal by the Textile Advisory Board to impose government control over the entire textile sector.^[82] Nor was this economic oversight role, once taken on, quick to disappear at the end of the war—even though Spears and his American counterparts were anxious to see the resumption of free trade in the region and determined to secure the competitive position of their countries’ commercial interests. Despite state controls, local prices for many imported goods were considerably higher than global prices, and governments reaped windfall profits from their monopoly over trade in various commodities. Given politicians’ reluctance to tax, they were not inclined to give up this source of revenue. Nor were local manufacturers inclined to see protectionism disappear. Syrian industrialists lobbied for the continuation of protectionist legislation after the war, hoping to expand their operations before more competitive Western producers could reenter local markets.^[83]

In the Egyptian case, the system of import licenses, quotas, and excluded goods that was installed beginning in the fall of 1941 was based on a division of labor. For a combination of political and administrative reasons, once the schedule had been formulated the Egyptian government was responsible for distributing of licenses. The result was a political entrepreneur’s dream come true. We know this conceptually from the recent accounts of rent-seeking and governance in Egypt and elsewhere in postcolonial Africa, as well as anecdotally from the lurid tales of the Wafd party in office between 1942 and 1944 and Durrell’s unforgettable portrait of those in Cairo and Alexandria “in a money daydream . . . who have skimmed the grease off the war effort in contracts and profiteering.”^[84] Nonetheless, as elsewhere in the region, all decisions on licenses were forwarded for review by MESC, which held effective veto power through its influence on shipping and supply commissions in London and Washington.^[85]

Though few details are available as yet, this particular regulatory regime emerged as the result of “long drawn-out and difficult negotiations” with the Allied authorities.^[86] For instance, MESC exploited Egypt’s dependence on fertilizers at different points to obtain wheat, barley, rice, and millet for export. A British organization—the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation—received all fertilizers shipped to Egypt and released them to the Egyptian government only with the authorization of the regulators. And the government organization that determined fertilizer allocation for different crops included British authorities as members.^[87] While such authorities saw no need to gracelessly trample the myth of Egyptian sovereignty—Lampson never called for armor to surround the finance ministry—Allied control over the supply of strategic goods gave them significant leverage over arenas deemed of vital importance.

Third, and perhaps most important, trade restrictions gave MESC a stake in the development of local production capacity for items that could no longer be imported. In other words, MESC became an agent in the construction of import substitution industrialization in the Middle East, and its intervention gave a particular cast to the form of ISI. For MESC officials, the move toward ISI raised much deeper issues than those posed by rationing or price controls, interventions that were perceived as flexible and potentially short-term. Tinkering with the organization of industry was a different matter. MESC economists had an intuitive sense that the path on which they set local industrialization would determine future prospects for economic development. To mention again Hunter’s account, he emphasizes the importance MESC officials attached to the long-term effects of their actions:

The struggle for imported supplies was a war problem, and one likely to cease after the war when normal trade could be resumed. But its corollary, the effort to increase local production, at once entered the field of possibly permanent economic improvement; and it was in this field that the work of M.E.S.C. had its chief interest in the future.

Although there was an urgent need for some products which could have been made in the Middle East, a good deal of care had to be taken not to create uneconomic industries which would wither away altogether when lower priced and better quality goods from the industrial West were again freely available. The war and consequent shortages acted almost as a high tariff wall behind which it would have been possible to create a number of enterprises; but the temptation was resisted.^[88]

Despite the reticence Hunter attributes to MESC, it helped launch a number of industrial enterprises in both Syria and Egypt, especially in the fields of mining, chemicals production, and construction supplies. In addition, Syrian manufacturers seized on the sudden absence of foreign competition to ramp up their own production and capture the profits held out to them by closed wartime markets. Their efforts led to a tremendous industrial boom. Indeed, increases in local output made it possible to meet military requirements for many items without imposing hardship on civilians.^[89] Private investment in industry soared. According to Wilmington, “For years afterwards the business community of the region mused about the war years as something akin to a golden age of bustle and confidence.”^[90]

The golden age was not to last. Crucially, and somewhat ironically given industrialists’ enthusiasm for protection, MESC officials helped construct a version of ISI that transformed industrialization into a state project. If private capital drove the wartime expansion of import-substituting sectors—with public investment largely limited to heavy industry and food processing—wartime controls represented the first critical moves toward state appropriation of industrialization in both Egypt and Syria. With MESC support, states established a range of heavy industries and thus helped construct industrial public sectors. Control regimes institutionalized the role of government as the direct manager of industry and created significant financial incentives for them to expand their role in the years after the war. MESC also provided local governments with a discourse that linked economic management to norms of fairness and social justice and gave intervention a powerful element of legitimacy. It is not surprising therefore that the end of the war did not bring about the removal of tariff barriers as Hunter expected. In fact, the sheltering of local economies gave rise to protectionist coalitions of state managers and industrialists who worked together to embed state-managed ISI within the political economies of postwar Egypt and Syria. The lower-priced and better-quality goods (presumably British goods) that Hunter expected to flow into the region after the war did not materialize. Instead, the pattern of industrialization that MESC officials feared was precisely the one they helped to construct: state-dominated forms of import substitution embedded first within nationalist-liberal, and later within populist, strategies of economic development.

Tax Policy and the Limits of Mesc Authority

Among the many changes associated with wartime shifts in the economy of the Middle East was rampant inflation. Spending by Allied armies and expenditures by MESC itself combined with restrictions on trade to produce vast increases in money supply and corresponding increases in local prices. Despite extensive use of price controls and more limited reliance on rationing of scarce goods, the money supply in Syria (in pounds sterling) grew by more than 1,000 percent between August 1939 and June 1945, while local commodity prices jumped by 860 percent in the same period.^[91] For allied authorities, the concern that inflation might generate social instability led them to explore a range of strategies for absorbing excess purchasing power, including tax reform. In this area as in others, MESC officials expressed confidence that reforms would bring lasting benefits to the region, but managing fiscal policies was a lower priority and their efforts lacked the urgency and intensity of their intervention in trade and agriculture. As a result, Middle East authorities exerted less pressures to overcome entrenched local interests in the area of taxation, providing considerably more latitude for local politicians to shape policy outcomes. MESC economists encouraged local politicians to impose considerably higher direct taxes on their populations, but in the face of local resistance they abandoned this tack and shifted to other ways of absorbing purchasing power, such as the sale of gold, a policy that was developed by a MESC economist, R. F. Kahn, who was a colleague of Keynes at Cambridge, and reviewed by Keynes himself in his capacity as a director of the Bank of England.^[92]

For Syrian politicians, the idea of shifting from indirect to direct forms of taxation posed a considerable political dilemma. State revenues were derived almost entirely from indirect taxes, principally customs duties. Syria had no income tax at all until 1942 and then assessed taxes of only 3–4 percent on fixed-wage earners. Agricultural income was largely exempt from taxation. The move to direct taxation would thus alienate virtually every electoral constituency, as well as cut into the prerogatives of the land owners and capitalists who sat in Syria’s cabinet and national assembly. This is not to say that Syrian politicians made no effort to respond to the urgings of MESC economists. In 1944, avoiding policies that targeted the commercial elite, the government attempted to impose direct withholding on the wages of textile workers. Yet even singling out workers proved ineffective. News of the change prompted a strike among mill workers in Aleppo, and the government relented.^[93] By the end of the war, and in the absence of strong Allied pressure, little remained of MESC’s efforts to shift the organization of tax policy in Syria.

In Egypt, the situation was similar. Taxes in Egypt increased more during the war than in neighboring Arab states, but in an oft-cited 1945 address the president of the National Bank of Egypt admitted that “Egypt still remains one of the least taxed countries in the world.”^[94] And the increase in indirect taxes such as customs duties more likely exacerbated rather than checked rising prices. Egyptian officials apparently preferred price-fixing and rationing schemes. As a result, former prime minister Isma‘il Sidqi’s projection, on the eve of the war, of the state’s need for new sources of development revenues went unheeded.^[95] Colonial arrangements (the debt administration and the system of commercial treaties known as the Capitulations) tightly constrained the state’s fiscal powers. Egypt had no income tax until these controls were dismantled in 1937–38. The government imposed four new taxes in January 1939—on movable property, on commercial and industrial profits, on professional earnings, and on salaries and wages. During the war these schedules were adjusted mildly upward and were supplemented by an excess profits tax passed in 1941. Significantly, this emergency levy was never applied to agricultural land rents, though these had soared together with property values.^[96] Nonetheless, the government made up for the loss in revenue from the import decline, and by 1944 direct taxes netted £E 14 million or approximately 30 percent of all taxes and customs duties.^[97]

As in Syria, these wartime arrangements did not outlast the fighting. Firms proved more resourceful than the overtaxed employees of the finance ministry, where reforms designed to close up loopholes in the tax regime and raise rates were enacted after protracted negotiations, in 1949.^[98] In the intervening years, the state reverted to its pattern of relying on import duties, which increased both absolutely and relative to other taxes in the postwar period. Thus, by 1948, direct taxes totaled £E 11.8 million, down from 1944, while customs and excise duties climbed to £E 51 million or 71 percent of all revenues. The share was identical to that of 1939.

Labor and the Indirect Consequences of Mesc Intervention

Despite the close association between Keynesian economics and problems of employment, MESC regulators were virtually silent on the issue of labor policy in the Middle East. In part, this reflected an appreciation of the difference between agrarian and industrialized economies, and in part the perception of Allied regulators that wartime demand would itself provide sufficient employment to avoid serious labor shortages in the region. What stands out about the war period, however, especially for Egypt, were the indirect effects of MESC’s intervention in other areas on how the state managed the regulation of labor. Even without direct forms of intervention, the war caused significant shifts in the relationship between the state and local labor markets.

Labor power represented Egypt’s primary contribution to the war effort. In contrast to the small numbers of citizens absorbed by the Egyptian army, the number of workers employed by the Allied armies in the Cairo, Alexandria, and Canal Zone bases peaked at 210,000 in 1943, and these massive new flows into military construction and service sectors represented the overwhelming share of the growth in the ranks of the wartime urban labor force.^[99] Syrians were similarly recruited for defense works, though the 30,000 mostly unskilled workers employed in the peak year of 1943 did not represent the same order of magnitude as in Egypt, where shortages of skilled and semiskilled labor of all classes were acute.^[100]

For the duration of the war, officials did little more than let the market, that is, wages, govern the allocation of labor resources. At most, and under pressure from newly legalized labor unions and their core constituencies, the state directed firms to pay (nominal) cost-of-living allowances and began to subsidize some basic commodities as hedges against the inflationary spiral of prices and rents.^[101] The real problem for politicians would come once the war ended. With the steep decline in demand for labor, the recent flood of migrants to Cairo and other urban centers would be transformed into a reservoir of unemployed and impoverished city dwellers.^[102] In 1943 the Egyptian government unveiled the country’s first five-year plan, outlining future public outlays for infrastructure and social and industrial construction. A new hydropower station and fertilizer-manufacturing complex anchored the plan, which needed and received the endorsement of the allied economic authorities, not least because both the Roosevelt and Churchill governments recognized the centrality of these industrial schemes to postwar Middle East policy.^[103] The Egyptian government, no less clearly, viewed these and related policies as designs for coping with the postwar unemployment problem.^[104]

The obvious example is the steep rise in tariff levels imposed on top of the protection already provided to the cottonseed oil producers, the distilleries, the giant spinning mills, the canning industry, the sugar monopoly, and other privileged economic actors by the wartime diversion of shipping space and the import control regime put in place by MESC. Despite these war-driven forms of protectionism, the tariff on manufactures rose 50 percent in 1941 and ratcheted up twice more in 1942 and 1943. True, firms and their agents may well have been motivated to shore up their (un)competitive positions in the postwar market, but for politicians these rents were the price for maintaining uncompetitively high employment levels. In archival data from the late 1940s, firms are explicit about the existence of this bargain.^[105] And, by the time of the 1952 revolution, at least some large investors were looking for alternatives.^[106]

Legacies of Allied Regulation

By the end of the 1940s, citizens of Egypt and Syria were subject to political economies that had been profoundly restructured as a result of MESC intervention. Allied regulators had shifted the prewar, liberal trajectory of state-market relations in these countries, and in the Middle East more broadly, onto a new trajectory. Their impact certainly varied, leaving only faint traces in some areas while having tremendous weight and longevity in others. Where the Allies perceived regulation to be critical for success of the war effort, and where local political and economic actors perceived regulation to be in their immediate (but not always long-term) interests, interventionist norms became deeply embedded within domestic political economies. Where the Allies attached a lower priority to economic outcomes, and where local politicians associated regulation with high political costs, wartime innovations were more fleeting in their effects. Yet the overall shift in state-market relations was unmistakable and reached even into areas, such as labor, that were not part of its formal mandate. Above all, in both Egypt and Syria the regulation of markets would come to be seen as a normal and appropriate response to questions of development. For a decade after the war, certain groups of capitalists would struggle to overcome the accelerating move toward statist development strategies. But the normative and institutional legacies of the war had become too deeply consolidated in these states to be forced aside. Within only fifteen years, little was left in either Egypt or Syria of the economic liberalism of the prewar period that capitalists would recall with increasing nostalgia.

Though mediated by the vastly different colonial contexts of Egypt and Syria in the 1940s, wartime economic policies created new institutional arenas within which capitalists, landowners, colonial representatives, and local politicians struggled to secure their interests. These transformations were not in any sense necessarily antagonistic toward capitalists—the merchants, entrepreneurs, industrialists, traders, and others whose activities dominated the economies of both countries before and during the war. Indeed, the rise of wartime regulatory regimes designed to substitute local production for foreign imports and administer the purchase and distribution of essential commodities had widely differing effects on capitalists, strengthening and enriching them in some instances, eroding their power and well-being in others. Capitalists and state institutions alike often benefited considerably, however, from wartime rents: the windfall profits resulting from the supply and maintenance of foreign troops, foreign aid, wartime contracts, and, notably in Syria and Lebanon, levels of inflation that greatly enriched those who controlled the supply of necessary goods.

Capitalists thus fared reasonably well during the years of the war, and in both Syria and Egypt the immediate postwar period was a time of rapid private sector growth. Yet in both countries wartime economic practices helped consolidate notions of the economy as a legitimate object of regulation, and of the state as the necessary agent of economic coordination and management. They valorized the belief that a “national” economy could be directed to achieve distributive justice. They extended “rational” administrative practices into the management of agricultural production and supply—at least in Syria—in ways that disrupted long-standing patterns of agrarian production based on sharecropping relations between landlords and peasants. Moreover, and perhaps most important, these notions and practices, and the institutions through which they were effected did not disappear with the end of the war or the departure of colonial powers. In both Egypt and Syria, wartime regulatory institutions and practices were appropriated by nationalist movements. They were carried over and incorporated into postwar, postindependence processes of state formation and economy building.

Conclusion: Critical Perspectives on the Middle East Supply Centre

This chapter brings together ideas, institutions, and actors to trace the specific routes through which a particular set of developmental norms were transmitted into and institutionalized within a specific set of political economies. This argument, which locates one important force behind Middle East state and market formation at the intersection of externally imposed wartime economic regulations and the domestic political contexts of the region, has implications for a range of contemporary debates concerning the relationship between state and market in late-developing states, and the relationship between domestic and international influences shaping patterns of state and market formation. In particular, the chapter challenges revisionist explanations of the political economy of state formation in the Middle East, arguing that postcolonial conflicts between statist and market-oriented visions of economic development—conflicts that resulted in the marginalization of private sectors in our two cases, Egypt and Syria—cannot adequately be understood without reference to war-related transformations that reshaped the institutional arena within which struggles between private capitalists and state actors were played out. The state-led and import-substituting economic development strategies that became dominant in Syria and Egypt after World War II, as in much of the developing world, did not reflect simply the inability or unwillingness of local capitalists to shoulder the burdens of development.^[107] Nor do they indicate a lack of state capacity to create and manage markets.^[108] Rather, they can be seen as a product, at least in part, of three interrelated aspects of the experience of World War II in the Middle East: (1) wartime efforts of Allied powers to manage and organize the local economies of Egypt and Syria in keeping with their sense of military priorities—and in keeping with a set of administrative preferences influenced by the increasing acceptance of Keynesian interventionist strategies; (2) the negotiations between Allied officials and local leaders over how to implement these efforts; and (3) the transformation in the balance of power between state actors and local capitalists produced by the policies that resulted from this process of bargaining.

Inevitably, however, there are gaps in detailing the causal links that illuminate the relationships at the core of this study. Despite access to diplomatic archives and to the small secondary literature about the work of MESC, we are aware that much remains hidden from view. A more fine-tuned judgment about MESC and its role is difficult, given how little we actually know about the history of specific economic institutions in the Middle East and of specific policy making arenas, episodes, and outcomes. British officials at the time understandably celebrated rather than looked critically at their wartime statist experiment, and found it convenient to explain most economic problems as the result of local administrative deficiencies, tradition-bound peasants, and local political corruption. Nonetheless, Vitalis has previously documented incidents of collusion between British officials and Egyptian capitalists in subverting export controls and rationing rules.^[109] Clearly, paeans to the efficiency of Anglo-Egyptian planning need systematic review, as do the earnest testimonies in the British Parliament that the massive allied operation imposed no particular burden on the Egyptian populace. As Milward proposes, the massive influx of soldiers and civilians strained the resources of Middle Eastern countries “to the utmost,” and if Egypt was “relatively well off” in the war, it was despite the Allied administration, which he says contributed to famine in India in 1943.^[110]

We know that London viewed MESC as vital to the refashioning of neocolonial arrangements in Egypt and the Levant, which led the U.S. government in turn to oppose plans to reconfigure MESC as a joint Anglo-American regional development agency.^[111] Assistant Secretary of State Acheson and other top officials, such as Roosevelt’s confidant Patrick Hurley and the senior U.S. representative to MESC James M. Landis, prevailed in the policy debate, backed by the findings of the business leaders and government officials who comprised the special Culbertson economic mission to the Middle East.^[112] This opposition was framed in terms of continuing statist economic structures at the behest of Great Powers. The irony is, of course, that the statist currents grew stronger in the first postwar decade, aided by the U.S. Embassy, which was pressing in the late 1940s for more comprehensive forms of planning; U.S. technicians, who were designing land reform schemes in Egypt in 1951–52; U.S. funding ($40 million by 1954); and the U.S. consulting firms who were paid to design the Nagib-Nasser regime’s import substitution industrialization program.^[113]

In reality, U.S. officials were among the most fervent early disciples of import substitution industrialization, and were the conduits to Egypt and the rest of the Middle East region for ideas, routines, and rationales that were widely adapted in the decade following the war’s end. As we have seen, specific policies constructed in an ad hoc fashion to cope with the exigencies of conflict came to serve as organizational templates. Postwar administrators, suddenly more easily able to see why and how it was possible, for instance, to substitute for the Alexandria Cotton Futures Market or to distribute agricultural inputs, “reinstalled” these wartime programs. In related fashion, to the extent that there were cadres who were already inspired by Turkish, Soviet, or U.S. alternatives to the “liberal” state that had become naturalized over the previous half century, the war opened up a significant political space for these new statist currents.

In part, our arguments challenging the purely domestic and “nationalist” origins of statism in the Middle East derive from a problematic historiography in which statism is seen to emerge “first” in places such as Latin America and Turkey, and only much later, in the 1960s and beyond, in Egypt, Africa, and Asia. This narrative, a product of post-1968 intellectual trends, is intent on constructing ISI as an act of resistance within the global order and, significantly, in defiance of alleged U.S. preferences for unregulated markets. But this reading is called into question by, for instance, archival accounts of postwar U.S. initiatives in the Philippines and elsewhere, as well as a new wave of economic histories of the Southern Cone that trace the multifaceted and contingent origins of the statist programs and currents of the 1940s to the 1960s.^[114] Far from emerging against U.S. interests, scores of countries adapted ISI projects under the guidance of the U.S. state. In India, where “socialist” currents allegedly had envisioned and pressed for such reforms before the war, nonetheless, following the allied intervention, these policies took on a distinctly new cast. In Turkey, where the Soviet project was particularly influential, and which in turn influenced particular Indian intellectuals, Americans had a remarkable influence in reconfiguring these policies, as is now widely recognized.

The allied experiment in the Middle East during World War II may thus be a critical link in a much broader account of global shifts in economic arrangements. As Wilmington reminds us, MESC influenced the European experiment in World War II while other of its cadres went on to administer UN development projects and the regional commissions such as Economic Commission for Latin America (1949) that proved so critical to ISI in Latin America. The unfortunate irony is that this legacy has somehow been lost, and the countries of the Middle East are now more likely to be portrayed as places where the vestiges of colonialism first had to be obliterated before authorities there could experiment with public planning, industrial development, and economic regulation.

Notes

This essay is in every sense a joint venture, and the order of the names is the result of a coin toss. Heydemann thanks Joel Migdal, Michael Barnett, and David Waldner for critical readings of earlier drafts of this article, as well as Columbia University for a grant that funded travel to archives in the United Kingdom. Vitalis thanks Philip Khoury for originally supporting the research he presents in this essay and Ellis Goldberg for countless conversations that shaped these ideas. Both of us are grateful to our coparticipants at the November 1994 SSRC workshop, “War as a Source of State and Social Transformation in the Near and Middle East,” and to the Ford Foundation for funding it.