The business of property : levantine joint-stock companies, land, law, and capitalist development around the Mediterranean, 1850-1925
Keywords: History.

The Business of Property: Levantine Joint-stock Companies, Land, Law, and Capitalist Development Around the Mediterranean 1850-1925 is framed by two questions: First, how did land in the Levant become commodified? Second, how was this process of commodification -- with its related impetuses and impacts -- related to the development of capitalism around the Mediterranean basin in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries? Drawing on archival research I conducted in Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine/Israel, France, and Britain in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew, French, German, and English, and drawing on private company archives, I argue that prominent Beiruti families who formed joint-stock companies in the mid-nineteenth century -- the Sursuqs, Bustruses, Tuenis, Debbas, Khuris, Najjars, and Tabets -- relied on forms of sharecropping rooted in the Ottoman social formation as the most efficient techniques for local capital accumulation in the labor-scarce region of the Levant. It was the mutual sharing of these techniques and competition across the Mediterranean basin that gave nineteenth-century capitalism in the region its shape. Only during the First World War, as a result of dire food shortages and the new Levantine companies' ability to make super profits off grain speculation with Ottoman government support, did the firms' land tenure arrangements in parts of Greater Syria and Palestine begin to take on a commodified form, making them acceptable to European buyers. Indeed, the crisis of World War I concretized processes that were already underway in the Levant from the mid-nineteenth century and transformed the shape of capitalism globally. After the war, the British and French mandate governments formalized these wartime-changes, permitting private land sales to European groups and making possible the largest land sales in Palestine between the Levantine companies and the main Zionist purchasing agent, the Jewish National Fund. In favor of investigating the global through specific local connections, this dissertation focuses primarily on land and labor in the region of the Levant, and particularly Palestine. In so doing, it eschews the common Arab peasant verses Zionist framework in favor of a focus on a broader historical narrative of Palestine within the history of capitalist development around the Mediterranean. Specifically, I argue that land sales and disputes between early Zionists and Arab peasants represented an extreme outcome of a specific and ongoing processes of primitive accumulation -- the dispossession of the peasantry from the means of production for capitalist gains. The Levantine company records provide a basis to argue that this process was different from the private property or freehold verses usufruct paradigms that scholars of land and labor in Palestine have previously employed to describe this region. Moreover, this dissertation elucidates that similar processes were underway elsewhere in the Levant on other Beiruti-owned lands connected to European centers of capital. Nevertheless, the logic of settler-colonialism in this period of rapid economic and social change -- dedicated to the goal of establishing exclusive property rights over land and resources -- shaped labor-capital relations and property ownership approximating freehold in Palestine. Prior to the First World War, Ottoman legal institutions supported Levantine families' widows and local peasants who claimed continued access rights to land and its products in the region. After the war, however, Zionist groups in conjunction with Levantine sellers were able to enforce a form of private ownership of landed property under a single owner. These forms continued to be locally distinct and globally recognizable. They accompanied epistemic and physical violence and were largely incomplete.