In the late 19th and early 20th century, tobacco exports from the Ottoman Empire rapidly increased. Thousands of workers began to earn their livelihoods in warehouses, sorting and baling tobacco leaves according to their qualities. Ottoman towns where tobacco warehouses were concentrated soon became the sites of frequent labor protests. This article analyzes strikes that broke out in two such towns, İskeçe (Xanthi) and Kavala, in 1904 and 1905. It underlines the active role of the Ottoman government in the settlement of these strikes. It also shows that mobilized tobacco workers devised effective protest tactics and often secured a say in key decisions, such as when and under what conditions the warehouses operated. However, in both towns, labor activism was characterized by fragmentation as well as unity. The workers who took to the streets did not equally share the burdens and benefits of their collective actions. That inequality, the article argues, was rooted in gendered power relations, intercommunal rivalries, and other social tensions among the workers.

Through ethnographic and archival research conducted in Istanbul and Izmir, this article examines the dynamics and regulation of charitable giving in contemporary Turkey. The article is based on interviews I conducted with the volunteers, employees, and aid recipients of three civil society organizations that rely on charitable giving to fund their projects, which center on helping the poor and providing aid during and after wars and other disasters. I document how religious ideals of anonymous charitable giving for the sake of giving, without expectation of return, are closely intertwined with anxiety over finding a worthy charitable association and recipient. In doing so, I focus on vakıf as both a concept and a practice that gives meaning to charitable giving in Turkey. The increasing desire to document, define, and categorize the deserving poor as a way to justify the intent to give and to receive goes against the anonymity and immediacy of giving, thus riddling intent with ethical contradictions. I argue that attention needs to be paid to the intent, practice, and various forms of giving, and not just to the effects and outcomes of charity.

The Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline), which extended from Dhahran in Saudi Arabia to Zahrani in Lebanon and operated from 1950 to 1982, was haunted by the Arab–Israeli conflict throughout the years of its operation. The route of the pipeline—which traversed Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—was chosen so as to circumvent Palestine/Israel. However, following the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights in the 1967 war, Israel became an active participant in this project, with the full consent of the transit states and Egypt. This article uses Tapline as a means to analyze the interconnected world facilitated by oil pipelines, which defies common wisdom about state sovereignty or the function of interstate boundaries. In addition, Tapline demonstrates how this interconnected network created possibilities for Arab–Israeli cooperation that might have seemed inconceivable initially, given the hostile dynamics of the conflict.

This article explores the experience of the Great War in Syria and Lebanon with a specific focus on the famine that, combined with other wartime calamities, decimated the civilian population. Using food as its primary register, it looks at a wide range of largely untapped Syrian and Lebanese poems, zajal, plays, novels, memoirs, and histories written over the course of the 20th century, in order to illuminate the experiential dimensions of the civilians’ war and to delineate some of the discourses that structured it. More specifically, it argues that the wartime famine in Syria and Lebanon gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that is deeply informative about the ruptured world of the civilians’ war.

The article is a case study of work organization at the Services d'Egypte of the Suez Canal Company from the outbreak of World War II to the company's nationalization in 1956. In this multinational and multicultural workplace, organizational hierarchies and division of labor were traditionally defined according to “national” identities, while maintaining a strict segregation between européens and indigènes, to use the company's terminology. Starting in the 1930s, the company faced new measures of economic nationalism imposed by the Egyptian government, including required quotas of Egyptian personnel. These measures progressively redefined the political boundaries of the company's action in the management of its workforce. Using unpublished archival documents from the company's personnel files, this article analyzes the processes of feminization and Egyptianization of the company's office workers during World War II and the 1950s. The process was driven by a precise organizational strategy, based on both “racial” and “gender” criteria, which aimed to redefine the company's internal hierarchies and to keep management and decision making in the hands of the “Europeans,” while complying with the terms of the conventions of 1937 and 1949 that regulated the relationship between the company and the Egyptian government.

World War I in the Ottoman Empire was a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scale. By 1916 in the Greater Syrian provinces, men, women, and children were dying en masse of a war-induced famine so devastating that popular memory still names this war ḥarb al-majāʿa (the war of famine). Despite the civilian catastrophe, people's experiences on the Ottoman home front have been only marginally explored in the scholarship. Focusing on the city of Beirut, this article highlights the centrality of food provisioning in the competition for political legitimacy in the provincial capital. Through a detailed analysis of how the Beirut municipality was represented in the city's daily newspaper al-Ittihad al-ʿUthmani, I argue that for local reform-minded notables and intellectuals the war presented an opportunity to prove, both to the local population and to the Ottoman state, that issues related to the internal security and well-being of the Beirut province generally and the city specifically could be dealt with locally through existing governing bodies. The article thus traces the fierce political games played around the issue of food by various actors seeking to win the hearts of Beirutis through their stomachs.

This article reads Bashar al-Asad's rule through the prism of social activism and, in particular, through the field of charities. The sociopolitical transformations Syria experienced between 2000 and 2010—the shift in state–society relations, the opening of the civic arena, and economic liberalization—are explored through the activities of charitable associations, including their interactions with other Syrian actors, and we argue that they reflect the unraveling of the old social contract. The Syrian leadership outsourced important state welfare functions to charities while also creating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) under its own control and supporting developmental NGOs loyal to the regime. These NGOs differed from the existing charities in terms of their social base, financial backgrounds, motivations, modes of institutionalization, and public relations strategies, and enabled the authoritarian regime to pursue a new strategy of divide-and-rule politics. At the same time, subcontracting poor-relief measures to charities eroded the regime's political legitimacy and helped sow the seeds of the 2011 uprising.

This article revisits the official culture of the early khedivate through a microhistory of the first modern Egyptian theater in Arabic. Based on archival research, it aims at a recalibration of recent scholarship by showing khedivial culture as a complex framework of competing patriotisms. It analyzes the discourse about theater in the Arabic press, including the journalist Muhammad Unsi's call for performances in Arabic in 1870. It shows that the realization of this idea was the theater group led by James Sanua between 1871 and 1872, which also performed ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Misri's tragedy. But the troupe was not an expression of subversive nationalism, as has been claimed by scholars. My historical reconstruction and my analysis of the content of Sanua's comedies show loyalism toward the Khedive Ismail. Yet his form of contemporary satire was incompatible with elite cultural patriotism, which employed historicization as its dominant technique. This revision throws new light on a crucial moment of social change in the history of modern Egypt, when the ruler was expected to preside over the plural cultural bodies of the nation.

During the Balkan Wars (1912–13), the mobilization of the home front became significant for the belligerent states, which initiated propaganda activities demonizing their enemies and galvanizing the emotions of their publics. This paper explores one type of such mobilization efforts from above, atrocity propaganda, through which states sought to invoke hatred and mobilize public support for war by focusing on the atrocities (mezalim) that their coreligionists had suffered at the hands of enemies. Although the term “atrocity propaganda” has been used exclusively in the context of World War I in the historiography, the practice it describes was effectively utilized during the earlier Balkan Wars. In the Ottoman Empire, both state and civil initiatives played crucial roles in the making of atrocity propaganda, which was disseminated through intense coverage in the Turkish-language press. The imagery it employed shifted with the onset of the wars, becoming increasingly shocking. Atrocity propaganda contributed to the well-known radicalization of nationalism in the late Ottoman Empire.

Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important historiographical moment, in which the major categories, historical narratives, and key assumptions within the field are undergoing radical changes. A cluster of books and articles written by scholars trained in history, anthropology, and area studies departments, and published in Middle East studies rather than Jewish studies book series and journals, suggests that the study of Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the American academy is undergoing a change which might be termed “the Middle Eastern turn.” For such scholars, the history of Jews in Muslim lands, as modern subjects and citizens, is typified by a multiplicity of categories related to their identities—Ottoman, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, and local-patriotic—which they explore by looking at the political organizations and social and cultural institutions that enabled the integration of modern Jews into new imperial and national frameworks. This new scholarly wave is transnational, as it illustrates the importance of Jewish networks and Jewish languages in the Middle East, and likewise seeks to draw comparisons between Jews and other transregional and religious minorities, such as Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians. It is interdisciplinary, as it attempts to incorporate the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Finally, it is postcolonial, in its critiques of national elites, national narratives, and nationalist histories. These new accounts uncover how processes which affected the entire Middle East, like Ottoman and Egyptian reform politics and the rise of nation-states, shaped modern Jewish lives.

The struggle against gender-based violence in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region has witnessed some significant achievements since the late 1990s. A subject long excluded from public discourse in the region, it has now moved increasingly into the mainstream, compelling the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to take legal and practical measures against such practices as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and domestic violence. This article traces the sources of these shifts in the KRG's stance, looking especially at the role of transnational women's rights networks in the region. It highlights these networks’ successful strategy of binding their cause to the KRG's endeavor to legitimize and consolidate its contested sovereignty over the Kurdistan Region. In doing so, the paper addresses an underexplored subject in the literature on women's rights campaigns in the Kurdistan Region and contributes to the study of transnational advocacy as a source of normative change.

This paper focuses on a long-running and understudied Egyptian economic institution, the beer industry. While the presence of a well-developed beer industry in a predominantly Muslim country is noteworthy in itself, it is the consistent profitability of this industry despite the vicissitudes of Egypt's economic and political development that have made it truly remarkable. Relying heavily on archival material, including documents preserved in Cairo's Dar al-Wathaʾiq (Egyptian National Archives), this paper tracks the development of the beer industry in Egypt from 1897, when Belgian entrepreneurs started the Pyramid and Crown breweries, to the 1960s, when the Egyptian government nationalized the two companies. This analysis uses the history of the beer company to map larger social and economic trends in the colonial and semicolonial Egyptian economy (1882–1963) and to further problematize the foreign/Egyptian dichotomy that shapes discussions of it.

In the spring of 1902, Miryam bint Lalu Partush appealed to military representatives in Ghardaïa, in the Mzab Valley (a valley of five fortified oasis cities in the northern Algerian Sahara, six hundred kilometers south of Algiers), for the paperwork that would allow her to undertake a six-month pilgrimage to Jerusalem with her husband, the wealthy merchant Musa (Moshe) bin Ibrahim Partush. Miryam Partush was unusual in possessing the means for such a rare, costly voyage; but notwithstanding her class, Partush's legal status was typical of most Muslims and southern Algerian Jews in Algeria. She was not a citizen, nor did she hold official papers of any kind. When Miryam Partush appealed to the military authorities in Ghardaïa, then, she was appealing for many things: for the right to leave her native valley and travel to the port of Algiers; for the papers that would allow her to cross colonial boundaries; and for the documentation that would register her liminal legal identity. Authorizing her travel, Algeria's governor-general named Partush a “non-naturalized Jew from the Mzab.” Thus did Partush embark on her six-month journey with a negative legal identity: this Jewish woman was definable, in the eyes of the law, only by what she did not possess.

These are critical times for democratic politics from Morocco to Iran, as heterogeneous popular movements for greater representation and social justice increasingly challenge established authorities. It is not surprising that these struggles have laid claim to symbolic urban places in the process of claiming their collective political demands. Politics is not purely discursive or institutional; it always has material and spatial dimensions, which for democratic politics is manifested through public space. For all the recent enthusiasm about the emancipating possibilities of the digital media, the fact remains that Tahrir Square (Cairo), Gezi Park (Istanbul), Revolution Street (Tehran), and Pearl Roundabout (Manama) are not virtual locations on the Internet.

In scholarship on the Middle East, as on other regions of the world, the sort of social history that climaxed from the 1960s through the 1980s, and in Middle East history through the 1990s—that is, studies of categories such as “class” or “peasant”—has been declining for some time. The cultural history that replaced social history has peaked, too. In the 21st century, the trend, set by non-Middle East historians, has been to combine an updated social-historical focus on structure and groups with a cultural–historical focus on meaning making. Defining society against culture and policing their boundaries is out. In is picking a theme—consumption or travel, say—then studying it from distinct yet linked social and cultural or political/economic angles. This trend has spawned new journals like Cultural and Social History, established in 2004, and has been debated in established journals and memoirs by leading historians of the United States and Europe.

For much of the modern era the Middle East has been beset by war. From imperial intervention to regional struggle, the reach of war has left few untouched. The region's geography, the rise and fall of its most powerful institutions, and the pressing challenges of daily life remain entangled with war and its legacies. Middle Eastern wars are most often explained in terms of struggles for land and other resources, autocratic machinations, and clashes over identity and religion. All of these are true. But war is never the same everywhere. In important ways these broad frameworks hollow out the complexity and scale of war, and why it matters so much. What else is there to say about “war”? Rather than the political forces that drive it, the essays here are interested in and suggestive of the productive power of war, the ways it has transcended the battlefield and become normalized socially, politically, and environmentally. In particular, the contributors reflect on the role of experts, technical expertise, and the science of war in the making of new social, political-economic, and cultural relations across the region in the century following the start of World War I.

Some fifteen years ago, the Israel Museum exhibition “To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel” featured a photograph by the Israeli artist Meir Gal entitled “Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest.” At the center of the photograph was Gal, holding the nine pages that dealt with the history of Jews in the Middle East in a textbook of Jewish history used in Israel's education system. As Gal viscerally argued, “these books helped establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering.” More damningly, he wrote that “the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their origins, and replaced their Jewish-Arab identity with a new Israeli identity based on European ideals as well as hatred of the Arab world.”

Reflecting on the state of Ottoman social history poses a paradox. On the one hand, it is impossible not to appreciate the great strides accomplished over the past three decades. Earlier approaches have been challenged, topics that were previously untouched or unimagined have been studied, and the foundations of a meaningful dialogue with historiographies of other parts of the world have been established. On the other hand, the theoretical sophistication and methodological debates of Ottoman social history still look pale compared to European and other non-Western historiographies in the same period.

In 1915, soon after Egypt's entry into World War I, the British War Office sent a medical mission to Egypt to investigate the state of bilharzia infection in the country. Bilharzia, also known as schistosomiasis, ran rife among agricultural cultivators in Egypt during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The entry of British-occupied Egypt into the war, and its emergence as a battle theater, heightened fears within the British government that its soldiers would fall prey to the same ailments that plagued Egypt's population.

Designers and architects argue that interaction in public spaces is the product of relations between physical, cultural, social, and aesthetic components. As an art historian, my interest in and understanding of the production of public space is necessarily linked to its visual construction and to public art in particular. Urban planners have always included art in public spaces as a means of forming relationships between the people and the space. Governments have similarly understood the political significance of public space and its power to make meaning and have commissioned art accordingly. This essay reflects on the role of aesthetics and public art in the production and transformation of the modern public space in the Arab world by considering two examples from Cairo and Baghdad.