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Men of Capital examines British-ruled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s through a focus on economy. In a departure from the expected histories of Palestine, this book illuminates dynamic class constructions that aimed to shape a pan-Arab utopia in terms of free trade, profit accumulation, and private property. And in so doing, it positions Palestine and Palestinians in the larger world of Arab thought and social life, moving attention away from the limiting debates of Zionist–Palestinian conflict.
Reading Palestinian business periodicals, records, and correspondence, Sherene Seikaly reveals how capital accumulation was central to the conception of the ideal "social man." Here we meet a diverse set of characters—the man of capital, the frugal wife, the law-abiding Bedouin, the unemployed youth, and the abundant farmer—in new spaces like the black market, cafes and cinemas, and the idyllic Arab home. Seikaly also traces how British colonial institutions and policies regulated wartime austerity regimes, mapping the shortages of basic goods—such as the vegetable crisis of 1940—to the broader material disparities among Palestinians and European Jews. Ultimately, she shows that the economic is as central to social management as the political, and that an exclusive focus on national claims and conflicts hides the more complex changes of social life in Palestine.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804796729 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Men of Capital
Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
By Sherene Seikaly
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9672-9
CHAPTER 1
Men of Capital
Making Money, Making Nation
IN THE MID-1930s IN PALESTINE, a group of elites who defined themselves as "men of capital" shaped economics as a body of knowledge. Shut out of the institutions that defined economy as a science of markets, they formulated economy as a science of the self. They sought to propagate what they understood as social progress, shape new notions of class and status, and guard their interests. Meanwhile, during this very period, the rebels of Palestine realized horizontal solidarities and achieved considerable gains in challenging British colonial rule, Zionist settlement, and Palestinian social hierarchy. In the midst of social and political upheaval, "men of capital" took part in a broader Arab intellectual and cultural project of awakening, the nahda, to proselytize the ideal economic subject.
The trajectories of these men challenge the conventional depiction of pre-1948 Palestinian social life as defined by ineffectual and factionalized notables, an increasingly disenfranchised peasantry, and an active but small group of workers. Elite efforts to shape the saving and spending patterns of "social man" and his relationship to what they called the "social body" [al-hay'a al-ijtima'iyya] reveal formative ideas about the individual and his and her relationship to economy, nation, and the colonial state. These men's stories and projects provide a biography of economy, which challenges some longstanding assumptions. Conventional and even revisionist scholarship continues to present elites as a group of notables whose ways of seeing the world were ineffective and out of date. However, these men were making money and nation in new ways. They were not all landowners; there were bankers, accountants, commercial businessmen, and to a lesser extent industrialists. Economics as a body of knowledge and economy as a science of the self were central to their visions and projects. These men located their ideas on capital accumulation and its relationship to national economy in a broader Arab project. In doing so, they challenge the temporal and conceptual boundaries of Arab liberal thought.
In his preface to the 1983 reissue of Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Albert Hourani defined liberal as the changes of a new world order that sprang from technical and industrial revolutions during the two hundred years his seminal work covered. This order expressed itself in "the growth of a European trade of a new kind [and] the consequent changes in production and consumption." However, he argued, there were few precise ideas about social reform and economic development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arab thinkers assumed that social and economic change "could and should wait until after the attainment of independence." Few were aware of the problems of "maintaining standards of administration" and "defining the frontiers between private enterprise and State control." It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the new nationalism defined welfare not "in terms of individual freedom, but rather economic development, a rise in general living standards and the provision of social services." Mark LeVine echoes these conclusions when he explains that under British rule Palestinians "did not think in individualistic, capitalist terms, they were not concerned with maximizing their individual income." Thus, for several generations historians have accepted the claim that economic thought was static.
However, neither economic thought nor the Arab liberal project was as linear or as singular as it appears in these accounts. Scholars have gone far in pluralizing the nahda as a heterogeneous phenomenon that transcended religious, ethnic, and social categories. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, in particular, has challenged historiographic conceptions of the late nineteenth century as the antechamber of nationalism in Syria and Egypt. She reveals the period before 1914 as rich in the articulation and dissemination of socialist and anarchist principles. Khuri-Makdisi has argued that Middle East historians have deradicalized authors by interpreting them as promoters of free market and liberal economic thought. Yet despite this claim, scholars have not explored the complexities and trajectories of economic thought as a formative component of the nahda. The linking of vitality and economy as well as concerns with economic growth and its relationship to general welfare, government intervention, and private enterprise have an important and overlooked history. Palestinian articulations that tied profit to progress while reifying their social power are an entry point into this history.
Alternates
In the mid-1930s just as international recession spread and Palestinian social and political discontent was progressing into a guerilla war against colonial power, a group of men in Jaffa began publishing the periodical Al-Iqtisadiyyat al-'arabiyya (The Arab Economic Journal, in its editors' translation). The editors assured their readers of "a complete economic arrival." As late as 1936, in the midst of global depression and in the very moment of social upheaval in Palestine, it was possible for this group of elites to envision the future in overwhelmingly optimistic terms. As largely urban-based small industrialists, merchants, bankers, and professionals, they were shielded — like others in the colonial world, where urban small industry saw a boom in this decade — from the depths of rural poverty, which also gave rise to new ideas and movements.
Palestine was an active site for these new ideas and movements. Scholars have convincingly evidenced that the Great Revolt of 1936 to 1939 was not a historical rupture but a culmination of radical mobilizing that sought to dislodge the failed politics of notable elites. Charles Anderson has rigorously shown how the rise of workers' syndicates, youth societies, unions, and village and migrant associations in the late 1920s and the early 1930s expressed a new mode of mass politics. Building on the work of Ted Swedenburg and Ghassan Kanafani, he challenges "the effendi thesis," the historiographic conviction of a rigid Palestinian social hierarchy in which only elites had agency. Bringing in radical social forces is crucial to destabilizing this thesis; but another as yet untouched assumption is that elites were unchanging. Engaging the innovations and strategies of these elites reveals the politics — not of revolution, but of men of capital.
The men in Iqtisadiyyat complicate our understandings of the constituencies and projects of Palestinian elites. New modes of politics challenged and inspired these commercial elites. There were common threads that crossed radical and elite divides, most notably the definition of "the political." For example, in the wake of rising national tensions culminating in competing religious claims on the Wailing Wall/al-Buraq in 1929, youth radicals organized a conference of Arab students in Jaffa. They defined their work as "nonpolitical," in part to receive approval as a registered society but also to distance themselves from factional rivalries.
Men of capital in Iqtisadiyyat made a similar move for altogether different reasons. They defined their journal as "an open space for serious research," which would provide "men of the nation" with the tools to participate in an "economic nahda." Iqtisadiyyat, the editors explained, was a unique intervention in a landscape of political division and party factionalism. The editors presented their project as distinct from, if not superior to, the work of "men of politics." They did this neither to effect radical change nor to cling to old privileges. Rather, they sought to shape economics as a neutral and scientific realm of nation building, to define class and status in new ways, and to safeguard their own power. Iqtisadiyyat expressed the interests of an alternate group of "intellectuals, men of science, art, education, capital, and works."
Who were these alternate "men of the nation"? The moving force behind Iqtisadiyyat was Fu'ad Saba, the first Palestinian licensed as an auditor under the British Mandate. Saba received a bachelor's degree in commerce at the American University of Beirut. The son of an Anglican pastor, he was a self-made man who established a highly successful team of accountants, Saba and Company, in 1920. He was also the main architect of the Palestinian National Fund, which was established in 1930 and sought primarily to purchase lands. In June 1936, Saba was appointed secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the group of cross-factional elite figures who sought to contain and control the Revolt's potential. Saba and his colleagues challenge a simplified portrayal of Palestinian social life and the ongoing dismissal of businessmen as self-evidently colonial collaborators.
The numbers we have for the Mandate period reflect the consolidation of Arab and Jew as mutually exclusive categories. Economic calculations intend to make indices and process legible. Yet, in this case, they rendered thousands of Sephardi, Maghrebi, and Yemeni Jews in Palestine invisible. As Michelle Campos has succinctly put it, the separation in Palestine between Jew and Arab was a result of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict, not its cause. This separation shaped the stories we tell about British-ruled Palestine, as well as the very tools we have to tell them.
With these qualifications in mind, we can identify the period just before World War I as a time when a nascent commercial class separate from the landed elite had begun coalescing in Palestine. In line with broader late Ottoman trends, new opportunities in banks, trade bureaus, shipping companies, printing works, customs posts, and commercial agencies expanded the small but important group of shopowners, distributors, and retailers as well as professionals such as teachers, journalists, lawyers, and civil servants. A decade before the war, the proliferation of Arabic dailies like Filastin and Al-Karmil were crucial sites of intellectual production and political expression for these constituencies. By 1914, there was already a diverse range of local industries, including flour milling, soap making, weaving, pipe making, and metal shops. The post–World War I period featured an intensification of this dynamic. Between 1918 and 1927, Arabs and Jews established 2,269 commercial and manufacturing enterprises. Sixty percent of these enterprises were Arab owned.
By the 1930s, even as economic separatism began to become entrenched as a result of the Zionist conquest of land and labor, Palestine was nevertheless experiencing a heavy period of economic growth. The combination of cheap labor and surplus capital meant the expansion of a trade and industrial class of importers, exporters, wholesalers, brokers, and small manufacturers. Palestinian capital investment in this period reached 2 million pounds, mostly in tobacco, cardboard, soap and milling factories, and a growing textile industry.
During World War II, trading and industrial ventures further expanded. In 1939, there were 339 Arab industrial establishments employing 4,117 people. The number of Arab industrial establishments jumped in 1943 to 1,558 employing 8,804 people. These numbers are small in comparison to the rapid growth of Jewish manufacturing during the Mandate, which went from generating 50 percent of Palestine's output in the 1920s, to 60 percent in the early 1930s, reaching 80 percent during wartime-induced industrialization. The growth of Jewish industry did not, however, necessitate Palestinian economic stagnancy.
Indeed, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry estimated that Palestinian ownership of capital (liquid assets, rural land, industrial capital, commercial stocks and commodities, motor vehicles, agricultural buildings, tools and livestock) totaled 132.6 million pounds. Palestinians held considerable cash in the two Arab banks, which expanded faster in this period than any other financial institution in Palestine at the time. Between the years of 1939 and 1946, deposits and credits grew by a factor of twenty-six in the Arab Bank and fourteenfold in the Arab National Bank. In 1941, the total capital in both banks was 532,215 Palestinian pounds. By 1945 that number rose to seven million.
Corporate forms of organization and limited companies witnessed a rapid growth after World War II, resulting in the establishment of businesses such as Middle East Airlines in 1943 and the Arabia Insurance Company in 1944. Both firms reopened in Beirut after 1948. Their shareholders would rapidly become some of the wealthiest Palestinians in the world. As Palestine fell, these men would rush to guard their wealth. Some would transfer funds to neighboring branches. Saba and Company had established offices in Amman, Damascus, and Beirut before 1948. Others, like Abdul Hamid Shoman, who founded the Arab Bank in 1930, conducted daring exploits to smuggle documents, safe deposit boxes, cash, and bank accounts across rapidly shifting borders. In the 1950s and 1960s, men like Saba, Shoman, Yusif Baydas, and Abdel Muhsin al-Qattan led some of the largest and most successful insurance, banking, and contracting ventures in the Middle East. These included firms such as Arabia Insurance, the Arab Bank, Intra Bank, the Contract and Trading Company, the Commercial Building Company, and the Al-Mashriq Financial Investment Company. The stories of these businessmen usually begin after 1948. However, they began amassing their wealth decades earlier. On the pages of Iqtisadiyyat, we can trace how they shaped economics as an object of knowledge and economy as a means of social reform.
Saba and his colleagues combined a commitment to free enterprise and private property with support for armed struggle and guerilla warfare. This pattern would survive the defeat of 1948 and continue long after into the 1950s and 1960s. Recounting these businessmen's relationship to the Great Revolt and to armed resistance more broadly complicates how businessmen, or sometimes even more simplistically Christian merchants, serve as synonyms for collaborators. Certainly, in the mid-1930s many businessmen packed up their wares and temporarily relocated until the "troubles" died down. And in Haifa, Christian businessmen such as Imil Butaji (Emile Boutagy) and Jad Suidan actively opposed the men they called the "bandits" of the Revolt.
But we should be careful not to abide too strictly to these representations that elide merchant, Christian, and collaborator. Saba is a case in point. He was an Anglican, a businessman, and funder of the rebels. Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim is another example. A Muslim, a close comrade of the populist Islamist radical 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam and the editor of the Islamist-leaning Yarmouk newspaper, Ibrahim led the National Committee in Haifa during the Great Revolt, was a founding member of the pan-Arabist Istiqlal Party, and positioned himself as a dissident, a radical nationalist, and a man of capital. Lest we fall into the equally dangerous trap of romanticizing these figures as heroic nationalists, we should be clear that both Saba and Ibrahim were committed to redefining and sustaining their class project. To engage these men's histories and critique the formative legacies on economy, needs, and management that they left behind, it is necessary to move beyond indictment and vindication.
An Organ of Change
Defining itself as the "organ" [lisan hal] not of a party but of the alternative group, Iqtisadiyyat first hit the presses in 1935. It went from being a bimonthly publication in its first year to a weekly in the remaining two years that it ran. The editorial team consisted of Saba and his colleagues 'Adil Jabr and Tawfiq Farah. Both men self-identified as economists [iqtisadyyin]. The journal came to a halt in 1937 when the British colonial government exiled Saba to the Seychelles for his support of the Revolt.
Iqtisadiyyat was one component of a longer and broader phenomenon of cultural ferment and intellectual production in the Arab world. From the late nineteenth century on, journals, books, and newspapers as well as printing shops, publishing companies, bookstores, literary societies, and reading rooms marked the cultural life of Beirut and Cairo. The excitement and energy of the nahda was not limited to these two centers, but included Aleppo, Alexandria, Damascus, Tripoli, Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and beyond.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Men of Capital by Sherene Seikaly. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Politics of Basic Needs chapter abstractThis chapter introduces Palestinian "men of capital" in British ruled Palestine. It lays out their historical erasure as the product of settler colonialism; the historiographic dominance of the aristocrat, the comprador, and the middle class hero; and how nostalgia, mourning, and idealization of pre-1948 Palestine have flattened social life. Elites were not homogenous landowning elites but worked in commercial and industrial ventures. These men, and to a lesser extent women, shaped a broader Arab Nahda, or renaissance, as an economic project. The chapter maps the importance of new regimes of calculation in realizing national economy as a space of surveillance. It argues that an attention to how these regimes unfolded in Palestine destabilizes the conventional depiction of the colonial body as the agent and the colonized body as his ephemeral shadow.
1Men of Capital: Making Money, Making Nation chapter abstractThis chapter details how men of capital in Palestine shaped economics as a body of knowledge and a science of the self. It shows how these men propagated what they understood as social progress, shaped notions of class and status, and guarded their social interests. These men were bankers, commercial entrepreneurs, and industrialists who located their ideas on capital accumulation and its relationship to national economy in a broader Arab project. The chapter challenges the temporal and conceptual boundaries of Arab liberal thought. By analyzing a dozen editorial articles and a number of contributed pieces in the periodical al-Iqtisadiyyat al-'Arabiyya, the chapter reveals how these Palestinian thinkers defined economy, described the economic conditions they lived in, and sought to shape an ethical economic subject.
2Women of Thrift: Domesticity and Home Economics chapter abstractThis chapter details how the home became a site of fortifying social hierarchies at the same time that the discourse on domesticity described itself as a force of social reform in early twentieth century Palestine. By analyzing an article on the family budget and a ten-part radio program on the ideal Arab home, this chapter provides a window into how elites employed social difference to define new norms of class, gender, and collectivity. Reformers defined home economics as a necessary science and a mode of management. In doing so they created possibilities for and confined men and women. The chapter exposes the heavily policed contours of the civilized and the cultured. These contours would prove resilient across times and spaces to contain the political.
3A Nutritional Economy: The Calorie, Development, and War chapter abstractThis chapter details British economic policy in the Middle East broadly and Palestine specifically during World War II. Scholarly depictions of the early twentieth century obsession with calculating economy have focused on the importance of measuring and realizing growth. This chapter looks instead at the construction and provision of basic needs during times of scarcity. It shows how British officials sought to realize economy as calculable through new technologies of rule such as the calorie and the emerging science of nutrition. Far from an imperative to rationalize the colonized body, this effort was born of the exigencies of war. British colonial officials introduced new conceptions of development, poverty, health, and productivity throughout the war. Their failures reveal the politics of basic needs. They also show how paradigms such as colonial development and sciences like nutrition promised the universal but enforced, indeed were constituted by exclusion.
4A Public Good: Palestinian Businessmen and World War II chapter abstractThis chapter details how Palestinian businessmen in Arab Chamber of Commerce attempted to manage economic crises during World War II. The self-defined social role of the Chambers was to guard the nation's public good. Wartime austerity was a structure of exclusion that was central to the erosion of Palestinian presence on the land. In the face of growing Jewish consolidation, economy took shape as a site of national battle. Men of capital were no longer the vanguard of a profitable future but were now the managers of crisis. Their central heroes were no longer the "civilized" and the "cultured" but the native authentic consumer, the honorable peasant and Bedouin. The lexicon of progress and civilization gave way to conspiracy, paralysis, and injustice. The broad territorial expanse of pan-Arabic economic regeneration shrunk to a bifurcated space of an Arab versus a Jewish economy in an increasingly embattled Palestine.
5The Vegetable Racket: Scarcity and the Cost of Living chapter abstractThis chapter provides a case study of wartime economic policy. It details the British colonial government's effort to coercively control the production, distribution, and marketing of every vegetable in Palestine for six months in 1943. It historicizes the new index of the cost of living as a technology of economic calculation and rule. The chapter shows the shallowness of British government renditions of the Arab profiteer and "unorganized" Arab vegetable producers as the source of the "black market." It revels instead how Jewish cooperatives like Tnuva determined regulated and unregulated prices. The vegetable crisis and the attempt to tame the cost of living index exposes the limitations of British colonial power and its capacity to homogenize people and standards. Finally the vegetable story reveals the differences between Jewish and Arab relationships to government regulations as well as their access to institutional power.
Conclusion: Postwar Austerity and the Discipline of Detail chapter abstractThis chapter traces how wartime austerity influenced peasants, villagers, and consumers in Palestine. A close look at British rule in Palestine reveals the dangers of overestimating colonialism's coherence. However, territorial and corporeal articulations of the healthy economy were not limited to colonial officials but important sites of Palestinian visions. Pan-Arabism was not only coupled with "socialism" but also relied on a transhistorical "commercial essence." A new mass of austerity regulations during World War II revealed the depths of Palestinian exclusion from state institutions. Palestinian men (and women) of capital in their imaginings of territory, in their emphasis on detail, in their ideas of progress did not live their reality as shadows of the Jewish settler or the British colonial officer. Their realities were part of a broader Arab project. This project, the Nahda was contingent on exclusion.