States of Cultivation

Imperial Transition and Scientific Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean

Elizabeth R. Williams

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781503634688
• eBook ISBN: 9781503635937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the period of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon coincided with a critical period of transformation in agricultural technologies and administration. Chemical fertilizers and mechanized equipment inspired model farms while government officials and technocratic elites pursued new land tenure, credit-lending, and tax collection policies to maximize revenue. These policies transformed rural communities and environments and were central to projects of reform and colonial control—as well as to resistance of that control.

States of Cultivation examines the processes and effects of agrarian transformation over more than a century as Ottoman, Syrian, Lebanese, and French officials grappled with these new technologies, albeit with different end goals. Elizabeth Williams investigates the increasingly fragmented natures produced by these contrasting priorities and the results of their intersection with regional environmental limits. Not only did post–World War I policies realign the economic space of the mandate states, but they shaped an agricultural legacy that continued to impact Syria and Lebanon post-independence. With this book, Williams offers the first comprehensive account of the shared technocratic ideals that animated these policies and the divergent imperial goals that not only reshaped the region's agrarian institutions, but produced representations of the region with repercussions well beyond the mandate's end.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Transliteration
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Provincial Legibility and Ecologies of Extraction: Agrarian Networks and the Making of Late Ottoman Rural State Space
• 2. “Agriculture from a Book”: “Scientific” Agriculture in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean
• 3. The Trials and Tribulations of Tractors: From Ottoman Provinces to French Mandate States
• 4. The Politics of Agricultural Expertise and Education: Exerting Rural Influence Under the French Mandate
• 5. Of Mice, Sunn Bugs, Drought, and Taxation: The Pests of Mandate Rural Administration and the Crisis of the 1930s
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List