Men of Capital

Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

Sherene Seikaly

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804796729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

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.

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.”¹ 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.”² Few were aware of the problems of “maintaining standards of administration” and “defining the frontiers between private enterprise and State control.”³ 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.”⁴ 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.”⁵ 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.⁶ Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, in particular, has challenged historiographic conceptions of the late nineteenth century as the antechamber of nationalism in Syria and Egypt.⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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.¹²

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.”¹³ 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.”¹⁴ 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.”¹⁵

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 1920.¹⁶ He was also the main architect of the Palestinian National Fund, which was established in 1930 and sought primarily to purchase lands.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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.²⁰ 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.²¹ 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.²² 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.²³ 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.²⁴

FIGURE 1 Fu’ad Saba in his first office in Jerusalem, ca. 1920s. Courtesy of Fuad Saba.

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.²⁵ 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 tob...