The Charity of War

Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East

Melanie S. Tanielian

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503603776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

With the exception of a few targeted aerial bombardments of the city's port, Beirut and Mount Lebanon did not see direct combat in World War I. Yet civilian casualties in this part of the Ottoman Empire reached shocking heights, possibly numbering half a million people. No war, in its usual understanding, took place there, but Lebanon was incontestably war-stricken. As a food crisis escalated into famine, it was the bloodless incursion of starvation and the silent assault of fatal disease that defined everyday life.

The Charity of War tells how the Ottoman home front grappled with total war and how it sought to mitigate starvation and sickness through relief activities. Melanie S. Tanielian examines the wartime famine's reverberations throughout the community: in Beirut's municipal institutions, in its philanthropic and religious organizations, in international agencies, and in the homes of the city's residents. Her local history reveals a dynamic politics of provisioning that was central to civilian experiences in the war, as well as to the Middle Eastern political landscape that emerged post-war. By tracing these responses to the conflict, she demonstrates World War I's immediacy far from the European trenches, in a place where war was a socio-economic and political process rather than a military event.

CHAPTER 1

A CITY AND ITS MOUNTAIN, A MOUNTAIN AND ITS CITY

Sitting on the second-floor balcony of the new Near East personnel house, Nellie Miller-Mann breathed in her new surroundings. “Everything is lovely and the goose hangs high,” she wrote to her sister. Nellie’s new home was a typical upper-class house situated on the hillside overlooking the bay of Beirut. The Beirut harbor, nestled into a cove protected from the usual southwest winds, was visible in the distance. Spanning the entire building, the balcony immediately became Nellie’s favorite spot, as it was a “lovely cool place to sit out at night and watch the sunset behind the palms and the moon rise over the Lebanon mountains and peek through the fir trees.”¹ With great enthusiasm, Nellie described the scene: “The Lebanon Mountains, which extend far out into the sea in front and the distant peak of Sannin Mountains, the highest peak of the Lebanon, was like a huge shining coral. It was the most wonderful sight.”² The Mennonite missionary was not the only one impressed; many before her had marveled at the scene. Six decades earlier in 1858, Lady Strangford, a British writer and nurse, saw an “amphitheater of mountains,” at center stage a city that rose from the water’s edge, crawling up the slopes of the foothills. It fascinated “the eye in the first moment,” forging an “everlasting memory of loveliness.”³ The women’s view must have been similar to that captured by the photographer from the Bonfils studio at the beginning of the twentieth century: majestic snow-covered mountains as the backdrop for a city at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. The city as foreground to the distant limestone peaks and the ubiquity of the mountains have been described by travelers and replicated in countless images of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One arrived in Beirut via train from Damascus, by sailboat or steamer from the Mediterranean Sea, or by carriage from the northern and southern coastal towns, such as Tripoli and Sidon. Whether crossing the mountains from the west, traveling alongside the peaks from the south and the north, or approaching them head-on from the east, one’s encounter with Beirut meant traversing, brushing up against, or simply observing the snow-covered peaks. City and mountain, as in the women’s accounts, were visually indivisible.

There, however, was more than met the eye, as the connection between the urban center and its rural hinterland was existential as well. During most of Ottoman rule over the Levant, Beirut and Mount Lebanon constituted two distinct and independent administrative units, but the city and the mountain district maintained close political and socioeconomic ties. These ties mandate a combined history, as war, famine, and the politics of provisioning took place within the context of an entangled history of Beirut and Mount Lebanon that affected the relationship between them. A key argument of this book is that the wartime politicking around providing food and in the struggle against infectious diseases challenged, renegotiated, and reshaped preexisting power constellations that opened a space for the political union of an already visually and existentially united city and mountain in the postwar period. To fully understand the special relationship of Beirut to its hinterland during war and in the postwar period, it is necessary to first outline their changing social and economic linkages, administrative setup, and demographic makeup leading up to 1914.

In the 1980s, famine theorists moved away from explaining mass starvation as an act of God or nature to its being the outcome of human action and inaction.⁴ It was a late revelation. Fourteenth-century Arab scholars, though couching the point in religious rhetoric, had long insisted that humans caused famine. Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was among the first to consider famine (maja‘a) the outcome of bad government,⁵ when he drew a clear link between poor governing and high grain prices.⁶ Ibn Khaldun blamed famine on the government’s “coercion of the subject” and its failure to intervene successfully to remedy the decrease in agricultural production and the food shortages that resulted.⁷ Fifteenth-century Mamluk chroniclers such as Ibn Taghribirdi (1410–1470) and the Arab historian Taqi ad-Din al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) took up Ibn Khaldun’s interpretational frame.⁸ For al-Maqrizi, famine, which he referred to as “ghalā’ [increase in prices] that causes jū‘ [hunger] and mawt or mawtān [death],” was the outcome of high prices, oppressive taxes, and the debasement of currency, all of which, as we will see, played a role in the war of famine in 1914–1918.⁹ He also indicts governmental mismanagement for further causing people’s distress during famine.

In modern famine studies, the fact that famines are the result of human action or inaction gained currency after economist Amartya Sen published his study of the 1942–1943 Bengali famine in 1981.¹⁰ The study demonstrated that famine was not the outcome of lack of food due to harvest shortfalls. Instead, Sen saw famine as the outcome of “a crisis of exchange entitlements, legal, economically operative rights of access to resources that give control of food devoid of yields.” It was not the food itself that was important but “the relationship of persons to the commodity.” He famously asserted, “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough to eat. While the latter can be the cause of the former, it is but one of the many possible causes.”¹¹ Since the publication of Sen’s Poverty and Famine, many social scientists have used his entitlement-based theory to highlight the changing socioeconomic and institutional relations between food and people during famine.¹²

In recent decades, entitlement-based approaches have been criticized on at least two counts. First, there is a general focus on the event itself, often neglecting long-term historical processes, conjunctures, and contingencies that produce starvation.¹³ Second, entitlement theories are not interested in what follows in the wake of disaster. These are serious oversights. Famine, after all, happens in society, which, as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, rests on the “idea of networks of affinity and affection.”¹⁴ Suffering, she argues, evokes altruism and caring. A more skeptical approach of course may argue that the distress of some is an opportunity for others. Michael Watts and Hans Bohle suggest a threefold “vulnerability” theory that invites both a historically grounded approach and one that takes into account famine responses, recovery, and relief.¹⁵ The three basic defining coordinates are the risk of exposure to crises, the risk of inadequate capacities in coping with them, and the risk of severe consequences and hence slow or even limited recovery from crises.¹⁶ Together they make up a particular space of vulnerability. More important, each element making up this space is dependent on historically specific social, political, and economic structures. The famine and responses to it then can only be fully understood in the context of long-term socioeconomic developments and locally and historically specific configurations that both rendered Beirut and Mount Lebanon vulnerable to famine and determined the social position of various local, state, and international actors that would dictate their capabilities to participate within the political field of provisioning.

This chapter situates the war of famine not as a rupture but as the historical context in which local politics happened. Nineteenth-century economic changes not only rendered Beirut and Mount Lebanon particularly vulnerable to wartime famine but also, combined with increased access to education and the emergence of mass politics following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, broadened access to politics. This resulted in a particular set of local actors in both state and civil institutions who had various degrees of access to power and, from the outset of the war, had the potential to mitigate or exaggerate the horrors of the famine. The following then is both an administrative road map and a socioeconomic survey that paints the mise-en-scène and introduces the relevant actors of the wartime provisioning drama.¹⁷ The goal is to historicize the wartime agents of provisioning in their operational spaces so that change over time is clearly visible as we move into the war years.

Economic Changes: Forging a Space of Vulnerability

The visits of Lady Strangford and Nellie Miller-Mann to Beirut straddled six decades. Their descriptions of the physical landscape suggest few if any changes. In reality, the years between the women’s visits were arguably the most tumultuous decades in Lebanese history. The intermittent years accounted for significant administrative, political, economic, social, cultural, and demographic changes and witnessed violent intercommunal conflict, war, famine, and eventually colonial occupation. The long nineteenth century no doubt was a time of profound change for the Ottoman Empire and its multiethnic population. The empire not only had to contend with the globalization of a capitalist world market, accompanied by increasing Western encroachment on its territory, but also faced local strongmen and newly emerging nationalist independence movements that challenged Ottoman sovereignty.¹⁸ The years leading up to 1914 were filled with conflict, war, revolution, and significant territorial losses. The Ottoman state, while it was the only sovereign Muslim empire to survive in an era of aggressive nineteenth-century imperialism and nationalism, was caught in a seemingly irreversible downward spiral. Selim Deringil describes the situation well: “The Ottoman state, together with its contemporaries, Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia, was engaged in a struggle for survival in a world where it no longer made the rules.”¹⁹ In the Syrian provinces, the changes were notable in an ever-growing missionary movement, an increased presence of European investors and diplomats, and a lengthy Egyptian-Ottoman struggle culminating in the invasion of Egyptian troops, followed by Ottoman centralization efforts of and international intervention in the politics, economy, and administration of the region.²⁰

Since the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had ruled the Levant through a decentralized system based on middlemen who pledged loyalty to the sultan and paid yearly tributes.²¹ Mount Lebanon, a semiautonomous region, was administered by local strongmen from the Ma‘an and Shihab families. Notable Maronite and Druze families served as intermediaries between taxpaying common folk (ahali) and the ruling emir and enjoyed significant autonomy, as long as they preserved order in their domains. These tax-farming families (muqata‘jis) commanded the political landscape in support of or opposition to the emirs and would prove to be a politically resilient group.²² It was for the most part a system of nonsectarian patronage, which began to crumble with the Egyptian occupation in 1831.

The imperial ambitions of Mehmet ‘Ali, an ethnic Albanian strongman and Ottoman governor of Egypt since 1805, drove him to expand his domain into Greater Syria in 1830. For commoners in Beirut and Mount Lebanon the new regime meant high taxes, a monopoly economy, violent repression, military conscription, corvée labor, and forced disarmament.²³ The oppressive and exploitative policies meant that the population was even more disappointed when its reigning emir Bashir II al-Shihabi (1788–1840) threw in his lot with the invaders.

By the late 1830s, disillusion had turned into local unrest and uprisings, as locals demanded an end to the exploitation followed by administrative reforms, including the formation of a representative council.²⁴ Faced with growing regional instability and Mehmet ‘Ali’s expansionism, the Ottoman sultan sought help from the European powers. None was too eager to help. Only when Russia made overtures to intervene on behalf of the Ottomans did Britain bother to address the tension between the governor of Egypt and the Ottomans. But their help would not come for free. In exchange, the British demanded trade advantages. The Ottomans agreed. The resulting Treaty of Balta Liman (1838) effectively gave Britain full and unrestricted access to the Ottoman markets.²⁵

Unsurprisingly, Mehmet ‘Ali refused to recognize the treaty, and his military successfully resisted the Ottomans’ attempt at expelling him from Greater Syria. It was only after Britain and Austria dispatched a military vessel to the eastern Mediterranean in support of the Ottomans that Mehmet ‘Ali withdrew his troops.²⁶ The British took advantage of...