Introduction Excerpt for Unmentionables

INTRODUCTION

LOOKING FOR WORK

There are three men. One of them likes to be in the shade all the time.

Answer: snow and ice.

The second is an old man, but as soon as he reaches old age he becomes young again.

Answer: the moon.

The third man is a dead man, and yet he speaks to live men all the time.

Answer: writing in a book.

RIDDLE RECORDED IN BOSTON’S SYRIAN QUARTER, 1903.¹

JANUARY 29, 1912—THE MOON WAS nearly full the night before John Ramey died. The snow was several days old now, hardened with daily melt into a thick sheet of ice that refracted the moonlight surrounding the checkpoint. A makeshift garrison protected state guardsmen who had come to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to stop rioters from tossing the ice through mill windows. This billet was at the corner of Elm Street, a throughfare in Lawrence’s Syrian Quarter. “That’s where they found the dynamite,” one militiaman said to another, tipping back a bottle of local araq to kill the cold. Behind them, a cluster of boys assembled unnoticed in preparation for an ambush. The boys crept closer, gathering snow to build an arsenal of projectiles. One of them yelled, and they started chucking snowballs at the men occupying their neighborhood. Startled, the militia broke formation and, in the ensuing chaos, guardsmen began frantically chasing their assailants through the Syrian tenements. They captured two Syrian boys, so-called child operatives employed by the American Woolen Company (AWC) then on strike with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Najib Kalil, age fifteen, and Abdallah Najjum, age sixteen, were detained at the mill building overnight, guarded by armed men deployed by the state. The rest of the Syrian boys fled into the night, but within an hour Kalil’s and Najjum’s fathers—also AWC strikers—joined an angry crowd that descended on the garrison. Surrounding the checkpoint and banging pots and pans, they woke up the city and demanded the boys’ release. A standoff resulted. And John Ramey was observed there, holding at the front.

In later sworn testimony, police and state officials squabbled over whether John Ramey was sixteen, eighteen, or twenty years old.² Some said he was among those boys who had thrown ice at the garrison and that he returned with a seething mob after his friends were detained. Others claimed he was never there. What is certain is that the next day—January 30, at noon—John marched at the head of a strike demonstration through the mill zone, carrying the cornet he played with the city’s Syrian Drum Corps. Ramey led hundreds of Syrians to the canal separating the AWC factories from the tenements known as the Syrian Quarter. As demonstrators pushed the armed militiamen across the canal bridge, Ramey was bayoneted twice: in the shoulder and back. He fled home to his parents, who brought him to a hospital where he died from his injuries. Fearing a retaliatory insurrection, officials banned public assembly and locked down the city. But that night, the moon reached fullness as the Syrian Drum Corps marched on the streets, men playing their drums and women at the flanks, banging pots and pans. Midnight marches came every night that followed, as grieving Syrian strikers reminded Lawrence about their slain cornet player. John Ramey’s body was interred at St. Anthony’s Maronite Church. The garrisons stayed. Neighborhood boys continued to pelt soldiers with snowballs.

This is what we know about John Ramey. He was born in Falougha, in Ottoman Mount Lebanon, and he died by bayonet in Lawrence, one of three people killed during the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912. Ramey’s story is repeated everywhere one reads about the Syrian immigrant working class, inflected a little differently each time. There’s a version where John is marching at the militias at the head of an IWW contingent; another where he is an innocent bystander, not a striker at all. In one account, John witnesses a police officer brutalizing a Syrian woman and is stabbed in the back as he defends her. John Ramey, an anarchist villain engaging in deportable offenses; John Ramey, a factory boy murdered for tossing snowballs at police.³ In each of these stories, Ramey’s ghost speaks for the living, put to work in the memorialization of the strike credited with making the American working class. John Ramey offers a glimpse into Syrian proletarian life in the mahjar (diaspora); an entirely new history awaits behind him.⁴

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This book explores the making of the global Syrian working class, situating Arab textile workers within the fields of labor history, migration studies, and critical studies of capitalism.⁵ It also traces the development of the Syrian textile industries in the mahjar. As weavers, stitchers, garment workers, or peddlers, Syrian migrants fed a transnational textile trade directed by Syrian merchants. These workers had a vastly different experience of the mahjar from that celebrated by cultural elites of the time. This is revealed in Syrian American print culture and the numerous serials, novels, and books that champion titans of Syrian commerce: the chiefs (zuʿama) of émigré politics, the intellectual luminaries of the Pen League (al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya), or the nostalgic, pioneering figure of the pack peddler. Each of these figures told a specific history of the mahjar, portraying emigrants as shrewd and entrepreneurial, upwardly mobile, racially respectable, hard-working, and devoted to living in two worlds, both Syrian and American. Early histories of this diaspora call Syrians “incurable emigrants and traders,” connecting their arrival in America to “an age-long movement, a chapter in a long series of migrations” dating back to the Phoenicians.⁶ Syrians “did not usually take up factory employment” and are remembered for their commercial ventures instead.⁷ “Profiting by the special aptitudes of their race and prompted by wanderlust and the desire for profitable trade,” historian Philip Khuri Hitti wrote in 1924, “business is their lodestar . . . no nook of the world escapes them.”⁸ Hitti published The Syrians in America the same year that the 1924 Immigration Act imposed quota restrictions on new arrivals, necessitating a migration story staked on racial respectability and Arab contributions to America.⁹

Yet, the well-known arc of mahjari historical writing and its fixation with commerce as its central driver is discordant with evidence that factory labor formed both the bones and sinews of the mahjar’s economy. Syrian factory operatives struck and shut down factories in Lawrence in 1912, 1919, 1921, and 1924; in Paterson in 1913, 1919, and 1924; and in New York City in 1913, 1916, 1919, and through the 1930s. In New England mill towns, Syrians formed a crucial part of woolens, leather, silk, and cotton broadcloth industries, a unit capable of organizing across multiple mills and taking a strike general. Many labor unions saw Syrians as a key constituency, and Syrian workers joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. However, the conservative wings of the American labor movement, including the United Textile Workers (UTW, an American Federation of Labor affiliate) viewed them as a racial threat to native labor. The AFL’s craft unionism sought to protect skilled white industrial workers from immigrant labor, a strategy that was “exclusionary by nature” and led the union to endorse instruments like hiring controls, immigration restrictions, and deportations. Xenophobic organizers joined employers in stereotyping Syrians as irredeemable radicals.¹⁰ During a 1919 silk strike in Paterson, New Jersey, UTW vice president Thomas McMahon condemned Syrian weavers linked to the IWW, calling them “traitors in the industrial movement” who “through their un-American organizations . . . and every underhanded method seek to arouse class hatreds and racial animosities.”¹¹ These weavers stopped work to protest McMahon’s refusal to discuss their demands for a forty-four-hour work week. Two thousand of them walked off the job, undermining UTW’s bargaining power with Paterson’s silk manufacturers. Trade unions were not only aware of the numbers of Syrian workers in woolens, cotton, and silks but appreciated that Syrian organizers could quickly mobilize 3,000 workers in Lawrence, or 5,000 in New York, Brooklyn, or Paterson.

In addition to working for U.S. firms, Syrian immigrants, particularly young women in garment work, were employed in factories established by other Syrians. The so-called “Syrian shops” (as unions called them) appeared in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, established by émigré merchants who had followed Syrian textile workers abroad. New factories emerged as the Syrian merchant-manufacturer class scaled up, employing anywhere from a few dozen to a thousand people. Most of these factories produced white goods: undergarments, lingerie, pajamas, and household linens with lace or hand embroidery. Of all these goods, the Syrian kimono was most iconic, a collarless long robe that opened in the front, adapted to American tastes from its Syrian skandarani silk counterpart. The kimono created a new émigré industrial elite, the so-called kimono kings of New York: Mikhaʾil Arida, Abdalla Barsa, and Elias Mouakad, among others.¹² Popular writings on the mahjar often begin here, with a Carlylean fascination with émigré merchant-manufacturers, great men with rags-to-riches stories, who achieved immense wealth, status, and power. The workers who stitched these pieces are effaced from these narratives; the presence of Syrian women workers in the garment factories was as “unmentionable” as the lingerie they produced. Once finished, the Syrian American kimono joined the abundance of white goods in the suitcases of Syrian pack peddlers.

FIGURE 1. Portrait of an Unidentified Syrian Operative, Ayer Mill, American Woolen Company, Lawrence, MA, circa 1914–1922. Source: Lawrence History Center Photography Collection.

The Syrian peddler is the next hero of the celebratory mahjar story: he is a humble protagonist, an appealing narrator, and a symbol for the migrant community’s upward social mobility. The peddler’s hegemony similarly originated in the laudatory journalism of the early twentieth century, establishing a cultural heritage which has informed successive generations of scholarship. Writing of Syrian peddlers in 1921, Syrian American journalist Sallum Mukarzil described him as a “pioneer of Syrian trade and the chief factor in its development.” Working with Syrian merchant-manufacturers across the United States and Latin America, peddlers discovered and expanded markets; if the mahjar was a human body, Mukarzil reasoned, peddlers “are like the eyes with which to see what is around it, to notice the markets, and to move its feet forward.”¹³ In subsequent historical writing, the peddler became a romantic figure; his appeal derived from the perception that he was untethered to the struggles of industrial wage labor.¹⁴ He was a symbol of success as well as a representation of an alternative destiny, a totem to economic freedom in a mahjar where many actually experienced wage precarity. Notably, these representations were invariably male, though peddling was also women’s work.¹⁵ Meanwhile, new scholarship contests the peddler’s hegemony as the diaspora story that matters, proposing plural Arab American histories in place of Mayflowerist reductions.¹⁶ Though once thought of as merchants in miniature, peddlers were also textile workers, the final link in a supply chain upon which the rest of the industry depended.

A history of the mahjar’s textile industries and the people who forged them, this book examines how Syrians working in textiles navigated processes of class formation, racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. The mahjar’s textile industry both originated in and depended on a hemispheric labor economy which doubled as its primary commodity market. Syrian merchant-manufacturers directed the influx of new Syrian migrants, who picked up either factory work or peddling to feed the industry. The continuous, circular migration of these workers enabled the expansion of Syrian manufacturing across the hemisphere, reaching global scale by the early 1920s. Syrians working in all facets of the textile industries navigated the politics of class, race, and gender—politics which defined the Syrian community’s right to belong in America. Émigré merchant-manufacturers cultivated claims to mainstream American whiteness; prominent Syrian Americans petitioned U.S. courts “to prove their status as ‘white persons,’” most memorably by supporting the 1915 appellate case of George Dow.¹⁷ In New York City, Syrian American manufacturers moved capably among chambers of commerce, trade commissions, and regulatory bodies to defend their commercial interests. Meanwhile, Syrian factory workers found themselves marked as racially other, perceived by U.S. employers as an insular minority to be leveraged against native-born workers, and by unions as a threat. This position led them in two directions: into union-resistant Syrian shops, or, alternatively, into the radical wings of the labor movement. Syrian peddlers navigated the liminalities of situational whiteness, maintaining their legibility through multiple passports and letters of marque signed by merchant elites, or by cultivating relationships with consular staff and plugging their trade into American narratives about expansion and free trade. Syrian American class formation was also deeply gendered: while the majority of Syrian textile and garment workers were women, the industry’s celebrated heroes are all men. This book illustrates how Syrian women’s work in textiles, their management of labor and mutual aid networks, and their strike activities sustained Syrian textiles in the mahjar. It also addresses the politics of these workers’ erasure, questioning the class politics that rendered them unmentionable.

While historians have long understood the significance of textiles to the early Syrian diaspora, both structural theories of class and the contours of available archives have shaped how Syrian textile workers are remembered. A focus on class as a structural location rather than a set of social relations influenced classic economic histories of the Middle East and its diasporas, starting with a definition of class as a direct economic relationship to the means of production. Immigrant workers were defined as working class if they traded labor power for wages in a factory setting; this structural relationship presumes workplaces as central to class belonging at the expense of all other spheres of activity that uphold, maintain, and facilitate waged work: households, religious institutions, mutual aid networks, welfare organizations, or other sites of unpaid labor.¹⁸ Put another way, in Syrian American working communities, spaces beyond the factory floor were most generative of class identity and consciousness. This was especially true for women workers as they took on economic roles in their communities in addition to waged factory work. Their labors were both waged and unwaged. These spaces of class identity and organizing cannot be reconstructed in major institutional archives like employer records or the files of trade unions.¹⁹

Available archival collections can also only partly explain the elision of workers from the mahjar’s historiography. The mahjar’s vast print cultural footprint, featuring dozens of serials, newspapers, literary works, and small-run publishing houses, expanded across multiple continents yet narrowly recorded the perspectives of metropolitan elites and their politics.²⁰ From the Ottoman period through interwar European Mandates, Syrians in the Americas campaigned for development, national liberation, and anticolonialism from abroad.²¹ This politics relied on the networks and technologies of a transnational professional class that was, at best, uneasy about groups who contested racial respectability tropes and at worst, hostile to them.²² Syrian workers shutting down factories, factory women contesting paternalistic nationalisms, and child operatives throwing snowballs at the cops challenged the image of a mahjar cooperating with capital in a hemispheric project of racial uplift. The sources that make up this book, therefore, come from the records of Syrian American workers’ societies, individual life histories, union records, employment files, business ledgers, and consular correspondence, in addition to print culture. What results is a new history of Syrian transnationalism centered on the textile industry, its contours across the Arab Atlantic, and the workers who sustained it.

This book takes its shape by tracing the movement of people and textile goods through one interconnected route across the Arab Atlantic, shaped by the passenger steamship routes running from Beirut to Marseille, and onward to New York City and Veracruz. This was never the only route that shaped the hemispheric mahjar; others brought Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian migrants to the Caribbean, to Central and South America, or to West Africa. But to make sense of the mahjar’s textile industries, one must build on the geography set forth by the recognizable imprints of its economic activity: the movement of silk weavers and lace makers; the routes of peddlers; the couriering of raw linen, cotton yarns, silk cocoons, and fabrics; Syrian merchant-manufacturers pursuing global supply chains; and the Syrian jobbers who directed the flow of all of them.

A transatlantic journey from Beirut took between twenty-eight and thirty-two days by steamship, making stops at Mediterranean and Atlantic ports which became important nodes in the mahjar’s textile economy. For Syrian immigrants traveling in third class, the experience of passage was almost never linear.²³ There were disruptions and setbacks. There were prolonged quarantines, denied entries, and deportations. There was fraud, perpetrated sometimes by malicious smugglers but also by marginalized people, motivated by self-preservation. Though the moment of arrival often symbolized the telos of immigration in popular accounts, a substantial historiography demonstrates that passage was a process that transformed the people who endured it.²⁴ A steamship ticket could turn into weeks or months of delay, of negotiating contradictory migration regimes, of running out of money or luck along the way. The trip required a routinized, high-stakes performance of identity at each waystation.²⁵ At waypoints, entry ports, or land borders, officials responsible for vetting new immigrants demonstrated preferences for the right documents or witness letters. Savvy travelers consulted mahjari whisper networks or advice literature, committing the correct answers to memory.²⁶

Beirut was the departure port for most Syrian emigrants before 1914. An Ottoman seaport moving both commerce and passenger traffic, the imperial government wavered between a liberal stance on emigration control and concerns about the increasing numbers of Arab departures.²⁷ After departing Beirut, the next stop for emigrants was usually Marseille. The French port city had a “virtual monopoly on the transit of Syrians” to the Americas; 2,000 to 4,000 emigrants moved through annually in the 1890s, rising to 10,000 per year by 1913.²⁸ Using port records, Céline Regnard reveals, “Syrian emigrants were a majority among the transient populations in Marseille,” and boardinghouses, migration agents, and textile merchants proliferated there to serve them as they awaited their transfer to America.²⁹ Recollecting his family history from Boston, Charles (Khalil) Shagoury described how his father, Joseph, arrived in Marseille from Damascus in 1906 with wife, Wadia, and two small children.³⁰ French officials detained Joseph on suspicion of trachoma, a suspicion Charles’s sister, Laurice Shagoury Maloley, attributed not to actual illness but to a “scam” perpetrated against Syrians “perceived to have some money.”³¹ His wife and children proceeded to the United States, leaving Joseph behind in France. After several weeks, Joseph made an agreement with a Syrian merchant from Boston, who paid his passage in exchange for his work as a textile peddler.³² Though such arrangements felt improvised and were remembered as such, they were becoming institutional: by 1920, several Syrian textile merchants had opened stores in Marseille to recruit potential workers before their arrival in America.³³

Leaving Europe, Syrian migrants proceeded to America, usually arriving in New York to be processed at Ellis Island. Upon arrival, they could expect invasive medical testing and interviews about their family status or financial circumstances. The Shagoury family was no exception. Arriving without her husband, Wadia Shagoury knew she was at risk of rejection. On the ship, she handed one of her two infant children off to another family, changing that child’s surname to Homsy as a result.³⁴ Wadia and her remaining infant were held at Ellis Island for eighteen hours, where they “underwent extensive physical examination, and endless questioning and filling out forms.”³⁵ Her daughter, Laurice Maloley, recalls in a family history that Wadia was cleared only when a relative from Boston came to her rescue.³⁶ Once in Massachusetts, Wadia worked at a Boston dress factory; her husband, Joseph, arrived several weeks later and peddled table linens, underwear, and children’s apparel.³⁷

Each step of the Shagoury family’s passage meant walking a categorical tightrope: to avoid being deemed “likely to become a public charge” and deported, immigrants needed to demonstrate a connection to a job, or a relative, and prove their medical and racial fitness. Joseph’s delay in France, Wadia’s concern about arriving with two children and no husband, and the role of New England Syrians in vouching for them amounted to a performance of identity beyond the Ottoman passports they carried. That the Shagourys understood how to navigate these performances illustrates how circuits of knowledge also moved along this corridor via networks of kith and kin.³⁸ Despite their successes, the threat of removal loomed for years: Wadia resisted her children’s suggestions that she apply for U.S. citizenship for decades because her immigration papers erroneously “listed her as a widow with one child.”³⁹ Deportation was a very real risk. In an oral history taken in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the grandson of Shehadi Batal describes how Shehadi was jailed for eleven days and then deported to Marseille because he had been “evasive” during his interview at Ellis Island. “He was stuck in France with no money” to either proceed to America or return home to Mashghara, Lebanon. Shehadi took odd jobs in town, saving for another ticket and living in a spare room at the docks. He got lucky when he met “a man from Worcester called Forsley,” who connected him to another relative in Massachusetts who sponsored his visa under an assumed name.⁴⁰ Shehadi worked sweeping floors in a Worcester textile mill before again encountering trouble with his immigration status; he quit the factory and began selling “holy pictures” and trinkets as a peddler.⁴¹ With disruptions, setbacks, and guile, the Shagoury and Batal families navigated the Marseille-New York line. For others, the route from Marseille turned to the south.

Arriving at the Mexican port of Veracruz in the 1890s, Syrian merchants and their peddling networks became an increasingly visible community in Mexico’s textile trades. Syrian merchants in Veracruz, Yucatán, Mexico City, and the northern borderlands states managed one branch of a hemispheric textile trade remarked on by historians of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Central America, and the United States.⁴² They imported textile goods from Europe and the Middle East and later from Syrian-owned factories in the United States or Latin America. This trade extended into the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a distinct commercial zone where peddlers organized to supply Mexican retailers with goods sourced from around the mahjar.

Whether headed for New York City, Veracruz, or another port on the Atlantic, hundreds of thousands of Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians moved through this migration corridor.⁴³ While most passengers stayed aboard when ships stopped at Madeira or the Azores, a few disembarked at these ports as well. In 1924, Anthony Ramey was one of them. Anthony grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, until his parents caught him with a local girl and decided to send him home to Falougha. Anthony spent a year in Lebanon; he married there, sold off some family properties, and returned to Massachusetts with his bride to open a butcher shop. In an oral history interview, Anthony described his shore leave on the island of Terceira, where he bumped into an Azorean teenager also from Massachusetts: “He’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him. And I says, ‘I should know this fellow.’ He tells me ‘I’m from Lowell but I used to go to Lawrence [for work] and used to hang around Valley Street.’ And I says ‘wait a minute, I used to meet you up at Merrimack Park at the dance hall!’”⁴⁴ The pair spent the day together near São Miguel, where Anthony learned his companion was fleeing a felony charge; this was the reason his parents sent him to Terceira. As the pair returned to the port that evening, they passed right by the storefronts of Mallouk Bros. and K. W. Saydah and Co.: Syrian embroidery firms whose factories appeared on the islands and whose goods sat below deck on Anthony’s ship, bound for Beirut.

Such points of connection recur in the archives of Syrian migration. Each instance feels spontaneous, but the total sum reveals a mahjar linked by specific patterns of migration, work, capitalist accumulation, and debt. In addition to the route explored in this book—Beirut, Marseille, Funchal, New York, Boston, Veracruz—Syrian merchants conducted similar patterns of migration and trade between Mediterranean Europe and French West Africa, as well as in the Philippines, China, and Australia.⁴⁵ Furthermore, these routes did not end with seaports but joined railway networks leading Syrians across continents: into the U.S. Midwest, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, or Argentina’s interior.⁴⁶ But as this work seeks to make sense of this route across the Arab Atlantic through its industrial patterns, one turns now to the specific labor economies that confronted Syrian workers upon arrival.

A global labor history approach allows for deeper study of Syrian labor and the networks which developed, sustained, and channeled it. As Marcel Van der Linden describes: “The working class consists of all carriers of labor power whose labor power is sold or hired out to employers . . . whether under economic or noneconomic compulsion, regardless of whether these carriers of labor power are themselves selling or hiring out their labor power and also regardless of whether these carriers themselves own means of production.”⁴⁷ Considering the relations between employers and laborers at the point of production, alongside circuits of recruitment, migration, credit, and mutual aid, reveals the complex dynamics between the factory floor and the world beyond it. This approach also creates room to examine the emergence of the mahjar’s merchant elites and to consider forms of labor often treated as anomalies in labor history, specifically, women and girls engaged in home work.

Just as this book is about the development of a global Syrian working class, it is also a history of Syrian merchant-manufacturers, a capitalist class that assumed control over critical textile supply chains after 1910. Merchant capitalism, defined here as direct merchant control over supply chains, allowed Syrian firms to squeeze vendors producing commodities and to relocate sites of production as needed. Building on Wallerstein’s theory of the commodity chain as “a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity,” Nelson Lichtenstein terms this direct merchant control “supply-chain power.”⁴⁸ Supply-chain power was a central organizing principle for the Syrian textile industry: merchant-manufacturers increasingly dominated the diaspora’s textile labor market, manufacturing sector, and retail networks. This section briefly examines each stage of this process: labor economy, manufacturing, and retail networks in the mahjar.

Upon arrival in the Americas, Syrian labor migrants typically entered one of two sectors in the textile industry: manufacturing or retail. Many Syrians employed in spinning, weaving, and garment sectors had performed similar work in the Middle East prior to emigration, and scholars describe how foreknowledge of silk processing, weaving, or needlework may have made some Syrians more mobile than their counterparts who lacked this expertise.⁴⁹ However, first-time proletarians (both women and men) were also prevalent across the industry, especially in woolens, shoe leathers, piecework, or the needlework sectors. Most Arab workers came abroad in pursuit of better wages and steady work, encouraged further by Beirut’s growing passenger steamship traffic, a global shift in favor of international labor migration and, increasingly, the presence of Syrian ethnic communities abroad.⁵⁰ According to a 1911 industry conditions survey by the U.S. Immigration Commission, nearly half (46.7 percent) of Syrian men working in U.S. textiles had prior experience in Syrian factories. The rate among Syrian women workers was 19 percent; most of the rest listed as “no occupation” prior to emigration. Most Syrian women who joined American textile firms performed “unskilled” tasks like garment stitching, which were considered heritage crafts in the Middle East.⁵¹ In essence, the textile work carried out by Syrian women in America in the early twentieth century represented a new form of labor commoditization, transforming work that was once done within households into standardized, industrial production.

Textile labor in the mahjar did not solely occur in factory settings. Syrian women continued to do various sorts of home textile production, including seamstressing, hemming, lacemaking, and hand embroidery (tatreez). The latter underwent a transformation in Syria, Mount Lebanon, and Palestine in the decades before mass emigration: the arrival of imported machine yarns led to the commoditization of Syrian lace and embroideries, and Syrian women who once hand spun thread for household use began to accept piecework contracts with metropolitan merchants.⁵² This trend followed Syrian women to the mahjar, where their lace and needlework designs became marketable commodities alongside laces from Irish, Florentine, Philippine, or Madeiran textile goods. Needlework served as an economic lifeline for Syrian families in the mahjar; it was a hand skill that resisted full mechanization and could be performed at home, often amid other sorts of household economic production. In 1901, the U.S. Immigration Commission reported that “if the man goes peddling . . . his wife and children will find shelter with some poor family from their own village and . . . turn their attention to the manufacture and sale of lace which all Syrian women and girls can make.”⁵³ Syrian merchant-manufacturers delivered yarns to these working households, where women worked them into cuffs and collars, appliques, or edging trim.⁵⁴ The laces would be added to garments in the Syrian shops and consigned to peddlers who distributed them to wholesale or retail markets across state lines or international borders. Charlotte Karem Albrecht articulates the gendered dimensions of this sector perfectly: “Peddling relied on Syrian women not only as peddlers but also as those who labored in multiple ways to make peddling a profitable occupation.”⁵⁵ Their labor was rarely recorded in state archives. Writing of Syrian and Ottoman Sephardi immigrants, Devi Mays argues, “It is all too easy to overlook the migrant women . . . who appear as ‘homemakers’ on all official documents but who worked late into the night sewing the clothing their husbands, fathers, or they themselves peddled.”⁵⁶

Needlework often served as a supplementary income source for Syrian women alongside their factory employment. A 1915 report by the Immigration Commission noted this practice, claiming that it offered Syrian women economic flexibility: “The labor supply is fluid, because of the ease with which considerable proportions of immigrants can withdraw from the labor market by returning to their homes in times of industrial insecurity.”⁵⁷ However, returning to the household did not signify a departure from the labor market. Women who did needlework at home sustained a household income. Their piecework also mitigated the risks associated with family peddling businesses and subsidized the commercial endeavors of husbands, father, uncles, or male cousins. In an oral history collected by her daughter, Hannah Sabbagh Shakir recounts how she and her friends worked with imported Aleppan laces for her brother’s business, Sabbagh Bros. of Boston in the 1910s. Hannah performed this needlework in addition to shifts at the factory where she and her mother were employed: “We made the gingham, and I ran six big looms, just like a man. We worked twelve hours a day, from six in the morning till six at night, with half an hour for lunch, and Saturdays till twelve. I made $6 a week.”⁵⁸ Hannah’s father and brother all worked as weavers in Saco, Maine, and Boston before leaving industrial work to establish an importing business.⁵⁹

The same qualities that made Syrian hand lace so popular in the mahjar also contributed to its obscurity in histories of this diaspora; Syrian women did this work in improvised spaces, creating a commodity lace which manufacturers blended with imports from abroad and branded as “Irish,” “Florentine,” or “Cluny.” Produced behind the scenes, its origins were effaced as it moved through the supply chain. Syrian lace workers in homes across New England, New York, or elsewhere are thus remembered as purveyors of craft, rather than piece-rate laborers.

After picking up lace pieces, a runner carried them in a suitcase to the factory, where Syrian merchant-manufacturers employed women to stitch them onto garments. In addition to the thousands of Syrians who worked for American employers in vast textile mills, Syrian merchants cornered the whites and lingerie industries specifically, opening dozens of factories devoted to the supply, manufacture, and finishing of underwear, hosiery, household whites, and kimonos. The Syrian shops developed out of import businesses, managed directly by merchants who experimented with local textile production as a means to combat the uncertainties of the global commodities markets. The Syrian shops emerged following a global price shock and financial panic in 1907, which struck the textile and garment industries particularly hard, bankrupting several Syrian import merchants and jobbers and resulting in factory layoffs for garment workers. Merchants who weathered the panic branched into local textile manufacture, drawing on the labor of Syrian women and men in the migrant colonies.

Syrian garment factories appeared in industrial centers across Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, and, in the beginning, directly fed peddler networks. Often, they began as improvised workshops composed of a few dozen people employed by Syrian merchants: in east Boston, for example, Albert Homsy opened an apron factory and, employing a dozen Syrian women who had previously sewn aprons under mill conditions, produced a competing product within the community.⁶⁰ Homsy’s operation remained small. Never employing more than a dozen women, many of them with direct ties with one another, the Homsy apron business illustrates how petty merchants moved into specialty products and could rely on personal networks as both a labor source and a market. Homsy’s pattern—the recruitment of labor through “relatives or acquaintances from the Old Country” and the maintenance of “small shops [that] demanded little expensive technology . . . had low labor costs [and] easily undercut older, larger factories”—replicated an industrial strategy embraced by various immigrant groups in garment work around the same time.⁶¹ These products expanded Syrian commercial networks: when Homsy aprons left Albert’s factory they moved into suitcase trades to be sold by peddlers who also carried Syrian kimonos.

FIGURE 2. Women seated at Singer machines at one of New York City’s “Syrian shops,” garment firms manufacturing kimonos and other white goods under direct merchant control, circa 1930. Source: Faris and Yamna Naff Arab American Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Large Syrian manufacturers began as improvised, semi-centralized piecework workshops attached to merchant businesses before graduating into full-fledged factories with mechanized production, branded products, contracts with department stores and national retailers, and a workforce ranging from dozens to thousands of people. The heart of this manufacturing was New York City’s Garment District, where Syrian merchant-manufacturers produced garments for retail distribution, for the peddling market, and by the 1920s, for export to Latin America and the Middle East.⁶² In these factories, women vastly outnumbered men, working on sex-segregated floors managed by (usually male) supervisors. Male operatives did large format work like broadcloth weaving, cutting, or machining, leaving the stitching and garment finishing portions to women. Segregation by sex in New York’s “Syrian shops” followed global historical patterns. This wage segmentation strategy was widely practiced across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East: women’s wages were lower, and their work was classified as unskilled. In Ottoman Mount Lebanon, this practice also had cultural implications; Akram Khater illustrates how sex segregation served as a means of preserving patriarchal family honor.⁶³

Just as Syrian workers relied on hometown networks as they moved abroad, the mahjar’s merchant-manufacturers also operated in concert with one another. Circuits of textile production, finance, and commodities intertwined with merchants’ personal networks as they cooperated to enter new markets, control supply chains, contest trade regulations and tariffs, or oust competitors.⁶⁴ As a class, mahjari men of capital achieved near monopolies over kimonos in New York, embroideries on Madeira Island, and undergarments in the Philippines. Being men of capital required more than economic success. Sherene Seikaly brilliantly illustrates how land holders, merchants, and industrialists in interwar Palestine held themselves responsible for “embodying a new kind of economic conduct,” one that would benefit the nation and realize its independence through economic knowledge production, calculation, and management of economy, partnerships, and accumulation.⁶⁵ Headquartered in New York City, Syrian merchant-manufacturers placed a similar faith in “economic accumulation that would realize national independence,” a stance that coded this elite’s attitudes on unionization as well as its stewardship of the mahjar’s respectability tropes.⁶⁶ Émigré merchant-manufacturers relied on transnational class alliances to combat labor uprisings and keep Syrian labor disputes out of the papers; they also invoked the need for race solidarity to quell strikes. These corporate actions were based in the merchant-manufacturers’ class position but also reflected ideas about homeland national development, industrial patriotism, or diasporic noblesse oblige.

As the final vector in the mahjar’s global supply chain, the peddler carried goods from the factories to retailers and consumers; logistics was his business. The carrying trades mirrored the same piece-rate system observed of Syrian needlework: merchant-manufacturers lent textile goods to peddlers at an agreed-upon piece price that once satisfied, allowed him to accrue his own profits. Peddlers operated at all scales, from small door-to-door operations where Syrian women and men forged personal relationships with their customers, to concerted operations with contiguous territories managed by bosses who subcontracted work to new immigrants.⁶⁷ Borderlands trading between the U.S. and Mexico was particularly lucrative, attracting both petty and established merchant networks. As both material and migrants moved through these networks, the peddling trades also became sites for labor migration, including clandestine migration and smuggling of people and illicit goods.

Textile workers, merchant-manufacturers, and peddlers. These are the main characters in this book, and their labor histories can only be understood together. Syrian peddlers represented a labor force and a market for merchant-manufacturers, as well as an outlet for surplus labor. Syrian women who crocheted lace or worked in garment factories paid the rent, enabling male relatives to pursue merchant businesses. Merchant-manufacturers employed thousands of Syrian garment workers and outsourced production abroad, as they faced off against the unions and women who staged pickets outside their factories. And pack peddlers expanded local markets as they moved across borders, establishing new commodity chains that attracted merchant capital and, in some cases, inspired the construction of new textile factories in Latin America. The political economy of this industry was thoroughly transnational, dependent on ties of ethnicity, race, and diaspora embedded within circuits of exchange. A history of work in the mahjar, therefore, must consider striking workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, suitcase peddlers in northern Mexico, merchant capitalists on Madeira Island, and kimono factory bosses in New York City. And it must contemplate them together.

Chapter 1 picks up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where we left John Ramey’s grave marker in the snow. It narrates the 1912 textile strike known as “Bread and Roses” from the perspectives of its Syrian participants. This strike reportedly made the American labor movement: in 1912, thousands of immigrant workers walked off the job at the mills of the American Woolen Company (AWC), demanding better pay, improved working conditions, and better sanitation in both the AWC factories and the company’s tenement housing where most Syrian workers lived. Though the walkout was spontaneous, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) quickly organized pickets of Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Syrian workers and placed interracial cooperation at the forefront of strikers’ demands. Syrian involvement in this strike has assumed primacy in Arab American historiography, but very little is known about how this strike fed broader patterns of labor contestation and class consciousness among Syrian textile workers across New England’s many textile mills. The chapter pulls at this thread, unraveling how the oft-told story of John Ramey has shaped our understandings of the Syrian American working class and imagining what a counternarrative might look like along the way.

Chapter 2 digs into the networks of Syrian labor power emerging after the Bread and Roses Strike, examining the politics of mutual aid in industrial Massachusetts. Syrian mutual aid societies appeared in communities across the mahjar, providing myriad services to support the working class: unemployment insurance, healthcare benefits, housing and heating assistance, and food aid. Though often remembered as spaces for leisure, ethnic cultural preservation, or Americanization, mutual aid societies were also sites of labor history: they gave Arab workers a powerful transnational alternative to formal trade unionism in a racially hostile environment. In Massachusetts mill towns, Syrian societies pooled resources for workers’ direct benefit and opened meeting halls where they organized strike committees, selected labor leaders to represent their nationality, and nurtured whisper networks capable of inspiring Syrian sympathy strikes out of town. The chapter illustrates that radical textile unions valued Syrian workers as an asset due to their numbers, but the extant historiography posits them as marginal participants in the labor movement owing to their relative silence in formal union records. I argue that there is a good reason for this omission: most Syrian American labor activism, solidarity building, and class consciousness happened within Syrian spaces. Building from the records of three Syrian mutual aid societies operating in Massachusetts, the chapter reveals that by the time Syrian leaders approached union leadership to join a strike, the ethnic infrastructure behind them was already sophisticated enough to take that strike general.

Chapter 3 moves from the mills of New England into New York City’s Garment District, where three to five thousand Syrian women garment workers stitched kimonos adjacent to the Washington Street Little Syria ethnic colony. The Syrian shops emerged in response to a vibrant carrying trade in imported textiles, linking Syrian importers to peddling networks that stretched into the American interior. Syrian merchants established garment factories to supply peddling networks locally, starting with Syrian lace and underwear before landing on the signature open-front kimono. Dozens of Syrian shops opened after 1910, rising to national prominence by the 1920s, when Syrian kimonos were featured in Vogue magazine and sold in the city’s department stores. The chapter also narrates a new labor history of the Syrian shops, where shop bosses resisted unionization, including an assertive campaign by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) between 1913 and 1919. Syrian merchant-manufacturers achieved this by maintaining a segmented, primarily female Syrian labor force bound by a factory culture that centered racial respectability and a patriarchal obligation to find employment within the Syrian community, rather than beyond it.

Chapter 4 boards a steamship from the port of New York and arrives at Madeira Island, one among many islands that became sites for Syrian textile manufacturing in the 1910s. The source of the island’s eponymous linen goods, Madeira embroideries came to America almost exclusively via German immigrants until World War I, when Syrian merchant-manufacturers purchased the German embroidery houses, seizing the supply lines linking Funchal to New York. They operated a virtual monopoly through the 1920s. Working within diasporan trade networks to crush competitors, Syrian American firms, led by naturalized citizens, lobbied Funchal’s U.S. Consulate to protect their trade interests. The chapter tells the story of Madeira’s Syrian merchants and the supply chain they guarded, situating it among similar Syrian supply chains operating in Italy, the Philippines, China, and Japan during this period.

Chapter 5 follows Syrian supply chains in the opposite direction, tracking embroidered linens, silk kimonos, and lace goods as they moved into the hands of peddlers who carried them into the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Mexico was a primary market for Syrian American textiles, and for new immigrants arriving via Veracruz, peddling labor was a primary means of getting by. Though Syrian peddlers are frequently thought of as merchants in miniature—as capitalist entrepreneurs working at molecular scale—this chapter instead argues they represented a casualized workforce bringing Syrian goods through the “last mile” on behalf of large textile firms. Brought into peddling through channels subsidized by the mahjar’s textile merchant-manufacturers, the borderlands were both a migration corridor and a space for work. Syrian comerciantes ambulantes fanned out among competing cells of merchants, who managed both the traffic of migrants seeking to join families in the United States as well as the movement of textile goods into the stores and homes of Mexican buyers. Meanwhile, immigration officials on both sides of the border struggled to parse licit from illicit trades, following orders to facilitate cross-border commerce while prohibiting unauthorized immigration and smuggling of contraband.

Finally, this book’s conclusion looks back at Syria and Lebanon, states which emerged under a colonial French Mandate during this period. As émigré merchant-manufacturers globalized their brands, some sought to revitalize the textile industries in their homeland. Raising money from the mahjar or leveraging assets in Asia, the Americas, or the North Atlantic, these manufacturers mounted campaigns to establish new, mechanized factories in the Middle East, deploying ideas about diasporic obligation, economic development, and hopes for independence. It examines two projects: an abortive 1920 attempt by ʿAssy Shaheen and Sons to establish a “cocoon to garment” silk plant in Beirut and the 1930s establishment of the Arida plant in Tripoli. It considers the role that industrial developmentalism played in émigré elite politics, especially as Syrian American workers again went on strike in the early 1930s.

*   *   *

Syrian workers began arriving in textile towns around 1900, working first in the bottom rungs of the spinning, weaving, and woolens industries. As an ethnic group usually associated with itinerant commerce, Syrians working in industry were initially treated as oddities or anomalies. But their numbers grew. The U.S. Immigration Commission noted the presence of the “industrial Syrian” in New England and New York, concluding in 1901 that 15 to 20 percent of Syrian immigrant women were “dependent upon textile-mill work.”⁷³ The same report remarked on the Syrian’s “docility as a proletarian,” a stereotype that led manufacturers to fill factories with Syrian immigrants as a buttress against “strike-ready” groups of Italian or Jewish workers. The perception that Syrians were born strikebreakers began in 1900, when Paterson, New Jersey, silk manufacturers weathered a ten-week strike by trucking in Syrian and Armenian silk workers. Unorganized, not local, and not conversant in English, these workers ran the plants with a skeleton crew; they were also encamped in the mill zone to avoid the shouts and projectiles hurtled at them by striking weavers picketing outside.⁷⁴ In another instance of strikebreaking in Camden, Maine, a 1910 strike turned violent when management trucked in Syrian adjuncts to run the machines. Discovering Syrian “scabs” in the company boardinghouse, strikers shot at them with pistols before a stick of dynamite was detonated, leveling the tenement, injuring eight, and causing the rest to flee. Undeterred, mill owners trucked in thirteen more Syrians the next day; they were beaten by strikers before they could be put to work.⁷⁵

Manufacturers’ use of Syrian out-of-towners became so predictable that local newspapers mentioned it as an expected benchmark in coverage of textile strikes. In 1907, a disturbance in Waterville, Maine, broke out when mill owners pitted Greek, Armenian, and Syrian workers against one another to stave off a strike over wages. As mill operatives sought to overcome ethnic divisions, management used distrust as a wedge, offering each group of immigrants the jobs of the others. A riot resulted. “Will Waterville have a race war?” the Boston Globe asked. Yet despite the conflict’s clear material bases, the press attributed the violence to “tribal hatreds” and the mercenary “knownothingness of representatives of foreign lands.”⁷⁶ Syrian workers experienced intense racial animus in textile towns, often distrusted by labor organizers who perceived them as strike-proof despite the poor living and working conditions they endured. “Other nationalities distrust him,” a 1901 congressional report concludes about the Syrian worker, warning that though Syrians have “not been brought into any organization,” the “recent unrestricted competition has so lowered the price of his labor that he is himself quite dissatisfied.”⁷⁷ Mistreatment by manufacturers—especially during strikes—formed the first grievance Syrian workers launched at their employers, the first rallying cry that led them to organize mutual aid societies, join the unions, and oppose the politics of racial division that management had assigned to them. And they would leverage their networks across the mahjar to force the boss’s hand.

Notes

1. Howard Barrett Wilson, “Notes of Syrian Folk-Lore Collected in Boston,” Journal of American Folklore 16, no. 62 (1903): 135.

2. Ramy’s death certificate declares he was twenty years old. His grave marker (installed by the American Lebanese Awareness Association later) estimates he was sixteen or seventeen. 1913 Congressional testimony records him variously as sixteen, eighteen, or twenty; notably, John’s parents were not among those who testified. The Massachusetts State Guard’s 1912 incident report was neither released to city police nor made public. Additional speculation about Ramey’s age is fueled by two trends: the regularity with which immigrant workers overreported their ages to secure adult wages and the will of legislators seeking to expand or limit the use of child operatives in mills. John Ramey Certificate of Death, January 30, 1912, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, County of Essex, book 12, page 12, no. 129, Lawrence History Center, Arab American Collection (hereafter LHC/AAC); communication with Kathy Flynn, October 23, 2021, Lawrence History Center, Lawrence, Massachusetts.

3. There was a version where John Ramey became a cautionary tale. The daughter of Sicilian mill workers, Laura Peters recalls her parents warning her not to be out late because of “that Syrian boy from Elm Street” felled by bayonet. Ramey’s ghost haunted her childhood. Laura Peters Oral History, Lawrence, MA; Faris and Yamna Naff Arab-American Collection Archives Center, National Museum of American History (hereafter NMAH/NC), box 80, folder 19.

4. Ramey’s biography appears in generations of historiography, one of a sparse number of Syrian workers’ life histories linked by a clear citational chain. In chronological order, see Evelyn Menconi, “The Bread and Roses Strike: Syrian Connections,” William G. Abdalah Library Newsletter (Fall 1987): 1–3, LHC/AAC, box 2, folder 6; Michael W. Suleiman, “The Arab American Left,” in The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Dan Georgakas and Paul Buhle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 242–43; Evelyn Shakir, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 48; Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2006), 150; Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 3–26; Ethan Snow, “Voices of Labor Militancy in Lawrence, 1912–1931,” in The Great Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912: New Scholarship on the Bread and Roses Strike, ed. Robert Forrant and Jurj Siegenthaler (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 135–53; Donald Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 180; Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, “Legacies of Labor: Lebanese Workers in America, Lawrence Massachusetts,” 2018; and Dominique Cadinot, “Integrated Laborers but Marginal Figures: The Untold Story of Early Syrian-American Factory Workers,” Labor History (2022): 234–47. Evelyn Menconi originally credits Lawrence Immigrant City Archivist Eartha Dengler for this biography, which was also the focus of a 1989 ethnic history exhibit put together by the Lawrence Lebanese American Awareness Society.

5. Though Arab migrants were usually referred to as “Syrian” during this period, the term denoted an ethnic, racial identity across the Americas, both before and during the establishment of League of Nations Mandates in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. This book uses the term capaciously, as is typical in historical writing on the mahjar. However, the “Syrian” community was a blended one, comprising Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian immigrants; where possible, I identify the origins of individuals named in this book.

6. Philip K. Hitti, The Syrians in America (New York: Doran Company, 1924), 56.

7. Habib Ibrahim Katibeh and Farhat Jacob Ziadeh, Arabic-Speaking Americans (New York: Institute of Arab American Affairs, 1946), 5.

8. Hitti, The Syrians in America, 57.

9. Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Reed Johnson Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 67–70.

10. James R. Barrett, History from the Bottom Up and Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working Class History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 127.

11. “Silks: Mixed Situation Develops When Paterson Mills Open for Work, Radicals Refuse to go in until Eight O’clock,” Women’s Wear 19, no. 29 (August 4, 1919), 6–7, 21.

12. Katibeh and Ziadeh, Arabic-Speaking Americans, 7.

13. Sallum Mukarzil, Tarikh al-Tijara al-Suriyya al-Amrikiyya (New York: Matbaʿat al-Suriyya al-Amrikiyya al-Tijariyya, 1921), 20.

14. Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 128–61. Evelyn Shakir challenges this tendency in Bint Arab, 46–47, as does Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, “Gendering the Chain Migration Thesis: Women and Syrian Transatlantic Migration, 1878–1924,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 71–74.

15. Gualtieri, “Gendering the Chain Migration Thesis,” 67–78.

16. Charlotte Karem Albrecht, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023); Stacy D. Fahrenthold, “Ladies Aid as Labor History: Working-Class Formation in the Mahjar,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 17, no. 3 (2021): 327; Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Charlotte Karem Albrecht, “An Archive of Difference: Syrian Women, the Peddling Economy, and US Social Welfare, 1880–1935,” Gender & History 28, no. 1 (2016): 127–49; Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jacob Rama Berman, American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the Nineteenth Century Imaginary (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 180; Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 82–83; Shakir, Bint Arab, 38–41; Naff, Becoming American, 128–61. The term Mayflowerism originates in Rudolph Vecoli, “Problems in Comparative Studies of International Emigrant Communities,” in Lebanese in the World, ed. Albert Hourani and Nadhim Shehadi (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies and I. B. Tauris, 1992), 721.

17. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009), 66–73; Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 239.

18. David Camfield, “Re-Orienting Class Analysis: Working Classes as Historical Formations,” Science & Society 68, no. 4 (2005): 422–25.

19. One notable exception is Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

20. Nadim Bawalsa, Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022); Reem Bailony, “Transnationalism and the Syrian Migrant Community: The Case of the 1925 Syrian Revolt,” Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 1, no. 1 (2013), 9–31; Stacy D. Fahrenthold, “Transnational Modes and Media: the Syrian Press in the Mahjar and Emigrant Activism during World War I,” Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies 1, no. 1 (2013), 32–57; Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

21. Stacy D. Fahrenthold, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Camila Pastor, The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Hani Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Simon Jackson, “Diasporic Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations,” Arab Studies Journal 21, no. 1 (2013): 166–90; Andrew Arsan, “‘This Age Is the Age of Associations’: Committees, Petitions, and the Roots of Interwar Middle Eastern Internationalism,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (2012): 166–88.

22. A similar pattern shapes narratives about working women in Lebanon, particularly when they went on strike; Malek Hassan Abisaab, “‘Unruly’ Factory Women in Lebanon: Contesting French Colonialism in the National State, 1940–1946,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3 (2004): 58–60.

23. Naff, Becoming American, 109.

24. David Gutman, “Travel Documents, Mobility Control, and the Ottoman State in an Age of Global Migration, 1880–1915,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 3, no. 2 (2016): 347–68; Kemal H. Karpat, “The Ottoman Migration to America, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, no. 2 (1985): 175–209; Hatice Ayse Polat, “Contending Sovereigns, Contentious Spaces: Illicit Migration and Urban Governance in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Global Histories: A Student Journal 3, no. 1 (2017): 108–26.

25. Randa Tawil, “A ‘Flying Carpet to Doom’: Retracing Gender and Orientalism through the Transnational Journeys of a Syrian Migrant Woman, 1912–1949,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 43, no. 1 (2022): 120–44.

26. See advice manuals like Jamil Butrus Hulwah, al-Muhajir al-Suri: wa-ma Yajibu an-Yaʿarifahu wa-Yaʿamalu bihi (New York: Matbaʿat al-Huda, 1909); Ibrahim Hitti, Khulasat Sharʿi al-Muhajara, and Jamil Butrus Hulwah, Nizam al-Wilayat al-Mutahida, and Huquq wa-Wajibata al-Jinsiyya al-Amrikiyya (New York: Matbaʿat al-Huda, n.d.).

27. Engin Akarli, “Ottoman Attitudes towards Emigration,” in Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, 130–31. See also Khater, Inventing Home, 53–56.

28. Céline Regnard, “The Transit Stage as a Migratory Experience: The Syrians in Marseille,” in Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World: Agency and Mobility in Port Cities, c. 1570–1940, ed. Christina Reimann and Martin Öhman (New York: Routledge, 2020), 154–155.

29. Regnard, “The Transit Stage as a Migratory Experience,” 154.

30. Charles Shagoury family history, private manuscript (s.d.), 3–4.

31. Laurice Maloley, Destiny by Default: A Memoir (Boston: First Books, 2002), 10–11.

32. Charles Shagoury family history, private manuscript, 4.

33. Mukarzil, Tarijkh al-Tijara, 21.

34. The child, Rose Homsy, later eloped with this couple’s son, Albert Homsy, in 1921. Albert had an apron factory where sisters Rose Homsy and Mary Shagoury worked. Maloley, Destiny by Default, 35.

35. Maloley, Destiny by Default, 11.

36. Laurice Maloley, family history, private manuscript, 3.

37. Charles Shagoury, family history, private manuscript, 2.

38. Regnard, “The Transit Stage as a Migratory Experience,” 161.

39. Maloley, Destiny by Default, 131. Joseph Shagoury achieved American citizenship in the early 1920s, as did Wadia Shagoury in the 1940s.

40. Batal Family History Narrative, 1–3; LHC/AAC, box 1. Batal’s rescuer was Bashara Forzley, a peddler from Karhoun. In his memoirs, Forzley describes a 1908 trip to Jerusalem to visit his mother; it is likely he encountered Batal in Marseille on his way home and connected him with a Worcester cousin, Shaker Syiek. Bashara Kalil Forzley, An Autobiography of Bashara Kalil Forzley, ed. Philip Forzley (Worcester: Self-published 1958), 10–11. See also Najib E Saliba, Emigration from Syria and the Syrian-Lebanese Community of Worcester, Massachusetts (Antakya Press, 1992).

41. Batal Family History Narrative, 2–3.

42. A representative sample of the historiography on this hemispheric trade includes (in reverse chronological order) John Ermer, “Our Representative on This Island: Local Belonging and Transnational Citizenship among Syrian and Lebanese Cubans, 1880–1980,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida International University, 2021); Lily Pearl Balloffet, Argentina in the Global Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020); Steven Hyland Jr., More Argentine Than You: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants in Argentina (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017); Pastor, The Mexican Mahjar; Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat, eds., Between the Middle East and the Americas: the Cultural Politics of Diaspora (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Gildas Brégain, Syriens et Libanais d’Amérique du Sud, 1918–1945 (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2008); Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); John Tofik Karam, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); Sofia D. Martos, “The Balancing Act: Ethnicity, Commerce, and Politics among Syrian and Lebanese Immigrants in Argentina, 1890–1955” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2007); Maria Narbona, “The Development of Nationalist Identities in French Syria and Lebanon: A Transnational Dialogue with Arab Immigrants to Argentina and Brazil, 1915–1929” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007); Cristina Civantos, Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); ʿAbd al-Wahad Akmir, al-ʿArab fi-l-Arjintin: al-Nashuʾ wa-l-Tatawwur (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahda al-ʿArabiyya, 2000); Liliana Cazorla, Presencia de inmigrantes Sirios y Libaneses en el desarrollo industrial Argentino (Buenos Aires: Fundacion los Cedros, 2000); Oswaldo Truzzi, Patricios: Sirios e libaneses em São Paulo (São Paulo: Editorial Hucitac, 1997); María Cruz Burdiel de las Heras, La emigración libanesa en Costa Rica (Madrid: Cantarabia D.L., 1991); Mintaha Alcuri Campos, Turco Pobre, Sírio Remediado, Libanês Rico: Trajetória do Imigrante Libanês no Espirito Santo (Vitória: Instituto Jones dos Santos Neves, 1987); Clark Knowlton, Sirios e libaneses em São Paulo (São Paulo: Editoria Anhembi, 1961).

43. Kohei Hashimoto, “Lebanese Population Movement 1920–1939,” 107; Charles Issawi, “The Historical Background of Lebanese Emigration, 1800–1914,” 29–31; Karpat, “The Ottoman Emigration to America,” 183–84; Élie Safa, L’émigration libanaise (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Saint Joseph, Beirut, 1960), 188–91.

44. Anthony Ramey oral history interview with Juliet Bistany, Methuen, MA, June 5, 1985; LHC/OH121–121A. Anthony and Maria Ramey were married in Lebanon in April 1925.

45. Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diapora in Colonial French West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Middle Eastern Migrants in the Philippines: Entrepreneurs and Cultural Brokers,” Asian Journal of Social Science 32, no. 3 (2004): 425–57.

46. Balloffet, Argentina in the Global Middle East; Tawil, “‘A Flying Carpet to Doom’,” 120–44: Campos, Turco Pobre; Cazorla, Presencia de imigrantes sirios y libaneses; Edward Curtis, Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest (New York: New York University Press, 2022).

47. Marcel Van der Linden, “The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012): 66–67. See also Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

48. Emmanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World-Capitalism System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (1974): 387–415; as cited in Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Return of Merchant Capitalism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 81 (2012): 13–20.

49. Abdallah Hanna, al-Haraka al-ʿUmmaliyya fi-Suriya wa-Lubnan, 1900–1945 (Damascus: Dar Dimashq, 1973), 12; Munira D. Atyah, “Cotton Textile Industry in Lebanon” (MBA, American University of Beirut, 1964), 12.

50. Khater, “‘House’ to ‘Goddess of the House,’” 325–48; Malek Abisaab, Militant Women in a Fragile Nation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010), 9–12; Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71–73; Donald Quataert, “Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001): 93–109; Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1981), 158–61.

51. “Occupation before Coming to the United States of Foreign-Born Females Who Were Sixteen Years of Age or Over at the Time of Coming, by Race of Individual,” in Immigrants in Industries (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), 33.

52. Abisaab, “‘Unruly’ Factory Women,” 61–62.

53. Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 443–44.

54. Joel Beinin describes a similar transition in Egypt in “Egyptian Textile Workers: From Craft Artisans Facing European Competition to Proletarians Contending with the State,” in The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000, ed. Els Hiemstra-Kuperus and Lex Heerma van Voss (Ann Arbor, MI: Taylor and Francis, 2010), 182. See also John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 111–13.

55. Karem Albrecht, Possible Histories, 4.

56. Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 10.

57. W. Jett Lauck and Edgar Sydenstricker, “Conditions of Labor in Principal Industries: A Summarization of the Results of Recent Investigations” (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1917), 10.

58. Evelyn Shakir, “Syrian-Lebanese Tell Their Story,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 7, no. 1 (1983): 11.

59. Sabbagh Family Reunion Book, Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, MI, Evelyn Shakir Collection (herafter AANM/ES), box 1, folder 4.

60. Maloley, Destiny by Default, 35.

61. On Jewish American garment workshops, for instance, see Daniel Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 8.

62. Mukarzil, Tarihh al-Tijara, 22–25.

63. Khater, “‘House’ to ‘Goddess of the House,’” 329–31.

64. A similar pattern of supply chain control and accumulation appeared among Ottoman Armenians; see Yasar Tolga Cora, “Female Labor, Merchant Capital, and Resilient Manufacturing: Rethinking Ottoman Armenian Communities through Labor and Business,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61, no. 3 (2018): 361–95.

65. Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 13–15.

66. Seikaly, Men of Capital, 20.

67. Charlotte Karem Albrecht, “Narrating Arab American History: The Peddling Thesis,” Arab Studies Journal 37, no. 1 (2015): 100–17; Berman, American Arabesque, 180–82; Naff, Becoming American, 199.

68. James L. Gelvin and Nile Green, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014); Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004): 155–89.

69. Fredy González, Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

70. Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

71. David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

72. David M. Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer, and Peter Cole, eds., Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

73. Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 446.

74. Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 445–46.

75. “Escape Bullets and Dynamite: Syrians Near Death in an Attack at Camden,” Boston Globe March 209, 1910, 9.

76. “Will Waterville Have a Race War? Syrians and Greeks Appear to Have Tribal Hatred for One Another,” Bangor Daily News, August 15, 1907, 2. See also Eric J. Hooglund, “From the Near East to the Down East,” in Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants to the United States Before 1940, ed. Eric Hooglund (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 85–103.

77. “Review of Special Reports: Syrians,” in Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, xli.