Table of Contents for States of Cultivation
Introduction
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a moment of rapid innovation in agricultural technologies that coincided with a fundamental reconfiguration of the economic and political space of the eastern Mediterranean. During this period, in which technocratic elites experimented with measures to facilitate access to and assess these technologies, the Ottoman provinces of the eastern Mediterranean became mandate states under French and British rule. Despite shared "scientific" technocratic ideals and networks, the divergent motives of Ottoman, Syrian, Lebanese, and French actors led to different approaches to commodifying the region's land and contrasting projects for shaping the region's rural state space. The transition from integrated Ottoman provinces to a colonial periphery of the French Empire resulted in not only intensified extraction, increased tensions between technocratic officials, and decreased attention to ecological constraints but also the transformation of local infrastructure to facilitate dependency on the metropole.
1.Provincial Legibility and Ecologies of Extraction: Agrarian Networks and the Making of Late Ottoman Rural State Space
Reforms passed after the initiation of the Tanzimat in 1839 aimed to make the Ottoman Empire's provincial countryside more legible and therefore increasingly more lucrative for the Ottoman state. The eastern Mediterranean was an integral part of these projects, which involved more streamlined taxation processes, administrative restructuring, agrarian credit experiments, and new land registration policies, most notably expounded on in the 1858 Land Law. These developments occurred in a global context of political-economic restructuring as Ottoman officials tried to ensure that agricultural production, the empire's main source of revenue, could meet the increasing financial demands of the nineteenth century. As these policies began to take effect, Ottoman technocrats circulating in global networks started to focus more on increasing agricultural output, efforts that intensified after the 1908 revolution.
2."Agriculture from a Book": "Scientific" Agriculture in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean
To assess the relevance of new agricultural technologies to the ecologies of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman administrators established a network of institutions, namely, model farms and fields and agricultural schools, that promoted "scientific" agricultural practice throughout the empire's provinces. Although the knowledge produced in these institutions relied on local expertise, discussions about "scientific" agriculture tended to obscure the incorporation of this expertise, insisting instead on a "scientific" knowledge that was distinct from these contributions. Catering to the children of those with the resources and land to risk experimenting with new methods, these institutions led to heightened social differentiation within rural communities, leading to protests from those who did not see these projects as benefiting them.
3.The Trials and Tribulations of Tractors: From Ottoman Provinces to French Mandate States
In the years immediately before World War I, the eastern Mediterranean had a substantial scientific agricultural infrastructure, including several depots, to facilitate and encourage experimentation. Despite myriad challenges, efforts to maintain this infrastructure continued during the war. Following the war, however, the region, composed of provinces that had been an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, became colonial peripheries of the British and French imperial spheres. Different parties—French, Lebanese, and Syrian—espoused visions for the region's development, making their cases based on the "natural" boundaries that they claimed encompassed the space that should be theirs to exploit. Their competing plans involved incompatible overlapping claims, provoking clashes as French officials consolidated mandate control over the region. While the French focused on raw materials for French industry and making Syria's land legible to foreign capital, local officials urged a state-directed comprehensive economic plan.
4.The Politics of Agricultural Expertise and Education: Exerting Rural Influence Under the French Mandate
Local technocrats and French mandate officials espoused competing narratives in promoting their respective plans for agricultural education and experimentation. Local technocrats called for a multilevel infrastructure that would both educate children in rural communities to a level deemed appropriate to village life and produce trained agronomists who would serve as liaisons between state institutions and rural areas as part of cultivating a national state space. In contrast, mandate officials prioritized only basic agricultural education in the mandated regions with an eye toward spreading French influence, insisting that upper-level institutions were the prerogative of the metropole, thereby creating ties of dependency between the metropole and the mandate. Meanwhile, international actors also offered agricultural training and imported their technologies to gain influence, anticipating post–World War II development initiatives.
5.Of Mice, Sunn Bugs, Drought, and Taxation: The Pests of Mandate Rural Administration and the Crisis of the 1930s
Over the course of the 1920s, mandate agricultural policies refused to acknowledge the ecological limits of extraction, pushing farmers to their limits as they dealt with the compounding effects of revolt, drought, and pests. The global economic crisis of the 1930s only further exacerbated the situation. As local agronomists and technocrats advocated a more balanced approach to investment and extraction, mandate officials insisted that their policies were not the problem; rather, lack of local initiative was the issue. Resistance escalated into increasingly organized political protest by the mid-1930s. The crisis enabled Syrian nationalist elites, many of whom had investments in agriculture and were therefore not immune to these compounding crises, to promote themselves as mediators, intervening with mandate authorities on behalf of cultivators.
Epilogue
In the final years of the mandate and the first years of independence, local technocratic elites grappled with the mandate's legacy. They also turned to the emerging institutions of "development" for assessments of their needs regarding agricultural planning and, in some instances, for capital. The assessments and representations of these foreign experts reflected the colonial discourse of mandate officials as well as the inertia or fragmentation that prevailed in developments affecting agriculture during the interwar period; however, rather than acknowledging these issues as having roots in mandate policies, this literature tended to portray them as timeless problems, indicative of the region's status as "behind" in the continuum of progress. Such characterizations did not acknowledge or account for local technocratic expertise and its longue durée contributions to and plans for agriculture in the region or the impacts of colonial rule.