This study will rst provide a clear framing of colonialism by addressing the theoretical overview provided by Osterhammel in conjunction with comparative historical discussions. The discussion will then continue with the origins and development of martial law in Palestine, beginning with the establishment of the Mandate system to the present day. Finally, we will end with an evaluation of the relationship between Israel and Palestine and create a more nuanced view and a fresh examination of the structure behind the conflict.

Turkey’s Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti) dominated politics in the country from its election in 1950 until its removal by a military coup in 1960. During this decade, Turkey was integrated into the economic and security institutions of the American-led Cold War order. At the same time, domestic politics in Turkey became more contentious, polarizing society along partisan lines. I argue that this polarization was a result of Democrat Party leaders’ decision to restrict institutions like the press, opposition, and internal party dissent in order to buy themselves the time necessary to weather politically unfavorable economic conditions.

This dissertation looks at the materials produced by members of the Democrat Party including speeches, newspaper columns, court records, and memoirs in order to understand how party elites justified their actions to the public, how they shifted over time from criticizing single-party rule to attempting re-establish it. I argue that two factors are essential in understanding this return to authoritarian methods of governance. The first concerns the particular individuals overseeing the process of democratization during the 1950s. The second is the Cold War order in which that democratization took place. Turkey’s transition to democracy (starting around 1945) was managed by the same people who had shaped its previous single-party system (1923-45)—this included the founders of the Democrat Party, all formerly influential figures in the single-party regime. This continuity ensured that, once in power, recourse to authoritarian solutions was never wholly unthinkable for DP leaders. Whether authoritarian methods were deemed necessary or practicable, however, depended on the changing political and economic conditions of the American-led Cold War order. As the decade progressed, this order became more authoritarian as regimes in countries ranging from France to Pakistan to Turkey took steps to constrain and de-democratize the political process.

In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, a group of authors in the Syro-Lebanese diaspora including Chekri Ganem, Nadra Moutran, and Joseph Saouda constructed an Orientalizing discourse to promote a Francophile Catholic vision of Syria’s future, emulating the values and rhetoric of their adopted homeland. At various points, these authors demanded self-rule, increased representation in the Ottoman administration, and independence. In both political publications and literary works including poetry, novels, and theater, these authors drew upon their missionary educations in the schools of the Jesuits, Lazarists, and other French orders in Syria, as well as the memory of the 1860 civil unrest to create and express a hybrid identity. They revered France as the pinnacle of civilization and culture, while drawing Orientalist images of Syria as a wild and untamed land, nevertheless taking a measure of pride in their Arab heritage. While they have been dismissed as shysters in the pay of foreign governments, Ganem and his cohort from Cairo to Paris engaged in early movements of Ottoman reformism, while challenging Hamidian and Unionist centralization and the dearth of Arabs in positions of power after 1908. In shaping the French Orientalist discourse surrounding the future of the Ottoman Empire, they led a colonization of the mind, reproducing the values of their missionary education. Finally, this group of authors’ close association with the colonial lobby within the French Foreign Ministry, academic groups and commercial organizations meant they pursued a different agenda than their Young Ottoman and CUP contemporaries – autonomy, decentralization, and eventually the mandate system.

Education is liberating and confining. It is assumed that increased access to education enables women’s socio-economic mobility, improving their civic participation and social benefits. Gendered education, however, reinforces ideologies that demarcate concepts of femininity, circumscribing women’s place in society. In twentieth-century Egypt, missionaries, the state, and Egyptian nationals claimed that to educate a woman was to edify, shape, and alter the nation, beginning within the individual home. Girls’ education, therefore, encoded beliefs of womanhood that couched prescriptive gender norms and policed girls’ minds, bodies, sexuality, and roles in public and private domains. Educate a Girl, Educate a Nation takes education as a contested site of nation-making and examines the struggle between American missionaries and the state to govern girls’ education, and inevitably, fashion the ideal Egyptian woman citizen.

Though current literature often positions missionaries as part of the colonial project, I demonstrate that missionaries, whether intentionally or not, served a critical purpose in Egyptians’ nationalist post-colonial identity formation. Girls’ schools were sites of transnational pedagogical exchange and citizen-making that developed new notions of womanhood as an amalgam of American and Egyptian ideals, customs, and contexts. The struggle to control education consequently elevated girls’ choices in and quality of schooling which facilitated a thriving, unprecedented, educational boom; in this unique moment, girls transformed themselves from subjects into citizens.

Despite its significance, virtually no literature examines Upper Egypt’s premier girls’ school, the Asyut Pressly Memorial Institute (PMI), mainly due to source inaccessibility and scarcity. Using the case of PMI, this dissertation tells a larger story of power, womanhood, feminism, Copts, and the transnational dynamics in the development of Egypt’s national education system. Missionaries and the state used schools analogously to construct the ideal woman as an educated wife and mother loyal to the nation; missionaries inculcated Egyptian patriotism into girls with hopes to build an indigenous cohort with Protestant values to evangelize throughout and alter the nation. Using a novel source composition of archival records, periodicals, oral histories, and missionary and colonial records collected throughout the USA, UK, and Egypt, this study centers Upper Egypt within the discourse on nation-state building.

Through the application of sociological theory to the historical study of Egypt under the British occupation (1882-1952), this dissertation argues that sport plays a significant role as a transformative element in society and politics, rather than merely a reflective one. It demonstrates that sport, and its concomitant discourse, acts as a channel to convey the ideas of intellectuals in a more accessible way. Acknowledging the role of sport restores the agency of a broader segment of the population to negotiate the meaning, and ultimate impact of, particular ideologies.

The enduring nature of sporting institutions in post-revolutionary Egypt was built upon foundations laid during the preceding seven decades of British occupation. Through the use of national newspapers and magazines, supplemented by archival material from Britain and the International Olympic Committee, this case study demonstrates how sport can serve as an organizational force that is able to engender political transformations. This dissertation highlights the development of sport in Egypt from its origins as a tool used by the colonizers to reinforce their rule into a multifarious series of perspectives on what “Egyptian sport” could mean. These narratives slowly coalesced into a single ideal of a “sportsman” who transcended sectarian, ethnic, and class differences and represented his nation on the world stage at the Olympics and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s.

By the time of the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, sport had established itself as a potent channel for spreading ideology, and thus there was more continuity than discontinuity between British and post-revolutionary policy. It was not until the 1956 Suez Crisis that a shift occurred in which the Egyptian government abandoned its attempts to become one among the club of Europeans, instead seeking a leadership role in the Arab World.

This thesis offers a nuanced analysis of state-business relations in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within a comparative and transnational framework. It challenges the conventional wisdom that emphasizes the dominant role of political elites in economic affairs while downplaying the agency and power wielded by businesspeople. A multidisciplinary approach that integrates historical, economic, institutional, and diplomatic analyses illustrates that the state’s influence on the business world had limits, and business associations and their leaders employed various strategies to safeguard and expand their interests and shape the economic landscape of the region.The first part examines Ottoman participation in the world’s fairs abroad and the Ottoman Empire’s penchant for finding a place for itself in the world system in a period when many intellectuals and politicians in the West saw the Ottoman state as the Sick Man of Europe. As one of the few politically independent Islamic powers, the Ottoman Empire wanted to represent its economy, art, customs, people, and religion at expositions that attracted millions of visitors. Ottoman ruling elites, commercial classes, intellectuals, and artists attempted to present an image of a united, strong, and civilized empire. While the Ottoman state and its political elites could not create the impression that they had hoped to achieve, a growing number of private enterprises and chambers took advantage of these fairs. Business associations maintained their intermediary role between the Ottoman economy and the outside world despite the absence of international fairs within the empire itself. The second part of the thesis explores the divergent paths of business associations and international fairs in the inter-war Middle East. To demonstrate that the circumstances of the different post-Ottoman countries varied greatly, it investigates the trade fairs of the inter-war period at two levels: regional and international. Trade fairs on the regional and international levels contributed to the emergence of new capitalist classes and the formation of national economies in the Middle East despite the devastation of World War I, political turmoil throughout the region, and the Great Depression. Chambers and fairs put businessmen from post-Ottoman countries in direct contact with one another. International fairs outside the Middle East further gave businessmen a voice and representation regarding business matters. Along with state authorities, business classes, individually and collectively, contributed to the representation of their home countries. Businessmen in the colonial Middle East exercised less control of associations and fairs than did their counterparts in politically independent countries because of colonial governments. As with their counterparts in Greece and Turkey, they used business associations and gatherings to preserve and multiply their personal wealth and social influence. Nonetheless, their weak connection to international chambers of commerce and the absence of a regularly held international fair in Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem restrained their collective power. A comparison of the interwar Middle East with the late Ottoman Empire in terms of business associations and gatherings revealed many profound changes. The two decades following the collapse of the empire were full of fairs, several of which attracted a considerable number of exhibitors and visitors from abroad. Unlike the closing decades of the empire, post-Ottoman countries staged fairs in which foreign countries, including the Great Powers of Europe and far-away nations of Scandinavia, officially attended. Interwar fairs were more successful than their prewar counterparts in terms of number of visitors, size, longevity, international recognition, diplomatic use, design, and architecture.

This dissertation investigates the Ottoman Empire’s settlement of refugees fleeing Russian persecution along the empire’s desert frontiers between 1866 and 1918. I contend that Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the state officials who planned their settlement developed the internal frontiers of the Ottoman Empire to transform these regions’ societies, politics, and environments well into the twentieth century. The dissertation is thus an intervention in the histories of population mobility, the environment, and the project of modernity in the Ottoman Empire. It investigates the implications of Istanbul’s policies, driven by what I refer to as a “civilizing attitude,” for the refugee settlers, administrators, local populations, and the environments of the Middle East. The Ottoman state enacted a program of creating model agricultural settlements populated by refugees to sedentarize nomads, whom officials viewed as backwards. The dissertation argues for the agency of the refugees, who adapted to challenging circumstances and ultimately influenced the drawing of borders in the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The analysis takes as its case studies settlement schemes in Benghazi, eastern Libya; Quneitra, southern Syria; and Resülayn, northern Mesopotamia to conclude that small communities of refugees at the far edges of empire altered historical trajectories on the regional, imperial, and global levels.

In September 1959, Lebanese president, Fuad Shehab, signed an agreement with Father Louis-Joseph Lebret. Lebret was the founder of the IRFED, a Paris-based institution set up to provide technical expertise to developing nations. During its mission, IRFED conducted a series of studies that formed the basis for comprehensive development projects in Lebanon. I investigate French and Lebanese collaboration on state development and social welfare projects in rural Lebanon from 1958 to 1970. During his presidency Shehab sought to implement development projects to bridge socioeconomic disparities between the developed urban coast and the poorer rural interior. Shehab and his entourage believed that economic inequality and lack of state outreach inflamed sectarian and class tensions between citizens, leading to the Civil War of 1958. I look at how the state designed and implemented projects; how communities at the site of development perceived them; and how these plans and the reactions they engendered influenced global discourses of development and planning. My work contributes to three key research lines. The first is in Lebanese historical accounts of postcolonial Lebanon.The current historiography of Lebanon focuses on its pre-nation state Ottoman roots, or its period of French colonial rule (1920-1943). By researching recently uncovered Lebanese documents from the ministries of Planning, Industry, and Agriculture, my research looks at Lebanon after its independence, during the years of heightened nation building, while focusing on planning at Lebanon's peripheries. The second, is in larger development histories. By highlighting the role of on-the-ground politics and the actions of state and non-state actors in Lebanon, I show that development is made, not by experts sitting in tall buildings of international organizations, but in the specifics of every city, region, and country. Third, I argue that the Catholic social thought at the root of IRFED and Lebanese state planning ideology, reflected the parochial attachments Lebanese and French planners had towards a pastoral vision of the countryside. Ironically, state planning rooted in this romanticized idea of rural life failed to empower rural citizens and set up extractive mono-crop agricultural industries, impoverishing the rural Lebanon and dispossessing its occupants. This rural ideal showcases the way that rapid urbanization proceeded apace with seemingly contradictory ideological agendas: on one hand, to preserve an undeveloped pastoral rural ideal, and on the other, to develop a robust agricultural sector and deter rural flight.

This dissertation examines the importance of schools to the national project, the increasing popularity and significance of girls’ education in the interwar period to that project, and the ways in which girls and women defined and acted out their citizenship as students, teachers, administrators, and alumnae, in the context of colonial occupation and nation-building in the post-Ottoman Middle East. It uses colonial, state, institutional, and school archives, press accounts, memoirs, and interviews with alumnae related to six girls’ schools with secondary programs that operated before, during, and after the French Mandate in Lebanon: the three girls’ schools of the American Mission, the Maqasid’s Kulliyat al-banat, the Greek Orthodox Zahrat al-ihsan, and the secular nationalist Ahliah.

In its engagement with these sources, and with scholarship of the Mandate period in the Middle East and Lebanon, sociological conceptions and definitions of citizenship, postcolonial theory, and theoretical frameworks concerning gender, nationalism, and space, this dissertation argues that girls’ education and educational institutions served a discursive and material function in defining girls’ and women’s citizenship in interwar and early independence Lebanon. The vision of women’s citizenship articulated discursively in curricula and the press and materially in girls’ schools was a type of social citizenship, one that allowed girls and women to reconcile their multiple loyalties and drew on their experiences during the Mandate.

School curricula called for girls’ education for the creation of modern wives and mothers for the nation’s men and boys, linking educated womanhood and the modern home with national uplift. The Beirut-based women’s press simultaneously bolstered and challenged such a conception through discussions of educated women’s role in political life and the home. Materially, schools served as sites through which colonial, national, and local claims were made. They also provided a space in which students, teachers, and administrators articulated their own visions—of the school, the nation, and their citizenship. When looking at Mandate Lebanon from the perspective of girls and women, one encounters a nonsectarian vision for Lebanon that looks to what Lebanon can be rather than what it is or was.