Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East

In 1840, a coalition of European powers decided to take on an alarming problem to their south.footnote¹ The Albanian-born governor of Ottoman Egypt, Mehmed Ali, had spent the past two decades building up a formidable industrial and military capacity in his assigned territories. A veteran of the Napoleonic wars, the Wahhabi revolt and the Greek rebellion, Ali administered Egypt as a province of the Sublime Porte in name only; in reality he was forging a Mediterranean Prussia. Ali’s troops marched on Palestine, Syria and then Greece, claiming territory and stationing men. The Ottoman Sultan could do little about it. Eventually, British and Austrian navies cut off Egyptian supply lines and entered Alexandria’s waters. Under duress, Ali signed a series of capitulations which opened Egyptian markets, dismantled its manufacturing base and defanged its military. Egypt experienced rapid under-development, becoming an exporter of raw commodities and an importer of European manufactures for the next century.footnote² It was not until the rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser that such statist attempts would occur again in North Africa, to be met once more with external military response. Today, not coincidentally, Egypt lags behind other middle-income states in industrial capacity, as well as being the world’s largest importer of wheat.

Amid these nineteenth-century efforts at geopolitical renewal, Egyptian intellectuals attempted a synthesis of Islamic political thought and European political economy. Writing in 1869, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi hoped that the development of labour in Egypt and other Muslim states might speed ‘the advancement of societies’.footnote³ Qasim Amin’s The Liberation of Women and The New Woman appeared not long after. Though the actors have changed since Tahtawi and Amin discussed the relation of emerging social formations to state building, the debates over the prospects for regional order, popular cohesion, and political rejuvenation remain largely unaltered. To chart the historical terrain, this essay tracks the making and unmaking of social compacts and state formations in the Middle East and North Africa (mena), amid changing political-economic conditions, across five broad chronological periods: the tail end of the Ottoman and Persian empires, the colonial interlude, the era of political independence, the infitah years of economic opening, and the current upheaval of unrest and militarization. Despite the lack of settled conceptual or geographic definitions for the region, certain patterns can be discerned.

Few zones of the world have been so riven by opposition, real or imagined, for as long as Europe and the Middle East. Most recently, the institutional turn in economics has produced attempts to explain anew the divergence of socio-economic trajectories between them. These accounts focus on the persistence of ‘bad’ institutions in mena areas over the longue durée—lack of primogeniture, for instance, or dominance of state rulers over local elites.footnote⁴ Yet economic historians of the region counter that, in reality, institutional pluralism, not uniformity, was the rule. Land tenure patterns ranged from small peasant holdings to tax farming by notables to imperially administered estates. Commerce and credit tended to flow through and between urban locales, overcoming or bypassing religious dictates against usury through flexible interpretations of scripture; the roles of women and religious minorities as traders were not insignificant. Nomadic tribal confederations ranged across large swathes of the region, coexisting within and around agrarian empires and their urban metropoles. The ‘gunpowder empires’ of the early modern period—as Marshall Hodgson termed the Ottomans and Safavids—more successfully centralized a ruling apparatus and market penetration over large territories compared to previous centuries. Long before Western colonialism, the internal and external borders marked out by these and subsequent warring empires laid the foundations for twentieth-century state-building in the mena region.

As elsewhere, the internal authority of these empires was irregularly exercised. By the end of the eighteenth century, merchants, artisan guilds and religious endowments tended to administer most social aid and welfare in imperial urban zones. Charitable giving was, of course, an Islamic injunction. Through the pooling of donations and assets under religious endowments, Hodgson noted, ‘various civic essentials and even amenities were provided for on a private yet dependable basis without need or fear of the intervention of political power’.footnote⁵ Yet the few studies that exist show that inequality was quite high in West Asian empires. The Gini index during the eighteenth century for sampled records in Cairo and Damascus hovered around 0.75, while northern Anatolian locales stood at 0.60.footnote⁶

Increased commercial trade with the capitalist world-economy and penetration by European merchants and militaries did not have a single, generalized effect on social structures in the region. The variation of peasant tenure patterns, merchant–state relations, and artisan guild politics differed widely, based on relations between local elites and imperial centres. Hardly the paragon of ‘Asian despotism’, Ottoman capacity for state regulation was in fact limited and had reached its apex in the sixteenth century. Most revenues were kept by tax-farming notables, while merchant entreaties against foreign competition from European trade went largely unheeded.footnote⁷ The re-centralization of the Ottoman bureaucracy through nineteenth-century reforms brought the state back into social regulation and class formation, most notably in Mehmed Ali’s Egypt and the wealthier Ottoman provinces. A mixed economy of state relief took shape, linked to military buildup and urban policing.footnote⁸ The Persian Empire under the Qajar dynasty fared worse at fiscal-military centralization, as evidenced by a series of famines during the 1860s–70s. During these catastrophes, an imperial ban on cereal exports was mandated but unenforceable. Most of the famine aid came from European missionaries, not the imperial government in Tehran, and was directed towards religious minorities.footnote⁹

Given the unevenness of state penetration combined with social deprivation, it is not surprising that unrest broke out. The nineteenth century witnessed a wave of uprisings on mena imperial peripheries, led by men whom Eric Hobsbawm would have instantly recognized as primitive rebels: the Sudanese Mahdi, the Daghestani Imam Shamil, the Shirazi Bab (precursor to Baha’ism), the Sokoto’s Usman dan Fodio (between Lake Chad and the Niger River), or the Somaliland’s Mohammad Abdullah Hassan (the original ‘Mad Mullah’). These were generally millenarian movements which devised radical worldviews and appealed to social justice under the guise of Islamic tradition. Whether quickly extinguished or successfully converted into proto-states, their presence was often a pretext for the intervention of Western colonial armies.

The inability of mena empires to confront external and internal challenges spurred urban intellectuals to argue for more radical social and political measures to be carried out by the state. Along with other agrarian empires such as Russia, India and China, the Ottomans and Persians underwent anti-imperialist revolts in their urban centres in the early twentieth century.footnote¹⁰ The dynamics were similar: elites attempted to redirect their remaining imperial resources towards military upgrading, popular mobilization and nationalist myth-making, often combined with a degree of emancipation for women of the elite, at least.footnote¹¹ It is not a coincidence that the first successful attempt, Kemalism, occurred at the heart of West Asia’s imperial arena. The mena social compacts of the mid-twentieth century owed much to its example.