Mandating the Mahjar

This chapter analyzes Lebanon’s census of 1921 and argues that the French Mandate counted emigrants to bolster the confessional system it was building in Greater Lebanon (Grand Liban). As the Mandate’s first point of contact with its colonial citizens, census-taking was a means of refracting French authority into the transnational Lebanese communities. The Mandate used census records in lieu of a formal Lebanese nationality, making optional registration a deeply politicized act among Lebanese and Syrian migrant communities in the Americas. For some, being counted was the first act of a new Lebanese citizenship; for others, it was intolerable sublimation beneath the colonial yoke. The French Mandate used the census to domesticate the diaspora, to parse friend from foe, and to cut ties with perceived troublemakers.

New Syrians Abroad

This chapter focuses on Syrian migrant activists who lobbied for American intervention and a US Mandate in Syria after the 1918 armistice. Calling themselves the “New Syrian” parties, activists in New York City, Boston, Buenos Aires, and Cairo petitioned for the United States to take guardianship of Syria as a bulwark against French colonialism in the region. The New Syrians were rejected by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which led them to promote their ideas through petitioning and mass meetings held in the mahjar. Examining a history of the Wilsonian moment from beyond the Paris petitions, the chapter argues that the conference engaged in the construction of a legal fiction: that the Syrian mahjar favored the French Mandate. Far from partners in empire, the diaspora Syrians and Lebanese presented the French with the difficult task of pacifying an extraterritorial subject population that could not be controlled through blunt military suppression.

The Mahjar of the Young Turks, 1908–1916

This chapter examines the Ottoman Empire’s rediscovery of the Syrian mahjar after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The revolution toppled the Hamidian states and brought the constitutionalists to power in Istanbul. The new Committee of Union and Progress party saw in the Ottoman diasporas the opportunity to reclaim migrants through diplomacy, economic development, and repatriation. The Unionists cultivated Syrian, Armenian, and Turkish ethnic fraternal societies in the American mahjar, opening new Ottoman consulates in the Syrian and Lebanese communities, especially under Mundji Bey in New York City and Amin Arslan in Buenos Aires. Although Syrian clubs readily promoted Young Turk ideas to bring the ‘spirit of 1908’ to America, these clubs also transformed into spaces for substantive citizenship and critique. As the Ottoman Empire slid into a militarized Unionist government after 1909, the Syrian societies abroad formed the nuclei of the mahjar’s decentralist, reform, and Arabist political movements.

Conclusion

This conclusion briefly examines how the French Mandate’s incomplete pacification of the mahjar allowed Syrian migrants space to contest the brutality of French rule during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–1927. Revisiting the story of former Ottoman consul to Argentina, Emir Amin Arslan, the conclusion illustrates how the Mandates managed migrant anticolonialism through papers. Contrasting the use of newsprint, petitions, passports, and propaganda to promoted a post-Ottoman free Syria during the war, by the mid-1920s the Mandate employed its documentary regimes in new ways to cut ties with Syrian émigré activists and political problems abroad. French threats to denationalize 110,000 Syrians in Argentina in retaliation for the perceived support of Syria’s revolutionaries amounted to a new partitioning of Syria from its diasporas. The chapter closes with a consideration of how this politics of partition have been repeated in histories of the Middle East that elide migrant stories through archival silencing.

Mashriq and Mahjar

This chapter tracks the migration of a half million Arab migrants from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas between 1880 and 1914. Syrians and Mount Lebanese departed the Ottoman Middle East to plug themselves into the expanding capitalist economies of the post-abolition Atlantic world. Through labor migration, Syrians developed a transnational remittance economy that successfully confronted the peripheralization of the Arab eastern Mediterranean. Steamship, telegraph, and printing technologies facilitated the establishment of Syrian “colonies” (jalliyyat) in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. Once abroad, Syrian migrants built social institutions that connected the Arab Atlantic across continents and linked the diaspora to its homeland. Fraternal societies, philanthropic clubs, mutual aid societies, and the Syrian diasporic press each contributed to this new public sphere, abetting Syrian commercial success and grabbing the attentions of the Ottoman state by the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.

Introduction

For empires and states, diasporas present a tantalizing transnational frontier to be reclaimed for state-building purposes. Between 1880 and 1920, a half million Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Arabs left the Ottoman Empire, settling in “Syrian colonies” across the Atlantic. This introduction explores the processes by which nationalist historiographies have marginalized Arab migrants. It critiques the silences that place-based archives produce and argues that reclaiming, controlling, and containing Syrian migrants abroad lay at the center of Ottoman, American, and French projects aimed at the Middle East. Writing migrant histories from indigenous archives restores the scope of such projects. Examining the papers migrants carried with them across the diaspora—papers, passports, petitions, correspondence—allows this work to pursue Syrians across multiple archival regimes. Migrant print culture is more than the sum of its writings; rather, what makes paper powerful is its ability to define the scope of Syria’s transnational geography.

Travelling Syrians, Immovable Turks

This chapter investigates passport fraud and migrant smuggling between the 1918 armistice and the establishment of the French Mandate in 1920. During the war, the United States had progressively identified “Syrian” as a national origins category to exempt Arab migrants from travel restrictions imposed on other Ottoman nationals. The French consulates of the Americas expanded this nationality category by offering Syrian migrants sauf conduit (or safe conduct) passports to facilitate repatriation after 1918. These passports claimed Syrian and Lebanese migrants as French protected persons, exempting them from America’s travel ban while also claiming them as future French colonials. France used the document to bolster its own claims to Syria and Mount Lebanon as a League of Nations Mandate, but the passport also opened the door to migrant smuggling. Because US laws governing national origins remained ambiguous, smugglers turned ineligible Ottoman Kurds and Turks into “Syrians” on paper.

Former Ottomans in the Ranks

This chapter examines the clandestine recruitment of ten thousand Syrian migrants into the militaries of the Entente powers. As conditions deteriorated in Ottoman Syria and Mount Lebanon, Syrian migrant organizations shifted from providing humanitarian relief toward military resistance against the Ottoman state. Activists from competing Syrianist, Lebanist, and Arab nationalist movements produced propaganda in support of the war against Istanbul, conducted espionage for the Entente powers, and recruited Arab men from across the mahjar into Entente military service. The chapter tracks migrant networks between Syrians in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States who worked to deliver migrant troops to the army, where the US government granted recruits passports and a post-Ottoman nationality status to facilitate their service. Syrians joined up under a patriotic rhetoric promising the war would deliver Syria’s liberation, but they also resented nationalists’ attempts to claim them as symbols for competing homeland projects.