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Contribution short abstract:

This contribution considers the economic and environmental consequences of efforts to expand rainfed cultivation into more arid regions of the eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Contribution long abstract:

As one Syrian agronomist observed in the early twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean had vast expanses of fertile plains but few sources of consistent water to ensure irrigation for their cultivation. These regions were either dependent on rainfall or, if the geography was right, groundwater channeled through underground tunnels from higher elevations to lower ones where it could be distributed through irrigation networks. For administrators in the late Ottoman Empire and under the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, these lands represented one of the best options for increasing revenue extraction from agricultural production but maintaining them in cultivation proved challenging. This contribution to the roundtable considers the management strategies devised to expand cultivation into these arid regions by the Ottoman administration and then the French mandate government. It contrasts their approaches and the divergent environmental and economic consequences for these lands and their inhabitants. The case study proposes to explore how administrative strategies aimed in the late Ottoman period to use these lands to disrupt provincial elite capital accumulation and shore up a source of fiscal sovereignty while, under the mandate, official projects targeted them as repositories for investing surplus colonial capital, ultimately leading to cultivator dispossession. The contrasting approaches to managing these resources suggest the unique ways in which state power has been variously exerted in the service of capital in marginal ecologies to produce new social and economic realities.