Transnational Ligatures of Empire: The “Atavistic” Syrian Migrant and the World's “Intermedium”

From the 1890s to the 1930s, Syrian migrants throughout the Atlantic world formulated various, yet intersecting, self-understandings by claiming that they were an integral component of the modern moment. They projected constructed identities within both national and imperial frameworks, sometimes both frameworks within the same receiving society. The idea of diaspora (mahjar) played a central role in their identity formation, both as a category of self-understanding, and later as a category of scholarly critical analysis. Through the mahjar, Syrians constructed a narrative of communal worth in the modern era that associated capital gains and racial categorization with human value. Syrians compared their status within global human hierarchies against other migrant groups’ in an effort to either distance themselves from undesirable communities, or draw themselves closer to “belonging” as representatives of societal norms. Syrians recognized that desirability varied by location: the praxis of national belonging, the colonized other, and racial undesirability.

In practice, Syrian migrants built vast commercial networks and economic “empires” within broader imperial structures and composed self-promoting narratives equally as grandiose. Reasoning with the audiences of their host societies, these migrants fashioned histories of belonging out of otherness. Syrians conceived of an “atavistic” national identity: an expression of Syrian-ness that reconciled thousands of years of commercial and cultural efflorescence through the language of the modern. As imperial sojourners, Syrians constructed myriad identities in a comparative context: against other ethnic and national groups struggling for social and legal recognition within receiving societies where Syrians did the same. Moreover, the post-World War I competition in the Arab world helped forge the idea of a liminal Middle East, which like the identities of Syrians in diaspora, was formed ultimately in the crucible of imperialism. Syria itself became an “intermedium”: a territorial space neither Western nor Eastern; neither purely progressive nor solely decadent.