Missile-Guided Development: State Building and Economic Centralization in Egypt during World War II

Headquartered in Cairo and spanning the entire Middle East, parts of North Africa, and beyond, the Anglo-American Middle East Supply Centre (MESC) was established in 1941 to meet the needs of Allied forces during the Second World War, mainly economizing on shipping space to free capacity for armaments and other war materials. “Bestriding the Middle East economy like a giant and imposing its views and wishes on the production and consumption of nearly 100 million people toiling in a vast sub-continent,” in the worlds of the Center’s semi-official historian Martin Wilmington, the wartime agency reconfigured the economies of the Middle East as a single economic unit. It successfully decreased imports from over 6 million tons a year in pre-war years to 1.5 million a year by 1944, while producing, storing, and transporting military supplies for Allied forces in North Africa and the Soviet Union. In an effort to avoid widespread famines and social and political unrest, which had culminated in popular uprisings and revolts across Britain's vast empire in the preceding decade, the agency worked to foster industrial and agricultural production, facilitate investments in infrastructure and transportation, centralize and coordinate shipping and distribution, and institute rationing schemes, standardized practices, regulatory norms, and interventionist policies, many of which became central features of statist regimes to come. While some scholars have located the roots of Arab statism in nationalist developmentalist ethos and ideas of politico-economic sovereignty that may be traced back to the early twentieth century and before, others have challenged the “nationalist origins” of statism, arguing instead that the institutional consequences of the MESC influenced post-war trajectories of state- and economy-building. Based on archival documents of the MESC and focusing on Egypt in particular, my poster will present how the agency’s wartime interventions influenced state-building, information infrastructures, and competing conceptions of the role of the state in society and the economy during and after the war, as well as Britain’s own doctrines of developmentalism in the post-war period. To do this, I will trace American and British approaches to the development of the Middle East during and after the war, including the extent to which Keynesian understandings of economic intervention and management influenced the policies of the MESC. I will also consider how the MESC influenced the state’s changing role in national development; examine the beneficiaries of the agency’s policies; and investigate how Egyptian actors (e.g. politicians, peasants, landowners, laborers, industrialists) negotiated, bypassed, and at times disrupted MESC policies and activities.