A Legislated Crisis: Agrarian Administration in the Ottoman and French Mandate Eastern Mediterranean

In the aftermath of World War I, the Eastern Mediterranean, which had been integrated provinces of the Ottoman Empire, came under French and British colonial rule. This regional transition coincided with global developments in agricultural technologies, the emergence of an agronomic expertise deemed “scientific,” and experimentation with new administrative and fiscal policies to grapple with the economic implications of these developments. In French mandate Syria and Lebanon, there was substantial continuity between the technocratic ideals pursued by Ottoman, Syrian, Lebanese, and French officials, but Ottoman and French approaches to imperial rule diverged considerably. Most work on this region has dealt with these two imperial contexts separately and so has not addressed the nature of these continuities and divergences nor their consequences. This paper examines how this transition reconfigured the region’s economic space by tracing the shifting legal frameworks for agrarian finance, land tenure, and agricultural taxation policies promulgated to facilitate the lucrative promise of new technologies and their capital-intensive demands. It argues that Ottoman laws intended to create increasingly homogenized, integrated institutions across the empire; ensure continuity of production; and shore up economic sovereignty were rewritten or replaced under the French mandate by legislation that encouraged regional fragmentation; favored foreign creditors and extraction; undermined national economic sovereignty; and tied the region to France as a dependent, colonial periphery. Syrian and Lebanese technocrats protested these legal developments, advocating for their vision of an integrated national economy and conditions conducive to technological experimentation, but their efforts to curb French imperial designs were largely thwarted. Using legal texts, periodicals, petitions, and administrative documents from Turkish, French, and Lebanese archives and libraries, this paper demonstrates how these mandate legal policies led to an increasingly fragmented and indebted economic space resulting in a major fiscal crisis by the mid-1930s.