This dissertation provides the first transnational genealogy of the individuals, ideas, and institutions that culminated in the adoption of Afghanistan's first constitution in 1923. Based on archival research in Afghanistan, Turkey, India, and Britain, the study uncovers the longue durée history behind the text, including the genesis of its drafting commission, its multinational contributors from Constantinople to Qandahar, and the challenges they overcame in producing the pioneering charter. Drawing on records and manuscripts in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, the study first traces the burgeoning tripartite ties between Ottomans, Afghans, and Indians from the aftermath of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion to World War I. While historians of Pan-Islamism have tended to focus on radical ideologues and militant jihads, the emphasis on confrontation with the west has overlooked more subtle internal processes, such as the surge in students and scholars--as well as texts and ideas--traversing between the Ottoman and British empires at this time. Challenging conventional tropes of warring tribes and barren frontiers, I locate Afghanistan as a crucial juncture for such transnational social networks, and a center of debates about law, citizenship, and what it meant to be a modern Muslim. The dissertation culminates with the convergence of three simultaneous developments of profound historical impact in the greater Middle East: the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Afghanistan's independence from Britain in 1919, and the Indian Khilāfat Movement of 1919-1924. Amidst this dramatic backdrop of revolutionary politics and Pan-Islamic activism, I draw attention to an untold juridical history: the ensuing competition between Ottoman lawyers, Afghan administrators, and Indian jurists who converged in Kabul to market their expertise to the world's only fully-sovereign "Islamic state." It was the synthesis of these legal actors and the diverse juridical histories they represented, I conclude, that ultimately produced Afghanistan's first constitution between 1919 and 1923.

In unearthing the social and cultural origins of Afghanistan's first constitution, the dissertation contributes a long overdue corrective to the scarce scholarly literature on Afghan legal history. The study also problematizes literature on the modern Middle East that silences the non-Ottoman "periphery" as passive objects caught between the colonial rivalry of Britain and Russia. Such works, I show, ignore the contributions of other independent rulers in the region such as the Bārakzai dynasty in Kabul, including the Afghan monarchs Amir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1880-1901), Amir Ḥabīb-Allāh (1901-1919), and Amir Amān-Allāh (1919-1929) in particular. By examining the Afghan court's patronage of scholarly networks from Damascus to Delhi, I argue that this unique constitutional project cannot be reduced to European mimicry and obeisance, nor an identity politics of Pan-Islam triggered at the behest of the Ottomans. In this manner, the dissertation enriches Afghanistan studies beyond the confines of the Great Game, Cold War, or recent literature on "failed states." Instead, the study persuades us to rediscover Afghanistan with a different past--when Kabul represented a center of debates, cosmopolitanism, and contested visions of reform in the region.

The dissertation's focus on emergent transnational Islamic legal cultures--or juridical Pan-Islamism--between the late Ottoman empire, British India, and Afghanistan illustrates how modern notions of law, administration, and statecraft transcended politically-bounded territories. More specifically, the study sharpens our understanding of how urban centers within the vast socio-cultural zone stretching from the Balkans to Bengal came to be increasingly linked through specific networks, institutions, and processes of expertise associated with Islamic legal modernism. In tracing the social and institutional genealogy of the first Afghan constitution (1923), the dissertation examines how modern Muslim legal practices developing in Istanbul, Kabul, and greater Delhi in the long nineteenth century could simultaneously overlap, intersect, and co-evolve into distinct Ottoman, Afghan, and Indian juridical fields. Finally, as a socio-legal history it shows how a diverse cast of actors--Turks and Arabs, Indians and Persians, but most of all, Afghans--shaped the fields of constitutional law and politics in the greater Islamic world.

This dissertation examines the socioeconomic history of Kütahya, an inland town in western Anatolia, with a specific emphasis on the transformation that took place in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century. However, it is not a socioeconomic history of an urban center or of a region in the traditional sense. Rather, it uses Kütahya and the surrounding region as a ground upon which it seeks to answer a series of questions about this transformation. These questions concern the impact of the administrative function of a city on its socioeconomic development; the extent to which a new financial policy implemented at the end of the seventeenth century--the malikâne system--affected power relations in the region surrounding Kütahya; and the role played by the cash requirements of the state at the end of the eighteenth century in the monetization of the economy. The dissertation also examines various aspects of credit relations, changes in consumption patterns, and the relationship between privilege and the accumulation of wealth.

The research does not subscribe to any particular perspective on the transformation that took place in the eighteenth century, nor does it focus on one particular framework of interpretation, such as center-periphery relations or the rise of the local notables. Rather, it is intended to provide as much concrete evidence as possible on these issues for a city and region for which there is literally no secondary literature.

The findings of this research show that generalizations about the transformation that took place in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century need to be qualified with further research--especially with in-depth studies on different regions of the empire. During this period, local notables emerged, the financial and military crisis took a serious toll on the region, the economy became more and more monetized, credit relations expanded, and some sectors of society accumulated wealth. But, relations of power vis-à-vis the center did not change significantly. The notables that emerged posed no challenge to the central authority, the economy was to a great extent regional, and the accumulation of wealth remained a function of political and economic privilege.

The dissertation consists of two parts. The first three chapters are intended to provide a lengthy prelude to the eighteenth century, and draw largely on secondary sources. These chapters present a socioeconomic context for the changes that took place in the eighteenth century, and within which those changes can be assessed. The scarcity of secondary sources, and the highly descriptive nature of the few that exist also made it necessary to include an organized narrative for the period between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries in the first three chapters. The last three chapters cover the period roughly from 1671 to 1820, and are based to a great extent on primary sources--especially on the court registers. These three chapters seek to answer the questions concerning the transformation of the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century with the evidence provided by the primary sources.

World War I, no doubt, was a pivotal event in the history of the Middle East, as it marked the transition from empires to nation states. Taking Beirut and Mount Lebanon as a case study, the dissertation focuses on the experience of Ottoman civilians on the homefront and exposes the paradoxes of the Great War, in its totalizing and transformative nature. Focusing on the causes and symptoms of what locals have coined the `war of famine' as well as on international and local relief efforts, the dissertation demonstrates how wartime privations fragmented the citizenry, turning neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother, and at the same time enabled social and administrative changes that resulted in the consolidation and strengthening of bureaucratic hierarchies and patron-client relationships.

This dissertation is a detailed analysis of socio-economic challenges that the war posed for Ottoman subjects, focusing primarily on the distorting effects of food shortages, disease, wartime requisitioning, confiscations and conscriptions on everyday life as well as on the efforts of the local municipality and civil society organizations to provision and care for civilians. Although all residents of Beirut and Mount Lebanon took part in the same war, their experiences were often different, mediated by existing gender and class differences and communal belongings, which the international conflict - and concomitant interventions by the state as well as international relief agencies - both exposed and exacerbated. The war aggravated the inequalities embedded in late Ottoman and European colonial definitions of citizenship, since class and communal affiliation determined people's access to food, their ability to avoid conscription, fight disease, obtain provisions, and secure relief funds. Moreover, mutual sacrifice, collective martyrdom and communal resistance rule loom large in state-sponsored national narratives about World War I. Post-colonial Lebanon is no exception. This dissertation reveals how attempts to construct a dominant 'collective' memory of World War I to promote national unity served to mask the continued perpetuation of social inequalities and contributed to tensions within post-independence Lebanese society.

This dissertation contributes to the general scholarship of World War I, which so far has dismissed the experience of civilians on the Ottoman homefront as peripheral. Second it shifts the historiographical focus of World War I in the Middle East as a political diplomatic event, toward it being understood as a dynamic social, economic and political process the outcome of which was dependent as much on the immediate necessities of war, its political economy and strain on civilians, as on long-term historical developments that had left the region vulnerable to the wartime disruptions in the world market and hence more susceptible to famine. Third, this social history of World War I in the Middle East outlines interactions between the Ottoman military authorities, provincial representatives of the state, municipal council members, religious leaders, greedy merchants, bakers and local law enforcement agencies and their relations to the urban and rural poor, that force us to rethink common perceptions of Ottoman tyranny and ambivalence in regards to its civilians and poses a challenge to sectarian interpretations of the war experience on the homefront.

This dissertation investigates the governance of seventeenth-century Damascus by examining claims upon the productive capacity of land, and the collection and redistribution of agricultural taxes. The early modern Ottoman Empire--of which Damascus was a province--was a large agrarian empire wherein the interests of numerous groups and individuals converged around the land and its produce. In light of its centrality to both the subjects and the state, the management of land as a resource has much to tell us about what governance was expected to be in this period, at a time before religious, economic, political or social authority had been disembedded from one another. In this, Damascus is not much different from any other provincial town lying within the early modern empires of Asia and Europe; the issues raised here are not pertinent to the history of the Middle East alone but are relevant to other early modern states.

The inquiry into what the state governs and how it does so starts with the observation that Ottoman political literature conceives of a unified political body wherein different groups of people play different roles in allowing the state to function. Through the lens of tax assessment and collection, the first chapter examines the role within the Ottoman state body that is played by the peasant cultivators in the villages surrounding Damascus. The first half of the chapter explores how the prerogatives comparable to other fiscal military states shaped Ottoman taxation policy in the seventeenth century. The importance of obtaining cash led not only to the imposition of new taxes and updated tax registers at the Istanbul finance bureau, but to a new responsibility of the villagers for tax collection. The chapter argues that where compliance with taxation was concerned, the most important governing authority in the village was the villagers themselves. Examining the interactions between villagers, judges, muftis and tax farmers, the chapter examines how individuals and groups that are not state agents strictly speaking, become authorized to exercise state power. The chapter concludes that peasant cultivators do not merely maintain a relationship with the Ottoman government, rather, in some sense they are the government and form an integral part of its machinery.

The question of how the governing authority of the state intersects with the authority of Islamic law has long been a question in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and Islamic societies in general. However, the question of shifts in the configuration of religious and temporal authority in the seventeenth century is not an issue whose importance is confined to the history of the Islamic regions of the world. Rather, the question of expanding state power and the proper role of `religion' in the body politic is a widespread concern of the early modern period. With this question in mind, the second and third chapters explore the changing legal powers of the sultan and his agents to control productive land and peasant labor. Chapter two notes a change in the meaning and scope of sultan's authority to legislate peasant access to the land in the seventeenth century. This expansion in the sultan's legislative role is absorbed into the jurisprudence of the empire's jurist-scholars, and creating a specifically `Ottoman' practice of Islamic scholarship. Starting in the sixteenth century, the sultan's enacted laws--known as `qanun'--regulate with far greater detail the rights and obligations of peasants and soldier-tax collectors. What emerges is a right of usufruct for the peasantry that is controlled by the dynasty's statutes rather than the interests of local military administrators or local custom. The fact that this concept of the usufruct right eventually comes to prevail in Damascene villages suggests that usufruct was an increasingly standardized right across the empire's rural communities. This is despite the fact that the Damascenes had their own local and juridical traditions that ran counter to the concept of usufruct being promulgated by the sultan. What we find in juristic discussion of usufruct is a very slowly changing idea of the boundaries of imperial authority and its legal consequences.

While the second chapter demonstrates a growing consensus that the sultan had wider authority to legislate in matters pertaining to the lands of the state treasury, the legality of some land tenure practices sanctioned by the sultan remained controversial. The third chapter examines the limits of state power to pursue its need to fill the coffers, and how it was expected to treat the village taxpayers. There was no debate among Ottoman subjects that a solvent treasury was a necessity. Without exception, we find that keeping fertile land productive and distributing the revenues in appropriate ways are shared priorities. The common reference point defining the limits of the sultan's authority over production and taxation was the shari'ah, yet there was great disagreement on what the shari'ah enjoined, and in some sense, what the shari'ah was. When it came to what means of extraction the shari'ah permitted or the extent to which the state could coerce the villagers to produce, disagreement was rampant. It was not always the ulema (religious scholars) that opposed state actions on the grounds that such actions violated the shari'ah--as this chapter shows, the views of the ulema were sometimes more cooperative with the dynasty's decisions than those held by its temporal administrators. Both chapters address the question of the shifting configuration of state and religious authority in the early modern world, and examine its consequences on the lives and livelihoods of Damascene cultivators.

The fourth and fifth chapters investigate two groups in Damascus who were frequent beneficiaries of the revenues produced in the villages, the ulema and the soldiers based in the city. The right of these groups to receive the tax moneys of the peasant cultivators was premised on the services that each provided for the political body as a whole. There did not appear to be much dispute about the nature of the services that each was to perform, but differences did spring up when the question arose of how or whether such services had been performed in specific instances. The chapter maintains that it is these conflicting interpretations of service, status, privilege and vocational responsibility that most clearly reveal how the provincial elites did or did not take part in the exercise of Ottoman authority in Damascus. The ulema earned their access to the revenue sources through their scholarship and teaching and the general duty of providing moral guidance to other Muslims. Part of this duty was to denounce oppression, and to protect the strong from abusing the weak. An argument arose among the ulema of how much honor or revenue one could seek from the state without compromising oneself in the process. Could one covet the sultan's largess and still be adequately critical if he or his agents overstepped their authority? Other ulema found that the dignity of their profession was an asset when their management of cultivators and taxes was called into question. They deflected the accusations of greed and fraud by invoking their dedication to pious works and scholarship. In all cases, the self conception of the ulema as a group with a particular function in the political body was critical to the way they responded to opportunities for gaining wealth and power.

For the soldiers stationed in Damascus as well as the great military families of the countryside, access to rural revenues was contingent upon obedient military service. Increasingly, the entirety of the fiscal and military resources of the province of Damascus was oriented towards financing the pilgrimage to Mecca. The need for effective, reliable and obedient military leadership of the pilgrimage began to assume a higher priority for the Ottoman government. From 1660 to 1690, the Damascene janissaries dominated the office of pilgrimage leader, as they had a number of qualities to recommend them for the position: not only did know the routes from accompanying the caravan, but their capacity to create trouble as well as their expectation of reward was modest in comparison with the great military families of the countryside. Through investigation of their economic activities, it is clear that the question of which soldiers were considered `local' to Damascus had more to do with their involvement in the city's commerce rather than their origins or ethnicity. In turn, when the dynasty finally moved to destroy their leadership and punish them for insubordination, the question of how their `local' sympathies had affronted imperial prerogatives played out differently than might be imagined. While the issue of what constituted obedience might be read differently in Damascus than in Istanbul, it was clear that the Damascenes shared the belief that military men, even local military men, must be obedient to the sultan.

This dissertation argues that Damascenes from all backgrounds play an important role in Ottoman governance of the province, and one that is comparable to that of other early modern subjects. It shows people trying to locate their place within the political body as a whole, while the limits of their duties and powers associated with different groups underwent great flux and were vigorously debated. It is this uneasy integration of these various groups into the body of state which best demonstrates the relations between the subjects and the state in the early modern Middle East.

This dissertation is a contribution to the reframing of the history of postcolonial Lebanon, and in particular the era between independence from France and the outbreak of the civil war of 1975-90. The dissertation’s central argument is that rather than seeing postcolonial Lebanese history as a product of the contentious interaction between sectarian social groups, as is common in much of the literature on Lebanon, it is more useful to see that history as a product of the struggle to impose and maintain a liberal, laissez-faire economic model by the dominant faction of the postcolonial ruling elite, the commercial-financial bourgeoisie. This economic model entailed, in essence, appending the Lebanese economy to those of other regional powers, particularly the oil states of the Gulf, in order to continue the country’s colonial-era role as an entrepôt for the broader Middle East. As a result of its attachment to the economies of regional states, and its concentration in finance, trade, and the service sector, the Lebanese model was both highly unstable and grossly unequal. As a consequence, the Lebanese ruling elite struggled to impose and maintain this model, and they did so only by crafting a highly rigid political system that denied space to even the more moderate reformist forces. These features of the Lebanese system, its instability, inequity, and its rigidity, played a determining role in shaping Lebanon’s postcolonial history.

The dissertation uses archival sources from Western diplomatic archives, the archives of the World Bank Group, and the private papers of the head of Lebanese General Security, along with published sources, to describe how this laissez-faire model came into being, to explore its key features, as well as efforts to oppose it. The dissertation provides an analysis of the ways in which the model’s inequity and instability impacted Lebanese society, through a discussion of the Litani River hydroelectric project and the Intra Bank crisis of 1966 respectively, and uses an account of the fate of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), as well as some of the major struggles within the Lebanese labor movement, to expose elite efforts to maintain the status quo and to enforce a high degree of political rigidity. Ultimately, the dissertation is an attempt to argue that Lebanese exceptionalism is rooted, not in the sectarian cleavages within Lebanese society, but rather in the laissez-faire economic model which set postcolonial Lebanon’s experience apart from that of its neighbors elsewhere in the Arab world

This dissertation examines how U.S. foreign policy shaped the origins and expansion of Middle East studies and expertise. For over sixty years the United States has considered the area called the "Middle East" to be vital to its national security interests, and governmental and academic institutions have been essential pillars in support of this policy. America's involvement in the Middle East has matched its rise as a global superpower and I argue that U.S. foreign policy significantly influenced the production and professionalization of knowledge about the region. I demonstrate that passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 ultimately led to the growth and diversification of the field. Moreover, my dissertation contends that an unintended consequence of this expansion was strained relations between academia and the government, which contributed to and was compounded by decreased federal funding for area studies. By the late and post-Cold War periods, I assert that these factors led to a perceived decline in the field while private think tanks garnered increased attention and influence.

Drawing on research completed at national, university, and foundation archives, I explain how key governmental and non-governmental institutions collaborated to promote Middle East studies and expertise. I examine early American attempts to produce contemporary regional expertise through different wartime agencies and programs during the First and Second World Wars. In particular, I focus on the Inquiry, a group of scholars created to help President Woodrow Wilson prepare for the Versailles Peace Conference, as well as the Office of Strategic Services and the Army Specialized Training Program. I assert that the example of these initial efforts and their alumni helped establish the institutional precursors for the development of area studies. During and after the Cold War, I analyze how the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency coordinated with the Middle East studies programs at Princeton and Harvard and supported the American Universities of Beirut and Cairo. I also discuss the coordination of private foundations and academic societies with governmental agencies as well as their funding and support of area studies programs before and after the NDEA. This includes the activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

I conclude that different regimes of knowledge production and cultures of expertise related to the Middle East have emerged over the past century. While these regimes have often intersected and competed for supremacy, I contend that U.S. foreign policy interests and goals have had a predominant influence on the contested ways knowledge is produced, communicated, and consumed. I demonstrate that the terminology and associated geographical representations inherent in U.S. foreign policy discourse has been adopted and promulgated by academic scholarship on the Middle East. Thus, revealing that even when Washington's policies are contested by area experts its interests have already been subsumed into existing discourse on the region. While university-based Middle East studies were successful in expanding and enhancing the U.S.'s knowledge about the region and producing potential candidates for government service, I assert that the foreign policy and intelligence establishments developed their own processes for collecting and analyzing information and trends which benefited from but were independent of academic scholarship on the Middle East. Furthermore, I argue that think tanks emerged at the expense of university-based Middle East studies programs by actively pursuing research agendas in support of U.S. foreign policy objectives in the region.

Nadim Rouhana, Institute for Conflict Resolution, George Mason University, and Gershon Shafir, Department of Sociology, UC San Diego, talked about democracy in the Israeli context. Beshara Doumani, Department of History, UC Berkeley, talked about democracy in the Palestinian experience. The accompanying audio files provide the complete recording and audience discussion of the talks given by the authors. Those who download the audio files must have their own software for playing and listening.

This dissertation explores the development of modern property administration and governance in the Ottoman Empire from the perspective of pastoral nomads. Utilizing both central state archival material and district court and land registers, the study combines analysis of governance, administration and the development of modern private property regimes with a social history of pastoral nomadic groups during the Hamidian period (1876-1909). The research employs a case study of the district of Salt in the southern half of the Ottoman province of Syria (contemporary Jordan) to advance three main arguments.

First is the imperative to rethink the characterization of pastoral nomads in the historiography of the Ottoman Arab provinces as members of autonomous “tribes” with marginal roles in processes of modern state building. I show how Ottomanization in the Arab provinces extended beyond urban elites to include nomadic communities in the Hamidian period. Using a fine-grained case study, the dissertation demonstrates that interaction with Hamidian property administration facilitated the rise of a “middling group” of nomads who obtained positions as low-level bureaucrats with powers to sanction claims over land and livestock as well as to allocate tax burdens. Analyzing how the growing wealth and power of this middling group was challenged from above and below, the dissertation introduces differentiation and internal contestation into nomadic groups usually discussed exclusively in terms of their leaders.

Second, the dissertation challenges the narrative of Ottoman law and administration as emanating from Istanbul and the related peripheral status of the Empire’s Arab provinces. By detailing the involvement of pastoral nomads in district-level property administration, I show how provincial struggles shaped the social meaning of Ottoman legal and administrative categories and prompted central bureaucrats and jurists to continually clarify and adapt their attempts to survey, tax and regulate people and property.

Third, the dissertation offers new perspectives on the making of modern property relations in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. It details attempts to regulate and exploit both land legally categorized as “empty” and livestock resources in the Empire’s far-flung provinces. Moving beyond narratives of modernizing Ottoman reforms as derivative, rigid or Orientalist that suppose a unitary state agent, the dissertation emphasizes the uneven, internally contested and regionally interconnected aspects of these projects. The dissertation therefore highlights the parallels between contested modernization projects in the Ottoman Empire and other contemporary imperial settings while rethinking the role of marginalized populations in those efforts.

This dissertation examines the links between education and political culture by analyzing government-employed educators during the formative period of nation-state creation in the Middle East. It argues that a dearth of qualified personnel, coupled with local support of education, allowed educators in the government schools of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, to act as privileged intermediaries, backed by both the states that employed them, and by their societies. Educators’ status as popular and scarce civil servants encouraged them to participate in anti-government protests while remaining government employees. The aggregate consequences of educators’ ability to protest without losing their posts included ideological flexibility, the sidelining of educated groups from armed rebellions and the maintenance of non-representative regimes. Their stories articulate how local civil servants, frequently at the lowest levels of colonial bureaucracies, shape administration and governance.

During the late Ottoman period, educated individuals participated in a culture of petitions and negotiation, which connected civil servants and the Ottoman state. The British military and Mandate administrations incorporated Ottoman laws regarding education, as well as Ottoman-founded institutions and Ottoman-trained personnel into the educational systems of the Mandates. This continuity between British and Ottoman policies, institutions and personnel perpetuated Ottoman-era modes of interaction between educators and the governments that employed them.

British policy makers feared anti-colonial rebellions on the part of an educated unemployed, like uprisings that had taken place in both India and Egypt during periods of British control. Therefore, British officials in Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan restricted government schooling, particularly at upper levels, to a select few. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the region, and the League of Nations’ requirements to prepare the Mandates for eventual independence, resulted in local and international demand for government-sponsored education. This situation of scarcity and need granted educators a privileged position vis-à-vis their employers. Educators used their rare status to manipulate and petition their governments, while rising through the ranks of the civil service. In so doing, they evinced a broader notion of agency than simple resistance to colonial domination.

Educators also theorized and articulated a variety of political ideologies, particularly during the interwar period. Educators’ experiences as students and their relationships to their governments as well as their birthplaces and families shaped their concepts of political affiliation. The American University of Beirut (AUB) in particular functioned as a hub of pan-Arabism for educators; students from throughout the region met, studied, and learned to protest while at AUB. Their academic credentials permitted AUB graduates to put their philosophies into practice, as teachers, authors, administrators and later ministers throughout the Mandates. However, self-avowedly nationalist educators, even at their most extreme, overwhelmingly remained employed by their governments in some capacity despite their rebellious reputations. Educators’ need to work within the government, to keep their present jobs, and the desire of local communities to preserve education and to safeguard their children’s futures reinforced teachers and administrators’ incorporation into government service.

In the late 1950s, three factors threatened educators’ intermediary role. These factors denigrated teachers’ social and economic status, and pushed them towards collective rather than individual action. Mass education reduced the scarcity of teachers; their formerly rare educational qualifications became more common, and less valuable. Standardization, through rigid modes of inspection and national examinations that dictated children’s future careers, reduced educators’ ability to teach beyond the prescribed curriculum. Repressive measures on the part of each government also limited the intermediary position teachers had previously enjoyed. The concurrent hardening of national borders reduced the fluidity of political affiliations once open to the Mandates’ inhabitants.

From the late 1890s through the late 1950s, educators and former educators leveraged their scarcity. As both teachers and government ministers, they influenced the young minds of the region within and beyond the classroom. Their favored status lasted until colonial restrictions on education lessened, and mass education eroded their capacity for bargaining with their governments. The stories of these teachers and administrators underscore the importance of local civil servants to the functioning of imperial, colonial and independent governments. Their rebellions from within the government bureaucracy demonstrate how government education as an institution can simultaneously shore up and impair the authority of its state.