This paper returns to one of the germinal texts of nineteenth-century Arab political thought, Butrus al-Bustani's Nafir Suriyya (‘The Clarion of Syria’). A series of broadsides published between September 1860 and April 1861, these reflected on the confessional violence that had rent apart Mount Lebanon and Damascus in mid-1860. As scholars have suggested, Bustani – now regarded as one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda, or ‘awakening’ – here offered a new vision of Syrian patriotism, which formed part of a longer reflection on political subjectivity, faith, and civilisation. But, this paper argues, these texts can also be read as reflections on the changing workings of empire: on the imperial ruler's duties and attributes and his subjects’ obligations and rights; on the relationship between state and population and capital and province; on imperial administrative reform; and on the dangers foreign intervention posed to Ottoman sovereignty. Drawing on the languages of Ottoman reform and ethical statecraft, as well as on imperial comparisons, Bustani argued against the autonomy some counselled for Mount Lebanon and for wholesale integration with the Ottoman state. These texts offer grounds for methodological reflection and for writing Ottoman Arab thought into broader histories of imperial political thought.

This essay focuses upon a single speech by the Ottoman man of religion Shaykh Ahmad Tabbarah. Though short, it allows us to reconsider the ways in which we have framed intellectual production beyond Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For even as scholars have queried the diffusionist sweep of earlier narratives, asserting the intellectual agency of non-Western thinkers, they have continued to lay the emphasis on the ways the latter customized European thought to local exigencies. Tabbarah, however, engaged in two-way translations and transgressions. Arraying French sources into a Khaldunian narrative even as he slotted statistics into conventional rhetorical forms, he imbued the secular with the religious, and the religious with the secular. Resolutely refusing to choose between these various elements, he laced them together into a compound creation, which drew its strength from the confluence of two seemingly incommensurable bodies of thought.

This article examines three diasporic campaigns orchestrated by Middle Eastern political entrepreneurs in Paris, New York, and Cairo, in the years bookending the First World War. Mobilizing across borders, their organizers were exemplary denizens of the transnational public sphere created by Ottoman migrants from the 1880s onwards. Exponents of globalism, they regarded the body politic as a diasporic construct unconstrained by territory. Furthermore, they saw the associations that they founded both as instruments of civility capable of reforming society and as practical political vehicles, mouthpieces for the claims that they communicated to the ‘community of nations’ through petitions and telegrams. Such strategies of appeal suggest that many of the features of ‘interwar’ Middle Eastern internationalism emerged not in response to the post-war settlement but in the last decades of Ottoman rule. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of the histories of globalism, the practices and perceptions of public life, and the engagement of non-Western people with international society.

In the years before 1939, the functionaries of Afrique Occidentale Française, or AOF, as France's West African possessions were known, consistently failed to introduce effective legislative controls upon Eastern Mediterranean migration under their purview. This was not for lack of trying; from 1905 onwards, administrators both in the territorial government of Guinea and in the Government-General of the Federation in Dakar repeatedly attempted to close their gates to these interlopers of empire, most of them from present-day Lebanon, who first began to venture into West Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century. By the late 1930s, some six thousand citizens of the Mandatory states of Lebanon and Syria resided across AOF. Most worked as produce brokers, shopkeepers, and traders, buying up groundnuts, palm oil, or kola nuts from African producers, and supplying them in turn with consumer goods such as textiles and clothes, processed foodstuffs, alcohol, and matches. Despite their attempts to channel and stem this flow of men and women, AOF administrators proved unable to impose effective legislative checks upon their movements.