In 1943, Lebanon gained its formal political independence from France; only after two more decades did the country finally establish a national central bank. Inaugurated on April 1, 1964, the Banque ...du Liban (BDL) was billed by Lebanese authorities as the nation's primary symbol of economic sovereignty and as the last step towards full independence. In the local press, it was described as a means of projecting state power and enhancing national pride. Yet the history of its founding—stretching from its Ottoman origins in mid- nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth—tells a different, more complex story. Banking on the State reveals how the financial foundations of Lebanon were shaped by the history of the standardization of economic practices and financial regimes within the decolonizing world. The system of central banking that emerged was the product of a complex interaction of war, economic policies, international financial regimes, post-colonial state-building, global currents of technocratic knowledge, and private business interests. It served rather than challenged the interests of an oligarchy of local bankers. As Hicham Safieddine shows, the set of arrangements that governed the central bank thus was dictated by dynamics of political power and financial profit more than market forces, national interest or economic sovereignty.
Mahdi Amel (1936-87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. This first-time English translation of his selected writings sheds light on his notable contributions to ...the study of capitalism in a colonial context.
When Nafir Suriyya—“The Clarion of Syria”—was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its author Butrus al-Bustani, a major figure in the modern Arabic Renaissance, had witnessed his homeland ...undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Written during Ottoman and European investigations into the causes and culprits of the atrocities, The Clarion of Syria is both a commentary on the politics of state intervention and social upheaval and a set of visions for the future of Syrian society in the wake of conflict. This translation makes a key historical document accessible for the first time to an English audience. Rereading this work in the context of today’s political violence in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on sectarianism, class rebellion, foreign invasions, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and nationalist tropes of reconciliation. “The first English translation of this foundational text offered alongside a fantastic historical introduction, this is an excellent and much-needed contribution from uniquely qualified scholars.” STEPHEN SHEEHI, author of The Arab Imago BUTRUS AL-BUSTANI was a nineteenth century Ottoman Arab educator and public intellectual regarded by many as the first Syrian nationalist owing to the publication of his Nafir Suriyya following the 1860 communal disturbances in Mt. Lebanon and Damascus. JENS HANSSEN is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. He is author of Fin de Siècle Beirut and coeditor of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age and Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age. HICHAM SAFIEDDINE is Assistant Professor of History of the Modern Middle East at King’s College, London. He is author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon, cofounder of Al-Akhbar English, and editor of The Legal Agenda English Edition.
This article explores how the Arab Marxist, Mahdi Amel (1936-1987), conceptualized hegemony in a colonial and sectarian context. I explore Amel's articulation of ideology as class struggle in ...relation to Gramsci and other leftist intellectuals of his generation. My aim is to expand our understanding of how hegemony is transformed when it travels into anti-colonial, Arab Marxist thought in general and its Lebanese communist variant in particular. The first part of the article looks at Amel's articulation of Arab bourgeois hegemony under colonialism and its manifestation in political rather than civil society. The second part details Amel's theorization of sectarian bourgeois hegemony in Lebanon. In Amel's thought, the relationship between class, sect and state, which I explore, gave rise to a chronic and sectarian hegemonic crisis that has haunted the Lebanese bourgeoisie from the time of independence until the present.
When “The Clarion of Syria” was penned, between September 1860 and April 1861, its anonymous author—identified only as “a patriot”—had just witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in ...what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Butrus al-Bustani, the author, wrote a series of pamphlets to his fellow Syrians that became a key text of the nineteenth-century literary revival movement known as the Nahda. They addressed an array of universally resonant and locally relevant themes that render the pamphlets pertinent beyond their immediate context. With a style oscillating between Paulinian sermon and Socratic dialogue, the author ponders the meaning of civil war in relation to religion, politics, morality, society, and civilization. Above all, the text was an anti-sectarian clarion call to build a cohesive and “civilized” Syrian society in place of what the author considered a community gripped by the most pernicious of conflicts, violent fanaticism and factionalism. Rereading the pamphlets in the context of today’s political violence in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on (anti-)sectarianism, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and national reconciliation. This translation thereby makes an important historical document accessible for the first time to an English audience.
...this left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer in general any corresponding political action.1 In December 2010, Robert F. Worth of the New York Times asked ...al-Akhbar editor-in-chief Ibrahim al-Amin about the paper's founding ambitions. Add splashy full-page color photos and witty tabloid-style headlines, and you have an alluring product.5 Al-Akhbar's allure grew, and caught global attention in 2010, after it became the first Arabic paper to obtain and publish exclusive WikiLeaks cables that exposed the decadence and corruption of Arab regimes in general and the Gulf states' warmongering against Iran in particular.6 The subsequent outbreak of the Arab uprisings in 2010-11 would further boost the paper's credentials as a radical progressive voice of the Arab left.
Lebanon gained formal political independence from France in 1943. Yet, its Central Bank, Banque du Liban, was not founded until 1964. This study is a critical history of the making of Banque du ...Liban. I trace the Central Bank's formation from its Ottoman origins in the mid-19th century up to its inauguration in 1964 and restructuring a few years later following a major banking crisis. I analyze this history in the context of theoretical questions of state formation and institution-building in a Middle Eastern context. Employing a structural empiricist approach, I argue that Banque du Liban, as an instrument of monetary policy and a set of rules and regulations governing banking operations, was constituted by a complex interaction of war economies, international financial regimes, post-colonial state-building, global currents of technocratic knowledge, and private business interests. I show that despite its representation by Lebanese authorities as a symbol of economic sovereignty and growth, the resultant institution seldom acted as a lever for asserting monetary autonomy or pursuing economic development. It was, to a large extent, an apparatus that reproduced colonial monetary policies and, more significantly, served rather than challenged the interests of the indigenous banking class. My study questions dominant accounts of Lebanon's post-WWII political economy. It eschews a sectarian framework of analysis, challenges the division of Lebanon's post-WWII economic history into a laissez-faire period and a later planned phase, and emphasizes the institutional dimension of how political and economic forces shape the state. The study also aims to illustrate the historical specificity of the process of state building and the limits of economic sovereignty in a neo-colonial setting while simultaneously probing the degree of rupture and continuity in the evolution of financial institutions over time.
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