States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East - Hardcover

Robson, Laura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520292154 ISBN 13: 9780520292154

Verlag: University of California Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Across the Middle East in the post–World War I era, European strategic moves converged with late Ottoman political practice and a newly emboldened Zionist movement to create an unprecedented push to physically divide ethnic and religious minorities from Arab Muslim majorities. States of Separation tells how the interwar Middle East became a site for internationally sanctioned experiments in ethnic separation enacted through violent strategies of population transfer and ethnic partition.
 
During Britain’s and France’s interwar occupation of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, the British and French mandate governments and the League of Nations undertook a series of varied but linked campaigns of ethnic removal and separation targeting the Armenian, Assyrian, and Jewish communities within these countries. Such schemes served simultaneously as a practical method of controlling colonial subjects and as a rationale for imposing a neo-imperial international governance, with long-standing consequences for the region.
 
Placing the histories of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria within a global context of emerging state systems intent on creating new forms of international authority, in States of Separation Laura Robson sheds new light on the emergence of ethnic separatism in the modern Middle East.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Robson is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Portland State University. She is the author of Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine and editor of Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives.
 
 

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“With a focus on minority communities in the Middle East, Laura Robson examines the vital issues of ethnic borders and population exchanges. This is an original and clearly written work of important historical scholarship.”—Wm. Roger Louis, University of Texas

“This book focuses on the interwar period when those in charge of the mandated states of the Middle East dealt with the newly arrived non-Arab refugees in their midst as essentially unassimilable groups and—except for Britain’s encouragement of Jewish migration to Palestine—thought up various impractical schemes to resettle them elsewhere. Dr. Robson’s scholarship is of a high order and brings together a number of topics not generally found in each other’s company. Her work in the League of Nations’ archives has been especially fruitful.”—Peter Sluglett, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

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&;With a focus on minority communities in the Middle East, Laura Robson examines the vital issues of ethnic borders and population exchanges. This is an original and clearly written work of important historical scholarship.&;&;Wm. Roger Louis, University of Texas

&;This book focuses on the interwar period when those in charge of the mandated states of the Middle East dealt with the newly arrived non-Arab refugees in their midst as essentially unassimilable groups and&;except for Britain&;s encouragement of Jewish migration to Palestine&;thought up various impractical schemes to resettle them elsewhere. Dr. Robson&;s scholarship is of a high order and brings together a number of topics not generally found in each other&;s company. Her work in the League of Nations&; archives has been especially fruitful.&;&;Peter Sluglett, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

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States of Separation

Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

By Laura Robson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Laura Robson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29215-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 • Origins, 
2 • The Refugee Regime, 
3 • The Transfer Solution, 
4 • The Partition Solution, 
5 • Diasporas and Homelands, 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Origins

The idea that physical separation could serve as a solution to the problems of building a new world of nation-states arrived swiftly and dramatically on the global stage after the First World War. Transfer, resettlement, partition, ethnic engineering of various sorts became the solutions of the hour, as an international grab bag of diplomats, bureaucrats, nationalists, and refugees grappled with the astonishing collapse of the old empires and the problems of creating putatively representative systems of governance in the violently forged new nation-states of the Middle East.

Though its rise and broad acceptance seemed to happen rather suddenly, the concept of ethnic separation had some crucial precursors. Three major earlier iterations of protoseparatism arose almost simultaneously in the context of the late nineteenth-century encounters between the expanding British and French empires and the struggling Ottoman state: British and French communalizing policies in their colonies; the Zionist movement and a new discourse of Jewish ethnicity and nationhood; and ethnoreligious violence in the Ottoman-Balkan wars of the early twentieth century. All three of these phenomena, apparently disparate as they were, converged in the Arab Middle East as it was drawn into the spheres of European colonialism and Zionist ambition.

The peace agreements articulated and institutionalized these nascent concepts of ethnic separation. The new League of Nations was charged with overseeing and administering two major new international structures: the minorities treaties defining the rights of "minority" communities in the new nation-states of eastern Europe, and the mandate system giving Britain and France temporary right to rule over the former Ottoman Arab provinces. Both frameworks assumed ethnic nationalism as the basis for citizens' relations to the state and assigned the League the responsibility of policing the relationship between ethnicity, religion, and citizenship in the supervised territories of eastern Europe and the Middle East. By the mid-1920s, these earlier precedents had helped shape a new set of international structures that emphasized ethnic belonging as a fundamental aspect of modern statehood.

ETHNICITY AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE EUROPEAN EMPIRES

The rise of race science interacted with the massive expansion of European empire into Africa in the late nineteenth century, bolstering concepts of inherent, unchanging racial identities and feeding into political decisions to tie ethnicity and race to citizenship and nationhood. The pseudoscience investigating the biological basis of race concerned itself not only with colonial subjects but also, centrally, with the question of Jewish otherness. As Jews took an increased role in public life following the process of legal emancipation unfolding in nineteenth-century Britain and France, the question of racial and biological formulations of Jewish identity became a major topic in an emerging science of race, and many Jewish as well as non-Jewish scientists accepted the premise that there was a biological basis for political and social group characteristics.

By the late nineteenth century, this premise constituted one of the primary assumptions of late European imperial politics in both the colonies and the metropole. Public conversation about Darwin's theories of evolution unfolded alongside increased contact with Asian, African, and Middle Eastern populations understood as "primitives," particularly in the form of popular public exhibitions of racial and ethnic types. At the same time, a rising sense of white solidarity emerged from settler colonies from Australia to South Africa, as politicians and the public alike began to internalize the failures of eighteenth-century projects of cultural and political assimilation among colonized peoples. As the empires expanded, race consciousness became not only a legitimization of imperial rule but also a mode of governance in itself, structuring and limiting indigenous peoples' access to the colonial state.

British and French colonial officials accepted similar assumptions about the centrality and immutability of race, ethnicity, and religion, but created different political and legal systems around these ideas. First in India and then in Africa, British officials developed what they called a "status quo" policy: essentially, that imperial rule should seek to avoid major changes to cultural practice and particularly religious or ethnic difference, both because "native" forms of cultural practice were innate and unalterable and because such changes might unnecessarily raise resistance to colonial rule. As the noted Orientalist Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and an important early figure in academic "Orientalism," wrote to the governor-general of India in 1788, "Nothing could ... be wiser than by a legislative Act, to assure the Hindu and Mussulman subjects of Great Britain that the private laws, which they severally hold sacred, and violation of which they would have thought the most grievous oppression, should not be suppressed by a new system, of which they could have no knowledge, and which they must have considered as imposed on them by a spirit of rigour and intolerance." Such views combined new modern conceptions of race (Jones was the originator of the "Aryan Theory," which posited the shared origins of Indo-European languages and gave rise to the concept of the "Aryan race") with practical strategies for governing large numbers of resistant colonial subjects.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British imperial law in India approached the problems of governing pluralistic populations by enshrining purportedly traditional communal divides in formal legal terms. Beginning in 1909, a series of laws governing legislative representation established separate electorates for Muslims and Hindus. In so doing, they created a new political landscape, making rigid new political categories out of previously more flexible social ones and defining Muslims and Hindus as essentially different, politically and culturally. In Egypt, British officials (and some Coptic nationalists) developed a similar concept of the Copts as the only true descendants of the ancient Egyptians — "uncontaminated by intermarriage with Arabs and negroes," as one enthusiast put it. Some imperial propagandists explicitly compared the Copts to India's Muslims, presenting them as a subjugated group requiring protection from a potentially oppressive majority and promoting the idea of separate Coptic representation. These concepts of colonial "minorities" often made explicit reference to European Jews, demonstrating how metropolitan unease over Jewish political participation could make its way into unrelated colonial contexts. The Copts, Egyptian high commissioner Eldon Gorst told Edward Grey, were unfit for executive administrative positions because they "played towards the [Muslim] peasant, the same part as does the Jew in Russia."

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520292154
• ISBN 13: 9780520292154
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 262
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar