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Contesting the Colonial Narrative’s Claims to Progress: A Nationalist’s Proposal for Agrarian Reform
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Extract
In the years immediately following the imposition of mandatory rule in Syria in July 1920, French administrators declared their intention to develop the region in accordance with the ideals of progress and scientific rationality. Among the areas targeted for special attention and improvement was the field of agriculture. The first French agricultural counselor for the mandate, E. Achard, emphasized that attention to the mise en valeur (enhancement and development) of this sector could not only serve France’s need for specific commodities but would also make French mandatory rule a vehicle through which progress and scientific rationality would be imparted to what he depicted as an underdeveloped Syria. However, fifteen years later, it seems, little had changed. In 1935, Mohammed Sarrage, a Syrian student at Toulouse University, wrote a dissertation that soundly criticized the mandate government for its failure to institute the reforms necessary to advance or significantly increase Syria’s agricultural production. A closer examination of Sarrage’s critique and his proposed program for reform not only reveals the incoherence between French official discourse and actual policy, but suggests an alternative narrative to that of French officials regarding the sources of progress and modernity.
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- Special Section: Mastering Nature: Colonial Regimes and Environmental Policies
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- Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2010
References
End Notes
1 Mise en valeur is most commonly translated as “development” or “improvement”; however, when used in the French colonial context it implies development undertaken as much for the benefit of the metropole as for what French administrators claimed were the interests of the colonized territory and its population. See Achard, M. E., “La Syrie pays d’agriculture,” in Haut-Commissariat de la République Française en Syrie et au Liban, La Syrie et le Liban en 1921: La Foire-Exposition de Beyrouth, Conférences, Liste des Récompenses (Paris: Emile Larose, 1922), pp. 149–169Google Scholar.
2 Sarrage, Mohammed, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire (Toulouse: Imprimerie du Sud-Ouest, 1935)Google Scholar.
3 See, for example Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. He deals with this issue most directly in his subchapter “Material Mastery as a Prerequisite of Civilized Life,” 194–198.
4 Shakry, Omnia El, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Partha Chatterjee argues that “even as [nationalist discourse] challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based” (Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 30)Google Scholar.
5 Shakry, El, The Great Social Laboratory, p. 7Google Scholar. El Shakry defines “translation” as a process of adoption and transformation.
6 Goswami, Manu, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Haut-Commissariat de la République Française, La Syrie et le Liban en 1921, p. 150.
8 This description of Syria is taken from a speech given by the High Commissioner of Syria and Lebanon and the Commander in Chief of the Levant Army, General Gouraud, at a Foire-Exhibition held in the early days of the mandate to promote French commercial interests in the region. Haut-Commissariat de la République Française, La Syrie et le Liban en 1921, p. xviii; Parmentier, M. Paul, L’Agriculture en Syrie et en Palestine (Le Mans: Imprimerie Monnoyer, 1922), pp. 41–42Google Scholar.
9 For example, French officials were especially eager to encourage cotton production to supply French mills. However, instead of constructing the irrigation systems that would have spared local farmers the economic hardship resulting from a drought year, they allocated resources to building cotton ginning facilities (Ministère des affaires étrangères, Rapport à la société des nations sur la situation de la Syrie et du Liban (Paris: Imprimerie nationale 1930), p. 69).
10 See, for example, Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 56–61.
11 Khoury, Philip S., Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 400Google Scholar. It was an environment in which Sarrage, upon his return, would flourish and establish himself as an influential nationalist actor. He would join the National Youth and the Steel Shirts (Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 473). He was arrested in 1936 and again during WWII. Later he would be elected to represent Hama in the Syrian Parliament (George Faris, éd., Man huwafisuriya 1949 (Damascus: al-Matba’ah al-Ahaliyya, 1949), p. 202).
12 See Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 397–400 for a comprehensive summary.
13 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 46, 97.
14 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 129,130.
15 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, p. 138.
16 Ibid.
17 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 137–138.
18 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, p. 115.
19 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 115, 117.
20 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, p. 118.
21 Ibid.
22 Khuri, Albert, “Agriculture,” in Himadeh, Sa’id B., ed., Economic Organization of Syria (Beirut: The American Press, 1936), pp. 90–92Google Scholar. Khuri, a student from the American University in Beirut, described the situation thus: “a number of machines have been thrown out of use on account of the difficulty and expense involved in keeping them in good repair” (p. 92).
23 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 89–90.
24 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, p. 95. Even though these reforms were implemented under the Soviet Union, Sarrage uses the term Russia, “La Russie,” so I refer to it by that term here.
25 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 143–147.
26 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, p. 145. This school, founded, according to Sarrage, in 1908 by the Ottoman government (Khuri puts the date at 1910), had been funded primarily by confiscating Ismailis’ tributes to their religious leader, the Aga Khan (Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, 145, Khuri, “Agriculture,” p. 100). Sarrage claimed this was justified because it meant that an agricultural school could be opened in the one of the most fertile regions in Syria (p. 145).
27 Khuri claimed there were three. One, the Ta’labaya Agricultural School in the Biqa’ Plain, was founded by the American Near East Foundation in 1932, so it was not a mandate government initiative. It appears that the other two—the “Buka Orphanage” and the “Practical Agricultural School of Buka”—were both included by Sarrage in his reference to the Latakia school (Khuri, “Agriculture,” p. 100; see Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, p. 146, where he refers to the school’s orphans and scholarship students).
28 Khuri, “Agriculture,” p. 100. Khuri insinuated that the Selemieh school closed because its “results were not so successful [as anticipated] for practically all its graduates sought government positions with the result that very little was accomplished to the benefit of the farmers” (p. 100). He puts the number of those who had actually taken up farming at twelve percent, while those who had sought government posts he places at sixty percent (p. 100).
29 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, pp. 145,147.
30 Sarrage, La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire, p. 146.
31 Ibid.