Sherene Seikaly

Men of Capital

Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. November 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 156mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 532g
• ISBN-13: 9780804792882
• ISBN-10: 0804792887
• Artikelnr.: 42791976

Autorenporträt

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: The Politics of Basic Needs
chapter abstract
This chapter introduces Palestinian "men of capital" in British ruled
Palestine. It lays out their historical erasure as the product of settler
colonialism; the historiographic dominance of the aristocrat, the
comprador, and the middle class hero; and how nostalgia, mourning, and
idealization of pre-1948 Palestine have flattened social life. Elites were
not homogenous landowning elites but worked in commercial and industrial
ventures. These men, and to a lesser extent women, shaped a broader Arab
Nahda, or renaissance, as an economic project. The chapter maps the
importance of new regimes of calculation in realizing national economy as a
space of surveillance. It argues that an attention to how these regimes
unfolded in Palestine destabilizes the conventional depiction of the
colonial body as the agent and the colonized body as his ephemeral shadow.
1Men of Capital: Making Money, Making Nation
chapter abstract
This chapter details how men of capital in Palestine shaped economics as a
body of knowledge and a science of the self. It shows how these men
propagated what they understood as social progress, shaped notions of class
and status, and guarded their social interests. These men were bankers,
commercial entrepreneurs, and industrialists who located their ideas on
capital accumulation and its relationship to national economy in a broader
Arab project. The chapter challenges the temporal and conceptual boundaries
of Arab liberal thought. By analyzing a dozen editorial articles and a
number of contributed pieces in the periodical al-Iqtisadiyyat
al-'Arabiyya, the chapter reveals how these Palestinian thinkers defined
economy, described the economic conditions they lived in, and sought to
shape an ethical economic subject.
2Women of Thrift: Domesticity and Home Economics
chapter abstract
This chapter details how the home became a site of fortifying social
hierarchies at the same time that the discourse on domesticity described
itself as a force of social reform in early twentieth century Palestine. By
analyzing an article on the family budget and a ten-part radio program on
the ideal Arab home, this chapter provides a window into how elites
employed social difference to define new norms of class, gender, and
collectivity. Reformers defined home economics as a necessary science and a
mode of management. In doing so they created possibilities for and confined
men and women. The chapter exposes the heavily policed contours of the
civilized and the cultured. These contours would prove resilient across
times and spaces to contain the political.
3A Nutritional Economy: The Calorie, Development, and War
chapter abstract
This chapter details British economic policy in the Middle East broadly and
Palestine specifically during World War II. Scholarly depictions of the
early twentieth century obsession with calculating economy have focused on
the importance of measuring and realizing growth. This chapter looks
instead at the construction and provision of basic needs during times of
scarcity. It shows how British officials sought to realize economy as
calculable through new technologies of rule such as the calorie and the
emerging science of nutrition. Far from an imperative to rationalize the
colonized body, this effort was born of the exigencies of war. British
colonial officials introduced new conceptions of development, poverty,
health, and productivity throughout the war. Their failures reveal the
politics of basic needs. They also show how paradigms such as colonial
development and sciences like nutrition promised the universal but
enforced, indeed were constituted by exclusion.
4A Public Good: Palestinian Businessmen and World War II
chapter abstract
This chapter details how Palestinian businessmen in Arab Chamber of
Commerce attempted to manage economic crises during World War II. The
self-defined social role of the Chambers was to guard the nation's public
good. Wartime austerity was a structure of exclusion that was central to
the erosion of Palestinian presence on the land. In the face of growing
Jewish consolidation, economy took shape as a site of national battle. Men
of capital were no longer the vanguard of a profitable future but were now
the managers of crisis. Their central heroes were no longer the "civilized"
and the "cultured" but the native authentic consumer, the honorable peasant
and Bedouin. The lexicon of progress and civilization gave way to
conspiracy, paralysis, and injustice. The broad territorial expanse of
pan-Arabic economic regeneration shrunk to a bifurcated space of an Arab
versus a Jewish economy in an increasingly embattled Palestine.
5The Vegetable Racket: Scarcity and the Cost of Living
chapter abstract
This chapter provides a case study of wartime economic policy. It details
the British colonial government's effort to coercively control the
production, distribution, and marketing of every vegetable in Palestine for
six months in 1943. It historicizes the new index of the cost of living as
a technology of economic calculation and rule. The chapter shows the
shallowness of British government renditions of the Arab profiteer and
"unorganized" Arab vegetable producers as the source of the "black market."
It revels instead how Jewish cooperatives like Tnuva determined regulated
and unregulated prices. The vegetable crisis and the attempt to tame the
cost of living index exposes the limitations of British colonial power and
its capacity to homogenize people and standards. Finally the vegetable
story reveals the differences between Jewish and Arab relationships to
government regulations as well as their access to institutional power.
Conclusion: Postwar Austerity and the Discipline of Detail
chapter abstract
This chapter traces how wartime austerity influenced peasants, villagers,
and consumers in Palestine. A close look at British rule in Palestine
reveals the dangers of overestimating colonialism's coherence. However,
territorial and corporeal articulations of the healthy economy were not
limited to colonial officials but important sites of Palestinian visions.
Pan-Arabism was not only coupled with "socialism" but also relied on a
transhistorical "commercial essence." A new mass of austerity regulations
during World War II revealed the depths of Palestinian exclusion from state
institutions. Palestinian men (and women) of capital in their imaginings of
territory, in their emphasis on detail, in their ideas of progress did not
live their reality as shadows of the Jewish settler or the British colonial
officer. Their realities were part of a broader Arab project. This project,
the Nahda was contingent on exclusion.