Violent Interests: Capitalism and Social Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean

A French-Lebanese couple set out for Beirut where the man wanted to introduce the woman he wanted to marry to his family. However, as their passenger ship docked in Beirut port, the man’s father refused to allow the woman to disembark from the ship. A powerful and wealthy Greek Orthodox businessman, Musa Sursuq was opposed to his son, Jirjis Musa Sursuq, from marrying a French singer. As Kristen Alff describes, ‘He forbade his son from marrying the singer, telling Jirjis that he had already arranged for him to marry his first cousin Emilie.’ The world Musa grew up in, the newly acquired power and wealth acquired by his parents’ generation meant it was imperative for sons and daughters to marry within other newly wealthy Christian families or marrying cousins to strengthen business ties. Economic accumulation through marriage was the world of the 1860s, but by the time his son’s generation grew up in the 1890s, the children were no longer interested in arranged marriage as part of a business venture, as third generation wealthy children they were more interested in romantic love. The story of Lebanese families like the Sursuq family is the story of capitalism and Alff’s new book Violent Interests: Capitalism and Social Transformation In The Eastern Mediterranean, explores the changing nature of global capital through the 19th and 20th century rise of Beirut. 

The book follows the Sursuq as well as fellow Greek Orthodox and Maronite Christian families of the Bustruses, Najjars, Trads, Tuwaynis, Khuris and Debbases. The aim is to locate Beirut as a key city not only as a place being shaped by capitalism, but one shaping global capitalism from the 1830s to the 1930s. These families developed a vast network of commercial interests from Beirut, Liverpool, Marseille and beyond. Non-Europeans as agents in expanding capitalism in both the East and West. The Sursuq family were celebrities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, British and French tabloids wrote about their scandals, wedding announcements and legal suits with enthusiasm. When a marriage occurred between Sursuq and Bustrus families, British newspapers not only covered it, but the Russian Emperor became a godfather to their first-born son. In 1887, when a massive fire broke out in Paris’ Opera Comique in Bois de Boulogne, in which 131 people went missing, injured or died, one British newspaper only named members of the Sursuq family caught up in the fire. Arab families were transforming the world around them, in the English northern city of Manchester, 4 Arab trading houses were listed there in 1798 and by 1870, there were 400 of them. 

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Alff challenges previous historical works that argue Islamic law in the Ottoman World stunted the development of a capitalist economy, it is often argued that when Christians in the empire became exempt from local jurisdictions and came under European law in the 19th century, they acquired wealth which enabled them to build modern stock companies. However, as Alff shows, this is simply not true and that to understand the emergence of a capitalist class, we need to understand the intersections of Islamic law, Ottoman reform and European expansion in creating the conditions for them to come into being. By the 18th century, the Ottomans were building up Beirut as a commercial port hub, promoting cotton production in North Palestine and Silk production in Mount Lebanon. The agreement to allow Christians to use French law, facilitated the emigration of Christian families from parts of Syria to Mount Lebanon. Here they formed farming partnerships and these would become the precursor to joint stock companies formed later on. 

‘A great degree of continuity in institutional form and social practice thus existed between the eighteenth-century shareholding schemes under the malikane system and the formation of family business…an early predecessor of the joint-stock companies in the Eastern Mediterranean.’ The story ties into northern Palestine as these Beiruti families owned vast landholdings there, but these faced a unique challenge as Zionist settlers began moving into the area. In the late 19th century, these Beiruti families sold some of their land to these European settlers, while others lost their landholdings in 1948. ‘Palestine…is representative of a case of capitalist expropriation in that its history rests on the dispossession of peasants of their land and subsistence rights for the sake of companies’ seemingly boundless drive for corporate profit in the late nineteenth century.’ 

Violent Interests forces us to rethink the historical relationship between the Eastern Mediterranean and capitalism. Too often the Levant has been seen as a place where capitalism happened too, while for many this may well be true, it ignores not only the fact many from the region shaped it, but also that it emerged as a combination of internal and external forces. The book offers us a way of thinking about socio-cultural, economic and political transformations of the region, while thinking about why we end up with different results in different places. Ultimately, it offers us better critical engagement in trying to understand how the world around us came to be and for that reason is an important read.  

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