Violent Interests

Capitalism and Social Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean

Between the 1830s and 1930s, companies established by Beirut-based businessmen emerged among the largest shareholders in major British manufacturing and trading companies. These companies transformed from small family partnerships to large shareholder corporations that wielded significant influence across the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. People, capital, and ideas flowed from Beirut to Haifa, Alexandria, Liverpool, and London. In so doing, collaboration and competition across companies and regions gave global capitalism its shape.

Violent Interests examines processes of capital accumulation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the dynamic relationships of Beiruti entrepreneurs with centers of capital in Western Europe to reveal the inner workings of capitalism on local, regional, imperial, and global scales. Kristen Alff shows how land, labor, and gender relations were reorganized across the region, and focuses on war – most notably World War I – as powerful points of political economic change critical to the naturalization of capitalism's new social order in the Eastern Mediterranean. With profit propelled by war and the logic of commodification, the companies of late Ottoman Beirut, Alff argues, advanced the subjugation of social relations to the driving demand of capital accumulation – and transformed the Eastern Mediterranean in ways that endured long after the dissolution of both companies and empire.

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