Greater Syria—the region known in Arabic as Bilad al-Sham—is roughly coterminous with the modern nation states of Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, historian Cyrus Schayegh offers a new history of the region from 1850 to 1950 that emphasizes the multiple layers of spatial identity embraced by the region’s inhabitants, presenting in the process a much-needed challenge to the predominant ways in which we talk about the formation of the modern world. Below, Schayegh decribes the experiences of the denizens of Bilad al-Sham, and outlines the notion of “transpatialization.”
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Each age comes with its own dominant historiographic lens. When nation states crystallized in the nineteenth century, many historians—especially European ones—made them history’s quasi-metaphysical objective and central subject. When a globalization wave built up from the 1970s, historians reacted, too. “All local, national, or regional histories must be global history, too,” the late Christopher Bayly famously stated in his landmark The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914.
Logically, the reverse is true as well. Global history must also be local, national, and regional. It is for this reason that quite a few global—and, related, transnational—histories materialize in specific locales. And it is for the same reason that some scholars define globalization not as uniformly tightening interdependence but as uneven interplays between border transgressions and reassertions; and that writing global history is not simply about topics but involves a global optic on past events and trends, as Sebastian Conrad has recently underlined in What Is Global History? Despite these historiographic insights, however, a “real challenge” persists, he has noted: To “shift between, and articulate, different scales of analysis… In many case historians have opted for novel geographies, but in the end have tended to then treat these spaces as given.”
A related challenge has to do with how we conceptualize the socio-spatial making of the modern world. That development cannot be reduced to nation-state formation or globalization or urbanization, to mention three usual suspects. Certainly, accelerated interdependence across space, states’ unprecedented ability to penetrate their territory, and record urban growth all have been instrumental in creating the modern world, distinguishing it from premodern times. But none has been clearly dominant. This is not the least because they are intertwined—because “all local, national, or regional histories must be global,” too, to quote Bayly again.
Enter transpatialization: what we may call modern cities, regions, states—nation-states and others—and global circuits reconstituting and transforming each other more thoroughly and at a faster rhythm than before. This, I argue in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, is the primary distinguishing feature of the modern world’s socio-spatial making. Transpatialization does not denote one single process, and it is not an empirical unit. (Neither are globalization, state formation, or urbanization, for that matter!) It refers to a set of processes; it is a heuristic umbrella that does not assign artificial primacy to any one presumably unitary process such as “nation-state formation” or “urbanization” or to any one seemingly distinct scale like “the global” or “the local.”
To write a history of transpatialization, then, is to tackle Conrad’s challenge head-on. Such a history does not focus on one site. And it does not move back and forth between scales, which blend when viewed up-close, even when used for analysis rather than accepted as empirically real. Rather, it makes that blending its very theme. Its subject matter is exemplary instances of the fast-rhythmed reciprocal transformation of cities, regions, states, and global networks that constitutes the modern world’s overarching socio-spatial characteristic.
An illustration is the modern Middle East, and specifically Bilad al-Sham. This region is roughly coextensive with modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine, and home to many an age-old city including Damascus, Aleppo, and Jerusalem. Conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1516/1517, its cities had enjoyed considerable autonomy from Istanbul from the late seventeenth century. By the second third of the nineteenth century, however, a now quite firmly Eurocentric world economy and a reformed, more assertive Ottoman state permeated it, becoming deeply intertwined with the region and its cities. Seen from Bilad al-Sham, this reciprocal transformation had three key linked dimensions, characterizing socio-cultural, economic, and political life alike. While deeply transformed, cities remained central to inhabitants’ sense of belonging in a rapidly globalizing world. Interurban ties—often between a coastal and a hinterland city, for instance Jaffa–Jerusalem and Beirut–Damascus—were strengthened, not the least through new infrastructures. And the region as a whole became more integrated, though no single city could dominate all others, not even the region’s rising star, the global port-city of Beirut.
Following World War I, the victors divided Bilad al-Sham into French Lebanon and Syria and British Palestine and Transjordan. (All would become independent in the later 1940s, though Palestinians were denied statehood.) While the Mandates system of the new League of Nations, the world’s first permanent international organization of states, set some bounds to European rule, its touch on the ground was light. Heavy, by contrast, was the persistent impact of the aforementioned three urban, interurban, and regional nineteenth-century developments. After 1918, they deeply shaped the region’s embryonic nation-states as well as European imperial administrations and global economic forces operating in those countries. In turn, cities, interurban ties, and the region were reshaped.
Bilad al-Sham was, on the one side, deeply marked by its fourfold division. In the 1920s, it began to slowly shift from being mainly a patchwork region of cities and interurban ties to becoming principally an umbrella region of nation-states. Each imperially ruled nation-state developed its own economic and administrative institutions and accumulated its proper experiences. In each new country, people’s lives acquired a distinct texture. On the other side, Bilad al-Sham, having become quite integrated by 1918, forced the hand of the new French and British rulers. Just having quartered the region, they ironically proceeded to uphold its integration. They created a region-wide customs-free zone, and within that zone the policy decisions of one imperial power had the unintended consequence of spilling over the border, affecting the other’s policies. Such experiences and constraints in Bilad al-Sham shaped inter-imperial communications even beyond that region, including at the League of Nations in Geneva. Further, in Bilad al-Sham itself, incessant cross-border movements of people, animals, goods, and ideas impelled French and British Mandate administrators to cooperate systemically on matters as varied as law enforcement and disease prevention. Regional integration was sustained, too, by imperial infrastructural investments and by a technological novelty, the automobile. In short, Bilad al-Sham had tangible economic and demographic effects on the new nation-states and on their imperial rulers. This was true also for the region’s cultural-geographical framing. A flurry of Arabic texts on “Natural Syria” reinforced views of it as a naturally undivided unit. Even Zionists in the proto-state Yishuv, in Palestine, somewhat agreed.
Cities and interurban ties, too, continued to matter after 1918; and socio-spatial intertwinements involving them continued to unfold in lockstep with intertwinements related to Bilad al-Sham. No doubt, now superimposed on a map made up of cities and their rural hinterlands, and cutting across it, was a map of post-Ottoman national spaces. In return, the latter were subdivided into cut-off bits of cities’ hinterlands and interurban ties, many of which now straddled borders. That is, they were transnationalized, which politically constrained the European rulers of Bilad al-Sham’s countries, too. Collective identities were reshaped in a similarly double-sided manner. Surging nationalist rhetoric meant that city dwellers, many of whom spearheaded that very rhetoric, re-imagined their home as a place vital to the nation-state. Cities were “nationalized,” as it were. In turn, nation-states were not internally uniform but grew from their very start as a conglomerate of competing cities. They were “urbanized.” Further, overseas diaspora communities—hundreds of thousands of shawwam lived in Europe, Africa, and the Americas—often saw new national identities emerging back in the region through the lens of extant urban identities, too. And to lionize their importance in the new nation-state, city dwellers often asserted their city’s weight in a field that transcended the nation-state, the global economy, say, or the Muslim world. As a result, nation-states were inherently enmeshed with transnational spaces.
What conclusions can we draw from the Middle Eastern case? Firstly, the structure, function, and meaning of cities, regions, states, and global circuits change over time; they do so hand-in-hand; and none of them can be clearly delimited in space or by function. Secondly, the rhythm of these modern changes is faster than in premodern times. Transpatialization in the modern Middle East has experienced two stages: Ottoman and post-Ottoman; and both stages had distinct phases, to boot. Thirdly, relations between the urban, the regional, the state, and the global are not a zero-sum game; for instance, a more intense presence of state power in a city does not equal “less city.” Hence, we behold many mutually transformative dual relationships as well as a wealth of triple and quadruple intertwinements. Because cities, regions, state, and global networks are not mutually exclusive, but enmeshed, change in one affects all.
Finally and most fundamentally, it does not really make sense for historians to explicitly choose or implicitly accept any one socio-spatial field like “the nation-state” as the “ground floor,” as it were, of their narratives, “below” and “above” which are local and global (and regional and imperial) floors. The same goes for making “the global” one’s ultimate yardstick. No such hierarchy exists. And just as these socio-spatial fields are innately intertwined, so must be their histories.
