Thinking about Tariq Tell, “Guns, Gold, and Grain: War and Food Supply in the Making of Transjordan,” in War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). I wrote this review a few years ago to practice critical writing - not the best thing I’ve written but Tell’s essay infuriated me at the time.
States grow through war, are indeed designed for war, and it is usual, in studying the history of the formation of states in Europe and Asia in the early modern era, to focus on the act of warfare and its links to the growth in taxation, bureaucracy, markets and even citizenship and nationalism. So what happens when a state is built by actively attacking and challenging the very processes that are supposed to be tied to a strengthening, centralised state? This is the subject of Tariq Tell’s essay on the origins of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, or Transjordan as it was called between the world wars.
Tell attempts to move beyond the narrow historiographies of Hashemite propaganda of a patriotic people’s war rallied behind the sharif of Mecca, and the Arab nationalist counter-argument that Hussein’s revolt was a narrow, reactionary affair, the Bedouin tribes fighting for gold and not for a wider Arabist ideal. Instead, “it is precisely the social and economic conditions of war, local strategies, and material incentives, rather than the high politics of British treachery and Hashemite ambition, that hold center stage” in his narrative, focussed upon the way in which food supply “shaped patterns of participation.” Where the Turks controlled adequate supplies of food or the markets, “tribal leaders displayed a greater reluctance to join forces with the anti-Ottoman campaign of Sharif Hussein.” Only good harvests or material success in capturing those points of supply ensured widespread tribal backing for the Arab Revolt.
Tell lays the success of the revolt on “the inhabitants of the province, whether townspeople or Bedouin…united in their hostility to the centralizing bent of Ottoman reform.” Ottoman rule was extended into the Transjordan between 1851 and 1893 by forts and outposts, reinforced by loyal settlers from the Caucasus, Circassians and Turcomen implanted along the frontier. These settlements became centres for Arab merchants and professionals, who turned a former Circassian village, Amman (the current capital!) into a market town. Grain farming increased due to booming prices, while the collection of taxes “created excess demand for liquidity and, therefore, an opportunity for merchants to accumulate capital through money lending.” From the 1880’s onward, land transfers increased as communal Bedouin pastures were bought by settlers, merchants, moneylenders and bureaucrats, who, along with some Bedouin shayks, imported Palestinian and Egyptian sharecroppers. The surplus of this expansion of farming helped to solidify a new local elite. What, in some anthropologies of the Middle Eastern state, is called a ‘dual system’ of settled agriculture alongside nomadic husbandry, developed uneasily, with frequent raids and revolts well into the 1890s.
Tell stresses that Transjordan was an unlikely place for Arabist ideology to develop, as it was relatively ‘backwards,’ a frontier where the state was essentially substituting for any other social organization, and actually seen as being ‘progressive’ or at least superior to the alternative. But both the Bedouins and the Sherif of Mecca feared the centralising efforts of the Ottomans, especially the expansion of the railway, which curbed their significant autonomy. Tell notes, for instance, that Hussein’s call to revolt “appealed to educated Hijazi opinion in traditional rather than Arabist terms…and the articles and editorials of his mouthpiece Al-Qibla, accused the “atheistic” CUP [Commitee of Union and Progress, ruling party of the Ottoman Empire] of tampering with the Islamic legitimacy of the Ottoman state and called for the preservation of the ancient privileges of the Hijaz.” The fighting forces assembled by the Hashemites in 1916 and after were mostly, almost entirely Bedouin or Arab tribesmen: there were few deserters from the Arab officers in the ranks of the Ottoman army, and those that did join the revolt played little role in Hussein’s forces except in training and administration. The centrality of Bedouins and Arab nomads according to Tell “stamped the Arab Movement with a tribal character. This ensured that whatever the motives of its instigators, the form and content of the Arab Revolt reproduced traditional patterns of political change in the rural hinterlands of the Middle East.”
Guns, grain and gold, the title of Tell’s essay, were crucial for victory, all three made available by a massive British subsidy of £125,000 per month. Even with this money, “the logistics of food supply in the north Arabian desert (Badiyat al-Sham) worked against the revolt.” Even powerful Arab and Bedouin tribal organisations would not join the Sharif unless they enjoyed security “not only of arms, but of food.” In the last year of the war, for instance, it was a great harvest and abundant rains, combined with the British occupation of Palestine that decisively turned the Arab landlords conclusively against Ottoman rule.
Victory, however, did not cement a new Arab state in Transjordan: instead, as in other wartime situations, state collapse led to civil strife, as those groups held in check by the Ottomans turned on each other. Nomads raided the British or settled areas, and herders, peasants and sharecroppers began to burn “the land registries and tax offices in an effort to rid themselves of fiscal obligation or debt.” There were revolts against conscription, taxation and the gendarmerie, and local British and Hashemite authority struggled to implement their rule. Yet Tell, bizarrely, perhaps suffering from a desire to paint the state as a normative in this case, sees all of this resistance as tribal, backwards and anti-modern.
This violence seems, though, and caveat, as I am someone unacquainted with the primary sources or the greater specifics of Jordan, like a peasant revolution, especially if debt and taxation burdens were so high cultivators were willing to risk state repression to destroy the records of their bondage; remember, Bedouins too had lost much of their communal lands to new elites and sharecropper settlers, so their resistance shouldn’t really be a mystery, either. Instead, Tell argues this was all a problematic “resurgent local order,” the “renewal of the tribal particularisms on which it was based.” Certainly Bedouin raids were disruptive of settled agriculture and trade, so it was left to the British to ‘stabilise’ the country, following the efforts of a Captain Brunton
who formed a regular body of cavalry and machine gunners in Amman. The new force had the explicit aim of curbing bedouin raids upon the settled population and was initially recruited from the Circassians settled by the Ottomans for the same purpose. In October 1920 the force successfully collected taxes from Sahab and imposed peace after tribal strife in Madaba.
So, essentially, they replicated the Ottoman state but even more effectively.
Tells’ attempts, in his conclusion, to argue that war distorted, stretched out or challenged the state because of “extended lines of communication” and subsidies independent of local resources. Fair enough, but he then unfavourably compares the failure of state building and state-collapse in Jordan in the immediate aftermath of a total war to the longue durée of European state-building, which occurred over centuries, and even in its most accelerated states, such as after the Thirty Years War or in the early 19th century, still took decades of protracted, localised conflicts to formalise, against considerable localist, elite and peasant resistance. This argument undermines, in part, some of his early emphasis on the marginality of Jordan. State building was hard in Jordan not because the local society was ‘backwards’ but because the British, and Hussein, seemed to think it was “unpromising.” For Hussein Jordan was just a waypoint to Syria and for the British it was little more than a strategic frontier for Egypt and the Suez Canal, and proved very difficult to govern because the local elite had “little administrative experience” and were “tainted” by Arab nationalist political radicalism.[1]
Tell is really describing a temporarily successful regionalist revolt against a state-building process similar to that of other ‘latecomer’ modernisers like Siam, Iran or Ethiopia. The difference is that a more powerful neighbouring state used war and existing discontent to bring an end to what seems a ‘classic’ case of indigenous state formation and replace it with a colonial state. Given that it only took two years for the tribal resurgence, as described by A. K. S. Lambton[2], to be crushed by the British, the chaos after Ottoman collapse does not seem to confirm Tell’s suspicion “that the results of war making were more in keeping with the ideas of Ibn Khaldun,” i.e. chaos and degeneration. (The continued insistence that Ibn Khaldun, like de Toqueville, be treated as an ‘objective’ witness to their own times, and be used uncritically to support arguments about very different times and places, frustrates me to no end.)
The narrative analysis Tell lays down should make any scholar of war and state formation suspicious of how successful war actually can be at strengthening states. Additionally, having just reread pieces of David Sneath’s Headless State, I’m not particularly inclined to Tell’s fixation on an unproblematic treatments of tribe and state and his assumption that tribes are antithetical to states, which are somehow normative to modernity whereas tribes are just particularistic, dangerous, reactionary throwbacks. A recent article by Yoav Alon argues, quite convincingly, the opposite: that in order to rule at all, the British and Arab state officials absolutely “co-operated with tribes, shared power with them, co-opted their leaders and even incorporated tribal values into the ethos of the state.”[3] There is nothing, therefore, preventing the tribe, or the nomad, from integrating with and gaining from a modern state.
[1] Timothy J. Paris, Britain, the Hashemites, and Arab Rule, 1920-1925: the Sherifian solution (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), p. 126.
[2] Lambton, “The Tribal Resurgence and the Decline of Bureaucracy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in 18th Century Islamic History, ed. T. Naff and R. Owen, London and Amsterdam, 1977, pp. 108-29.
[3] Yoav Alon, “Tribal Shaykhs and the Limits of British Imperial Rule in Transjordan, 1920–46,” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History; Jan. 2004, Vol. 32, Issue 1, p. 69-92: p. 71.
