Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon

by Elizabeth F. Thompson

French rule in Syria and Lebanon coincided with the rise of colonial resistance around the world and with profound social trauma after World War I. In this tightly argued study, Elizabeth Thompson shows how Syrians and Lebanese mobilized, like other colonized peoples, to claim the terms of citizenship enjoyed in the European metropole. The negotiations between the French and citizens of the Mandate set the terms of politics for decades after Syria and Lebanon achieved independence in 1946.

Colonial Citizens highlights gender as a central battlefield upon which the relative rights and obligations of states and citizens were established. The participants in this struggle included not only elite nationalists and French rulers, but also new mass movements of women, workers, youth, and Islamic populists. The author examines the "gendered battles" fought over France's paternalistic policies in health, education, labor, and the press. Two important and enduring political structures issued from these conflicts:

- First, a colonial welfare state emerged by World War II that recognized social rights of citizens to health, education, and labor protection.

- Second, tacit gender pacts were forged first by the French and then reaffirmed by the nationalist rulers of the independent states. These gender pacts represented a compromise among male political rivals, who agreed to exclude and marginalize female citizens in public life.

This study provides a major contribution to the social construction of gender in nationalist and postcolonial discourse. Returning workers, low-ranking religious figures, and most of all, women to the narrative history of the region--figures usually omitted--Colonial Citizens enhances our understanding of the interwar period in the Middle East, providing needed context for a better understanding of statebuilding, nationalism, Islam, and gender since World War II.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Lebanon, Middle East, France, Academic, School

400 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Elizabeth F. Thompson is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Harvard, 2013), which profiles a dozen political movements against tyranny and inequality in the Middle East since 1839, culminating in the Arab uprisings of 2011. Her first book, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia, 2000), won book prizes from the American Historical Association and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Prof. Thompson has also won research awards from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Library of Congress. With Mustafa Aksakal, she is Middle East co-editor of the new 1914-1918 Online encyclopedia of the First World War and co-director of the National Endowment for Humanities Summer Seminar for Faculty, "World War I in the Middle East."