Week 8: Development and Colonial ‘Modernity’ in the British Mandates

Mini Lecture

Seminar Readings:

Priya Satia, ‘Developing Iraq: Britain, India and the Redemption of Empire and technology in the First World War,’ Past and Present 197, (2007): 211-255.

Fredrik Meiton, ‘The Radiance of the Jewish National Home: Technocapitalism, Electrification, and the Making of Modern Palestine,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no.4 (2015): 975–1006.

Jacob Norris, ‘Transforming the Holy Land: The Ideology of Development and the British Mandate in Palestine,’ Humanity 8, no.2 (2017): 269-286.

Jacob Norris, Chap. 3 ‘The ‘City of the Future’ Haifa, Capital of British Palestine on Haifa,’ In Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Further Readings:

Meiton, F. A. (2018). Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.

Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).

Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Martin Sicker, Reshaping Palestine: From Muhammad Ali to the British Mandate, 1831–1922 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999).

Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914–1940 (London: Cass, 1984).

Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

Roza El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2005).

Roza El-Eini, “The Implementation of British AgriculturalPolicy in Palestine in the 1930s,” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no.4 (October 1996): 240–42.

Robert Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

Jennifer L. Derr, ‘Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt: The Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography,’ in Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: California University Press, 2013).

Fredrik Meiton, Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

Ebubekir Ceylan, The Ottoman Origins of Modern Iraq: Political Reform, Modernization and Development in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

For comparison, see: Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Duke: Duke University Press, 2022).