Books by Simon Jackson
This volume delivers a history of internationalism at the League of Nations and the United Nation... more This volume delivers a history of internationalism at the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN), with a focus on the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, when the nation-state ascended to global hegemony as a political formation. Combining global, regional and local scales of analysis, the essays presented here provide an interpretation of the two institutions — and their complex interrelationship — that is planetary in scale but also pioneeringly multi-local.
Our central argument is that although the League and the UN shaped internationalism from the centre, they were themselves moulded just as powerfully by internationalisms that welled up globally, far beyond Geneva and New York City.
The contributions are organised into three broad thematic sections, the first focused on the production of norms, the second on the development of expertise and the third on the global re-ordering of empire. By showing how the ruptures and continuities between the two international organisations have shaped the content and format of what we now refer to as ‘global governance’, the collection determinedly sets the Cold War and the emergence of the Third World into a single analytical frame alongside the crisis of empire after World War One and the geopolitics of the Great Depression. Each of these essays reveals how the League of Nations and the United Nations provided a global platform for formalising and proliferating political ideas and how the two institutions generated new spectrums of negotiation and dissidence and re-codified norms.
As an ensemble, the book shows how the League of Nations and the United Nations constructed and progressively re-fashioned the basic building blocks of international society right across the twentieth century. Developing the new international history’s view of the League and UN as dynamic, complex forces, the book demonstrates that both organisations should be understood to have played an active role, not just in mediating a world of empires and then one of nation-states, but in forging the many principles and tenets by which international society is structured.
Papers by Simon Jackson
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa & the Middle East, 2019
This essay introduces a special section dedicated to examining the history and culture of automob... more This essay introduces a special section dedicated to examining the history and culture of automobility by considering the quartet of articles on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya and Algeria, and Syria that comprise the section. Jumping off from the work of Palestinian artist Jumana Manna to examine the motor vehicle as a multifaceted and ambiguous site of social experience and analytical possibility, the essay then sets the four essays that compose the section into the extant literature.
Contemporary European History, 2018
The books under review here represent a small sample of some of the best recent work in internati... more The books under review here represent a small sample of some of the best recent work in international history and Middle East Studies, and I parse particularly the intersections between the new international and imperial historiography and new work in Middle East Studies. With a view to both de-exceptionalising the history of the Middle East and interrogating the boundaries of Europe as a category of analysis, I argue that for contemporary European historians this historiography has much to offer, notably on the understanding of the First World War, on the nature of European colonial rule and on the history of the economic sphere.
Humanity, 2017
This article shows how emergency humanitarian food relief efforts fitted into the gradual establi... more This article shows how emergency humanitarian food relief efforts fitted into the gradual establishment of French imperial occupation in Syria-Lebanon between 1915 and 1925. It argues that we should grasp the years from 1915-1925 as a unit - a distinctively transformative “occupation decade” in the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire was replaced by the League of Nations Mandate system. It contributes thereby to current debates on the scope and chronology of the First World War. It also engages with a central question in the historiography of modern humanitarianism – the idea of emergency relief and socio-economic development as “dual modes” of humanitarianism, and concludes that state and non-state humanitarian relief are not easily separated.
Key Words: Humanitarianism; Food Relief; First World War; League of Nations; Mandate System; Middle East; Syria; Lebanon; Colonial Empire; France.
This article analyzes the network of phosphate producing sites in French colonial North Africa in... more This article analyzes the network of phosphate producing sites in French colonial North Africa in the twentieth century. By tracing phosphate flows across the region between mining sites, and by placing the North African network into imperial and global perspective, the article develops the concept of a phosphate archipelago, capable of recognizing the shared specificities of the phosphate mines as extractive spaces and of describing their insertion into adjacent local and regional dynamics. Drawing on political-economic writings after World War One, the article focuses mainly on phosphates’ role in the colonial politics of economic autarky, but also touches on labour migration, the role of phosphates as an actor, and the trajectory of the phosphate archipelago in North Africa across the watershed of independence in the 1950s and down to the present day, when it plays a key role in the politics of global nutrition and food security.
Arab Studies Journal Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring 2013.
Monde(s), Sep 2013
Que vaut la Syrie ? » La mission Huvelin, expertise économique et présence française au Levant, 1... more Que vaut la Syrie ? » La mission Huvelin, expertise économique et présence française au Levant, 1918Levant, -1922 Cet article analyse une mission universitaire envoyée en Syrie en 1919 pour préparer l'installation du mandat français dans cette région. Il montre comment le discours sur le développement économique produit par cette mission permit de surmonter les multiples oppositions à la présence française.
Chapter in Edited Book by Simon Jackson
Philippe Bourmaud, Norig Neveu and Chantal Verdeil, eds., 'EXPERTS ET EXPERTISE DANS LES MANDATS DE LA SOCIÉTÉ DES NATIONS : FIGURES, CHAMPS, OUTILS' (Paris: Presses de l'Inalco, 2020)., 2020
Pivoting empirically around an economic mission to Syria in 1954 by the International Bank for Re... more Pivoting empirically around an economic mission to Syria in 1954 by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the forerunner of the World Bank, this essay provides a conclusion to the volume by seeking to identify various ways in which expertise associated with the League of Nations Mandates endured or was recycled in the era after the dissolution of the League, namely the period of the establishment of the United Nations, of the Cold War, and of decolonization. It also suggests ways in which scholarship on expertise might develop the lines of inquiry established in the essays of this volume. To meet these goals, it focuses first on the question of continuity and rupture across 1945, second on the issues of space and scale and the possibility of producing histories of expertise that are both multi-local and trans-national, third on the under-explored topic of expertise associated with capitalist businesses and military institutions, and finally on the opportunities for histories that set late colonial international expertise into the context of the Anthropocene and specifically the « Great Acceleration » of the 1950s.
The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates Edited by Cyrus Schayegh, Andrew Arsan, May 31, 2015
Based on documents from a family archive in Beirut, this paper analyses the politics of food reli... more Based on documents from a family archive in Beirut, this paper analyses the politics of food relief in famine-ravaged Beirut in 1919. It examines the role in the relief operation of Charles Corm, a writer and businessman, showing how Corm acted as a broker for the distribution of food by the French military. The paper places this activity into the wider context of World War I food politics. Drawing on recent philosophical ethnographies of humanitarian situations the paper assesses the production of new social hierarchies in the immediate post-war moment, and the reassembling of new global humanitarian technologies in Beirut.
France in an Era of Global War, 1914-1945 Occupation, Politics, Empire and Entanglements (Palgrave 2014). Eds. Alison Carrol and Ludivine Broch
The chapter shows how the recruitment of auxiliary troops among the Ottoman diaspora in the Ameri... more The chapter shows how the recruitment of auxiliary troops among the Ottoman diaspora in the Americas during World War One helped lay the foundations for the French League of Nations Mandate in Syria-Lebanon after the war. Adopting a global approach to the wartime origins of the modern Middle East, it traces the discourses, administrative politics and Syrian and Lebanese mobilizations and print cultures that defined volunteer recruitment to the Légion d’Orient during World War One. Following recruits on their transnational journey from the Americas to France, Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine, it challenges accounts of French colonial rule based on the binary of colony and metropole, nuances debates on the French Army in World War One, and contributes to the new global history of the Mandate system.
Book Reviews by Simon Jackson
Journal of Global History, 2019
Books & Ideas, Apr 13, 2015
Why do people migrate? How can they live in several worlds and many nations at once? Tracing the ... more Why do people migrate? How can they live in several worlds and many nations at once? Tracing the history of the Lebanese migration to West Africa, Andrew Arsan offers a brilliant reappraisal of diaspora, nation and empire in the first half of the twentieth century.
Women's History Review, Dec 15, 2014
Op-Eds by Simon Jackson
History Today, 2020
The disastrous explosion in Beirut has prompted calls for French intervention in Lebanon. But the... more The disastrous explosion in Beirut has prompted calls for French intervention in Lebanon. But the history of France’s involvement in the region has been driven by the creation of proxy elites and the pursuit of its own interests.
The Conversation, Mar 10, 2015
Debates on the freedom of higher education are as old as the university. But today’s ideologicall... more Debates on the freedom of higher education are as old as the university. But today’s ideologically imposed constraints are very different from the financial dependence of public universities on the state after 1945. The current international trend towards semi-private, semi-public universities poses new challenges to academic freedom. This is exemplified by the dominance of market-based vocabulary and principles for scientific conduct. Co-authored with Stefan Nygard and Ann Thomson
As weaponry and training flows to the Kurds over the coming months, and the KRG fights Obama’s gr... more As weaponry and training flows to the Kurds over the coming months, and the KRG fights Obama’s ground war against the IS for him, we will be well-advised to consider the effects of this lethal largesse not just on the front lines, but on the political anatomy of the Iraqi and Syrian nation states in the years to come.
Black-clad fighters, suffering refugees and Western warplanes overhead – these are the mainstays ... more Black-clad fighters, suffering refugees and Western warplanes overhead – these are the mainstays of Iraq and Syria coverage as the Islamic State (IS) continues its campaign. Notably absent from debates is how today’s Iraq and Syria emerged from their own national histories, and not just out of foreign meddling – from Sykes-Picot to Bush and Blair.
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Books by Simon Jackson
Our central argument is that although the League and the UN shaped internationalism from the centre, they were themselves moulded just as powerfully by internationalisms that welled up globally, far beyond Geneva and New York City.
The contributions are organised into three broad thematic sections, the first focused on the production of norms, the second on the development of expertise and the third on the global re-ordering of empire. By showing how the ruptures and continuities between the two international organisations have shaped the content and format of what we now refer to as ‘global governance’, the collection determinedly sets the Cold War and the emergence of the Third World into a single analytical frame alongside the crisis of empire after World War One and the geopolitics of the Great Depression. Each of these essays reveals how the League of Nations and the United Nations provided a global platform for formalising and proliferating political ideas and how the two institutions generated new spectrums of negotiation and dissidence and re-codified norms.
As an ensemble, the book shows how the League of Nations and the United Nations constructed and progressively re-fashioned the basic building blocks of international society right across the twentieth century. Developing the new international history’s view of the League and UN as dynamic, complex forces, the book demonstrates that both organisations should be understood to have played an active role, not just in mediating a world of empires and then one of nation-states, but in forging the many principles and tenets by which international society is structured.
Papers by Simon Jackson
http://humanityjournal.org/issue8-2/introduction-transformative-occupations-in-the-modern-middle-east/
Key Words: Humanitarianism; Food Relief; First World War; League of Nations; Mandate System; Middle East; Syria; Lebanon; Colonial Empire; France.
Chapter in Edited Book by Simon Jackson
Book Reviews by Simon Jackson
Op-Eds by Simon Jackson
Our central argument is that although the League and the UN shaped internationalism from the centre, they were themselves moulded just as powerfully by internationalisms that welled up globally, far beyond Geneva and New York City.
The contributions are organised into three broad thematic sections, the first focused on the production of norms, the second on the development of expertise and the third on the global re-ordering of empire. By showing how the ruptures and continuities between the two international organisations have shaped the content and format of what we now refer to as ‘global governance’, the collection determinedly sets the Cold War and the emergence of the Third World into a single analytical frame alongside the crisis of empire after World War One and the geopolitics of the Great Depression. Each of these essays reveals how the League of Nations and the United Nations provided a global platform for formalising and proliferating political ideas and how the two institutions generated new spectrums of negotiation and dissidence and re-codified norms.
As an ensemble, the book shows how the League of Nations and the United Nations constructed and progressively re-fashioned the basic building blocks of international society right across the twentieth century. Developing the new international history’s view of the League and UN as dynamic, complex forces, the book demonstrates that both organisations should be understood to have played an active role, not just in mediating a world of empires and then one of nation-states, but in forging the many principles and tenets by which international society is structured.
http://humanityjournal.org/issue8-2/introduction-transformative-occupations-in-the-modern-middle-east/
Key Words: Humanitarianism; Food Relief; First World War; League of Nations; Mandate System; Middle East; Syria; Lebanon; Colonial Empire; France.
Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham (UK)
2-3 June 2016
Keynote Speaker: Nile Green (UCLA)
about (auto)-mobility, brings into conversation historians and social scientists who investigate the histories,
politics, and social, visual and aesthetic meanings of (auto)-mobility, primarily across the Middle East but also in
global and comparative perspective in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.
blockade also contributed to post-war ideologies of economic development focused on revivified connections between Marseille and Beirut, agricultural revival and modernization to make Lebanon ‘food independent’ and restore the
landscape of Syria to its perceived ancient status as the ‘granary of Rome’. The blockade thereby laid the foundation for the construction of Syria and Lebanon as economic auxiliaries of French post-war imperial economic autarchy.
The innovations in the chemistry of agriculture fostered by the war, and the simultaneous national-‐‑imperial spatialization of economic patterns that had been far more liberally imbricated across national borders before 1914, together provided a
matrix for the establishment of phosphate mining on a large scale in the French Protectorate of Morocco after 1918. But the creation of the Cherifien Phosphate Office (CPO), as the public mining company was known, was not just imposed from
Paris. Instead it reworked existing juridical, scientific and social strategies of mineral extraction in circulation across the varied modes of governance of the French colonial Maghreb, notably in the Protectorate of Tunisia lately analysed by Mary Dewhurst Lewis, as well as emerging from pre‑war patterns of fertilizer production that, as Edward D. Mellilo among others has shown, spanned the global South.
Drawing on primary sources that show how the CPO and its phosphates were imagined analogically and positioned within the wider politics of inter-imperial economic competition after the 1918 armistice, the paper argues that the environmental history of phosphates must be approached in conversation with the wider history of post‑war economic life, and the development in the 1920s and early 1930s, notably in the context of the League of Nations, of new quantitative metrics and national‑imperial imaginaries of commodity production.
Finally, by assessing the way that Moroccan and French imperial labour politics crystallized around phosphate mining in the 1920s, the paper explores ways in which global and imperial consumption patterns associated with phosphates drew workers away from other parts of the Moroccan environment, notably from farming, even as the phosphates themselves promised to durably alter agriculture across the world.