Mule Drivers in Nineteenth-Century Lebanon: from local social history towards Global History

Abstract

This article makes the case for a project in the making: a study of the social transformation of the countryside as it joins the global market over the long nineteenth century, told as a collective biography of the mule drivers of Ottoman Lebanon those obscure peasants who, owning one or a few mules, made their livelihood in the transport of goods and persons rather than work the land. Over the first half of the century, these actors mobilized for revolts while a village-based economy turned to cash-crop agriculture and the central government built a new state apparatus that would insure its survival 1860s to the First World War, as local resources were diverted to feed European industry and local petty-trade networks came undone, when elites at all levels struggled to assert their control over labor and resources, these same muleteers turned into social bandits smugglers who d extraction. Some of them accumulated wealth and ultimately integrated an emerging middle class. The projected account makes two historiographical interventions. (a) Within the history of tied to developments that are characteristic of capitalism over the period namely, the rise of a new kind of state and the loss of control over resources by local actors at the margins. This approach pushes against purely culturalist explanations, attempting to wed culturalist and materialist stances. (b) Conversely, by drawing parallels with other mounted