The Social and Economic Origins of Monarchy in Jordan

T. Tell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137015655
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An interpretative history of the emergence and consolidation of the modern state in Jordan, this book examines the resilience of the Hashemite monarchy and the economic sources of social power under Ottoman, British, and post-colonial Hashemite rule.

CHAPTER 1

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF HASHEMITE RULE

Modernization theory supplied little to resolve the paradox of Hashemite survival, or throw new light on the puzzle of monarchical resilience in Jordan. Its conceptualization of social change in terms of the static polarities of tradition and modernity obscures the real historical processes that bound the population of the East Bank to the monarchy during the Mandate Period, even as its focus on Trans-Jordanian “pre-modern values” neglects the material bonds that ensured their continued support after independence.¹ Similarly, the restriction of a modern, and therefore oppositionist, political sensibility to the Palestinians belittles a current of Trans-Jordanian political contention that has been at least as important as the more often remarked opposition of the West Bankers and the refugees. Tensions between Amman and the rural hinterlands, or between local loyalties and nation-building during Mandatory rule, are underplayed, and no satisfactory account is given of the role of East Bankers in the broad “supra-communal” movements of opposition that took their inspiration from left-leaning pan-Arabism after independence.² All in all, modernization theory perpetuated an image of Hashemite rule in Jordan in which the societal history of the East Bank was neglected, its political economy left unexamined, and the social upheaval brought by state formation and capitalist development all but ignored.

Matters were compounded by the fact that until the last decade of the twentieth century, the published histories of modern Jordan contained little that could rescue the history of the East Bank from the stereotypes of modernization theory. Historical “scholarship [was] restricted to the high politics of Anglo-Hashemite relations and the Palestine Question,” and neglected the “social history of Transjordan.” Histories penned by local scholars (by and large written with an eye on official sanction and therefore conveniently dubbed “Hashemite”) invariably traced the origins of modern Jordan to the “Great Arab Revolt” of 1916–1918, and showed little interest in the social structures of Trans-Jordan before the advent of Hashemite rule, or in “a history of important continuities across the century spanning the advent of direct Ottoman rule in the 1850s and the end of the British Mandate.” Society at large—whether in Ottoman or Mandatory times—was treated only in passing, and the most detailed information on the “the histories and politics of Bedouin, cultivators and townspeople, and their … relation to the emerging state” was to be found in foreign sources. These sources ranged from nineteenth-century European travelogues, through the reports and handbooks commissioned by the colonial authorities in Jerusalem, to the writings on tribal history and the social origins of the Arab Legion penned by its two British commanders, Frederick Peake (1921–1939) and John Bagot Glubb (1939–1956).³

OTTOMANISM TO ARABISM IN SOUTHEAST SYRIA

Ottoman rule over those parts of southeastern Syria that evolved into Trans-Jordan encompasses four hundred years of history. The area fell under Ottoman rule in the wake of the defeat of the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq in 1516, and remained under Istanbul’s sway until Hashemite forces under Faysal Ibn al-Husayn entered Damascus in 1918.⁴ Yet despite the length of the Ottomans’ tenure, the period has until recent years received scant attention from Jordanian historians. This is in part due to the nationalistic slant of historical writing in the Arab East after World War I. Arabist animosity to the imperial ancien régime, coupled with a desire to legitimize a Hashemite revolt against a Muslim caliph, led to the portrayal of the Ottoman period as one of “Turkish” misrule and unremitting decline.⁵ Another factor stems from the limitations of the written sources available to the historian. The steppe marches of the Syrian southeast lay on the periphery of Istanbul’s control, and even the more recent histories of the Ottoman’s Arab provinces view the period from the perspective of the major urban centers and administrative capitals. An “urban bias” in the historiography of the region ensured that the rural peripheries of Ottoman Syria were neglected, and as pointed out by Kamal Salibi, “tribal areas away from [the] cities were treated, for the most part, as if they did not exist.”⁶

While a veil of ignorance still shrouds most aspects of the middle centuries of Ottoman rule in the Syrian southeast, it is clear that this portrait of imperial misrule must be qualified when discussing Istanbul’s approach to Trans-Jordan at the zenith of its power during the sixteenth century, or after 1851, when under pressure from an expansionist Europe, the Porte embarked upon a belated attempt at centralizing reform. Partly as a result of the Ottoman Tanzimat, late nineteenth-century accounts of the districts of ‘Ajlun, al-Balqa’ and al-Karak report a steady growth of population, agriculture, and trade, and the rapid extension of the “Frontier of Settlement” dividing the steppe from the sown after the establishment of a direct Ottoman presence in Irbid in 1851.⁷ Yet the significant socioeconomic changes that resulted are by and large neglected by “Hashemite” historians in favor of a portrait of oppressive taxation and tribal chaos—the latter made all the worse by the upheavals of World War I. Even so fine a historian as Kamal Salibi offers a typically dismissive assessment of the remote corner of southeastern Syria that evolved into Trans-Jordan after the passing of Ottoman rule: “When Sharif Abdullah arrived in Transjordan to reclaim its territory in the cause of the Great Arab Revolt, no-one would have envied him his lot. What the British ceded to him out of their newly acquired Palestinian Mandate were areas which were deemed virtually ungovernable, in addition to being extremely poor and underdeveloped.”⁸

The Arab Revolt itself (1916–1918), the medium through which the Hashemites were drawn into the affairs of the Fertile Crescent, is viewed through a nationalistic lens and conceived of as the culmination of the “Arab Awakening” begun in the schools and intellectual circles of Beirut half a century before.⁹ Most accounts of the course of the revolt in Trans-Jordan depict it in Arabist terms, as the point at which “Arab nationalism was transformed from sentiment to political action supported by military power.”¹⁰ Hashemite historians stress the spontaneous loyalty offered by the people of southeast Syria to the Hashemites as leaders of the “Arab Movement” and their patriotic attachment to the short-lived kingdom established by ‘Abdullah’s younger brother, Faysal, in Damascus in 1918–1920. In similar vein, the presence of the Syrian Istiqlal Party in Amman after French occupation had extinguished Faysalite rule in July 1920 ensured that the evolution of Trans-Jordan from the wreckage of Ottoman Syria is portrayed in nationalist terms. According to Sulayman al-Musa, very much the doyen of Jordan’s official historians, “the state of Transjordan was founded as a result of two main factors: the political on one side and the Arab Movement on the other. The boundaries of the new state were generally fixed by foreign bargaining and power politics, but its national character was preserved by Arab effort.”¹¹

‘Abdullah’s rule in Amman was consolidated, however, at the cost of dependence on Great Britain, and his ties with the Istiqlal were compromised by a signal inability to pursue the reunification of Faysal’s kingdom. Musa attributes the failure of ‘Abdullah (and the wider Arab Movement as a whole) in achieving the ideals of 1916 to the backward and tribal nature of the Arab East and to the divisions this caused among the Arab people as a whole.¹² In this version, the Hashemites’ accommodation to colonial control was seen as an example of inspired realpolitik that saved what was possible and allowed the Arab Movement to live on to fight another day.¹³ The establishment of a Hashemite emirate in Amman was instrumental in separating Trans-Jordan from Palestine, and protecting its inhabitants from the eastward spread of Zionist colonization. Local revolts in the first years of Hashemite rule are dismissed as a product of tribal obscurantism or British intrigue, although the uprisings led by Kulayb al-Shurayda in al-Kura, and by Sultan and Majid al-‘Adwan in al-Balqa’, were sparked by indigenous resistance to the re-imposition of central taxation, and the movement headed by the ‘Adwan transcended its tribal roots and took on a proto-nationalist Trans-Jordanian coloring.

Despite his apologetic approach to the politics of Hashemite Arabism, and his failure to inquire into the social bases of the Arab Movement, Musa’s work—in line with the best of this semi-“official” current of historiography¹⁴—provides a wealth of detail about political life during Mandatory rule. The key monographs of this genre map the structure of the colonial state, listing its principal office holders and administrative personnel, before charting the constitutional evolution of Trans-Jordan from Mandate to independent kingdom in 1946. The monographs go on to chronicle the five Trans-Jordanian National Congresses (1929–1933) that defined the contours of Jordan’s “political field,” and recount the fortunes of the first generation of its political parties and politicians.¹⁵ However, the concentration throughout is on the doings of the Hashemites rather than on the history of the population at large.¹⁶ Trans-Jordan’s evolution into an independent state in 1946 is explained in terms of ‘Abdullah’s statecraft and his skill in bending even his British paymasters to the Hashemite cause. Remarkably enough, given the vogue for social history, and for the recovery of the politics of the subaltern among historians of colonial rule since the 1960s, the neglect of society on the East Bank has also marked the work of foreign scholars critical of Hashemite rule, not least Mary Wilson’s otherwise excellent biography of King ‘Abdullah. In the biography, the high politics of ‘Abdullah’s schemes for Syrian unity, and his relationship to Palestine and British imperial interests, receive prime analytical attention.¹⁷

THE FIRST HASHEMITE KING OF JORDAN

Despite ‘Abdullah’s stature as one of the prime movers of the Arab Revolt in 1916, and the fact that he arrived in Trans-Jordan in 1920 with the expressed intention of ridding Syria of French occupation, Mary Wilson presents his career as a product of Britain’s moment in the Middle East, seeing him as a cog in Britain’s imperial design rather than an accredited nationalist leader.¹⁸ Wilson explains the establishment of a separate Emirate in Trans-Jordan in 1921 by the Colonial Office’s need to secure communications between the Suez Canal and the oil fields of Iraq, and by ‘Abdullah’s willingness to accommodate Britain’s interest in order to curry support for his candidacy for the Syrian throne. France’s refusal to countenance an Arab king in Damascus, the threat of Saudi expansionism to the Hashemite homeland in the Hijaz, and the shift to localized (as opposed to pan-Arab) national movements in the Levant states as European control took hold, drove ‘Abdullah into increasing dependence on Britain after 1924. His room for maneuver was further constrained because Trans-Jordan, in Wilson’s estimation, lacked the social or demographic makeup that could sustain an independent process of anticolonial mobilization on the model of Syria or Palestine.¹⁹

While Wilson is far more cognizant than the Hashemite historians of the transformation of southeastern Syria in late Ottoman times, she portrays Trans-Jordan as backward, tribal, and poverty stricken, and argues that its separate “existence hinged on European interests rather than on a local or regional rationale.”²⁰ Lacking established urban centers or a “sizable middle class,” it did not, in her estimation, have the “demographic or social structure [necessary] to sustain a nationalist movement on its own.”²¹ As a result, meaningful contestation of Mandatory rule ended with the departure of the Syrian Istiqlal in the mid-1920s: “Transjordan after 1924 resembled a patch of desert after a sandstorm” where “[t]he winds of Arab nationalism had momentarily whipped up the dust devils of political change and had then moved on.”²² Wilson evinces little interest in local resistance to Mandatory rule—whether in the form of the tribal uprisings that erupted in al-Kura and al-Balqa’, or the five Trans-Jordanian National Congresses (a “so-called opposition” in her dismissive phrase). The nativist sentiments of the local opposition (as summarized in the slogan “Jordan for the Jordanians”) are seen to be a product of British manipulation, and the tensions that developed between the Congress movement and the Amir over demands for representative (niyabi) rule, or over ‘Abdullah’s favorable attitude toward Jewish settlement in the East Bank,²³ are underplayed. No proper analysis is undertaken of the social origins of the Congress Movement, or of the judicious colonial policies—land tenure reforms, light taxation and relief work, and the skillful use of military employment as a means of co-optation—that allowed the British to defuse and deflect its demands.²⁴

Instead, and in a telling echo of the strictures of modernization theory, Wilson maintains that local politics only revived with the entry of Palestinians into Jordanian life in 1948. She argues that this political turpitude denied ‘Abdullah the opportunity, available to nationalist leaders in the other Arab Mandates, of mobilizing popular support to enhance his bargaining position with his colonial patron. As a result, Britain was able to impose a close control of Trans-Jordan’s administration and finances, and ‘Abdullah was forced to accept client status as formalized in the unequal Anglo-Trans-Jordanian treaty of 1928 (“the perfect expression of ‘Abdullah’s dependence” in Wilson’s estimation). In order to enlarge his scope for independent action, ‘Abdullah had to look beyond the frontiers of Trans-Jordan for the means to pursue his dream of a (greater) Syrian throne. This led him into ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Paradoxes of an Enduring Monarchy
• 1. The Historiography of Hashemite Rule
• 2. Before Hashemite Rule: Ottoman Order and Local Order in Southeastern Syria
• 3. The Origins of Hashemite Rule: From Ottomanism to Localism in Southeastern Syria
• 4. The Establishment of Hashemite Rule: The Evolution of Trans-Jordan
• 5. The Infrastructure of Mandatory Power in the Towns
• 6. The Infrastructure of Mandatory Power in the Steppe
• 7. From Mandate to Kingdom: The Social Origins of Hashemite Power in the Sown
• 8. The Cohesion of the East Bank: The Consolidation of Hashemite Power
• Conclusion: The Moral Economy of Hashemite Rule in Jordan
• Notes
• Index