Historical continuities exist between the late Ottoman state, French Mandate, and Syrian Ba’ath regime’s understanding of development in the eastern Mediterranean world. In her first monograph, States of Cultivation: Imperial Transition and Scientific Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean, historian Elizabeth Williams explores the Ottoman and the French empires’ methods of “dominating nature and their policies in agricultural development” (p. 4). She demonstrates the complicated consequences of these policies on the agricultural resources and the people, mainly cultivators, landlords, and capitalists, who rely on them. By examining the implications of such extractive policies in the eastern Mediterranean world, Williams also emphasizes the ways in which imperial ruling and state building influenced the multiple dynamics between the environment, agricultural production, and the capital accumulation by underscoring transformation in land ownership, scientific practices, and indigenous knowledge and its production processes. In this regard, States of Cultivation is an important contribution to the literature on technocratic expertise, state formation, and developmentalism in the history of the modern Middle East and the crucial role of late Ottoman practices in the birth of these processes.

While highlighting consistencies between Ottoman, Lebanese, Syrian, and French policies in agricultural development Williams also stresses a fundamental difference between them. French officials, she shows, understood the region as a “repository for surplus French capital, privileged French expertise, and expressed disdained distance for local technocratic approaches and those who advocated them” (p. 7). Unlike the French colonial officials, the Ottomans and Syrians embraced local experts and their technocratic knowledge. These different approaches to the environment, its natural resources and residents, both human and nonhuman, furnished “fragmented spaces” and underscored various forms of conflicts emerging from the distinct priorities of political regimes (p. 7). Throughout the five chapters of the book, the author examines such imperial policies and their role in development, consistently emphasizing the regional environmental limits and implications on local farmers, a generic category that, unfortunately, has not been identified nor exclusively portrayed by the author through economic, social, or environmental lenses. Who were the farmers? How big was a farming household in nineteenth-century Syria? And in what ways did they interact with other “farmers” or markets? Similarly, pastoralists, constituting a considerable portion of Syria’s population up until the mid-20th century, and their interactions with the “farmers” are missing in the State of Cultivation.

To provide a nuanced understanding of developmentalism and the role of the Ottoman state and its technocratic mindset, Williams begins with the Tanzimat reforms and its most important legal code, the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which would eventually transform rural space, agricultural practices, and land ownership across the empire. On this front, the author dedicates Chapters 1–2 to describing how the Tanzimat state (1839–76) and its successor, the Hamidian regime (1876–1908), sought to make the local environments of the empire more legible, while implementing scientific experiments by building agricultural schools, teaching classes, and constructing experimental model farms for agricultural development that were seen by Ottoman officials as a crucial source of revenue for the imperial treasury. In the course of analyzing this long-term process, the author not only emphasizes the characteristic approaches of Ottoman officials “driven by both internal dynamics that built on existing contexts, practices and networks…and inter-imperial interactions,” but also explores the consequences of these policies on villagers (p. 23). Here, Williams challenges the conventional narrative that villagers were reluctant to register their land in their names due to fear of taxation, conscription, lack of understanding of its importance, and low rates of literacy. Instead, she contends that villagers had registered the land in their names with the declaration of the Land Code. However, they had an “inability” to hold the land due to the significant debt generated by the implementation of the Land Code, which required registration and reevaluation of its value (p. 56). For example, at the time of register, the land value registration was usually ten to fifteen times more than the actual value of the land. With the combined effects of increasing agricultural taxes based on inflated values and poor harvests caused by drought, peasants were forced to seek loans. The insufficient funds in the Agricultural Bank meant misfortune and dispossession for the villagers who collated their land to wealthy individuals of the area to pay their mortgages. As a result of this process, the Ottomans not only integrated the region within the larger planning infrastructure of the empire, and substantially increased the region’s agricultural capacity, but also allowed the wealthier landlords to become the main beneficiaries of the scientific agricultural project.

In Chapter 3, the author examines the final years of Ottoman sovereignty and the transition to the French Mandate regime in the eastern Mediterranean. While exploring the consequences of this political shift in the imperial space, Williams carefully lays out different policies and visions of the Ottoman and French imperial regimes for the region’s agricultural development. Ottomans understood the region’s development as an integral part of the empire’s provincial administration, whereas French Mandate officials saw Syria and Lebanon as a colonial periphery that should be both a market for French products and a supplier of raw materials for metropole industries. Thus, on the eve of World War I, the Ottoman administration continued to invest substantially in the empire’s scientific agricultural infrastructure, whether by opening more branches of the Agricultural Bank, completing new cadastral surveys, regulating mortgages, or affording more attention to taxation. The consistency of Ottoman investment in scientific agriculture and the reorganization of the state’s institutional practices resulted in a “threefold increase in revenue” between 1850 and 1914 (p. 121).

In Chapter 4, Williams examines the politics of agricultural expertise during the French Mandate regime. Though the Ottoman infrastructure for scientific agriculture continued to be the space for experimentation, with the transition to the Mandate regime, the number of such spaces continuously declined, and study abroad became “the only method” for residents to pursue “advanced agricultural training” (p. 163). Furthermore, during the Mandate years, various tensions emerged between local technocrats, who prioritized building a national economy and the infrastructure around it, with French officials articulating policies that eventually connected the region economically to the empire. This approach damaged the relationship between cultivators, local technocrats, and the Mandate officials, triggering more fractures than the Ottoman era. Despite their expertise, local technocrats and agronomists were not seen by their French partners as equally trained and knowledgeable since they were the citizens of colonial periphery. This “privileged ‘scientific’ expertise,” the author argues, became a tool for imposing “hierarchies of knowledge between the metropole and the mandate and reinscribing them institutionally” (p. 165). This hierarchical system would not only create divergence between the French technocrats of Mandate regimes and their local counterparts but also impact how each group generated and spread knowledge through various methods, including schooling and mobile lecturing. The imposition of the hierarchies would eventually strengthen the center’s control over rural producers, a process that began in the late Ottoman state.

In the fifth and final chapter, Williams analyzes the crisis of the 1930s, embodied in drought, insects, and rotten populations, in Greater Syria. She demonstrates how the socioeconomic and political decisions of the Mandate regime impacted the environment and society. Williams emphasizes the central logic of colonial extraction in which the colonial state prioritized the financial and material needs of the imperial center, by ignoring the needs of the cultivators. As she shows, this logic also contributed to the amalgamation of large land holding that eventually triggered rural migration and social unrest that became apparent during the 1925–27 Syrian Revolt. This situation, notably, points toward another story that has not been visible in the conventional narrative focusing on urban experiences. According to Williams, rural migration and social unrest during the 1930s suggests that farmers suffered more severe consequences of the Mandate regime’s policies than the urban population. The author, surprisingly, does not make any connections to, or even mention, the uprising that was happening on the other side of the border at the same time: the Sheikh Said uprising in Turkey in 1925. This uprising triggered a wave of transborder rural migration from Turkey to Syria. Including this information in the discussion would have made a significant contribution to the topics of environmental stress, taxation, and social unrest in Chapter 5.

In States of Cultivation, Williams uses a wide range of collections, including Ottoman and French imperial archives, the archive of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in Italy, the United Nations Archive in Geneva, and local archives in Lebanon and Syria, as well as Mandate-era court records in Damascus. This diverse array of sources presents a great opportunity for graduate students focusing on the Middle East, in general, and Syria and Lebanon, in particular, to learn about the diverse methodological approaches mobilized by historians. Additionally, the author’s proficiency in multiple languages and her engagement with global literature on developmentalism expands the reach of this monograph. Alongside scholars and students of the Middle East, policymakers will also find relevant explanations and suggestions for writing reports that provide solutions for development and emphasize the importance of indigenous knowledge and its dissemination on the ground. States of Cultivation, for all of these reasons, is a valuable contribution to the growing historical literature on the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman states, modernist agricultural policies, and state-led developmentalism in the Middle East.