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JADMAG ISSUE 7.1
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Spring 2019 Issue 7.1
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A Few Things Wrong with Political Economy of the
Middle East (Or, on Factories of the Semi-Civilized)
Julia Elyachar
My title is a provocation, with apologies to Bruno Latour. For those
unfamiliar with Latour’s article “On Recalling ANT,” he opens with
a now classic line: “There are four things that do not work with
actor-network theory: the word actor, the word network, the word
theory and the hyphen!”[1] Inspired by his piece, I point to a few
things wrong with political economy of the Middle East: political
economy, Middle East, and “of” (especially the “of”). I write as a
fellow traveler who believes we can all gain by suspending certainty,
for a moment, that we know what is political economy, let alone of
the Middle East.
ARTICLES
In this brief essay I do three things. First, I destabilize political economy as a concept and body of thought. Second, I read tangled threads
from the archive of political economy about the rise of commercial
society in the eighteenth century. Third, I revisit a central institution
in the history of economic thought—the factory—with particular
relevance for thinking about the Middle East and political economy
today. Along the way I ask: What do we lose when we assume there
are two stable entities, “political economy” and “the Middle East”
that we bring together with that “of”? In the bigger project of which
this is part I ask: What distinctive forms of commercial organization
characterize entanglements of the Ottoman Empire with the emerging
territorial states of Europe? Starting from there, how can we productively think against the theorizing that dominates colonial/postcolonial studies and political economy of the Middle East?[2] I do not ask
these questions as a pretend historian, or in ignorance of the wonderful work underway in our field. I ask as an anthropologist concerned
with understanding how these processes are constitutive of our own
times (or what anthropologists call the ethnographic present).
Political economy is not just a body of theory and
a set of conceptual tools. When canonical texts are
placed back in the “ethnographic” context of their
own times with forgotten voices restored to view, political economy can be an archive of historical conjunctures and problematics relevant to our own day.
The Many Meanings of Political Economy
It is obvious to this audience that the Middle East is a fuzzy concept.
We all have read (and some written) research on the multiple meanings and implications of “the Middle East” as a category. We know
reasons for its different appellations: the Orient, the Levant, the Near
East, and the Middle East, the Islamic World, the Muslim majority
world, and more. So I will set aside that element of the equation.
What about political economy?
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JADMAG ISSUE 7.1
Women working at a fuse factory in the Woolwich Arsenal in London in the late
nineteenth century. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Political economy means many things to many people. On the one
hand, political economy is a body of knowledge that arose in the late
eighteenth century to make sense of a world that understood itself as
“commercial society” and to understand the place of politics in it.[3]
Political economy can stand for materialist analysis, as opposed to a
focus on culture or ideas or religion. It can indicate analysis inspired
by Marx’s Capital, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, or Wallerstein’s
world systems theory. It can refer to a whole group of writers from
the late-eighteenth-century Scottish enlightenment onward, although
the most common names in history of political thought in this regard
might be Hume and Smith.
Political economy looks different in different fields. Undergraduate histories of economic thought might open with The Wealth of
Nations, move on to classical nineteenth-century political economy of Ricardo, Mill, and Malthus, and end with either Marx or the
marginalist turn and the rise of subjectivist theories of value. In anthropology, political economy can be an umbrella term for French
structuralist Marxist anthropology; ethnography of class, labor,
and exploitation; feminist Marxist anthropology; and more. Political economy can imply Karl Polanyi’s theories of the “substantive
economy” and of “free market society” disembedded from society,
or ethnography of neoliberalism, read through David Harvey rather
than Michel Foucault. Or it might be a shorthand way to reference
Marx’s critique of political economy and political projects to build
communism or socialism.
Reference to political economy indirectly summons forth a theory of
value. Marx reinterpreted the labor theory of value in his critique of
political economy. Different theories hammered out in different political and historic moments point to different factors of production
as being productive of value. For example, land was productive of
value for the physiocrats, gold was productive of value for mercan-
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of economic growth and accumulation that underlies economics and
political economy has shattered in a time of climate emergency.
a century earlier.[8] They, too, provided building blocks for the construction of social theory and political economy.
This is different than studying (or critiquing) the explicit claims of
any particular kind of political economy. Rather, reading canonical
texts in political economy in a broader web of interlocutors allows us
to foreground presumptions that turn on commitments foundational
to the discipline (such as accumulation). When thinking about climate change, native plants, or “botanical decolonization” in the Anthropocene, for example, it was uncanny to read Francis Bacon on
“implanting and displanting” settlers in seventeenth-century America.[5] When writing a piece called “Before and After Growth” in
2014 about movements for ecological economics, it was wonderful
to discover Lord Lauderdale condemning the “scourge of accumulation” in the early nineteenth century.[6] There is ample salvage work
of this kind to do in and on political economy of our region—from
before there even was political economy.
Traces of that history are everywhere once we begin to look: in the
railings of a Daniel Defoe against publick credit expanding with the
Levant Company in the East; in multiple musings about the “financial revolution” this entanglement engendered; in Defoe’s efforts
to clarify the difference between “trade” and “commerce”; in considerations of the dangers of commercial society in the writings of
Adam Smith—enemy of the Levant Company; and in the writings
of his interlocutor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, about the dilemmas of
commercial society.[9] Many of their concerns seem resonant in our
own times, when “classical” solutions and commitments of political
economy seem to have failed. Increasing numbers of people in the
West feel that their social and familial lives have been swept into a
vast sea of commerce. The relentless pursuit of profit without bounds
seems to have taken over the entire world and penetrated every aspect of life. New kinds of debt and securitization pervade worries
about the future. These writings can seem absurdly resonant to the
post-2008 securitized world.
We know that these thinkers helped lay the groundwork for what became political economy and social
theory. But debates about the Levant Company, the
Levant Trade, luxury goods from the Levant, and the
invention of new kinds of financial instruments such
as publick debt were also hot and fierce a century
earlier.
Khan al-Wazir, one of Aleppo’s largest caravanserais, was built in 1682. Photo via
Library of Congress.
tilists, and labor was productive of value for political economists
from Smith through Marx. Not all kinds of labor produce value in
a labor theory of value: Only productive labor does so—as opposed
to unproductive labor. In the eighteenth century, before the birth of
political economy, unproductive labor was associated in part with
excessive hospitality and effeminate luxury of concern to travelers
and traders in the Middle East. That matters for what follows.
Political economy is not just a body of theory and a set of conceptual
tools. When canonical texts are placed back in the “ethnographic”
context of their own times with forgotten voices restored to view,
political economy can be an archive of historical conjunctures and
problematics relevant to our own day. Concepts carry those pasts
along with them. Texts we now see as canonical were once part of a
broader web of intellectual and political debate. Keeping this in mind
allows us to see how some options and potentials were foreclosed,
and others remained open.
This is a good moment for such a reading of political economy. For
many secondary assumptions of political economy and economics
have been unveiled and seem nonsensical to young people living
through “climate emergency.” Political economy—like any theory—
makes assumptions and encloses a particular area for consideration.
In economics, that which lies outside the theory and its models is
called an externality. I have called these elements outside a system
that do not fit in, and yet knock at the door louder and louder, transients of the system. At certain periods, those transients can perturb
the system.[4] This is such a moment. The unquestioned imperative
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The Levant in Commercial Society (or, Before Political
Economy)
Trading companies like the Levant Company and the East India
Company were the subjects of huge debate in England in the eighteenth century. Writers like Daniel Defoe blamed them for the rise
of “public debt,” endless war, and senseless pursuit of commercial
gain.[7] These concerns are familiar to us. After the 2008 financial
crisis and ensuing waves of revolt around the world, commitments to
dynamic equilibrium, expanded reproduction, or normal distribution
curves came undone. Underlying assumptions of political economy
that “productive labor,” “growth,” and “accumulation” are positive
things (even if turned from private to social control) no longer hold up
without question. Lesser-read figures such as Veblen or Lauderdale
become as important as Marx and Smith. Lessons from the world of
long ago—what was then called “commercial society”—stretching
across the Mediterranean from England to the Levant, seem familiar
in uncanny fashion.
Anyone thinking about political economy still knows so much more
about the East India Company—before and after it took over the running of the Indian subcontinent with the collapse of the Moghul Empire—than about the Levant Company and its relevance for political
economy. The East India Company was of course a big concern of
great nineteenth-century theorists like JS Mill and Henry Maine, who
were both employees of the company. We know that these thinkers
helped lay the groundwork for what became political economy and
social theory. But debates about the Levant Company, the Levant
Trade, luxury goods from the Levant, and the invention of new kinds
of financial instruments such as publick debt were also hot and fierce
Traces of those concerns are buried as well in debates about the status of the Ottoman Empire as the first non-Western state to gain nominal admission to the nineteenth-century “family of nations” while
“incompatible with the culture and values of Christendom” and thus
“semi-civilized.”[10] Anthropology and economics helped divide
the world into the so-called “civilized” and the “primitive.”[11] The
ongoing critique of anthropology and efforts to decolonize the social
sciences forget, however, the crucial place of the “semi-civilized” in
this story. The Ottoman Empire was the well-considered and pondered case of the semi-civilized, and colonial jurists’ treatment of the
Ottoman Empire laid the legal and epistemological groundwork for
the Mandate system after WWI.[12]
In this genealogy of the West, the rise of the factory
marks a break: the birth of modernity and the industrial capitalist order. [. . .] The factory was a key site
where new techniques of “accounting for slavery”
were developed.
Graeber recently put it, the rise of “bullshit jobs” has come to replace
industrial productive labor in the West.[13] What does that mean for
the factory? Why is the Levant a crucial part of the answer? Quite
simply, the “factory” did not emerge from the pin factory of Adam
Smith. The factory has a much longer history rooted in violence,
unequal trade, and industrial espionage. And to fully understand the
place of slavery in the rise of US bloody capitalism,[14] we need to
begin from the Levant and the “Factory of the English Nation” that
moved into Khan al-Jumruk in Aleppo in the 1580s.
The factory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encompassed
functions that exceed the limits of political economy, though they are
integral to the logic of affaires of commerce of their time: factories
were sovereign way stations, military bases, trading posts, and financial nodes. English “factories” began operation in Aleppo more than
two hundred years earlier than in England. Long before the European trading companies established their foothold in the better known
case of South Asia, Aleppo was the major entrepôt through which
the trade of South Asian cottons was mediated. Levant factories were
linked to the West African coast as well via the sub-Saharan trade. In
Middle Eastern studies we know all of this, but we can push further
regarding significance. The Levant was part of the broader ecosystem from which the “triangle trade” and capitalism emerged. Innovations of “calculated values” developed in the early Levant Company
factories before the triangle trade got on its way.[15]
On the West African coast factories were sometimes forts, first for
the Portuguese and their trading empire and then for the English
Royal African Company and its successor corporations. Accounts
of building factories on the coast of Malabar in the fifteenth century depict a stone brought from ship to mark the place and begin
construction.[16] These stones had practical import; stone buildings
could be better defended. But they also projected solidity and weight
in the ground, an anchor to the fighting ships of empire on protected
extraterritorial space. A key organizational innovation of the factory
was to render multiple languages, goods, and currencies commensurable. The factory was a key site where new techniques of “accounting for slavery” were deployed.[17] Those techniques included
commensuration between slaves, palm oil, and cloth, as evidenced
by the detailed account books of the factory. While historians have
taught us of links between plantations, the slave trade, and the rise
of capitalism, the factory—a key organizational structure of capitalism—remains untouched as concept. Moreover, factories marked
out an extraterritorial space where local rule of law did not apply, enabling the violent commodification and trade of people to begin.[18]
The Factory: From the Levant to West Africa and England
Most accounts of the rise of “capitalism” are linked to the rise of the
“factory system” in nineteenth-century England. Adam Smith tells
the most famous origin story of the factory in The Wealth of Nations,
when a manufacturer making pins by hand is transformed through
application of the division of labor into a “factory.” In this genealogy
of the West, the rise of the factory marks a break: the birth of modernity and the industrial capitalist order. The factory in such standard
accounts is where the working class was born as well. In Marx’s
world-historical theory of Capital, the factory is where labor-power is put to work, surplus value is extracted, and conditions for the
extended reproduction of capital produced. The factory is where the
great “social question” of the nineteenth century began. Huge growth
in inequality in the West since 2008 draws our attention to the “social
question” once more; the factory requires similar attention. As David
Organizational knowledge in factories of West Africa developed in
concert with the Levant factories, where an ecosystem of the indigenous khan, caravanserai, and funduq gave recognizable form to
the “Factory of the English Nation” in Aleppo long before wealthy
merchants in England adopted the name factory. In the Levant, this
indigenous ecosystem took another twist when factors of the Levant
Company set up shop in Khan al-Jumruk, writing home about their
institution as the “Factory of the English Nation” in the Levant. We
have superb research in Middle Eastern, Ottoman, and Mediterranean studies recounting these facts. But we need bring them into
conversation with our assumptions about political economy.
Clues to such a rethinking of the factory lie at the margins of political
economy and anthropology as well as Middle Eastern and Mediterranean studies. We can return to footnotes about the Levant Company
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2 Thanks to Timothy Mitchell for this formulation.
3 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State
in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010);
J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and
History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, rev. ed. (1985; electronic, Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
4 Thanks to Paul Kockelman for this formulation.
5 Tomaž Mastnak, Julia Elyachar, and Tom Boellstorff, “Botanical Decolonization: Rethinking Native Plants,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
32, no. 2 (2014): 363–380.
6 Julia Elyachar, “Before (and After) Growth: Steady States, the Scourge of Accumulation, and an Economic Anthropology for the Anthropocene.” Unpublished
essay based on a talk given at the Department of Anthropology, Rice University,
15 October 2014.
An abandoned factory in Tripoli, Lebanon. Photo via Shutterstock
in Adam Smith and Daniel Defoe, and to Melville Herskovits’s and
Karl Polanyi’s seminal reading—and misreading—of the precolonial
West African “Port of Trade” of Dahomey in today’s Benin. All this
will allow us to better understand what happened to “factories of the
English Nation” on their way from the Levant to London via the accounting books of the Royal African Company in Benin and why this
matters today. Such research can add to the exciting conversations
about global capitalisms, accounting, and the slave trade that leave
the Levant out of the picture.[19]
Violence of the factory/fort recedes from view in the well-protected
domains of the Ottoman Empire.[20] It could run rampant in the explicitly brutal forts—showing the other side of the Janus faced factory/fort—of the so-called Gold Coast of Africa. It appears again on
the brutal floor of the factory in Liverpool and London. When we
look only at the beginnings of the slave trade, without the institutional innovations of the factory as a site of exterritoriality as well as
commensuration in the Levant, we miss key elements of the factory.
Only by establishing a new historical geography of the factory in
which the Middle East is central can we reconsider the paradigmatic factories of industrialization as written in the history of economic thought. This can help us think differently about the factory and
the violence of accumulation in our own times as well—including
carceral political economy in the United States.
We miss all of this, and much more, if we assume too quickly that we
know what is political economy of the Middle East.
[This piece draws in part on a talk called “Four Things Wrong with Political Economy of the Middle East,” presented at the meeting “New
Approaches to Political Economy of the Middle East” at Stanford
University, 19–21 February 2016. It also draws on my forthcoming
book A Semiotic Political Economy: Social Infrastructures, Phatic
Labor, and the Semi-Civilized as well as “Factories: An Anthropology
of Western Economic Order from the Levant” (in process).]
Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology and the
Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University.
__________________
1 Bruno Latour, “On Recalling ANT,” The Sociological Review 47, no. 1 (May
1999): 15, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03480.x.
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JADMAG ISSUE 7.1
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7 See Julia Elyachar and Tomaž Mastnak, “Beings that Have Existence Only in
the Minds of Men: A Look at Sources of Thinking about Financial Speculation
and its Consequences.” University of California, Irvine, working paper.
8 Julia Elyachar, “Rethinking Anthropology of Neoliberalism in the Middle
East,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, ed. Soraya Altorki (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015), 411–433; Elyachar and
Mastnak, working paper.
9 See Elyachar and Mastnak, working paper.
10 Umut Özsu, “The Ottoman Empire, the Origins of Extraterritoriality, and International Legal Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, ed. Anne Orford and Florian Hoffmann (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2016), 123–137.
11 Early neoliberals saw socialists as “voluntary primitives” who willfully
stripped themselves of the price system and thus rationality itself. See Julia Elyachar, “Neoliberalism, Rationality, and the Savage Slot,” in Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, ed. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
12 I spell out this argument in my forthcoming book A Semiotic Political Economy: Social Infrastructures, Phatic Labor, and Theory from the Semi-Civilized.
13 See David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2018).
14 Matthew Desmond, “American Capitalism is Brutal. You Can Trace That to
the Plantation,” New York Times Magazine, The 1619 Project, 14 August 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.
html; Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Eric Williams, Capitalism
and Slavery (With a new introduction by Colin A. Palmer), rev. ed. (1944; repr.,
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
15 William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative
Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
16 On the Portuguese in Malabar, see Charles Ralph Boxer, The Portuguese
Seaborne Empire: 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson of London, 1969).
17 Rosenthal, 2018. Note that I am here implicitly challenging Rosenthal’s claim
that those techniques developed specifically in relation to slavery. Like Deringer,
I think it a broader phenomenon, in which the Levant Company and the Levant
trade was a crucial and overlooked part.
18 Elyachar, A Semiotic Political Economy.
19 Rosenthal, 2018; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New
York: Vintage Press, 2015).
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resources, specifically tailored for the
needs of teachers, researchers, and
students. It is an evolving one-stop
shop for course design on the macro
level, lesson planning on the micro
level, and for scholarship vis-a-vis
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disciplines.
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20 On the well-protected domains, see Selim Deringil, The Well Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–
1909 (Oxford and New York: I.b. Tauris Publishers, 2000). I develop the argument in this paragraph further in Elyachar, “Factories.”
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