The French Colonial Mind, Volume 1: Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters

7 Information and Intelligence Collection among Imperial Subjects Abroad: The Case of Syriansand Lebanese in Latin America, 1915–1930

144 7 Information and Intelligence Collection among Imperial Subjects Abroad The Case of Syrians and Lebanese in Latin America, 1915–1930 maría del mar logroño narbona The establishment of French mandates throughout the former Ottoman provinces of Greater Syria and Mount Lebanon had certain unforeseen demographic consequences for France. One of these was the acquisition of administrative responsibility for multi-ethnic mandate populations of whom an estimated one-seventh of the total population of Syria and Lebanon lived abroad.1 This far-flung diaspora of Greater Syria’s indigenous peoples posed challenges that had previously afflicted the Ottoman Empire. The migrations that it represented were not consequences of the mandate regimes but, rather, originated in the larger population movements that had taken place throughout the Mediterranean in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. In a context of economic decline and worsening political difficulties at home, former Ottoman citizens migrated to Europe, West Africa, North America, and South America. Most of this migrant population settled in prominent urban centers of the United States, Argentina, and Brazil.2 The result was that by 1920 the widespread geographical diffusion of those with familial connections, whether immediate or ancestral, to the newly partitioned territories of French-administered Syria and Lebanon made for something of a fragmented mandate, one in which the new Information and Intelligence Collection 145 imperial occupiers would have to keep a weather eye open for the views and actions of large Syrian and Lebanese expatriate communities. What then did Greater Syria’s demographic fragmentation mean for France’s new colonial enterprise in the Levant? And how did this diffused population impact on French colonial minds in the interwar years? This chapter contends that the presence of substantial overseas communities of Syrians and Lebanese outside the French Middle Eastern mandate territories of Syria and Lebanon compelled the French authorities to look beyond the territorial boundaries assigned by the League of Nations in order to include these mandate populations living abroad. In other words the French mandate over Syria and Lebanon should be reconsidered as a subject-based mandate and not as a merely territorial-based one. Syrians and Lebanese overseas could work either for or against French diplomatic aspirations to achieve political hegemony and legitimacy in the Levant. Some expatriate communities became valued pools of support for French political control; others were among its bitterest opponents. What is incontestable is that the voices of some Syrians and Lebanese around the world, including those in Argentina and Brazil, were influential. Once again, though, there was a duality to this process . While some were instrumental in formulating and supporting the propaganda that legitimized French colonial aspirations in the Levant, others challenged that same legitimacy. In this context the organization and systematization of intelligence gathering over French mandate citizens abroad highlights the extent of the political, cultural, and economic influence wielded by these communities within the larger French colonial project in the Levant. As Martin Thomas explains, French intelligence gathering in the mandate territories has been analyzed by historians of mandate Syria and Lebanon predominantly in terms of the urban surveillance of notable elites.3 Building on Jean-David Mizrahi’s and Michael Provence’s analyses of clan leaders in the Jabal Druze, in his work Thomas has broadened the subject of surveillance to the Bedouin tribes of the Jazeera region in Syria and, even more important, has advanced the notion of “colonial states as intelligence states.”4 Put simply, the survival of imperial rule rested both on the quality of information gathered about dependent Language, Culture, Communities of the Colonial Mind 146 populations and on the ability to exploit it quickly enough to provide potential sources of popular opposition from escalating into major existential threats to the colonial state.5 While these scholars have identified state acquisition of political information about subjects’ actions and intentions as constitutive of colonial state control, their focus has been largely restricted to the territorial confines of the mandate territories. As this chapter shows, another object of control—and a subject of constant surveillance—was the political activities of Syrians and Lebanese abroad. Given the breadth of Syrian and Lebanese emigration overseas, and the fact that so little attention has been paid to non-English-speaking destinations for these emigrants, this chapter concentrates on the particular case of Syrians and Lebanese...