The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East by Melanie S. Tanielian (review)

The recent centennial of the First World War has facilitated renewed interest in this historic period, and many conferences, committees, articles, and lectures have followed. Reassessment and expansion of how we understand the Great War have necessarily underpinned these commemorations, and in that spirit Melanie S. Tanielian, Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Michigan, offers a compelling elaboration of the concept of “home front” during this war. As Tanielian herself notes, while there has been general agreement that a greater understanding of experiences in the Ottoman Empire is vital to a strong and representative literature on the First World War, such rhetoric has yet to be fully realized in practice. Though until recently the Levantine theater remained largely unaccounted for in comparison to the vast literature on the European theaters of war, scholars increasingly have found novelty in the stories of this region. For her part, Tanielian must be lauded for her diligence at employing previously neglected local sources. Particularly impressive is her work in the confessional communities’ archives in Beirut. These “new” sources, in tandem with established work, contribute to Tanielian’s captivating memoir of a city and a region at war.

Though situated against the broader Middle East, Tanielian’s focus resides in Beirut and Mount Lebanon. In doing so she raises the modern Lebanese capital to a par with the great European capitals of the war: Paris, Vienna, London, and Berlin. But Beirut is not one of those imperial seats; it is a Levantine port, the hub of eastern Mediterranean commerce and Ottoman regional authority. Growth and prosperity before the war came about as a result of British demands for free trade on the imperial core, after French intervention and the special privileges thereby elicited, and from the local-versus-national push and pull of politicking. Beirut was a city built on what we now call “globalization.” What, then, happens when the systems that undergird globalization fail?

The four horsemen of the apocalypse: War begot pestilence and famine, and with them rode death. But Tanielian reminds the reader that famine is not merely an act of God, but a process compounded, if not initiated, by man. It is then up to men and women to do what they can. From the Ottoman military governor Cemal (or Jamal) Pasha, to the notables of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, to the foreigners who stayed for the duration of the war, reaction to and combat of the hunger that swept modern Lebanon saw the creation of vacancies within society, which these actors rushed to fill. Tanielian documents the vast opportunities that arose in wartime Lebanon: openings in the Ottoman-versus-local balance, the possibilities of wartime profiteering, the chance to cement the status of notables and their families or for those same men to fall from grace, and avenues for the expansion of foreign influence. Ottoman governance prevailed in a milieu of scarcity and want, and where it failed to provide — for lack of ability or desire — other parties stepped in. One understands from Tanielian’s work the complexity of these agents and entities. The war and famine rearranged the board in this region of the eastern Mediterranean, swapping some of the pieces — replacing, for a time, French friars with German nuns, for example — but ostensibly, the game remained the same.

Tanielian’s work offers a frank and engaging account of the First World War in Lebanon. She establishes that Beirut and Mount Lebanon, although spared skirmish and battle, nevertheless suffered the horrors of war, but did not do so passively. Agents from across Lebanese, Ottoman, and even international society doggedly pursued what they thought best to endure the collapse of the international system. In providing us with this record, Tanielian serves both as scribe recording the past and as prognosticator warning for the future. Look here...