Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Akram Fouad Khater breaks new ground in Lebanese history by locating it within a broader, transregional literature on modernity, class formation, and gender. His book examines the experiences of tens of thousands of peasants who emigrated to the Americas and then returned home to Mount Lebanon before World War I. The author argues that returned emigrants' assertion of middle-class identity profoundly shaped Lebanese society's engagement with modernity and, more precisely, its redefinition of gender roles and family life in the twentieth century.

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Khater's focus on the experience of emigrants is ingenious and important. Anyone who has traveled through the Americas or Africa knows that the Lebanese rival the Chinese and South Asians in the scope of their mercantile diaspora. Khater estimates that one third of Mount Lebanon's population emigrated between 1887 and 1914 (p. 48), and that nearly half of those emigrants (about 78,000) had returned home by the outbreak of World War I (p. 112). These numbers suggest to Khater that the impact of foreign ideas and culture on Lebanon came not only through missionaries and European merchants—who are the usual focus in studies of Western imperialism—but perhaps more importantly through Lebanese peasants themselves. Indeed, Khater intends this story to challenge colonial studies that too often have focused on elites.

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