Interlopers of Empire

From Beirut to Berlin (via Geneva): The New International History, Middle East Studies and the League of Nations

“…71 Arsan, meanwhile, develops an approach to economic life in the Lebanese diaspora in West Africa focused on the social and political textures of commerce and credit, showing how Lebanese traders, much maligned by French settlers as predatory imposters, in fact worked the seasonal rhythms of West African agriculture with consummate skill, but also relied on types of social authority and trust developed in a wider diaspora community built around long-distance relationships to the 'home' villages of the Eastern Mediterranean. 72 For Pedersen -moving between nuanced case studies of Mandate government in Western Samoa, South-West and East Africa, Mandated New Guinea and the Middle East, while cycling ceaselessly back to Geneva and the dynamics of the League as a platform for publicity and system for the production of international normspolitical economy appears notably through the lenses of the commercial 'open door' and more broadly in the tension between 'market' and 'command' economy. 73 As she elucidates both in a close discussion of Belgian rule in Rwanda-Burundi (and notably of the use of forced labour), as well as by touching on the destruction of the Syrian silk industry by Japanese competition in the 1930s, the 'development on the cheap' model that emerged in most Mandates rested on imperial coercion above all -'"free labour" proved as elusive as "free trade"'.…”

Dystopia as Liberation: Disturbing Femininities in Contemporary Thailand

“…The film is based on a 1967 erotic novel by Emanuelle Arsan (2014Arsan ( [1967), the nom-de-plume of a Thai woman resident in France, Marayat Krasaesin.…”