By Syed Hamad Ali 

Andrew Arsan is a historian at Cambridge University specialising in
modern Middle East and French and British imperialism. His book,
“Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West
Africa”, won last year’s Gladstone Prize, an annual award from the Royal
Historical Society for the best first book in non-British history.

“We
tend to think about the Middle East only in terms of the flow of
refugees,” Arsan tells Weekend Review as we sit in his office at St
John’s College, Cambridge. “People who are forced out by war, by
dislocation, by conflict. Yes, there is clearly a truth to that,
especially at the moment. But we tend to forget the ways in which Middle
Eastern people moved about freely, for economic reasons — as economic
migrants, as labour migrants … in the late 19th, early 20th century,
people who were moving across the Indian Ocean, and also people who
moved out to the US, South America, West Africa. So I was interested, in
a sense, in not treating the Middle East as an exception, as very
different to other parts of the world, but trying to think about it as a
region, like other regions, which fits into a general pattern of global
history in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

Part-Lebanese and
part-British, Arsan grew up in Lebanon, France and then Britain. His
family moved from Lebanon because of the civil war; he was only seven
then. “We left right at the end of the civil war. We lived in the Mount
Lebanon region, which was particularly badly affected … There was a
lot of fighting in that region at that time.”

Interlopers of Empire

By Andrew Arsan, C. Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 420 pages, £28

The
Lebanese migrants in colonial West Africa lived in a large expanse
which covers present-day Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Benin and
Mauritania. Arsan’s own family had no direct links with West Africa.
“There are lots of people in Beirut and south of Lebanon who have those
connections. My family is not one of them. I had always heard about
people moving to West Africa, and always found it intriguing and
interesting. In my last year in university I studied a course in African
history and fell in love with the subject. So I wanted to find a topic
through which I could reconcile and bring together Middle Eastern and
African histories, and studying that made sense.”

A lot of the
research for the book was based on archival work in France, Senegal, the
UK and the US. Arsan also met Lebanese people living in West Africa. “I
stayed in a hotel owned by a Lebanese in Senegal and became friends
with the owner. I also met quite a few of his friends. I explored the
Lebanese social settings and was able to get a feel of those communities
in an informal way, not necessarily doing very structured interviews.

“The
hotel owner told me that his grandfather first migrated to Venezuela,
and after a few years, returned to Lebanon to meet his relatives. He
then set off for Venezuela, stopping at Dakar — like the coaling station
to refuel. He went for a drink in town and I guess had a good night and
missed the ship. And so stayed back in Dakar. It is a story that shows
the way in which serendipity, just the way incidents in individual lives
can change migration patterns, as much as large-scale events,” he says.

The
story of the Lebanese in West Africa offers a complicated picture of
the history of colonialism in the continent. “We have a tendency to
think that the colonial situation is characterised by a relationship
between the coloniser and the colonised. It is a very binary and complex
relationship. A lot of scholars have looked at the tensions of that
relationship, as well as its ambiguities, paradoxes. Very rarely do
people think about other communities and the way in which they
complicate that relationship. There has been some work done, for
instance on Asians in East Africa, or on the Chinese in Southeast Asia —
the way in which they complicated that relationship between the Dutch
and the Indonesians, the British and Malays. But the same hadn’t really
been done on Lebanese in West Africa.”

The Lebanese immigration to
West Africa was part of a much broader wave of immigration from Lebanon
and Syria in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was primarily a
wave of economic migration. “The bulk of migrants wanted to move towards
North and South America. But some people along the way ended up in West
Africa because it is on the navigation routes. Some people didn’t have
the money to get all the way to South America, or were dumped by
unscrupulous ship captains. They were told they had arrived in Brazil or
Mexico, when in fact they had only just arrived in West Africa. When
people realised that there was money to be made in Africa, they began to
send for others from their native villages.”

The Lebanese weren’t
always welcomed by the French. “The Lebanese posed unwelcome
competition to French companies which were dominant in the local and
global economies. The French tried to control it. The problem was that
the Lebanese were, in the eyes of the French at the time, racially
ambiguous. They were neither African, neither black or European. And so
how to place them was a complicated problem for the French.”

Curiously
at that time, a diverse range of people was lumped together and
labelled as Syrians — including people from East Mediterranean, Italians
and Jews. “I think that was because Syria was the dominant geographical
term for that part of the Levant. The Moroccans, the Italians, the
Maltese — there were a few of them who were lumped with the bulk of the
people who were from the region that became Lebanon and Syria after the
First World War.”

Over time, differences arose between the
Lebanese living in Africa and those living in Lebanon. “The ones in
Africa often think of themselves as in more civilised than the Lebanese
in Lebanon … They are not as obsessed with Lebanon’s political system
and its machinations. They have greater access to European culture and
society, and the wealthy ones spend a lot of time in France or Britain.
So there is this idea that they are closer to Europe than the Lebanese
in Lebanon.”

For Arsan, winning the Gladstone prize was a
“wonderful” affirmation of the work he has been trying to do. “I won it
along with another scholar, Lucy Ryzova, who also worked on the Middle
East — Egypt in particular. It was nice that two scholars of the Middle
East won the prize the same year. It said something about the
development of Middle Eastern studies in Britain.”

How long did he
take to write the book? “It took a few years. I did my PhD on the
Lebanese in West Africa. So that took about — all in all — five years of
work.”

And where does he prefer to write? “I like to write in coffee shops or in office but with music. I like to write with noise.”

A
lot of his teaching is on the Levant, from Iraq to Egypt. “Some of it
increasingly on the Gulf, partly because there is so much interesting
work being done on the Gulf at the moment, on the way in which the Gulf
states work and on their economies.”

Is there a growing interest
in the Gulf? “I think increasingly you are seeing French, British and
American scholars who are interested in the UAE, Saudi, or Qatar, and
the way in which those states work, the way in which legitimacy,
authority and sovereignty function in those states … and also, the
political economy of these states — the energy economy, labour
migration, and different aspects of it.”

Arsan has been working on
a couple of more books on Lebanon. One is a history of the country from
the 1560s with the advent of the Ottomans up to 2005. The other is on
contemporary Lebanon.

Researching through the archives of history
Arsan has found how immigrants from the Middle East have brought
benefits to their host societies. “I mean looking at Middle Eastern
migrants in not just West Africa, but places such as Australia, Latin
America, North America — you can see the way they have integrated very
successfully. Often over the course of several generations, [they] have
become an integral part of those societies. Look at places such as
Colombia, Mexico, or Brazil … one of the main hospitals in São Paolo
was built by Lebanese and Syrian migrants. As trite as it sounds,
migration can have clear benefits. But also sadly, you are seeing the
reproduction, the reiteration of a lot of the discourses and the
rhetoric — the racist kind of imagery — that were being used in an
earlier period against these migrants. Also, the way they are exploited
by people smugglers — I found the same stuff in the archives from
100-120 years ago.”

Did he see the same kind of racist words being
used at the time? “Yes, suspicion of Islam and Muslims, suspicion of
people who lacked European culture and therefore lacked ‘civilisation’,”
says Arsan. “And they would therefore be difficult to integrate,
assimilate into European societies — white societies. You see a lot of
debates in the early 20th century about whether Lebanese and Syrians in
Australia and the US can be classified as white. And what it is that
will allow them to be classified as white, and therefore to escape
segregation and be allowed entry. People smuggling is a very sad echo of
the past. You see the same pattern in which people are being sold
tickets or even visas at exorbitant prices, being defrauded of their
money and transported in very inhumane ways.”

Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.