Levantine Joint-stock Companies and Global Capitalism, 1830-1930

FAIN: FEL-288873-23

Kristen Alff
North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC 27695-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on the commercial activities and family joint-stock companies in the Levant from 1830-1930.

Levantine Joint Stock Companies and Global Capitalism, 1830-1930 investigates the commercial activities of Beirut-based, joint-stock companies. Drawing on newly available private archives of Levantine family companies, Ottoman records, petitions, and oral interviews, I found that Levantine companies’ business techniques shared features with Western Europe, recognizable by Marxian-Smithian theorists of capitalism, but were also distinctive in important ways. Arguing against past and present literature on dependency and great divergence, I show how Levantine companies’ insistence on different techniques for accumulation made them competitive on the global capitalist market. Tracing this competition and exchange from boardrooms in the Levant to offices and courtrooms in Brazil, India, Argentina, Russia, Britain, and France, I show how these prominent companies in the Middle East contributed to the operation of global capitalism throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.