Timelining Problems

It’s been a rough slog. Chapter Three of Zamir’s Formation of Modern Lebanon is a messy, descriptive text that zips back and forth across 1920-1925. Sorting it out has not been easy.

You see, I love timelining when it yields organized data. It’s a useful way of understanding a history, as historians are often quite giftless in their organizational ability. Without imposing my own order on the facts, I often won’t get at the meat of their argument. It’s also a useful way of preparing to synthesize several secondary sources. I get a high off of seeing the product grow and develop. It can be amazing.

Nonetheless, the method has some limits against which I’m struggling. Timelines are event driven. There are two types of narrative that can easily accommodate:

1. Event-oriented narrative: This type of narrative deals with temporal sequencing and causality of events. These are ideal for timelining because you can locate events relatively precisely. Even when precise dates aren’t given, one can often contextualize. The results look like this excerpt from the year 1921

March 4: De Caix and Catroux conclude an agreement granting the Druze of Jabal Druze local autonomy with minimal French intervention in their affairs (Zamir, Formation, p. 168, 134 in passing).

March: The High Commissioner issues an arrêté to unify all taxes and duties throughout the Greater Lebanon on the basis of the Ottoman legislation that had been in force in Beirut. The affect of this decision is most keenly felt in southern Lebanon’s tobacco-growing regions, as a monopoly tax existed on tobacco dating back to 1876. (Firro, pp. 79-80)

Sometime before April: Kamal al-As`ad tries to instigate a Shi`i rebellion in Jabal `Amil (Zamir, Formation, p. 135).

April 21: Gouraud pardons Kamal al-As`ad and gives him the Légion d’Honneur. This crude buy-off is apparently enough to win over the support of Jabal `Amil for the mandate. The Shi`a of the Biqa` Valley remain unenthused, as they had closer relations with Faisal (Zamir, Formation, pp. 135-136).

April: The High Commission holds a trade fair to encourage French trade and investment (Zamir, Formation, p. 104—Location of trade fair in unclear).

April: Gouraud holds a reception for Greek Orthodox leaders and notables (Zamir, Formation, p. 133).

2. Descriptive narrative to contextualize an event: These also are easy, as you can simply enter an excerpt of the original text beneath the event with its date. This is greatly simplified with a text scanner.

April: Albert Sarraut’s colonial program becomes French government policy, (Andrew, p. 226). Andrew and Kanya-Forstner on the Sarraut program (pp. 226-227):

In April 1921, the enormously ambitious colonialist vision of the Empire’s economic development also became government policy. Amidst exuberant colonialist fanfares Sarraut presented to the chamber a huge programme of infrastructural development covering every part of the Empire. The programme was intended to end the uncertainty and lack of continuity which had hitherto characterized attempts at colonial development and to provide the ‘clear, stable and precise plan’ which had been lacking in the past. From ‘museums of samples’ the colonies would be transformed into ‘centres of production’. ‘The progressive execution of a large and creative programme of action, carefully and conscientiously elaborated’, Sarraut declared, ‘will ensure, through the increased strength and prosperity of the whole of France d’Outre-Mer, the future strength and prosperity of the Mère-Patrie’.

The Sarraut programme, however, was not so much a development plan as an imperial fantasy. Ever since the war years, the popularity of mise en valeur had been based on the illusion that it would provide instant, or almost instant, solutions to the economic problems of the metropolis. But colonial government could never be other than very long-term and tremendously expensive. The very economic crisis which the Sarraut plan was intended to solve made its implementation impossible. The deficit on external trade in 1920 was 20.4 milliard francs, even higher than in 1919. During the year, the value of the franc fell by almost half against the pound and the dollar. The even more precipitate fall of the German mark made the prospect of reparations on the scale originally envisaged increasingly remote. Unable to balance the metropolitan budget, France was in no position to spend several milliard francs on the Empire. The most fantastic part of the Sarraut plan was its funding. Both Simon and Klotz had vaguely envisaged a state-financed Crédit National d’Outre Mer to provide an annual credit of 450 million francs over a ten-year period for colonial development. By 1920, however, it was unthinkable for parliament to approve colonial expenditures on this scale, and Sarraut abandoned the idea in favour of issuing bonds on the open market. By 1921, this idea too had been abandoned. Sarraut later admitted that he had counted on German reparations to balance the metropolitan budget and free private capital for colonial investment. Without reparations, he could think of no other solution. Incredibly, his Bill contained no financial provisions at all; these, he promised, would be submitted later. It did not even include an estimate of the total cost.

Harder than these first two, but still manageable is:

3. Narrative relating a compressed series of events: This is often used to summarize demographic and economic changes. Typically this narrative method describing a series of events as a general trend, locating endpoints of the process. One solves the problem by marking the endpoints in the timeline, each with a note dating the complementing endpoint.

Where I am having genuine trouble is dealing with a fourth type of narrative:

4. Descriptive narratives not tied to an event: Here’s an example:

Zamir on the malaise that begins to grip French imperial policy at this point (Zamir, Formation, pp. 103-104):

For the French, the disappointment was particularly acute. They had hoped that with the removal of Faisal and their occupation of all Syria their troubles would be over, but the following years found them faced with an exhausting war against Turkish nationalists in the north and continual unrest in Syria which culminated in the Druze revolt. The majority of the Muslims resented the French mandate, and Arab nationalist leaders in exile in the neighbouring countries and in Europe waged a bitter anti-French campaign in which they demanded the complete independence and unification of Syria. Fur­thermore, the French were soon disabused of their hopes for eco­nomic advantages stemming from their control over Syria. Having poured millions of francs into Syria and Lebanon, they had expected to reap the benefits of their investment, but it soon became apparent that Syria's economic potential and importance for France had been greatly exaggerated. Without the oil of Mosul and the rich agricultural region of Cilicia, and with the port of Alexandretta under continual threat from the Turkish nationalists, Syria could fulfil very few of their expectations. The French government and public then realised that Syria was not a second Algeria, but an economic burden that would have to be continually financed from Paris.

France was then undergoing a serious post-war economic crisis and lacked the resources necessary to establish control over Syria and Lebanon. The French public began to resent the large govern­ment expenditures in areas where they felt France had no vital inter­ests. As the difficulties confronting France in Syria became more apparent, nearly every aspect of the government's Syrian policy came under attack in the National Assembly and in the press. Moreover, after the enormous loss of life during the War the French were reluctant to send soldiers abroad to fight Turkish nationalists or Arabs for objectives that remained obscure. During the first few years of the mandate the formerly strong emotional drive for French control over Syria rapidly gave way to increasing opposition to French involvement there, particularly in the National Assembly. The Syrian mandate became a much-debated issue in French poli­tics, and proposals for a reduction in the Syrian budget an annual phenomenon. There were still many deputies and senators who felt the need for a French presence in Syria and Lebanon, but increasing numbers of them, particularly those of the Left, who from the start had opposed France's involvement in the Levant, criticised the government's policy and the large expenditure it entailed. The opposition was centred in the Finance and Foreign Affairs Com­mittees of both chambers; it eventually succeeded in exerting a strong influence on the government's Syrian policy.

Zamir gives no dates in this passage. Clearly the context makes clear that he is talking about attitudes that are forming over the early twenties. But it looks like the optimism of the Sarraut program gives way to this program of “empire on the cheap” fairly quickly. I stuck Zamir’s passage in 1921 in my timeline because it seems that the volte face was fairly quick. They’re making drastic cuts as early as 1921, and General Gouraud resigns as High Commissioner over these cuts by November 1922. But the Sarraut program becomes policy in April 1921! This is a very rapid turnaround. My problem is that Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, the authors of the source that tell us about the Sarraut program, don’t really cover how the volte face occurred. Zamir doesn’t give us nearly as much as Andrew and Kanya-Forstner on just how grand French ambition was (although to his credit, he does discuss this—you can rely on Zamir for detail, if not always for good contextualization).

What I imagine happened empirically is this: Sarraut and the many French interest groups that favored the colonial program had a very “neo-con” bent, where they imagined France as far more powerful than it actually was. Sarraut, the other French diplomats who favored the Syria policy and the interest groups who clamored for it simply assumed it would be easy to make Syria into an Algeria. I don’t know much about how Algeria became such a profitable colony for France, so I can’t compare and contrast. However, it’s pretty clear that Sarraut and company didn’t compare and contrast, either, and it was their empire!

The grand program has many interest groups backing it, but the appropriations committees in France take one look at the funding and say, “Mais non.” But the program is popular, so they give it some funding. It never dawns on our luminaries down at the Quai d’Orsay that they’re going to get back so little, so two or three years into the occupation, they suddenly have to retool and scale way back.

It’s my guess that all this goes down in 1921. But there’s no historical backing in my secondary sources.

Needless to say, Syria never became an Algeria for France.

In the third chapter of Formation, Zamir is in what I like to think of as his “high descriptive mode.” He does this a lot in his next book, Quest. He describes trend, giving dates only for examples or quick reference points. So instead of a chronology, he’ll talk about things thematically, going back and forth across the history taking examples from 1925, then back to 1918, etc. I try to order everything chronologically. It’s a pain in the ass. But when I’ve done the timeline a clear narrative emerges that makes his thematic discussion make sense. But it’s difficult to contextualize the thematic discussion without the chronology. This leads me to believe that al, good history must be based first and foremost on strict chronology. One builds the analysis over the chronology as you relate events in order. Zamir does this sometimes, but other times, he doesn’t. Those times are a huge pain in the ass.