CAPITALEAST · GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND RURALITY: AGENCY, COMMODIFICATION AND THE SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRYSIDE, 1870-1945

The Middle East is rarely associated with global capitalism. And yet, capitalist expansion had a substantial impact on its modern history. While previous works address issues such as dependency and coloniality, state building, human-environmental interaction and connectivity, there is little recognition of the influence of global capitalism on the socio-ecological transformation of the rural Middle East. CAPITALEAST therefore compares tribes of diverse origins, examining the capitalization of their agriculture and the commercialization of their livestock. It adopts a translocal and global approach to reveal the connectedness of the diverse social entities to the wider world like the nomadic, semi-settled and settled tribes living in cultivable, desert, and mountainous ecologies. The project argues that intertwined processes such as commodification, the scientification of cultivation and animal breeding, mechanization of agriculture, automobilization, and new patterns of land ownerships resulted in an impressive repositioning of tribal agency in the physical environment and a noticeable increase in urban-rural and global-local relations. States, urban elites and tribal leaders, and global capitalists all emerged as active participants in the process. The project proposes an ambitious longitudinal enquiry, combining an analysis of digitized and published sources with extensive work in regional and central archives. This ground-breaking research will create an online database including interactive maps, network graphs, and structured data about spatial locations which offer multiple avenues of interpretation of the sources. In addition, 5 monographs, 2 conferences and 2 edited volumes will constitute the other major project outputs. This project promises to recast the field of the Middle East history, contribute to the extra-European story of capitalism and open new frontiers in studying the history, sociology, economy and anthropology of rural peoples.