The Business of Property: Levantine Joint-stock Companies and Nineteenth-Century Global Capitalism

1 Whether the spark that caused 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate to detonate was accidental or intentional, many scholars and Lebanese citizens claim that blame rests with the negligence of individuals in the Lebanese state. Since at least the eighteenth century, labor has not been a friend, a neighbor, or a family member, but rather a number in an account book that conceals its humanness. 8 In a similar fashion, scholars of India suggest that bonded labor is not a residue of tradition that has vanished with the arrival of modernization of production but rather integral to the development and endurance of capitalism itself. 9 Given this understanding, I narrate a history of capitalism in the Levant in “The Business of Property” as a nonlinear process, building on variable social conditions, legal regimes, and attendant relations of production. In the nineteenth century, members of a new patriarchal capitalist class began to operate on the basis of dualisms, whose underlying ontologies had become mechanical: capital was separated from labor power, members were distinct from their companies, and society was removed from the physical environment.