Plague of Bureaucracy

This book discloses the ambiguities of the modern exercise of power during the French Mandate in the Middle East. The French administration in Lebanon attempted during the interwar years to expand its rule through the build-up of a large bureaucracy designed to oversee social, economic and political affairs in the country. At the same time, it hoped to establish among residents of the different territories brought together within the country a new relation of power according to a chain of command that extended from the Quai d’Orsay to the remotest village. The new modern bureaucracy would be anathema to the myriads of laws, statutes and religious interpretations that had governed the vanquished Ottoman Empire. In addition to these formal structures of power, the French sought to reproduce their rule and consecrate their position through informal networks with new and traditional political figures in the region. Although the French had hoped to employ informal arrangements to strengthen the formal institutions of governance, in practice, something different emerged. The bureaucracy empowered informal networks to alter and, ultimately, undermine the efforts of the high commission to administer the country.   In these ways, the reproduction of space in the colonial setting was not a function of the imposition of formal institutions of government but emerged through the capacity of informal networks to re-shape and re-appropriate the practices that underpinned this supposed new order. As a result of these often-latent networks, the post-colonial moment appeared as the evolution of—and not a rupture from—the inequalities of colonial rule and the contradictions of modern forms of power.