Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 79

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Lebanon: A History 600–2011
By: William Harris
Lebanon: A History 600-2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Xxv + 360 pp. £22.50. ISBN: 978-0195181111.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
James A. Reilly, PhD
University of Toronto
Canada
William Harris has written an expansive political and institutional history of Lebanon. Part One (pp. 29–143) traces the formation and development
of the country’s sects and communities from late antiquity. It marches smartly through the centuries of caliphs, crusaders and Mamluks, then
decelerates to narrate and analyze the emergence of the recognizable precursors in Ottoman times of today’s Lebanon. Part Two (pp. 147–283)
encompasses the post-World War I establishment of the Lebanese Republic, and carries the story up to the present. Harris, a professor of Politics at
New Zealand’s University of Otago, is aware of the pitfalls of primordialist readings of Lebanon’s history. Today’s Lebanese sects, he says, are
indeed historically rooted, but they are also culturally constructed; and there was nothing inevitable about the emergence of Lebanon as an Ottoman
entity in the 19th century and as a formally sovereign republic in the 20th. Harris’s narrative takes care to highlight the various historical
contingencies that shaped eventual outcomes.
The book is well sourced. Harris has consulted an impressive array of primary sources and memoirs, along with a wide selection of newspapers and
secondary sources in Arabic, French and English. The writing is clear and crisp. For this reader the narrative bogged down only when Harris
attempted to track the dizzying and kaleidoscopic trajectories of factions and families in the 17th and 18th centuries, material which even readers
familiar with Lebanon might find a hard slog. However, to Harris’s credit a reader never loses track of the narrative’s thread. Each chapter is
introduced by a synopsis of the material to follow, an arrangement that allows Harris to move back and forth between detailed exposition and
broader themes.
If Lebanon today is characterized by a sectarian structure deeply rooted in the state machinery, and by the emergence of the formerly marginalized
Shi‘a as a dominant sect and political actor, Harris puts these developments into their historical context. He does not challenge the well-established
narrative regarding the central role of Maronite-Druze interaction in the emergence of Ottoman-era proto-Lebanon (i.e., the Shihabi emirate and its
administrative successors). But Harris does explain how the 19th century politicization of Maronite Christian communal feeling created a template
for other Lebanese sects, a template that the Shi‘a have been the most recent to embrace. Moreover, it is clear that the consolidation of the 18th
century Shihabi emirate came at the expense of Shi‘a notables who formerly had played a significant role in the politics of the Mountain. Thus
readers gain a historically informed appreciation of the accelerated emergence, post-1979, of Lebanon’s Shia and the challenge that Shi‘a assertion
has represented to an earlier notion or idea of Lebanon.
This is an interpretive history, so Harris makes arguments or judgments that not all will embrace. His theses are, for the most part, internally
consistent and well constructed so his intervention into debates about Lebanese history is invigorating and provides material for study and
discussion. One major point (p. 142) is that European meddling or intervention was not the fundamental cause of the Druze-Maronite split in the
19th century. Rather, Harris sees the origins of this split in the manner of the Shihabi emirate’s consolidation under Bashir II. Another major point
is that France’s creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920 at the behest of Maronite Patriarch Ilyas Huwayyik amounted to “Maronite overreach” (pp.
178ff.), and in retrospect this overreach doomed the dream of a “Christian Lebanon” at the very moment when Huwayyik’s partisans thought they
had achieved it. Harris has little respect for the politics and politicians of the Lebanese Republic, characterizing the political elite as engaged in “a
free-for-all under a venal government machine d