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The study of the modern history of the Middle East has long suffered from a tendency to play catch up to new methodological and theoretical work pioneered in European historiography, seeking merely to apply such work to the Middle East. Elizabeth Thompson's excellent work is a different sort of endeavor. Her path-breaking book, recipient of the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Book Prize and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize, is an attempt to introduce a serious gendered perspective into the history of Mandatory Syria and Lebanon but to do so in a way that asks far broader questions about the nature and meaning of citizenship in the context of colonialism. Rather than limit her analysis of citizenship to the political language of liberalism and law, Thompson traces the emergence of a hierarchical colonial citizenship in Mandatory Syria and Lebanon. Using a variety of French, Syrian, and U.S. archival sources, as well as Arabic periodicals and personal interviews in Damascus, Thompson argues forcefully that this citizenship was defined largely by the social policies of the French Mandatory state mediated by male elites--religious patriarchs, urban notables, and rural landowners. These policies, however, were also contested by women's organizations, labor, and Islamic populist movements that challenged the gendered hierarchy of colonial power.
Without losing sight of the soldiers and the repressive state apparatus that undergirded the French Mandates, Thompson suggests that the French Mandatory state and its colonial citizens created a "civic order"--a broad arena in which state and citizen interacted, negotiated, dueled, collaborated, and bargained with one another. She argues that it was the dislocating context of World War I,...