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Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945
By Philip S. Khoury. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. 698 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
Philip Khoury ransacked archives on three continents and interviewed more than 40 people directly involved in the events he narrates to produce this comprehensive work on Syria under the French mandate The book helps fill an obvious lacuna in the literature on Arab politics and history in the 20th century. The only other major work on the subject, Longrigg's volume on Syria and Lebanon under the mandate, was published in 1958. French scholars shun the topic, presumably because of the very sad image it presents of France's imperialistic ambitions.
Khoury skillfully demonstrates that the ambitious of the French in Syria stemmed from their assertions of economic, political, and moral claims in the region. France had been by far the largest investor in the Ottoman empire, controlling 63 percent of the Ottoman public debt by 1914. But French investments were largely concentrated in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, and France's moral sway did not extend beyond the Christian communities that had come to depend on it. Khoury shows that...