2. Factory Girls

You threaten the girls that work in our factories with excommunication because they are not separated enough from the boys, and yet you find yourself incapable of doing anything against one individual who is abusing your name, and marching with an army against the government of your country!!

– Bernard des Éssard, French consul general in Beirut, 1866

Thus, in 1866, did the French consul general sarcastically chide two Maronite clergymen about the church's lack of action against the political renegade Yusuf Karam.^[1] To his mind, it was rather absurd for the church to worry about as “trivial” a matter as the distance between the bodies of workers in silk factories when there were far more “serious” matters at hand. What he failed—or chose not—to understand was that young women's work in the increasingly numerous silk factories presented a profound threat to the authority of the church over the “morals” of society in Mount Lebanon. Proximity of unrelated young men and women transgressed a central tenet of the gender politics in Mount Lebanon. When it occurred in one or two instances, it was a manageable scandal. But when thousands of women intermingled on a daily basis with strangers, the situation became a crisis of considerable proportions. Moreover, by entering into a new public space—created by steam-belching and foul-smelling factories—women were publicly undertaking atypical economic and societal roles within peasant families. Work in factories, then, not only threatened to create fitna (social upheaval) by making room for “uncontrolled” sexuality, but it also brought into question the very core of gender roles, themselves the cornerstone of patriarchal society.

This was but one of several consequences of the commercialization of sericulture, which came on the heels of sixty years of political turmoil in Mount Lebanon. Silk was also altering the meaning of class. While the society of Mount Lebanon had long been stratified into peasants and shuyukh, the boundaries between the two groups were articulated in patrilineal terms rather than financial ones. Put more simply, one was born into, and died within, a “strata.”^[2] Money could purchase many things, but not social status; and the families on top made certain of that. Mashayikh like the Khazins, Abi-Lam‘as, and Jumblatts were quite jealous of any encroachment on their social privileges and distinctions by the undifferentiated ahali, or the peasants.^[3] As one local chronicler put it, “In this country there is tremendous preservation of the rank of people according to custom, which does not disappear in poverty and cannot be obtained through wealth.”^[4] While in reality some families did cross these boundaries, the process took many generations to complete, and thus this limited permeability was hidden underneath the cloak of time. Yet, in the new economic realities of the Mountain, these sacrosanct “traditions” suffered far more rapid transformations that could not be concealed or ignored. Some peasants made fortunes that allowed them to buy honorary titles, and many a shaykh suffered humiliating financial crises that crippled his ability to sustain the social rituals necessary for his rank. At the same time that money from silk was wreaking havoc on social divisions, silk factories were infusing “class” with more economic meanings and refined divisions. In this climate, the term factory girl came to identify the social and economic measures of a working class and to differentiate it from peasants and elites.

Profits from silk cocoons augmented this new definition of class by raising the material expectations of many peasants in the Mountain. It started with the greater demand by the textile mills of Lyons for silk and the higher prices they were willing to pay for it. Peasants in Lebanon obliged with a dramatic increase in the cultivation of mulberry to feed more and more hungry silkworms. Within this unpredictable market economy there were more possibilities to make fortunes within a relatively short period of time—as well as to become destitute. As one commentator wrote, “The inhabitants [of Mount Lebanon] live in ease or misery depending on whether the harvest [of silk cocoons] was good or bad.”^[5] Good years meant more money to purchase goods (like coffee, rice, and sugar) that peasants rarely had before and that only the shuyukh were previously privileged to enjoy. While this was hardly unbridled consumerism, it still went beyond matters of survival to a quest for some modicum of luxury. Through this cycle peasants stepped further into the market economy, added more debts, and became more vulnerable to xthe changing fortunes of the silk market. And when it began to falter, the repercussions were large for a majority of peasants who had grown accustomed to a better life. Most prominent of these repercussions—as we will see in the next chapter—was emigration

Silk—or more accurately the interaction between the local peasant economy and European capitalism—was instrumental in unleashing a momentum for change that altered the meaning and form of gender, class, and the good life in Mount Lebanon. It is my aim in this chapter to make clear the nature and magnitude of these historical processes. I do so because these ruptures in the societal fabric of Mount Lebanon were critical factors in the history of emigration and in the making of the middle class.

Silk

To truly appreciate these transformations we need to look at the changing role of silk in the economy and lives of peasants.^[6] Sericulture, or the raising of silkworms, had been a steady part of the Mountain's economy for many centuries. Yet, while the role it played was important, it was not overwhelmingly critical. A look at the finances of one peasant family—as reported by David Urquhart, a European sojourner—will help clarify this point. He noted that “their resources are, two hundred mulberry trees, which produce silk worth 500 piasters; and a vineyard of two hundred vine-stocks, which gives as much more. They make up the rest by labor in the fields, . . . [which] gives 800 piasters.”^[7] Of the total 1,800 piasters that this family needed every year to survive, then, silk provided little over a quarter. This was not an isolated case by any means. Looking at the larger picture across the Mountain, we find that in the late 1790s silk provided only about 13.3 percent of the overall taxes, while olives, wheat, and grapes were providing more than that percentage.^[8] In the 1840s these numbers had changed only slightly. Finally, we can evaluate this relative importance of silk by comparing the size of the land that mulberry trees occupied as opposed to wheat, olive, and grapevines. As late as the 1840s, this land did not exceed 10 percent of the total planted acreage in the Mountain, while wheat covered close to one third of the jlal (terraces) of the Mountain, and grapevines followed closely behind.^[9]

After 1860 these numbers changed quite rapidly. Instead of the three million mulberry trees that were feeding silkworms in the 1840s, Mount Lebanon had—by World War I—twenty-eight million such trees planted, with an additional nine million in the vilayat (administrative district) of Beirut.^[10] In other words, the number of mulberry trees increased more than tenfold in the span of seventy years, while for centuries before the increase had been gradual and slow. More significant than the number of trees is the actual area that they occupied within the Mountain. The percentage of land that these trees took up increased from about 10 percent to more than 40 percent during the same seventy-year period.^[11] The augmentation of land dedicated to mulberry trees translated into a similar increase in the production of silk cocoons. While in 1861 the ahali of the Mountain raised 960,000 kilograms of cocoons, by 1890 they had pushed that number to 4.64 million kilograms; nearly a fivefold increase in just three decades.^[12]

With mulberry trees covering so much of the arable land during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, silk naturally came to play a dominant role in the agricultural economy of Mount Lebanon. Financial figures relating to the sale of silk thread and cocoons confirm its rising importance. Between 1836 and 1857 silk's share in the exports from Beirut hovered around 22 percent but never exceeded 36 percent of the total goods shipped out of that port. Even as late as 1857, silk accounted for less than 25 percent of the total 40 million French francs worth of exported material.^[13] This share began to change soon after the 1860 civil war, which opened the Lebanese economic doors wider to European capitalists. In 1873, for instance, silk accounted for 275 million of the 335 million piasters worth of exported goods, or 82.5 percent of the total exports.^[14] Thereafter, sericulture continued to occupy a position of primacy in the export trade of Mount Lebanon; even in 1911, when sericulture was in decline, silk provided 62 percent of the exports of Mount Lebanon.^[15] In the 1880s silk came to supply over 50 percent of the total revenues of the Mountain, whereas only thirty years before it was giving a mere portion of that percentage. In short, silk went from being a supplemental product that helped support a peasant family to being an essential cash crop on which Lebanese peasants depended for their survival.

This dramatic increase in the cultivation of mulberry trees and silkworms was generated by an intersection of French and indigenous economic interests. In turn, these interests were facilitated by the political upheavals that rocked Mount Lebanon for the first sixty years of the nineteenth century. To understand this period and its effects on Mount Lebanon, we now turn to a brief exploration of the political history of the Mountain in the years preceding 1861.

Until the late 1850s political life in Mount Lebanon was made up of four spheres. The first was that of the amir, who ruled the Mountain at times nominally and at other times more effectively, and whose main concern was to keep the shuyukh under his control, as well as to keep regional Ottoman rulers content and at bay. On the second level, were the muqata‘jis, or the shuyukh, who controlled areas that varied from one village to entire districts and whose main task was to collect the taxes from the peasants in their area, supply the amir with militia on demand, and keep the local peace. The third sphere was the Maronite church, which until the 1840s was at the periphery of political life, but it gained influence and power from that time and occupied a central role in the Mountain's politics throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Finally, there was the clan, which was much more present in the daily lives of the peasants and in more varied ways than any other political element. A set of rights and responsibilities which defined the patron-client relationship did exist between fellah and shaykh. Yet, for the most part, the shaykh's responsibilities were in effect limited to protecting the peasantry from foreign incursions; a task at which they were rarely successful. More accurately, the relationship among these four spheres was conducted mainly in the areas of taxation and recruitment for war, and the fellah was constantly trying to safeguard his crops and life from the ever-increasing demands of the shuyukh. Ultimately, under the system of the imara (rule by an amir), there was little that the peasant could do to hold either the amir or the shaykh accountable for his actions. Refusal to pay the exorbitant taxes brought military violence against the peasants. Migration to other areas within the Mountain was not feasible in most cases because the shuyukh, for all of their contention, tried to present a unified front against the peasantry and refused to allow any fugitive peasant to settle in their areas. Escaping to areas outside the Mountain was hardly attractive to a peasant, especially a Christian escaping taxation, since conditions of the peasantry in areas like Syria were generally much worse than they were at home in the Mountain.^[16]

The wide gap which existed between these political spheres made it easy for external political powers to exert their influence on the Mountain and to manipulate the local rivalries. From Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar to the French and English consuls in Beirut, the level of interference in the Mountain's internal affairs was at times astounding. For example, in exchange for his support, or even lack of opposition, al-Jazzar extracted hundreds of thousands of piasters from Amir Bashir al-Thani as well as from his rivals for the position of amir. The French consul, being the representative of the French king, the “protector” of the Mountain's Catholics, regularly received religious and secular delegates from the Maronite community who “consulted” with him about political matters from the selection of a new patriarch of the church to the appointment of a new shaykh.^[17] The only saving grace in this whole situation was the diffused aspect of political life and the abundance of players. Such a situation allowed the internal political actors of Mount Lebanon to manipulate outside forces by pitting them against each other in the struggle to gain the upper political hand. This was a rather negative way of conducting politics, but it did provide for some semblance of control on the part of the amir and the shuyukh as well as the peasants. Thus, Amir Bashir al-Shihabi appealed to Muhammad ‘Ali, the ruler of Egypt, to intercede for him with the Ottoman powers to ensure his return to grace, and in return he promised allegiance to the Egyptian ruler in his struggle for dominance over Syria. The Maronite church constantly appealed for the support of Europe's governments and, failing that, for the support of Catholics against supposed persecutions and threats by the Muslim powers and population.^[18] As with the economic situation, the multiplicity and diffusion of political powers was a source of both weakness and strength for the occupants of Mount Lebanon.

This balance was delicately perched on the notion that change within the system would be gradual and measured. But, by the first decade of the 1800s, and in particular after the end of the Egyptian occupation in 1841, this poise was badly disturbed. Before the Egyptians entered the Mountain in 1831, Amir Bashir's centralizing efforts and political maneuvering had created immense financial pressure on the peasantry. Payments to al-Jazzar and to subsequent pashas of Acre and Damascus forced Bashir to collect exorbitant taxes three and even four times a year from the only producing class in the Mountain: the peasantry.^[19] Bad crop years, unusually extreme weather, and a ballooning of the number of mouths that each peasant family had to feed made life almost unbearable for many peasants.^[20] Ultimately, the un-“customary” behavior^[21] on the part of the amir, and the financial hardships that it engendered, pushed popular sentiment beyond grumbling to the extraordinary point of open revolt.^[22] The popular displays of resentment against the ineptitude and oppressiveness of the local elites became bolder in language and goals as the economic situation worsened. Starting with limited and deferential complaints about unusually onerous taxation, peasants progressively increased the scope of their criticisms to encompass the iqta‘ system itself and not just its failures or excesses. Thus, between 1782 and 1858 there were at least seven major peasant revolts that derived from refusal to pay the demanded taxes.^[23] The most notable of these was the Kisrawan revolt of 1858.^[24]

Within two years this ‘ammiyat (popular uprising) had turned into a civil war that claimed the lives of thousands of peasants and pitted Druze against Maronite in the Mountain. At the conclusion of this communal violence, the Christians were rather badly beaten, with many of their towns and villages sacked and burned by the Druze. The Ottomans, with little if any immediate military presence, stood by and in some cases—as with the town of Marj‘uyun—assisted in the massacres. While losing badly, the Christians still managed to perpetrate many horrible acts of violence against the Druze in the smaller villages of the Shūf district of the Mountain. The Europeans, and in particular the French, alarmed at the defeat of the Christians, rushed in with troops and with threats of intervention if the Ottoman government did not put a stop to the events. When the shooting finally ended in 1861, Mount Lebanon was a transformed place. Many Maronites had escaped to Beirut and Kisrawan from the Druze-dominated areas in the Shūf. Foreign forces were in Lebanon, and the Ottomans were busy chasing those of the Druze who were designated as culprits. Some of the Druze leaders were put in prison, while many more fled to the Hawran region in Syria to escape capture. Soon after, diplomatic negotiations regarding Lebanon's political future commenced between the European powers (Britain, France, Austria, Russia) and the Ottoman Porte.

Having always intervened in the internal affairs of Mount Lebanon, the European powers—as represented by their consuls general—saw the 1860 war, to varying degrees, as a rather convenient pretext for furthering their interests in that country and by extension in the Ottoman Empire. Ultimately, the intense negotiations between the external powers and the lobbying of the internal political leaders led to the creation of a new political entity called the Mutasarrifiyya under a treaty that came to be known as the Règlement of 1861. In its totality, the Règlement exposed Lebanon to a much greater degree of European interventions, whether on the political or—more relevantly for this narrative—on the economic level. Sixty years of political turmoil cleared the path between “Europe”—through its local representatives—and the peasants of many intermediaries. Most notable among those were the shuyukh of the Mountain. This development led to the next step in the incorporation of Mount Lebanon into the world capitalist system and to a convergence between a local crop and a European need.

Increased weaving of silk textiles in France in the nineteenth century required more silk thread than could be supplied by European sericulture. This was especially the case after 1865, when a blight decimated French and Italian sericulture; industrialists of Lyons and Marseilles needed to find alternative supplies for their factories. The presence of European silk-spinning factories in Mount Lebanon, regular and inexpensive steamboat service between Beirut and Marseilles, diminution of tariffs and customs on exported silk thread, and the rise of French political prominence in Lebanese internal affairs after 1861 convinced these industrialists to choose Mount Lebanon as one source of silk. For the peasantry, increasing production of silk and selling it to the French made economic sense. While in the 1840s the price of one oka (1.228 kilograms) hovered around 12 piasters, by 1857 French merchants were paying 45 piasters per oka, and those prices persisted with minor changes through the 1870s. On another level, cultivation of mulberry trees was the most feasible way by which individual peasant families could increase their landholdings. Landlords intent on increasing their profits from sericulture needed peasant labor to terrace and plant mawat (literally, “dead”) lands. In exchange for their five- to seven-year labor investment, peasants would acquire one quarter of the new jlal of land through mugharassa contracts.^[25]

While French need for cocoons occasioned the proliferation of mulberry trees and sericulture, French demand for silk thread encouraged the industrialization of silk spinning in Mount Lebanon. Before 1838, silk spinning in the Mountain was carried out by hilalis (itinerant spinners), who used a hand-powered spinning wheel which the French called roue arabe. However, French silk factories required a stronger and more evenly spun silk thread than could be obtained using these traditional methods. This convinced some European entrepreneurs, bent on profiting from satisfying the requirements of French industrialists, to establish silk factories in Mount Lebanon.

The first viable “modern” silk factory was opened in 1838 by Nicolas, Joseph, and Antoine-Fortuné—Portalis three French commerçants who had been living and working in Alexandria.^[26] They located their filature in the village of Btater in the Jurd region of the Mountain. Their choice of that site was ideal in many ways. While close to the Beirut-Damascus route, the village was distant enough from the Muslim cities to allow a European Christian to buy plots of land without exciting too many sensitivities. Furthermore, the area was within easy reach of the Metn and Kisrawan districts, where silk raising was most common, and transport of cocoons would thus be low in cost. Water, a necessary ingredient for dissolving the glue off the cocoons, was more abundant than in other areas of Mount Lebanon. Pinewood, needed for heating purposes, was also to be found in greater supply than in the denuded highlands of Kisrawan and Bsherri.^[27] Perhaps most crucially, Btater and the surrounding villages were populated mostly by Christian peasants, who were more likely (because of a history of relations between the Christians of Lebanon and France) than their Muslim or Druze counterparts to accept employment from co-religionist Europeans.

Within the span of two years the Portalis enterprise had captured almost a 5 percent share of the spinning business in the Mountain.^[28] For one factory to garner this much of the silk production in a matter of two years signaled its success as well as its strong capital base. Perhaps a greater measure of its success was the number of European imitators who followed its lead. In 1846, an Englishman by the name of Scott opened another factory in Shimlan in cooperation with Amir Muhammad Arslan, the muqata‘ji of the area.^[29] By 1851 the number of European filatures had increased by six. A French merchant, André de Figon, established two factories: one in Ghazir, Kisrawan, and another in al-Qrayyé in the Metn district. Another entrepreneur, with an inflated sense of self-importance that led him to change his name from Thomas Dalgue-Mourgue to Mourgue d'Algue, established a fairly sizable factory in ‘Ayn Hamadé. Some Lyonnaise silk manufacturers followed suit and set up factories in al-Qrayyé and Hammana.^[30]

This sudden rush by French capitalists and merchants resulted from the success of the Portalis experiment in manufacturing medium- to high-quality silk thread at low costs. Profits from such an enterprise were obviously higher in an area where wage labor was much cheaper than in Europe. In 1851 a male Lebanese worker was paid 4 to 5 piasters for a day's work, while women were paid only 1 piaster for the same amount of work. In comparison, French men working in a silk factories in the Midi received almost 8.8 piasters each workday and French women spinners received 4 piasters.^[31] Furthermore, silk-factory laborers in Mount Lebanon worked longer hours than their French counterparts. An average working day in Mount Lebanon was 11.5 hours as opposed to 10.4 hours in France.^[32] In effect, then, male workers in Mount Lebanon received 40 percent of the daily wages paid to Frenchmen working in a Lyonnaise silk factory, and Lebanese peasant women received barely 22 percent of the daily wages of Frenchwomen. As twelve thousand of the fourteen thousand workers in filatures based in Mount Lebanon were women, French industrialists were, by the 1880s, saving almost 8 million francs annually by importing silk from the Mountain.^[33]

Besides allowing savings in wages, labor in Mount Lebanon was attractive to French industrialists and capitalists specifically because of its rural roots. By the 1840s, the French silk industry had had four centuries of history; its labor force was quite vocal in protecting its traditional rights and demanding new ones. In 1744 and 1786 workers in the silk factories went on strike against the new tariffs on labor costs and wages.^[34] Organized strikes also broke out in 1853, 1863, and 1867 in the Stéphanoise region, where more than forty thousand workers were employed in one of the three branches of the silk industry. After 1869, the strikes became much more organized and acquired the characteristics of urban union movements for better wages, fewer hours, and better conditions.^[35] In contrast, the Lebanese young women who were employed in the silk factories of Mount Lebanon came from patriarchal homes and were theoretically much less inclined to challenge male hierarchical authority. No history of guild participation or union organization prepared these peasant women, or men for that matter, to challenge wages, working hours, or conditions. And French entrepreneurs were quite eager to safeguard this “pristine” state of the indigenous labor force. Portalis, for instance, was quick to dismiss four French women reelers from their jobs as instructors to the local women workers in Btater on the grounds that they were disseminating “subversive ideas.”^[36]

The low cost of labor and material also made it quite inexpensive for the French capitalists to build their silk factories in the Mountain. The structures themselves were rather simple in design: a long rectangular space built of the local ubiquitous stone and roofed the traditional way with timber logs packed with dirt. Each of the basins where the cocoons were dipped to dissolve their glue cost about 1,000 piasters.^[37] Generally, the European factories contained at least eighty of these basins, which meant an initial investment of 80,000 piasters. Other operating costs, such as salaries, the purchase of wood for fuel, and transportation expenses, added another 30,000 to 40,000 piasters each year. Depending on the size of the factory, the European owner had to provide anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000 piasters for the purchase of silk. The total operating cost for a typical European silk factory in Mount Lebanon varied between 310,000 and 420,000 piasters; in years consequent to its establishment, the cost of basins would obviously be deducted from this annual cost. In French francs, the capital outlay did not exceed the 100,000 mark, which was quite modest when compared with the millions of francs invested in the construction of factories in Lyons.^[38]

Transportation of silk from Mount Lebanon became much more economical with the introduction of steamboat service to the port of Beirut around the middle of the 1830s. Sailboats gave way to the paquebots that reduced travel time between Beirut and Marseilles from three months to two weeks. In 1835 the English were the first to establish regular steam-liner service between Liverpool and Mediterranean ports, including that of Beirut. The French soon followed suit with paquebots connecting Marseilles to Constantinople and Alexandria, with calls at the port of Beirut. In 1841 a law was passed by the French parliament allocating almost 5,923,500 francs to the construction of six steamboats specifically for the Marseilles-Alexandria line, which passed by Beirut; by 1845 these boats were in full operation.^[39] By 1856 three French companies, two English ones, a Belgian, and a Sardinian planned to open new steamboat lines between Beirut and European ports. And by the 1860s steamboats were ferrying 70 percent of the four hundred thousand tons of shipments coming into and going out of Beirut.^[40]

As the number and size of boats arriving in Beirut increased, the cost of shipping decreased proportionately. Austrian steamboats reduced the freight cost by about 25 percent in the few years after they started operating between Trieste and Alexandria. Competition for business among the English, French, and Austrians drove the cost per kilogram even further down. In 1854, the transportation of a bale of silk weighing one hundred kilograms from the filature in the Mountain to the factory in Lyon added 370 piasters, or 1.7 percent, to the value of that package. As a result, the kilogram of silk arrived at the weaving factory in France costing no more than 232.5 piasters, or 52.8 French francs; quite a bargain considering that the cost of one kilogram of French spun silk was at least 57 francs and was often quite a bit more.^[41] By 1883 the freight cost of one hundred kilograms of goods varied between 0.8 and 2 francs depending on the material, while the overland transportation costs to Damascus were considerably higher—7.3 francs for every hundred kilograms.^[42] Equally significant was the time factor in shipping silk. Before the middle of the 1830s, shipments arrived at the silk manufactories of Damascus at least two months before they entered any European factories. With the introduction of steamboat service to the port of Beirut, large shipments of silk to Marseilles arrived only a day or two later than much smaller shipments that had entered the gates of Damascus. Thus, in only three decades, Mount Lebanon was brought physically much closer to Europe than it had ever been.

Another change was that the rise in European influence over Ottoman economic policies afforded the French capitalists greater security for their investments. The erasure of Ottoman government monopolies in 1838—under pressure from European powers—and consequent grants of commercial privileges to European merchants advantaged these merchants at the expense of their local counterparts. For example, while before the 1840s the Europeans were forced to pay the same tariffs as the indigenous merchants; by 1850 they were paying only 10 percent of the cost of exported silk as opposed to the 15, 30, and even 47 percent which the local merchants had to pay.^[43] After clearing the Egyptian forces out of Syria and Mount Lebanon, the Europeans gained even greater clout with the Ottoman Porte. The French consul general in Beirut could send letters to the Ottoman Porte demanding that one local official or another be restrained from “bothering” European merchants. By 1861, when the European powers had forced a political resolution of the 1860 civil war in the Mountain, French, English, and Russian consuls general had a direct say in who was appointed to govern the Mountain and were strong points of reference for the quibbling indigenous political factions. In fact, Article X of the European Règlement went so far as to place “all commercial litigation in the Mountain under the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Commercial Tribunal in Beirut,”^[44] which, although presided over by a Muslim, was made up mostly of European merchants or Levantine traders closely tied to European commercial interests.^[45] Predictably, these tribunals always judged in favor of the mercantile community and applied effective pressure on local authorities to reduce tariffs and customs duties. Control over the economy of Mount Lebanon was thus brought under even greater overt European influence.

All these factors made Mount Lebanon an increasingly attractive area for investment of European—but mainly French—capital, as was solidly manifested in the ten silk factories owned by Europeans. It was also displayed in a growing number of establishments that were financed by French merchants but managed and “owned” by Lebanese entrepreneurs.^[46] This arrangement derived from the desire—on the part of some Lebanese—to make money reeling silk and from the great cost associated with starting a filature for that purpose. This steep cost was prohibitive for most Lebanese even though most of the Lebanese-owned factories were modest structures of seventy to eighty square meters with fifty basins for immersing silk cocoons.^[47] For this reason they turned to the industrialists of Lyon for loans to help start their establishments. By 1910 the French were advancing about 8 million francs per year to the owners of filatures in Mount Lebanon; a sum that was equivalent to slightly more than one third of the silk that these same merchants bought in the Mountain.^[48] In return, these négociants received interest of 4 to 5 percent on their loans and, more important, guaranteed themselves yearly supplies of silk thread. Through this arrangement, Lebanese-“owned” silk factories soon outnumbered those directly managed and owned by Europeans. By 1862 there were 33 Lebanese filatures alongside the European ones.^[49] Twenty-three years later, the number increased to 101, and by 1893 there were 149 Lebanese silk factories in Mount Lebanon.^[50]

These numbers are pertinent to our story because every single factory employed young women to reel the silk cocoons. As new factories were built more young women left their homes and entered a workspace unlike any they had experienced before.

Gender

Regardless of who owned the factories, they all required workers to transform cocoons into an exportable silk thread. Peasants presented the only readily available pool of labor in the area. The task of the factory owner was to transform them from farmers accustomed to working according to “peasant time” to industrial laborers whose schedule was dictated by a clock linked to the exigencies of European markets.^[51] Until 1850 men were exclusively employed in the European-owned factories, but within eight years the formula was reversed and women constituted by far the majority of workers. The reason for this shift was ostensibly that “the young girls have . . . such patience at the same time as cleverness.”^[52] More to the point, male peasants proved most unable to meet the needs of these factory owners. Men, whose identity and honor were tightly linked to tilling a plot of land, were hesitant to be seen in a factory. This attitude severely limited the supply of male labor available to factory owners.^[53] Only those few who did not own even a small piece of land accepted factory work, and they did so reluctantly.^[54] Yet even they were uncooperative in following the dictates of a foreman as well as an artificial work schedule, and they generally voted against becoming proletarian by staying home. In fact, many European factory owners complained to the French consul general that after they trained some peasants in the skills necessary for industrial work and provided them with cash advances for their seasonal labor, the peasants would disappear into the Mountains.^[55] By 1858, these difficulties made factory owners look to women for their supply of labor.

Women in Mt. Lebanon had much to recommend them to factory owners. Because of the prevalent hierarchical division of labor that undervalued female work, women could be paid less, and they worked harder. In 1851 a male worker was usually paid 4 to 5 piasters per day, as opposed to the 1 piaster that a female worker earned.^[56] Moreover, the social structure of power which placed women beneath men fit well into the pyramidal division of labor in silk factories, with male owners and foremen on the one hand and women workers on the other.^[57] The transfer of the gendered division of labor from village to factory was facilitated in several ways. For European owners of factories, recruitment of women proved difficult at first because of the social taboos against contact with strange men. But in the early 1860s the owners circumvented this problem by recruiting young girls from European-run orphanages. In place of their parents, the European factory owner could incorporate these young orphans into a paternalistic institution where he became a surrogate patriarch. However, in some Lebanese-owned factories this transfer was made easier because they started out operation as family enterprises both in capital and labor.^[58] Many of the women who were first employed to spin the silk threads were relatives of the owner of the factory.^[59] In this manner, the owner extended his patriarchal control over his female relatives from the house into the factory.

Even when local factory owners began recruiting their labor from outside the clan, the patriarchal division of labor within the factory persisted.^[60] Employing a predominantly female work force deflected some of the criticism leveled by the Maronite church against mixing of the sexes on the factory floor. As we noted earlier, the church and Maronite elite had, as early as 1866, complained vociferously to the French consul about the practice of employing both men and women to work side by side in silk factories owned by French industrialists. While the practice continued, Maronite factory owners were reluctant to incur the anger of their powerful church and for that reason preferred to hire women almost exclusively with few male overseers.^[61] Additionally, factory owners thought young women less likely to dispute wages or to organize protests against the terrible working conditions in the factory because of the transplanted patriarchal structure. Thus, by the early 1880s, twelve thousand unmarried women and girls were working in factories outside their villages, as opposed to a mere one thousand men, who were employed exclusively as overseers. This number represented 23 percent of the total population of women of working age; on average, one out of every five families had a daughter working in these factories.^[62]

If it is clear why factory owners preferred to hire women, the question remains why peasant families who ostensibly considered their honor sacrosanct allowed their young women to work in these silk factories. The answer is twofold: money was needed, and honor was malleable. For the most destitute peasant families, factory work provided an essential source of income. In the 1860s, when a poor peasant family earned no more than 950 piasters per year, a young woman's additional wage of 275 piasters was more than welcome.^[63]

While survival pushed the poorest peasants toward new means of acquiring cash, concepts of honor and shame do not seem to have stopped these men from sending their daughters to the silk factories. Honor was never a static or monolithic idea that cut equally across class lines. Rather, as John Davis successfully argues, “honor is a system of stratification.”^[64] Wealth and status endow their owners with virtue and honor, while the poor have to contend with whatever is allotted them by their equals and superiors. In practice, a man of superior honor—that is, a landowner or a shaykh—could insult a peasant of lesser honor with relative impunity, while between equals such an insult could lead to bloodshed.^[65] It follows that the higher the social position of a family or lineage, the more visible was its honor, and the more crucial it was for its male members to safeguard both its honor and patrimony. Hence, among the shuyukh of Mount Lebanon—Christian or Druze women—were much more cloistered than they were among the poorer peasant families, whose women had to work in the fields and walk to the ‘ayn (water source) exposed to the eyes of strangers.^[66] In sexual terms—which is what honor is most closely associated with—an extramarital relationship between a couple from the shuyukh class could lead to bloodletting and long-lasting feuds, while poorer fathers had to force the man to marry the daughter or, if that failed, accept cash compensation.^[67] Finally, any shame that was associated with women's work in factories was counteracted by the fact that income from that work allowed men to continue their “honorable” work in the fields. In other words, the poorest male peasants sacrificed their daughters' reputation in order to retain their social identity as peasants, from which they derived their immediate and individualhonor, which they conflated with that of the family.

Although these factors made women's work in the factories economically indispensable, socially that work had repercussions. One of the consequences of sending women to work in the silk factories was immense social pressure on the families involved. The shame that was imposed on these young women became part of the peasant culture to the point where a father or mother who wanted to scold a daughter would say, “Are you going to behave like a factory girl?”^[68] Reproachful, and even spiteful, village gossip about purported indecent behavior among the ‘amila (female worker) tarnished the honor of the peasant family. Such sanctions were a reflection of the perceived threat that women's work in these factories posed to the existent social structure and mores rather than signs of concern for the welfare of the families involved. This threat was serious enough for the Maronite church to try to prohibit women from working in the silk factories by circulating an ecclesiastical letter which described factory work as immoral for women.^[69] When that proved ineffective, the church resorted to pleading with the French ambassador in 1867 to pressure the French owners of these factories to abstain from hiring women.^[70] Nor was the outcry only ecclesiastical, for some wealthier peasants and many more shuyukh petitioned the Maronite patriarch and government to put an end to women's employment in the factories. One of the many petitions proclaimed that “the honor of the Mountain was being trampled” through the work of these “girls.”^[71] These dramatic words are a clear indication that women's work in the factories had unleashed a crisis in patriarchy. By trespassing into the “male” sphere and threatening to undermine the idealized gender roles, these “girls” were not only “dishonoring” their particular families but bringing about social chaos.

From the point of view of the “factory girls,” work outside the house brought a dissonant combination of economic and social gains and setbacks. For the first time in their lives these young women were earning cash for their work. Previously, their work in the fields and at home was never directly remunerated, and the crops harvested were the property of the family as a whole and not that of a single individual. In contrast, their work in the factories became individually distinguishable, and its cash worth was clearly defined. This transformation certainly did not separate these women's interests from those of their families. Rather, women's work was part of an overall familial strategy which was meant to ensure the survival of that collectivity in changing social and economic circumstances. Still, because money was fast becoming the nexus of society, the earnings of a “factory girl” translated into buying and—to a smaller extent—social power. In the process, these women gained a greater sense of their individual self-worth and abilities through their work.

One example of this new awareness is to be found inside the factories. Between 1860 and 1880, some of the women who worked in the silk factories were hired through male intermediaries, and others were employed through family connections.^[72] Men negotiated all wages and terms of work. At times they even pulled the women out of the factory when not satisfied with what they got from the factory owner. This setup was in effect another form of patriarchal control that competed with that which the factory sought to impose on the women. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, factory owners, seeking to “rationalize” women's work and avoid competition over its control, began hiring women directly. Direct hiring was possible because of the increased availability of trained women silk workers and the desire of these women to negotiate their own contracts. Without the patriarchal buffer of an intermediary, these women had to struggle, directly and constantly, as workers with employers who were trying to extract more labor. Similarly, the ‘amilat (plural of ‘amila) tried to use the limited skilled labor pool to their advantage in negotiating salaries.^[73] For instance, some women, after promising to work for one factory owner, would at the last minute threaten to go over to a competitor's factory if the wages weren't raised.^[74] In one such instance, a French factory owner—de Figon—wrote a letter to his consul in Beirut complaining that “Scott—an English factory owner in the Matn region—took away all of my [women] workers by paying them 4 piasters per day,” instead of the 3 that de Figon was paying. An attempt was made to counteract this tactic by establishing a system of contracts and cash advances which committed indebted workers to a certain factory. But in areas where collecting debts was troublesome, at best, for anyone, let alone a Frenchman, these tactics were of limited success. Slowing down the pace of work and producing lower quality silk were also common tactics used by workers to protest low wages.^[75]

Ultimately, by the 1890s the ‘amilat were resorting to strikes as a way to claim control over their labor. Ducousso claims that the increase in strikes during these times was due to “emigrants returning from the American republics where questions of labor result in frequent conflicts, or to vagrant Europeans who travel throughout Syria fomenting such ideas.”^[76] However, such claims are spurious. First, by the late 1890s there were few returned emigrants. Those who had come back by then had worked mostly as itinerant workers and not as factory laborers, and their exposure to labor politics was minimal at best. Second, “vagrant Europeans” were not exactly commonplace in the Lebanese mountains, and the few who may have meandered that far off the beaten track are not likely to have been accepted as leaders to whom peasants would listen. It is far more likely that after two generations of women working in the factories, a consciousness of their self-worth and their exploitation had developed. This clearly was the case in a 1907 women's strike at a French tobacco factory. When the owners refused to provide its women workers with paid vacations, they went on a strike. After a week they won all their demands, which included twenty days of paid vacation and fourteen months of pay per year—the extra two being considered bonus.^[77]

Silk factories, then, provided an arena where the young working women could challenge patriarchal/capitalist authority—outside their family—without fearing extreme social reprimands. Gains achieved in a new public sphere did not guarantee a parallel success at home. However, these improvements served to highlight the difference between women's control in the factory and their relative powerlessness within the family. By the end of the nineteenth century, this obvious discrepancy pushed some factory women to try to gain more. This time it was a matter of deciding how to use their wages. Initially, when young women started working in the silk factories, they gave most of their wages to their parents, who decided what to do with it. But by the 1890s many women were keeping most of those wages to themselves. One contemporary proverb lamented how “all that the brunette makes [in silk factories] she spends on lipstick and make-up.” ^[78] Other evidence also points to the fact that the ‘amilat were increasingly using their incomes to purchase gold and other precious items for their dowry.^[79]

Certainly, before the time of wage-earning, young women did have a trousseau, but it was made up of home-woven items made from leftover silk threads. Such a situation required little in the way of decision making; the leftover silk could be used to make clothes and little else. However, with money, the decision became more complicated because of increased buying power and social prestige. One can argue that “factory girls” were allowed to keep their money for themselves only because it was a way to increase their chances of marriage. At a time when available single men were becoming scarce because of emigration to the Americas, such a tactic socially and economically fit the need of the family as a whole to marry off the young women. But even under such circumstances young women were in essence laying claim to their wages and their labor. In other words, they had acquired the power of independent and individualized decision making, something they had not enjoyed before.

Yet, the women did not necessarily view factory work as liberating. Along with the wages they earned came physical hardships and social problems. Being crowded into a small area with little light, less ventilation, and pots of boiling water was not healthy. According to Ducousso, what Dr. Louis Villermé noted about French women workers in France around 1825 could have easily been a description of the lot of Lebanese women spinners in the late nineteenth century.^[80] In a report, Dr. Villermé wrote, “It is difficult to give [a complete] picture of the miserable aspects of the lives of women employed in spinning silk, of the horrible deformations of their hands, of the bad state of health amongst many of them, and of the repulsive odors which attach to their clothes, infect the workshop and strike all those who approach it.”^[81]Nor was the pace of the work enjoyable. Although hard work was nothing new to these women, variety and social interaction were part of traditional daily work. In silk factories work was the monotonous repetition of spinning silk threads from sunrise to sunset, or anywhere from ten to twelve hours daily. On average seventy to eighty women were crammed into an area no bigger than two hundred square feet with a six-foot ceiling, and they worked around fifty basins belching hot steam around the clock. The spinning machines made far too much noise to permit conversation. The only breaks in the monotony were a half-hour break for lunch and two shorter breaks during the morning and afternoon. Few women could have felt this work to be liberating. In fact, many ‘amilat registered their dissatisfaction with “a good deal of indolence and very little interest [in their work],” according to Ducousso. The same European observer of this “sorry state of affairs” went on to recommend instituting a system of penalties and rewards and “tight surveillance” to “make them produce silk of good quality.”^[82]

Socially, the ‘amilat felt the disapproving pressure in stares when they went to work or when they walked to the village's water source. The stigma which came to be attached to the work and life of the ‘amilat not only was burdensome but also threatened their chances of marriage. “Tainted” as they were by contact with male strangers and relegated to an inferior class within peasant society, some young women saw their chances for marriage diminish. These chances were further reduced because parents, who were loathe to lose their daughters' crucial wages, kept them in the silk factories long past the prime years of “marriageability” for women, which was between the ages of sixteen and twenty.^[83] Paradoxically, marriage was the one way for these women to attain a respectable social position.

Thus these women found themselves torn between new economic demands and preexistent social expectations, between their individual future and the fortunes of the family. This position must have raised many questions in the minds of these young women about the relevance of the old rules and traditions. If fathers were neither “protecting” the honor of their girls nor working to marry them off, what did that mean for the daughter's “traditional” obligations? If a young woman was to give all her money to her family, why should she not expect to inherit some of the land just like her brothers, especially when the brothers were not obliged to work long days in the filatures? And if a “factory girl” could stand up for her rights in the factory, then why should she be silent at home? We are not privileged to know the answers to these and many other questions. As far as we know, “factory girls” did not leave any written records to tell us how they felt, nor did any contemporaries bother to record the trials and tribulations of these women. So we have to be content with guessing—on the basis of circumstantial evidence—that the establishment of silk filatures deeply disturbed the politics of gender and confused gender roles. In other words, the “classical” patriarchal contract—which had organized the lives of men and women in the Mountain—strained under the pressures of the new market economy.

Class

As much as women's work in silk factories muddled the lines between gender roles within peasant society, the commercialization of silk confused the boundaries of social divisions. To understand the extent of this change we need to cast a quick glance at “class” as it existed before the time of silk filatures. In those days there were but two social strata in the Mountain: peasants and shuyukh. Within this context, status was a hereditary matter. Individuals were born into their “class” and remained there even when their financial state deteriorated or improved. Thus a Khazin shaykh who had less money than a peasant in one of “his” villages retained his social preeminence. In fact, one of the charges that the Khazins leveled against the peasants who revolted against them in 1858 was that they were trying to upset this social equilibrium. Even at the height of the 1860 civil war that wracked the Mountain and pitted elites against each other, the shuyukh could still agree on one thing: the ahali who had become “uppity” should be pushed back into their proper place. In fact the Khazins, who had been dispatched from Kisrawan by the revolt of the ahali, anxiously signed on to a treaty among the shuyukh which recommended—among other things—that each person was to return “to his place” as it was in the past.^[84]

Equally, a financially comfortable peasant could not use his money to overstep the strict social boundaries that defined his relationship to the shaykh of his area. As one manifestation of this gap, Lahad Khatir notes that “the holder of a title [shaykh,amir, and so forth] had his clothes and the peasant had his, and the latter could not imitate the first and if he did then [he] was considered to have overstepped his boundary [thus] infringing on the right of that above him, and he was obliged, through force, to return to his familiar clothes.”^[85]

Strict social guidelines guaranteed, among other things, that no peasant could marry into the shuyukh stratum. So, the Shihab family could intermarry only with their social equals the Abi-Lam‘as. In the Druze town of Ammatur, the ‘Abd as-Samad and Abu Shaqra family married either within their own families or among each other.^[86] Other protocols emphasized daily the disparity of political power as well as the distance between these two classes. A peasant woman had to kiss the hand of the shaykha or amira.^[87] Aside from bearing the brunt of taxes levied in the Mountain, peasants were to give “gifts” to their shuyukh (soap and coffee, both of which a peasant was not to enjoy) on several occasions during the year. And on many Sundays—after listening to the exhortation of the priest to do God's work—the peasant was to work the plot of his shaykh for free.

These rituals of social power were imbedded in a patriarchal language that made the shaykh the ultimate “father” of the male peasants and the shaykha the “mother” of the female ones. While arranging a betrothal, for instance, a villager had to obtain the permission of his shaykh, much in the same way that a young man had to ask the approval of the patriarchs in his family before any major decision.^[88] Within the ranks of the elites, “class” solidarity was reinforced in patriarchal language. Thus, the Christian N‘ameh family was tied to their “cousins” the Abu Shaqra, who were Druzes, and the Hasans and Muja’is were similarly “related.” Bashir II, the ruler of Mount Lebanon until 1840, addressed the Druze shaykh Bashir Jumblatt as my “brother.”^[89] Throughout, money was never mentioned even when it did play a role in the definition of class. Hiding the source of elite power behind a language of inherited social position made it that much more difficult to question why the shuyukh were living off the work of the ahali. (Even during the revolt of 1858, when Maronite peasants demanded the removal of some of the informal taxes—like the ‘iddiyya—they did not explicitly question the social rank of the shuyukh or the basic privileges that such a position entailed.)

Silk helped change this state of affairs by clearly establishing money as a signifier of social status. A story about a marriage proposal will help explain this point. Elias Barakat had moved in 1886 to a village in Mount Lebanon called Bishmizeen. There he made a large sum of money trading silk cocoons. One day Elias presented himself in a neighboring village with the intention of choosing a bride for his son from an influential family. After the usual how-do-you-do's and thank-you's, the elders of the other family raised an objection to the marriage proposal by hinting—not so subtly, one must add—about Elias's unknown family background. Since he was a relative newcomer to Bishmizeen and not a man of the land, they were not so sure that he measured up to their social standards, or that he was mijwaz (marriageable). In response to this insult, the infuriated Barakat pulled out his money bag, full of gold and silver coins, and flung it on the floor saying, “This is my origin and this is my family heritage!” After a few moments of sizing up the money bag, the patriarch of the other family responded, “And an esteemed origin and kin it is! I bless this marriage!!”^[90]

Apart from being an amusing anecdote, this story indicates a changing attitude toward the social rituals of marriage. As some peasants became wealthy through the silk trade, their social aspirations rose, and they were not quite content with the barrier which separated them as fellah—rich or not—from the higher class of shuyukh. Like Elias Barakat they sought to better their social ranking by marrying into traditionally important families. At first these overtures were rejected by those of higher social status. Their pride and honor would not allow them to admit the “riffraff” into their midst. In fact they did all they could to secure the social distance between themselves and the upstart rich peasants. A story written by Mikhail Nu‘aymi records the desperate extent to which some elites went in order to avoid the humiliation of marriage below their social status. Titled “His Excellency the Bayk,” the story tells of Shaykh As‘ad al-Da‘ouq, who descended from a family that had been prominent in the Mountain. Silk, however, had allowed some shuraka (sharecroppers) to gather enough money to buy up most of the land that had previously belonged to this clan. Thus, nothing was left for “Shaykh As‘ad from the glory of his grandfathers except for the title of shaykh and uncounted debts.” To make matters worse, one of those newly enriched peasants “bought himself the title of Bayk . . . and dared ask Shaykh As‘ad for the hand of one of his daughters in marriage.” Livid, Shaykh As‘ad threw the man out of his house and locked himself and his daughters in, refusing to allow anyone to see his humiliation.^[91] Not all the destitute shuyukh had quite that fiery pride. When the economic status of some notable families dropped, their resistance to such proposals likewise took a dive. One contemporary bemoaned this state of affairs, in which “a lady from the Chehab family and their likes allows herself to marry a newly enriched man, even if he was of lowly character; and the prince takes the girl of a dog if she has money. . . . This is modernity.”^[92] The same realignment of social rank can be observed in letters exchanged between some rich fellahin and shuyukh. Before 1858, the greater the social distance between two people the more elaborate were the salutations at the beginning of any correspondence between them. Thus, when peasants petitioned a shaykh, the letter would generally begin with something like “His most honorable Excellency, the most illustrious, glorious, and honored Shaykh so-and-so, may his life be long ... ”^[93] However, the correspondence of a rich peasant like Boutros al-Asfar, who had loaned the Khazins large sums of money, was concise, brief, and its greetings were limited to “Our Dear Brother Shaykh so-and-so.”^[94] Beyond its offensive brevity, this preamble called al-Asfar and the Khazin shaykh brothers, elevating the peasant to the social rank of the shaykh. In addition, the contents were equally businesslike, without interjections of “Your Excellency” or circuitous requests. Shaykh Qānsuh al-Khazin had to tolerate such “transgressions” because if Boutros al-Asfar asked for all his money back, the shaykh would quickly become a pauper—as was obvious to all concerned.

To blur the social lines and power equations further, many of the wealthy peasants began to buy titles, such as shaykh and bey, and official positions from the Ottoman government. Acquisition of these titles translated into some political influence, but more important it diluted the social preeminence of those who had held such titles for decades and even centuries. Therefore, a wealthy peasant with a newly purchased title could propose to marry the daughter of a shaykh or a bey without any compunction because, after all, he had become the shaykh's equal. Moreover, he was most likely better off economically than the shaykh, who was failing to live at the same level as before, let alone keep up with the new and more expensive standard of living. (This new phenomenon was most apparent among the Maronites, where the peasants had clipped the wings of their traditional landlords—like the Khazins—during the Kisrawan revolt of 1858.) While all these changes did not extinguish the social aura of the shuyukh (after all those with new silk money were buying up just such “traditional” titles), they certainly dimmed it. And while lineage and heritage were not written out of the social formula for power and authority, having money did emerge as one way to circumvent the lack of “illustrious” ancestry.^[95]

While money from silk was redefining the meaning and composition of the elite in the Mountain, work in the silk factories was creating a new class that occupied the other end of the social spectrum. With the alienation of female work in silk filatures from its original familial context, new definitions of gender and class intersected in the “factory girl,” a derogatory term that consecrated the feminization of factory work. Dissolving silk cocoons and spinning their threads became tasks specifically associated with women, as ‘amila and silk spinner became synonymous terms. The only masculine term employed within the milieu of silk factories was nazzar, or overseer. At the same time, the term ‘amila established the boundary between “well-to-do families whose girls went to. . .school and those who were poorer and whose girls worked in the factories.”^[96] Hence, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, working in a factory came to be regarded socially as poor women's work.

Standing between the esteem which the elites enjoyed and the stigma that adhered to “factory girls,” the fellahin of the Mountain saw a path that could take them either way. It was a path that was paved with money, or the lack of it. A series of bad years, dipping silk prices, or just too many siblings could mean descent into a poverty that had become socially “shameful” in the widening breadth of economic possibilities. Those same opportunities could lead a peasant to a more financially comfortable life which also brought social gratification. In other words, peasants could—after the 1860s—envision themselves as landlords, even as they recoiled from the thought of working in silk factories. Class—a group of individuals defined by economic parameters and social ritual—emerged more clearly next to strata—an inheritable position—as a signifier of social status. Moreover, class had become a more variegated social field with greater heights and depths and with a fluidity of movement that must have appeared quite swift in comparison with the near-ossified hierarchy of past times.

A Better Life?

While money from silk was discombobulating the social hierarchy of Mount Lebanon, it was also altering the material expectations of the peasantry. A shift was underway in the second half of the nineteenth century from an economy of subsistence to one where luxuries were increasingly available and, at times, financially attainable.

Peasants involved in a culture of subsistence were traditionally conservative in their expenditures. A cautious approach toward spending derived from the realities of agriculture in a premechanized world, where the vagaries of nature could destroy crops and drive peasants into debt or worse.^[97] Exactions by the muqata‘jis and unpredictable multiple tax levies before 1860 made the survival of a family even more uncertain. In such a climate, peasants had about a half to a third of their crop left at the end of the harvest, and this amount had to sustain the whole family through the following winter. Cheap basic foods, like lentils and bread, that provided lots of carbohydrates with little fanfare were the daily staple. Clothing was equally simple and limited to a few items that had to suffice for two years and sometimes more. The home was sparsely furnished with few functional utensils and hardly any decorative elements. In short, the peasant spent hardly any money on items other than those absolutely necessary. By contrast, a developing culture of accumulation meant a propensity to buy items that were not essential for physical survival.^[98] Rather, these “luxury” items—which would have been foodstuffs, clothing, furniture, and ornamental mechanical devices—were acquired mainly as social and cultural symbols of economic ease, even when that was a precarious state at best. One way to measure the extent of this shift is to look at levels of consumption.

Sugar was among the most luxurious and novel of food products known in Mount Lebanon. Historically, the diet of the Lebanese peasant called for little in the way of a sweetener like sugar. Grape or carob molasses, honey, figs—fresh and cooked—and raisins were the sweets commonly eaten in the villages. More elaborate desserts were cooked on special occasions. Mughli, for instance, a dessert consisting of rice flour, spices, and molasses, was made on the occasion of the birth of a boy.^[99] Peasant aversion to “exotic” foods was proverbial as attested to by the saying “The fellah went down to the city and did not desire anything but tahini and molasses.”^[100] Yet, within sixty years sugar had become a regular staple in the diet of the peasants. One indicator of this change is the increase in the amount of sugar imported into the Mountain. Within a period of only twenty years the quantity of sugar imported through Beirut more than tripled—from 1.3 million kilograms in 1868 to 5 million in 1888.^[101] The per capita consumption of sugar amounted to more than 4 kilograms per year.^[102]

Rice was another food item which, until the late 1880s, was so expensive that only rich peasants could afford to eat it. Its expense was celebrated in many proverbs and popular sayings, including “Rice is King and bulgur wheat went and hung itself” (that is, rice is the luxury food while bulgur wheat is coarse).^[103] Another more explicit proverb recommended that “rather than eat rice [and run out of money, you better] . . . cover your behind.”^[104] Such forbidding wisdom seems to have become less applicable to the reality of the 1880s on account of the large quantity of rice that was being bought by the Lebanese peasantry at that times. While in the 1840s consular reports did not mention rice among the items imported into Beirut, 4 million kilograms were brought in through that port in 1887.^[105] In 1888 the quantity of imported rice increased to about 5 million kilograms, and a year later rice imports jumped to 6.35 million kilograms.^[106] In weddings that took place toward the end of the nineteenth century, peasants threw rice over the heads of the groom and bride; a rather extravagant gesture given the “kingly” status and cost of rice. A more telling, albeit still impressionistic, testimony to the increased use of rice among peasants came from the French consul general who, in 1889, remarked that “the locals make daily use of rice.”^[107]

Coffee, which had been consumed only by the shuyukh before 1860, became a drink of choice among the peasants, part of the social rituals that villagers engaged in during visits and celebrations. Thus, coffee was served not only during weddings and funerals, but also when neighbors came over for a social gathering in the winter evenings. The inclusion of this luxury into daily peasant life is readily reflected in the numbers of coffee sacks imported into Beirut and the Mountain. Peering through commercial reports filed by French consuls general from “Beyrout,” we can trace this shift. As late as 1861 there was not a single report of coffee among the items imported through Beirut and into the Mountain. Equally, reports from the port of Sidon were devoid of any mention of this item. One report notes that the equivalent of 230,000 French francs in “colonial” goods (coffee and sugar) were imported into Beirut in 1862.^[108] Thirty years later coffee warrants a more detailed entry in the reports. In a dispatch dated May 30, 1889, coffee warranted a whole paragraph that noted among other things that 173,000 kilograms of Yemeni coffee and 244,000 kilograms of Brazilian beans were brought into the port of Beirut. Additionally, the report recorded the changing cost of one kilogram of coffee from 2.35 francs (for the Yemeni brand) in 1887 to 2.7 francs in 1888. Similarly, Brazilian coffee underwent an increase from 1.95 francs per kilogram in 1887, to 2.25 francs for that same measure a year later.^[109] By 1892, close to half a million kilograms of coffee were being ground, brewed, and sipped from demitasses in the homes of Lebanese villagers.^[110]

Consumption of sugar, rice, and coffee was an indication of a shift not only in taste but also in the standard of living and its social representation. Given the stately status of rice and the use of sugar and coffee exclusively as “gifts” to the muqata‘jis before 1860, their addition to the diet of the peasantry in the later part of the nineteenth century must be construed as a symbol of the peasantry's climb up the social ladder or at least as an attempt to present an image of such mobility. By sharing in what used to be the fare of the elite, the peasant was in essence partaking of their social prestige.

Peasants' efforts to imitate the styles of the elite or, more appropriately, to obtain a few luxury items hardly constitute a new phenomenon. But if the aspirations had always existed among the peasantry, the lack of means and opportunity had kept these items beyond reach. This reality was written into folk tales that recorded the changing perceptions that peasants had of their world. In folk tales from the early part of the nineteenth century, for instance, we find few in which poor peasants acquire riches through their honesty, hard work, or luck. More commonly they were either tales of mythical Arabian heroes such as ‘Antar or stories of princes and princesses—distant elites that one could admire only from behind an insurmountable barrier. By the latter half of the same century, new themes had made their way into folk tales.^[111] Among these we find some where the peasant becomes wealthy after one feat or another. In one of the stories a poor honest woman receives money from a group of magical mice. She spends it on buying clothes for herself and her husband, and, consequently, “Haris [her husband] wore for the first time in his life a necktie and learned how to knot it.”^[112]

What we find, then, is that the political Règlement of 1861 and the commercialization of silk coalesced to allow a peasant choice in how to spend his or her money. In other words, the peasantry could select how they desired to represent themselves. Clothes and food no longer divided peasant from shaykh simply by dint of political decisions on the part of the muqata‘jis. Rather, their increased variety allowed for social gradation that was signaled in style and quality and that depended mainly on how much money one was willing and able to spend. This increased ability to make choices gradually, even if only partially, transformed peasants into consumers and diverted them ever so slightly from the culture of subsistence.

Conclusion

Beneath the “long peace” which reigned in the Mountain after 1860, momentous changes were brought about by silk.^[113] These seismic rumbles were unleashed because some peasants chose to participate in an economy that was as promising as it was volatile. Gender, class, and material life—the stuff from which identities were shaped—were thrown into a greater state of flux by money from silk. Thus, the fortunes and lives of the peasantry came to be tied to sacks of cocoons. Uncertainty about the success of the crop and fluctuating prices made this relationship complex and erratic.

Weather, the suitability of the silkworm eggs, and incubation conditions all contributed to the annual yield of silk cocoons. For instance, in 1862 the French consul general reported that “for many years now the silkworm eggs coming from Syria have not been successful [in producing silkworms].”^[114] In 1875 unseasonable rain and cold weather in May ruined at least half the silk crop. Finally, as one observer remarked in 1906, “most of the years the [silkworm] crop is not good because of the unsuitability of these [hatching] places that were generally very humid.”^[115] Together, these factors led the French consul general to report in 1890 that the “growers [of silkworm] in Syria have suffered in these last years from a progressive diminution in the volume of cocoons [harvested].”^[116]

The price of the silk cocoons mattered as much as the yield, and, to the further detriment of the Lebanese peasant, this price was controlled from Marseilles and Lyons rather than locally. This was such an accepted fact that the French consul general could simply note in passing in 1879 that “since it is the state of harvests in France and Italy which regulates the market in Syria, we have noticed considerable fluctuations this year in the price of cocoons and silk [thread].”^[117] Overall, some patterns can be discerned in the changes in silk prices between 1788 and 1914.^[118] Two concern us the most in this discussion: the rise and collapse of silk prices. Immediately after the introduction of French silk factories into the Mountain and the expansion of exports to France, the price of silk cocoons increased at an unprecedented rate. Between 1850 and 1872, for example, the price of one oka (1.28 kilograms) of silk cocoons rose rapidly from 15 piasters to 45.5 piasters.^[119] Yet, as French industrialists began to buy their cocoons from China and Japan, and as Lebanese silk factories went out of business, those prices began an irreversible and steep downward trend.^[120] Thus, the price hovered around 22 piasters per oka through the 1880s, and after the 1890s it fell to the 19 piasters mark, from which it never recovered.^[121]

This collapse was painfully relevant for a generation whose material expectations had been raised by the stupendous prices of the 1860s and 1870s. It was not simply that their life-styles suffered from the shrinking income but that their fragile social stature was beginning to disintegrate. As they slid into greater debt, peasants could see themselves moving backward after having experienced the possibility of a better life. Silk, then, had lifted hopes only to dash them for most Lebanese peasants; it brought into view new possibilities for life, only to snatch them away. For some of the ahali of the Mountain, this turn of events had to be borne with as much dignity as possible. For others it was intolerable. They searched for other means to cling to the shelf of newfound respectability that they had come to occupy. Mount Lebanon offered them little in economic opportunities other than sericulture. To benefit from job opportunities in the government bureaucracy or the merchant houses of Beirut, one needed a decent education—something peasants did not have ready access to. Work in silk factories was even less desirable than it was available because it was “women's” work. For many this situation left only one way out: to leave the Mountain in search of opportunities.

Notes