Kristen Alff, Violent Interests: Capitalism and Social Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Kristen Alff (KA): I first read about the Sursuq family’s land acquisitions, management, and eventual sale of land to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Mansur As‘ad’s Ta’rikh al-Nasira: Min Aqdam Azamaniha Ila Ayyamina al-Hadira [The History of Nazareth from Antiquity to the Present Time]. Before reading As‘ad, I had encountered the same narrative in the secondary literature, which traced back to a single source: a book by the South African-born British Christian Zionist, Laurence Oliphant. Oliphant described the Sursuqs as having purchased the land as private property from the Ottoman government through a bribe and then sold it to the JNF. As‘ad, however, told a very different story—one of piecemeal, messy, and highly contested land acquisitions. That discrepancy led me to want to understand how the Sursuq family, the largest sellers of land in early twentieth-century Palestine, had actually acquired and sold the land.
In the spring of 2011, shortly after reading As‘ad’s account, I happened upon a magazine in Lebanon announcing the digitization of Yvonne Sursuq Cochrane’s family archive, which reached back to at least 1831. I went to the Centre Phoenix pour les Études Libanaises at Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik to learn more. What I found was a history of family partnerships transforming into joint-stock companies and a multigenerational story of land acquisition and sale—enough to fill multiple books. The papers revealed how individuals in Beirut thought about capital accumulation and labor, while offering perspectives on nineteenth-century global capitalism from the margins.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
KA: Violent Interests argues that over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, companies established by Beirut-based businessmen transformed from small family partnerships into large shareholder corporations with agricultural, infrastructural, manufacturing, and financial subsidiaries extending across the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. Taking the Sursuqs’ companies as an entry point into the history of capitalism, the book traces how this transformation reordered not only the company but also land, labor, and the bourgeois family. These changes required interconnected forms of economic power and physical and symbolic violence. The state-sponsored death, destruction, and dispossession of World War I proved critical to consolidating and naturalizing capitalism’s new social order in the region. Violent Interests thus argues that the companies of late Ottoman Beirut helped transform the Eastern Mediterranean in ways that outlasted both the companies themselves and the empire, advancing the subordination of social relations to capital accumulation and the abstractions that sustain it.
The book contributes to several fields. For the modern Middle East, it offers a history of capitalism centered on Beirut and the Eastern Mediterranean that challenges both accounts of the region as a recipient of capitalist transformations originating elsewhere and nation-state-centered histories. It shows how capital accumulation was produced through regional networks of companies, landholding, finance, infrastructure, and labor stretching from Mersin to Alexandria, and how these processes were inseparable from imperial and state power. Its engagement with Marxist theory and Marxist feminism foregrounds the transformation of social relations as central to capitalist reproduction, while its account of Northern Palestine traces the intersections of accumulation, dispossession, and settler colonialism. More broadly, Violent Interests rethinks the relationship between capitalism and the state by showing how state power was deeply implicated in the violence and institutional transformations through which capitalist social relations were consolidated.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
KA: Violent Interests is my first book project, but it is also the culmination of my thinking about capitalism over the last decade. That should not suggest, however, that I have arrived at any concrete or final conclusion. Explorations such as these are never truly finished; they evolve as new questions, sources, and historical problems emerge. A reader could trace the evolution of my thinking about capitalism across my publications over the past decade, as I have continued to refine the questions I ask about capital accumulation, social relations, and the historical processes through which capitalism takes shape. Violent Interests brings many of these lines of inquiry together. In the book, I think—and hope—the reader will find the sharpest formulation yet of my thinking about capitalism and its relationship to the social and historical worlds in which it is produced.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
KA: I believe my biggest and most enthusiastic audience will be scholars of the Middle East. Within that group, scholars of political economy will find a narrative that is both familiar and innovative: familiar in its attention to questions of capital, land, labor, and state power, but innovative in the way it brings these questions together through the history of Beirut and the Eastern Mediterranean. Beyond this core audience, scholars of capitalism will find value in the book’s view from Beirut during what many describe as the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914), offering a perspective on global capitalism from a region often left at the margins of these histories. A third audience includes scholars interested in nineteenth-century Palestine, particularly those working on the history of land, agriculture, and settler colonialism. I hope the book will ultimately sit alongside a group of books on Middle East political economy coming out of Stanford University Press which takes up questions of difference, power, and universality in Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. My intention with Violent Interests was to bring these conversations into closer dialogue, demonstrating how a history rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean can speak to broader questions about capitalism, empire, and settler colonialism in Palestine.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
KA: Something that emerges more prominently in Violent Interests than I had originally intended is the extent to which agricultural practices and technologies in late nineteenth-century Palestine were obscured by Enlightenment-rooted modernization narratives. The double colonial presence that took shape in the early twentieth century—British mandate rule and Zionist settler colonialism—contributed to the erasure of landlords’ and peasants’ own understandings of modern farming and agricultural technology, which were often locally specific and sometimes contradictory. Scholars of Palestine have rightly challenged the claim that Jewish settlers made the desert bloom by demonstrating the extent of Palestinian agricultural production before 1881. My next book project takes this critique in a somewhat different direction by seeking to recover not only what Palestinians produced, but also the local knowledge and agricultural practices that served distinct purposes within particular social and ecological contexts.
The project asks how landlords, merchants, and peasants themselves understood agricultural production and technological change before 1881 and as they encountered new ideas about progress, modernity, and historical time. In doing so, it challenges the assumption that modernization was a universal process moving toward a predetermined endpoint. Instead, it asks how people in Palestine understood the agricultural worlds they inhabited, the changes they sought to make within them, and the futures they imagined for themselves. In recovering these perspectives, the project also seeks to uncover how settler colonialism contributed to the production of a colonial history of Palestine—a history whose effects continue to shape how the region is understood today.
J: What did you find most challenging when writing the book?
KA: I found it very difficult to narrate the relationship between theory and practice—to distinguish between what historical actors were doing and what they understood themselves to be doing. One of the book’s central claims is that certain abstractions are necessary for capitalism to reproduce itself. In the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, this involved increasingly separating the private from the public, the domestic sphere from the joint-stock company, and the political from the economic. These spheres were, in concrete ways, increasingly treated as distinct: women were disenfranchised from family companies, corporate bylaws separated personal from company finances, and wage labor was understood as independent from life at home.
In practice, however, these boundaries remained deeply porous. Families continued to shape companies, domestic relationships influenced economic decisions, and political power remained entangled with economic life. One of the major challenges in writing the book was therefore to represent both processes at once: the emergence, between the 1830s and 1930s, of new ways of separating and abstracting social life, and the persistence of the relationships that connected these supposedly distinct worlds well beyond the mid-twentieth century.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 5 to 10)
Although he never uses the term capitalism, Marx maintains that capital accumulation, created by ongoing capitalist competition, is a necessity for its existence. This competition propels a new and intensified drive for capital and, at the same time, redefines other social orders. For the period covered in Violent Interests, and put simply for the broadest readership, this can be understood as the ongoing tendencies of what Nancy Fraser calls exploitation (the creation of value through labor power) and expropriation (social conditions that advance capitalist reproduction, such as patriarchy and racial hierarchies) as two sometimes indistinguishable parts of the same socioeconomic process. Drawing on Tithi Bhattacharya, Susan Ferguson, and David McNally’s approach to Social Reproductive Theory, I argue that changing social orders are not a direct function of capitalist demand but rather that capitalist reproduction creates certain conditions of possibility and forecloses others. Once in place, and albeit not without contestation, these conditions are difficult to undo. Focusing on the Sursuq family, I argue that capitalism in fact entails, if not requires, the bifurcation of sites for the production of value and those for expropriation—public and private, company and family, work and home—even if these spaces are not always separate in social practice.
Furthermore, Violent Interests investigates this evolution of social relations in the Eastern Mediterranean through a global perspective by interrogating capitalism in various places of this region and in parts of Europe. An ongoing drive for capital accumulation produced and reproduced institutional and social difference everywhere—between Manchester and Beirut, but also between the lowlands of Mersin-Adana and the Jezreel Valley in northern Palestine. As Aaron Jakes and Ahmad Shokr argue, capitalism existed in Egypt, for example, but calling this Egyptian capitalism implies a local typology that simply cannot be supported with evidence. I argue here that economic institutions, social orders, and cultural norms, inside and outside of the Eastern Mediterranean, changed in tandem with competition and collaboration of local and global actors on the global capitalist market. I do so by interrogating the operation of capitalism and its ongoing production of different exploitations and expropriations, as defined above, within these regions and between them.
My focus on the Sursuq business ventures as well as the Sursuq family represents a point of entry to a study of capitalism by analyzing regional differences among changing capitalist institutions and attendant social orders. Martha Mundy and Richard S. Smith have argued that forms of private property emerged in particular regions of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire but did not emerge in others. Beiruti families became owners of large tracts of land in various regions of the Eastern Mediterranean. The same owners administered these lands together and in relation to one another and the vicissitudes of the global capitalist market. However, the administration of new property laws on these fertile plains produced different effects based on a multitude of factors: laws governing these regions, local applications of these laws, products the Beirutis grew on these lands, the geography and composition of the soil, and the status of trade and demand for these materials from various parts of the world.
[…]
After they acquired land grants in Egypt from Ismail Pasha [in Egypt], the Sursuqs began to consolidate property in the fertile plains in northern Palestine. On these lands, they consolidated their ownership by guiding the application of the Ottoman Land Code and laws of 1858 and 1859, which required rights holders on land to register it for tax-collection purposes. New land laws were one of many Ottoman reforms at this time that sought to modernize the empire. When official land registrations began in Palestine in the late 1860s, the Sursuq family took advantage of the creation of land surveys to put land in its name. Peasants who could claim rights on the same land, however, contested the results of these land registrations. Violent Interests shows how the Sursuqs and their companies could not fully consolidate their claims to ownership of land in this region during the Ottoman period due to political and social circumstances that were very different than in Egypt. On their other lands, like the cotton-producing fields of Mersin-Adana, they developed still other land tenure configurations in the early twentieth century[…].
In the late nineteenth century, transformations in property and labor also coincided with changes in emerging bourgeois family norms; namely, the divisions of spheres of work and home among the landowning families in Beirut. Interrogating the structure of the family and changing relations of social reproduction within it, I trace the Sursuq family from the late eighteenth century to the post–World War I period. Family business partnerships, once headed by Jabbour Sursuq and, later, his son, Dimitri, I argue, worked within Ottoman institutions, relying on arranged marriages and multigenerational households to accumulate capital in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Marriages between first cousins or within a limited set of business partner families were among these families’ initial techniques for capital expansion. Likewise, the architecture of the family home—airy structures with open rooms, called liwan—facilitated communal living, producing continuity between work and home, business and the family, and, more abstractly, public and private life. These living arrangements changed as the functions of the market became ontologically external to the family. Lawmakers imposed laws aimed to modernize the empire at the level of the family, placing inheritance, marriage, and divorce under the legal purview of the state.
These new legal norms shaped the institutionalization of the company and precipitated the theoretical and concrete separation of the Beiruti company and Beiruti family. These social transformations that I analyze in Violent Interests are not simply the direct outcome of private bourgeois interests. In this exposition, capitalism is reliant on public powers of the state “to establish and enforce its constitutive norms.” My approach to the state relies on re-entangling the institutions of the economy and polity which capitalism necessarily separates into “public” and “private” power. Changing social orders can thus be best described in the historical context of the changing nineteenth-century Ottoman state and its governing imperial laws and supporting legal norms. Modernization, regularization, and consolidation of bureaucracy and administrative reforms between 1839 and 1876, collectively known as the Tanzimat, came out of centuries of debate between legal scholars about property rights, taxes, and legal relationships between tax farmers, cultivators and state representatives, and the state. Together, they affected and reflected changes in global business as Great Britain imposed unequal trade politics on the Ottoman Empire as an answer to the Eastern Question. Foremost of these was the 1838 Balta Liman Treaty. Subsequent codes—the 1841 Commercial Code, the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, and its subsequent laws—reified and guided the commodification of company and land.
[…]
Another series of Ottoman reforms in the nineteenth century, first launched by Selim III in 1789, was the professionalization of the imperial military through new military equipment and universal conscription. Violent Interests contends that state violence played a central role in creating and maintaining social transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean through militarization and more subtle forms of policing. Examples contained in the book support the argument that the continuing process of capital accumulation and the attendant reformation of the mode of social reproduction necessary for capital’s reproduction also required continued violence on multiple overt and covert scales. The most straightforward acts of violence illustrated in the pages of this book can be best described as acts of physical violence, most extreme during times of war—murder, beating, and other forms of bodily harm. The Armenian genocide and the public hanging of suspected Arab traitors to the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I are well documented examples of violence. They took the form of military or police power of the state as brute force, often reserved for exceptional moments of intense contestation.
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The Sursuqs were at the height of their political power during World War I. In these roles they were well positioned to further their interests over the course of the war, especially given the harsh authoritarian style of Ottoman rule in the region of Greater Syria after the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) took over the Ottoman government by coup in 1913. World war produced an atmosphere in which the drive to accumulate capital became almost contradictory to the goal of preserving human life. As Graham Pitts and Melanie Tanielian claim, during the war, the Sursuqs acted with the power of the state as comanagers of monopolies with Cemal Pasha (Ar. Jemal Pasha), who formed one-third of the ruling triumvirate of the CUP. Together, the Sursuqs and Cemal Pasha, along with other companies in the region friendly to the Ottoman administration contributed to the intense famine at the start of the war. Starvation and death of individuals and families in the Eastern Mediterranean were both effects of the transformation of social orders and a vehicle for further capitalist reproduction and social change in the postwar era.