How do we understand conflicting claims to land and land’s relationship to colonialism? This is the question of Palestine. At its best, this question can offer new ways to think about land and history. Yet, histories and historiographies of Palestine remain limited to the territorial and conceptual borders of the nation-state. My book project, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine, charts an escape from nationalist confines. The central figure of my narrative is a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee. I explore how his trajectory from nineteenth-century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth-century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession.
Naim Cotran (1877-1961) was born in the northern coastal city of Acre, Palestine, at that time under Ottoman rule. He began his education at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. In 1899, he traveled to Baltimore to continue his medical training at the University of Maryland. Naim returned to Palestine to become one of Acre’s first registered medical doctors. During World War I, he served as a medical official in Omdurman, Sudan with the Anglo-Egyptian Army. On his return to Palestine, then under British rule (1918-1948), his in-laws gifted Naim and his young wife Aniseh an enslaved woman named Sa‘da. Naim and Aniseh manumitted Sa‘da, but she lived and died with them as their domestic servant. Eight miles northeast of Acre, in a village called Nahr al-Nabi‘a, Naim owned about twenty hectares of land. During the war of 1948, his children and grandchildren took refuge in Lebanon and Egypt. Naim and Aniseh stayed on the land, in an attempt to hold on to Palestine’s shrinking remains. They lost that battle in 1951 and became refugees who lived the last years of their lives in Lebanon. That doctor, Naim, was my great-grandfather. By sheer coincidence, I encountered Naim in ways that inspired new questions about history and the lived present. From Baltimore to Beirut is a sustained reflection on the meanings of archives, the writing of history, and the power of autobiography.
Sherene Seikaly is a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2024-25) and Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine, tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the editor of the Journal of Palestinian Studies, the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures series, and co-editor of Jadaliyya. In the academic year 2007/08, Sherene has been a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Esther Möller is the German vice-director of the Franco-German research institute in Humanities and Social Sciences Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and a visiting professor of history at Humboldt-University Berlin. Her research interests include the history of the the Middle East and North Africa, in particular Lebanon and Egypt, with a focus on education, humanitarian aid and (forced) migration. Among her most recent publications is the article Multiple Mittelmeer-Missionen: Religiöse, wissenschaftliche und humanitäre Begegnungen und Besitznahmen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Multiple Mediterranean Missions. Religious, Scientific and Humanitarian Encounters and Conquests in the 19th and 20th centuries), in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 49/2 (2023).
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