Recent scholarship on twentieth-century Syria has thrown new light on the popular movements that opposed the Arab nationalist government of King Faisal and then resisted the imposition of the French mandate in 1920, on state economic policy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and on the workers' organizations and radical parties that emerged as major political actors during the Second World War. Elizabeth Thompson offers a stimulating synthesis of this literature, and supplements it by devoting explicit attention to the way in which gender dynamics interacted with other factors. Specifically, she argues that a “crisis of paternity” (37–38) set the stage for French rule over Syria and Lebanon following the First World War; the mandatory authorities subsequently established a complex “paternalistic colonial civic order,” in which state officials manipulated the disbursement of material benefits to “a mediating elite” of local notables as a way of exerting “control [over] the unprivileged majority” (66). This system led to the emergence of a full-blown “colonial welfare state” by the late 1930s, which entailed an extensive network of state-funded schools and clinics, along with rights of popular expression and association (163–69). Key elements of the mandate order even outlived the French presence: “Paternal republicanism—the refusal to democratize and expand the colonial welfare state, and the persistence of heterogeneous citizenship rights—would contribute to the causes of Syria's successive coups beginning in 1949 and to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in 1958” (286).