Commoners assembled

Early in 1821, Abdallah Pasha, the newly appointed Ottoman governor of Acre in Palestine, demanded an excessively high sum in taxes from the emir Bashīr Shihābī, who held the district of Mount Lebanon from him as a tax farm. After attempts at negotiation within a delicately balanced system of power-sharing among Mount Lebanon’s own multi-religious elite, Emir Bashīr decided to demand the extra money mainly from the Christian peasants of the northern part of his domains. But in March, these Christian commoners gathered together, armed, at the village of Anṭalyās, and swore to resist the tax demands. After negotiations failed, Bashīr resigned the emirate and went into temporary exile inland, along with his most powerful supporter among the Lebanese elite, the Druze leader Bashīr Jumblāṭ. He left the emirate to two rival members of the Shihābī family, emirs Ḥasan and Salmān, who were supported by a different faction of the multi-religious elite. The commoners made a pact with them not to raise the taxes, and they were invested as joint emirs. But Abdallah Pasha grew impatient when they were unable to fulfil their conflicting obligations to him and to the commoners; and he did not oppose Emir Bashīr when he quietly returned to Mount Lebanon in June. Emir Bashīr now engineered a new pact, involving only moderate taxation, with much of the Mountain elite and some commoner leaders from the north-central districts, excluding those further north. He then turned to the districts further north to extract his taxes. Commoners here resisted in the second league of Liḥfid in the autumn, and attempted to ally with other elite factions. But they were decisively crushed by the troops of Emir Bashīr’s ally, Bashīr Jumblāṭ, and harsh punishments and fines imposed.Footnote ¹⁸

The 1821 movements were not without precedent: chroniclers mention earlier anti-tax revolts in a central Lebanese district in 1800 and 1805, while lesser disputes with tax collectors were doubtless frequent.Footnote ¹⁹ But the two leagues of the spring and autumn of 1821 were more serious, covering several districts of north-central Mount Lebanon and gathering several thousand armed men.Footnote ²⁰ They were also more organized, initiating novel forms of political organization and language. Peasants and other commoners gathered in a large, armed assembly and swore an oath of mutual support. They sent messages to other villages or districts urging them to join them and send delegates. They also appointed delegates to negotiate for them, and a man of rank as titular head; Maronite priests sometimes served as their scribes and may have originated some of their organizational forms. Their aim was not to take over political power, but to impose their wishes on the emir and the Ottoman state, by concluding alliances with other factions and binding the ruling emirs by pacts not to raise taxes.Footnote ²¹ In this sense their role was similar to that of other factions within the pluralistic system of negotiations backed up by violence that constituted Mount Lebanon politics. But previous factions had invariably been organized around the small number of elite families of rank – this was a new kind of political actor, referring to itself in terms of the ʿāmmiyya (commoners or commonalty) and jumhūr (crowd or populace), and to its own distinct ṣāliḥ (good or interest).

These distinctive features were later taken up by subsequent popular movements among Lebanese Maronite Christians: an 1840 rebellion against the occupying troops of Mehmed Ali of Egypt, a sustained uprising against the lords of one district in 1858, and the violence of sectarian militias in 1860.Footnote ²² Hence 1821 can be seen as the beginning of a distinctive local tradition of popular politics, one which later took on the varied connotations of Lebanese nationalism, Maronite sectarianism, and popular rebellion against ‘feudalism’. It is this later evolution that has led many subsequent historians to see the events of 1821, and still more so the later movements, as ideologically deriving from the European age of revolutions. Jumhūr was, after all, the term used by Napoleon’s Arabic translators to render the French ‘republic’ on his invasion of Egypt;Footnote ²³ and the related jumhūriyya became the usual Arabic term for republic. Later historians would read Lebanese peasants’ jumhūr, too, as a republic; the ʿāmmiyya became a commune or parliament, and ṣāliḥ the general interest or public welfare; their elite opponents represented ‘feudalism’.Footnote ²⁴ Behind this lay the suggestion that the 1821 movement, like its successors, was inspired at least in part by ‘ideas and institutions derived from the French republican tradition’.Footnote ²⁵

Certainly some among the Mount Lebanon elite had knowledge – albeit imprecise – of the French Revolution and its innovative political forms. Emir Bashīr’s court poet wrote an account of the French occupation of Egypt, using the term jumhūr (among others) for the French ‘republic’ and for its ‘national assembly’.Footnote ²⁶ Not long afterwards, a Syrian Christian merchant in Egypt sponsored Arabic translations of French and Greek Enlightenment writings, and at least one elite Christian at Emir Bashīr’s court, Mīkhāʼīl Mishāqa, was profoundly influenced by these.Footnote ²⁷ But he also remained staunchly loyal to Emir Bashīr during and after the 1821 uprisings, and was dismissive of popular involvement in politics.Footnote ²⁸ In both cases, however, wealthy merchants and court figures were at a considerable cultural distance from rebellious north Lebanese peasants.

The elite groups with the closest links to these commoners were their local village shaykhs, and the Maronite Catholic clergy who lived among them as parish priests and monks. Some clerics reportedly played an important role in the 1821 leagues: the Church and monasteries too were exposed to the emir’s tax demands.Footnote ²⁹ Maronite clergy possessed networks extending to Livorno, Marseille, and, of course, Rome; priests reported to the Maronite Patriarch from around the Mediterranean on the progress of the revolutionary wars. ‘What a vast overturning (inqilāb) in so short a time!’ one wrote after French troops occupied Rome in 1798: the Church’s order was destroyed and the people ‘behave like beasts’.Footnote ³⁰ Yet, as this instance shows, their view of these revolutionary events, so far as it is recorded, was wholly negative: this was the force which had ruined the Catholic Church, seizing their own Maronite monastery in Rome.Footnote ³¹ Close to this clerical point of view was a north Lebanese village shaykh with Church ties, who was executed for his part in the Liḥfid rising: Anṭūniyūs al-ʿAynṭūrīnī. In 1819 he included in his chronicle of Mount Lebanon a brief account of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s wars – but this expresses only dismay at the ‘great upset and confusion’ of the times, the killing of Louis XVI, and the attacks on Church and clergy.Footnote ³²

It is possible that Maronite clergy or shaykhs like ʿAynṭūrīnī had heard of the role played by Catholic clerics in popular movements – counter-revolutionary more often than revolutionary – across the Mediterranean, and this might conceivably have influenced their willingness to participate in the commoner leagues. But it seems distinctly unlikely that they would have called on French revolutionary models in order to do so – not least because they had more local precedents to hand. ʿAynṭūrīnī’s history relates with approval the 1759 rising of Christian commoners in his northern Lebanese district to drive out their Shia Muslim lords and replace them with Maronite village shaykhs, including his own father. They had gathered at the Maronite stronghold of Ehden and sworn on the Bible and the Sacrament (prepared by the bishop) ‘not to betray, and to spend … their necks’ blood’ in the cause.Footnote ³³

One word, one blow, one honour

In fact, if we put aside the later evolution of the Lebanese tradition of popular politics and the ‘modern’ connotations which terms like jumhūr acquired, we hardly need to turn to Europe to explain the innovations of 1821. Precedents for all of them can be found in the existing political culture of Mount Lebanon and Ottoman Syria, either among commoners at village level or among the elite. Oaths sworn in churches and written contracts were used to bind peasants and lords to sharecropping agreements;Footnote ³⁴ villagers made written agreements among themselves, or with outsiders, over shared resources such as water rights.Footnote ³⁵ Written pacts of a political kind were used to bind together members of the fissiparous Mountain elite, and to hold commoners to a particular elite faction.Footnote ³⁶ The language of such agreements, stressing unity, penalties for traitors, and sacred sanctions, is similar to that found in pacts of the 1821 commoner movement and its successor of 1840. The 1821 pact of Bshaʿla village runs, ‘we will all be brothers: one soul, one interest (ṣāliḥ), one word, one blow, and one honour’.Footnote ³⁷ The covenant sworn by the 1840 rebels in the church of Anṭalyās, in evocation of the oath taken there in the spring of 1821, imposed religious and social sanctions for oath-breaking. ‘If the least disturbance should come from us, we will be excluded from our religion and cut off from the community of the Druze’, swore the Druze; the Christians pledged: ‘he among us who betrays, St Elias will be his enemy, and his death will not be in the religion of Christ’.Footnote ³⁸ Meanwhile, delegates (wakils) representing their principals in monetary and administrative affairs were employed by merchants, churchmen, and the ruling emir himself.Footnote ³⁹ One chronicler suggested that the commoners of 1821 adopted the institution from the clergy, via the Maronite Bishop Yūsuf Isṭifān.Footnote ⁴⁰ The pact of Bshaʿla appointed a wakil to be responsible for the village’s ‘commitments and losses’ of money and men to the commoner cause.Footnote ⁴¹

Most striking, though, is the novel constellation of terms used to refer to the assembly or movement: the ʿāmmiyya (commoners, commonalty), the jumhūr (‘all of’, mass), and their ṣāliḥ (good, interest). These terms were indeed taking on new meanings through the events of 1821, but these can be explained as innovations from within the existing local political culture. Jumhūr had long been in use to indicate the totality or overwhelming majority of a group, often assembled together for some collective action such as a petition or pact.Footnote ⁴² Jumhūr could also mean a ‘mass’ or ‘crowd’, particularly an armed one.Footnote ⁴³ The chronicler Ḥaydar al-Shihābī, a member of Emir Bashīr’s retinue in 1821, often refers to the rebels simply as ‘those jumhūrs’, apparently grasping at a term that could describe this new presence on a political scene long dominated by a handful of notable houses.Footnote ⁴⁴

The term ʿāmmiyya (sometimes spelt ʿammiyya) can likewise be seen taking on new connotations. In documents and contemporaries’ accounts of 1821, as well as of 1840, it is sometimes used simply to mean ‘commoners’: the chronicler Ṭannūs al-Shidyāq often employs ʿāmmiyya with verbs and pronouns in the plural.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet his consistent use of this word to describe the assembled commoners also registers their distinctive identity as a non-elite grouping. This foreshadows the term’s emergent sense as a more or less organized collectivity, a ‘commonalty’, as expressed in the pact of Bshaʿla village:

This usage prefigures the later adoption of ʿāmmiyya as the accepted term for the two 1821 leagues – ‘the ʿāmmiyya of Anṭalyās’ and ‘the ʿāmmiyya of Liḥfid’ – as well as for later popular movements.Footnote ⁴⁷ The term ṣāliḥ, also used in the pact, had previously been used to express the ‘interest’ or ‘good’ of a particular group: peasants swearing loyalty to a lord had promised to ‘strive in his interest (ṣāliḥ)’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The novelty was in using it in conjunction with ʿāmmiyya and jumhūr, to refer to the ‘interest’ of the commoner collectivity, not of a notable faction.

‘Are Christians only for paying piasters?’

If the ideas and terms which some have attributed to French inspiration have more probable roots in local political culture, there remains another possible source of ideological inspiration: Greece. The outbreak of the war which would lead to an independent Greek state was actually simultaneous with the 1821 Lebanese leagues. The French consul at Tripoli could write of both peasant leagues and Greek risings as part of ‘l’agitation générale’, equally ‘symptômes de guerre, de Révolte et d’anarchie’. ^{Footnote 49} Early Greek revolutionaries dreamed of a rebellion spanning the Balkans and the Hellenic diaspora, and attempts were in fact made to draw Mount Lebanon into the struggle. In 1820 or early 1821, when the Greek leader Alexandros Ypsilantis was in Odessa preparing for the Balkan expedition which would initiate the war, he reportedly had tentative contacts with Mount Lebanon via a Macedonian merchant.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet these contacts were not with the commoner rebels but with Emir Bashīr himself; and they had no immediate consequences, since in the spring of 1821 the commoners forced Emir Bashīr into exile, and by July Ypsilantis was defeated and in an Austrian gaol.Footnote ⁵¹ When contacts were resumed in 1825–26 between the now-restored Emir Bashīr and the provisional Greek government in Nafplio, the only upshot was an unofficial raid on Beirut by some fifteen ships.Footnote ⁵² The notion of a Lebanese ‘second front’ in the Greek war remained stillborn.

On the other hand, the main dynamic of the Greek war, whatever the Jacobin or liberal inspirations of some of its instigators, soon became that of a Christian rebellion against the Muslim ‘Turks’. We might be tempted to see in Mount Lebanon a close analogue: a Christian popular rising against Muslim or Druze rule, exacerbated by the Christian–Muslim tensions bred by the Greek rebellion. The notion resonates strongly with subsequent Lebanese politics, which took a marked sectarian turn from the 1840s onwards.

The leagues of 1821 were certainly made up of Maronite Christians, and the clergy played a part in organizing them; the French consul of Tripoli called the first league’s titular leader ‘General of all the Christians of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon’.Footnote ⁵³ Their cause was based, in part, on specifically Christian resentments. The Druze-dominated districts of southern Mount Lebanon had been sheltered from Abdallah’s tax demands, and the burden pushed onto the Christians of the north alone, and their clergy and monasteries.Footnote ⁵⁴ As well as causing material hardship, unequal taxation had implications for the relative status of communities. All non-Muslims in Ottoman lands were supposed to pay an extra poll tax for their ‘protection’ by arms-bearing Muslims, but this had always been difficult to extract effectively from the independent, armed Christians of Mount Lebanon.Footnote ⁵⁵ New taxes for Christians alone could look like an attempt to reduce them to subject, non-martial status: as a poet put it, ‘Are Christians only for paying piasters, and Druze for fighting with curved swords?’Footnote ⁵⁶ Outbreaks of violence between Druze and Christians over taxes were reported in central Mount Lebanon in May 1821.Footnote ⁵⁷ Further north, there were older precedents for a quasi-religious insurrection, in the 1759 rising of Christians against their Shia Muslim lords, which had, by ʿAynṭūrīnī’s account, quickly turned into an assault on Shia in general.Footnote ⁵⁸

A rising of Christians, led partly by the clergy and contemporary with the Greek rebellion, might thus appear to offer propitious circumstances for a sectarian outbreak. The repercussions of the Greek war in Syria, as across the Ottoman empire, certainly increased tensions between Muslims and Christians. After the Ottoman authorities hanged the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Istanbul on Easter Sunday 1821, governors elsewhere hastened to remind Christians of their subject status. In Damascus, old sumptuary laws were re-enforced; along the Syrian coast, Abdallah Pasha imposed a poll tax on Christians, fined merchants, and expelled some from Tripoli; more fled into Mount Lebanon.Footnote ⁵⁹ Abdallah attempted to disarm Christians at Sidon in April, and at Tripoli in July.Footnote ⁶⁰

Such acts may have added to Mountain commoners’ feeling that extra taxation was an attempt to reduce them to subject status. And this may indeed have formed part of Abdallah Pasha’s intention, spurred not by Greek events but (one chronicler suggests) by his contacts with plebeian Sufi circles in Acre.Footnote ⁶¹ Only around the cities and the coast, though, could Abdallah impose his measures directly. In the Mountain, beyond the range of his troops, both Abdallah’s tax demands and the commoner leagues entered into a pluralistic politics of elite factions, which militated against any simple polarization of Christians against Muslims or Druze. The first league of commoners negotiated directly with Abdallah, and he reciprocated.Footnote ⁶² After forcing Emir Bashīr from power, they made a pact with his cousins and rivals, the emirs Ḥasan and Salmān (and the Druze elite faction which supported them), according to which they would not pay extra taxes. Abdallah endorsed this, investing Ḥasan and Salmān as joint emirs – though he also arranged for their public conversion to Islam.Footnote ⁶³ The latter was probably meant as a token of Ottoman loyalty in the context of the Greek revolt, yet the assembled Christian commoners do not appear to have objected, since they then accompanied the new emirs (along with their Muslim teacher and a regiment of Abdallah’s troops) to the capital, Dayr al-Qamar.Footnote ⁶⁴ A few months later, when the two officially Muslim emirs failed to deliver the taxes, Abdallah accepted the return of Emir Bashīr (widely believed to be a Christian), who concluded another pact with the Christian and Druze elite and commoner leaders of the north-central districts. When the second commoner league of Liḥfid arose, among the districts further north excluded from this pact, Emir Bashīr sent the Druze troops of his ally Bashīr Jumblāṭ to suppress it. The Christian commoners called on the (ineffective) aid of both the emirs Ḥasan and Salmān and their Druze supporters, and the Shia Muslim elite of the far north, their ancestors’ former lords.Footnote ⁶⁵

Despite the inherent sectarian potential of an all-Christian league with clerical leadership, the commoner leagues of 1821 seem – unlike their successors later in the century – to have largely avoided being drawn into a polarization along religious lines. The Greek events clearly affected those in Mount Lebanon to some degree, but largely by way of the Ottoman state and its anxieties. The direct effects of the Greek war began to be felt along the Lebanese coast only after the Liḥfid rising had been suppressed in November 1821, with the flight of Tripoli’s Greek Orthodox Christians into the Mountain and frequent raids on the coast by Greek corsairs.Footnote ⁶⁶ Soon thereafter, Abdallah Pasha himself would enter into rebellion against the Ottoman state, and receive aid from the corsairs while besieged in his fortress of Acre.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1826, Emir Bashīr’s renewed contacts with the Greeks led only to the brief assault on Beirut, which he refused to support.Footnote ⁶⁸ Neither Bashīr nor other Lebanese seem to have been inspired by visions of pan-Ottoman revolution, and the pluralistic politics of Mount Lebanon did not yet lend themselves to a sharp polarization between Christian and Muslim.

Extracting blood and treasure

Instead of French revolutionary ideology or a Greek-style polarization between Christians and Muslims, the Lebanese events of 1821 seem to be a case of innovation from within the terms of a local political culture. This culture involved factional bargaining among a pluralistic elite, backed up with violence but also employing oaths and written pacts (however frequently broken). In 1821, a commoner collectivity, the jumhūr ʿammiyya, broke into this hitherto elite sphere, blending some of its forms (loyalty oaths, delegates, written pacts, and correspondence) with village-level practices (village assemblies, collective agreements) to forge unity among commoners and to conclude agreements with other factions. If ideological influence is ruled out, how do we explain its simultaneity and parallels with the broader age of revolutions?

The possibility of simple coincidence cannot be excluded. But I will suggest here that, while ideological connections do not seem plausible, at the level of more material factors it is possible to trace common causes lying behind the Mount Lebanon leagues and other revolutions. To examine these, we must turn to the original casus belli of the 1821 events: Abdallah Pasha’s excessive demand for taxes. This belongs to a larger pattern: excessive tax demands from previous governors had also provoked smaller rebellions by Lebanese commoners in 1800 and 1805. It seems plausible to link these to the intensification of the extractive power of the state in the region.

The eighteenth century had seen a struggle among local elites and corporate groups to extract revenue from the increasingly profitable commercial economy of the south-east Mediterranean: silk from Mount Lebanon, tobacco from coastal Syria, cotton from Acre and Egypt, rice from Egypt, grain from inland Syria, soap and olive oil from Palestine, and coffee entering Egypt from Yemen.Footnote ⁶⁹ Over the course of the century, the power of the central Ottoman state had receded, allowing local magnates in Syria and Egypt, as elsewhere, to centralize and extend their power.Footnote ⁷⁰ The rulers of Acre, Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar and later Jazzar Pasha, were especially successful: monopolies and close ties to European merchants allowed them to concentrate revenue and military force in their own hands and extend their domains, supplanting other elites.Footnote ⁷¹

These magnates’ struggles constituted, in effect, an intra-imperial competition between local military-fiscal regimes, which could interact with the struggle between the central Ottoman state and other empires. In 1771, as the Ottomans were engaged in a costly war with Russia, the Mamluk magnates of Egypt invaded Syria in alliance with Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar, and explored a possible Russian alliance.Footnote ⁷² In 1798–99, French revolutionary forces invaded Egypt and Syria, facing British and Ottoman opposition and drawing regional potentates – the Egyptian Mamluks, Jazzar Pasha, Emir Bashīr – into the struggle. In its aftermath a new force arose, as the Rumelian soldier Mehmed Ali succeeded in making himself master of Egypt. The wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries placed great burdens on Ottoman state finances, spurring military and administrative reform at both central imperial and local magnate levels.Footnote ⁷³ There was an uneven but marked intensification of the military-fiscal state across the south-east Mediterranean, by way of the tight monopolies and mercenary armies of the rulers of Acre, attempts by Emir Bashīr to tighten his control over Mount Lebanon in the 1820s, and ultimately Mehmed Ali’s novel extractive regime in Egypt and the conscript army he would use to invade Syria in 1831.Footnote ⁷⁴

Rulers concentrated power and profit within a narrower circle: their competition led to frequent wars as well as increased demands for revenue, and both bore heavily on the common people. Around 1791, a farmer-poet in Mount Lebanon wrote:

In addition, these were years of frequent high prices, dearth, and locust attacks.Footnote ⁷⁶ These trials perhaps seemed worse by contrast with new opportunities offered by the expanding commercial economy: the 1790s poet writes of falling into penury from relative prosperity. In a period of rising prices and inflation, producers could do well if taxes were paid in cash at historic fixed rates.Footnote ⁷⁷ But rulers did their utmost to extract revenue from the system, Jazzar Pasha gaining a reputation for especial rapacity.Footnote ⁷⁸ He and other military-fiscal centralizers weakened or destroyed old intermediary elites, replacing them with new ones: chancellors and bankers, men adept in the manipulation of money and paper but whose legitimacy was often unclear. ^{Footnote 79} The poet of 1791 went on to blame the emir’s wealthy Christian chancellor:

Non-elite contemporaries elsewhere in Syria evoked a similar atmosphere of instability and conflict; as different elites rose and fell, contrasts between hardship and prosperity became more flagrant, and legitimacy was called into question.Footnote ⁸¹ Such polarities may help us to explain why certain peasant producers in north-central Mount Lebanon would themselves claim a place in the competition over tax revenue, previously the domain of the elite.

These south-east Mediterranean developments fit into a far broader pattern of increasing military spending and state centralization. Behind it lay, most probably, the increase in monetizable wealth produced by commercialization and ‘industrious revolutions’ across Eurasia and the Atlantic world, which raised the stakes of inter-state competition. Christopher Bayly places Jazzar Pasha and the Mamluks of Egypt, along with Mysore and the Maratha state in India, in a group of small, aggressive polities emerging from within the weakening Muslim empires of Asia; we might add further examples such as Nguyen Vietnam.Footnote ⁸² In the Euro-Atlantic nexus – including, Toby Green argues, West African polities – a quickening tempo of military competition pushed states into autocratic reforms designed to extract more resources from populations, provoking political crises.Footnote ⁸³ The major theme was that of Franco-British competition; lesser powers also attempted to keep up, enacting centralizing reforms which provoked rebellions from the Andes (Tupac Amaru, the Comuneros) to southern Russia (Pugachev’s rebellion of 1773–75, in the wake of the Russo-Ottoman war).Footnote ⁸⁴ The culmination of this process was the French Revolution and the wars that followed, which led to an unprecedented expansion of military-fiscal power, especially British, worldwide, impacting non-European polities and peoples which had not been deeply affected by the earlier dynamic.Footnote ⁸⁵

Logics of response

Increasing tax demands thus seem to have originated in a dynamic of military-fiscal competition, which ranged across continents. But the pressures this generated operated on a set of very different, and often separate, political cultures, from the Euro-Atlantic nexus to West Africa to the Ottoman empire. Where ideological links are absent, how can we explain the fact that some at least of these cultures responded in what look like parallel ways, involving (for instance) ‘bottom-up’ political organization by the common people, or formal ‘constitution-like’ negotiated pacts?

Let us first examine the nature of the response in Mount Lebanon in 1821, when Abdallah Pasha’s tax demand exerted a pressure on the emirate. Emir Bashīr al-Shihābī was adept at the delicate and sometimes bloody game of Mount Lebanon politics. This involved essentially balancing the tax demands of the Pasha of Acre against the reluctance to pay of various factions of the Mountain tax-farming elite, while retaining as much revenue as possible for himself. The emir had to avoid alienating either too many of the elite, who provided him with armed support, or the pasha himself, who could side with another faction and elevate another male member of the Shihābī family as emir.Footnote ⁸⁶ His qualified independence reflected the economic and military balance of power between the Mountain and the coast and plains. The Mountain was extremely hard to subdue by outside force, but it was sufficiently dependent on outside trade – not least for its food – that good relations were necessary in the long run.Footnote ⁸⁷ A powerful governor like Jazzar could play off elite factions against each other, securing ever-increasing promises of revenue from weak emirs.Footnote ⁸⁸ A powerful emir, as Bashīr became through the 1820s and 1830s, could build up his own military-fiscal regime and increase his independence of the Ottoman governors: armed Lebanese peasants could be a formidable force in regional wars.Footnote ⁸⁹ A sufficiently powerful alliance of the great tax-farming families, meanwhile, could impose its own candidate as emir.Footnote ⁹⁰

Success was never guaranteed: Emir Bashīr had been deposed a few times between his first appointment as emir in 1788 and 1821.Footnote ⁹¹ A particularly excessive tax demand could put a major strain on the delicate system. How did the emir respond when faced with Abdallah’s exorbitant claim in 1821? First he stalled. He might have considered resisting – as he would do in 1830–31.Footnote ⁹² But faced with Abdallah’s seizure of hostages, mobilization of troops, and parleys with his rivals, he had to sign a promissory note for the taxes. He then borrowed from moneylenders and his rich ally Bashīr Jumblāṭ, but this could only be a short-term solution.Footnote ⁹³ He could, of course, have demanded cash from others of the tax-farming elite, but he could not afford to alienate too many of the allies on whom he depended for military support. (Their coffers, besides, had reputedly been emptied by the rapacious demands of Jazzar Pasha.Footnote ⁹⁴ ) Christians, at any rate, would claim that Emir Bashīr was unwilling or unable to impose extra taxes on the southern districts because these were the domains of Bashīr Jumblāṭ and other Druze lords on whom his power depended.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Christian peasants of the northern districts, however, were unprotected by any important elite group: since the expulsion of the Shia lords, their taxes were farmed via petty Christian village shaykhs.

The imposition of the extra taxes on the northern commoners and monasteries provoked a temporary breakdown of the elaborate system of clientship whereby commoners were incorporated into competing elite factions. Instead of a ‘negotiated’ politics (in Yaycioglu’s terms), the emir’s ‘top-down’ imposition of taxation was met by a novel, ‘bottom-up’ mode of organization. The fact that the northern peasants were protected by no major elite faction opened the way for them to organize as a commoner collectivity instead. The local elite, of clerics and village shaykhs, was relatively humble and unintegrated into the politics of the Mount Lebanon emirate. They were unable either to offer the commoners effective paternalist protection or to suppress their risings – if indeed they wanted to.Footnote ⁹⁶ Village shaykhs after the second 1821 rebellion would claim that they had been compelled to go along with it, but may have been covering for a more active sympathy. One, ʿAynṭūrīnī, was killed for taking part, as was at least one priest.Footnote ⁹⁷ In any case, the local shaykhs could not or would not provide Emir Bashīr with enough military force to suppress the rising, and he had to call on Bashīr Jumblāṭ’s Druze retainers.Footnote ⁹⁸

The presence of an accessible, co-optable elite helps explain how the commoner movement could access elite political forms such as writing, pacts, and delegates – and hence why north-central Mount Lebanon in particular should have seen the emergence of this novel political form. Similar factors probably favoured the emergence of other episodes of ‘commoner’ self-organization during the age of revolutions. Yet behind such episodes, I suggest, lay generalizable connections between ‘top-down’ military-fiscal competition and the mobilizations of ‘common people’, which operated across what were often very localized and distinctive political cultures.Footnote ⁹⁹ Three logics seem to derive from the dynamic of military-fiscal competition itself. Adelman describes one: the imperial drive to compete for ‘frontier’ lands, particularly in North America, which drew indigenous peoples inhabiting such lands into the revolutionary conjuncture.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

A second logic was military: imperial competition placed military personnel at a premium, and they too had to come from part of the common people. Even before the revolutionary crises, this seems to have placed some ‘egalitarian’ groups of soldiers – Muslim tribesmen in India, Janissaries in Istanbul, armed bands in the Ottoman Balkans – in a strong political position.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The need for military or quasi-military personnel then increased dramatically in the revolutionary crises and wars themselves. This could lead to new political compacts linking citizens’ rights to national military service;Footnote ¹⁰² these, in turn, might include previously excluded groups, such as slaves freed in return for military service.Footnote ¹⁰³ Similarly, in both urban and rural ‘revolutionary’ politics, crowds and bands of common people, sometimes armed, became major forces; even where these operated in the interest of elite factions, they might command rewards for their service.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We can see a logic of this type, perhaps, behind the growing role of Lebanese troops in regional wars, and the Christian commoners’ demand to be recognized as fit, like the Druze, to ‘fight with curved swords’.

Most evident in the Lebanese case is a third logic, of fiscal extraction. The needs of military competition pushed states or state-like regimes into more ambitious modes of extracting resources from populations. Intermediary elites or corporate groups, part of an older ‘negotiated’ or paternalist order, were stripped away and replaced by new moneyed men and officials who, like the emirs’ chancellors, often lacked the legitimacy of the old elites.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The extractive power of state or magnate came increasingly to confront, in bare, unmediated form, the common people – who were, as Rediker and Linebaugh remind us, the producers of the wealth that was at stake in military-fiscal competition.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This newly stark opposition could lead these people towards organizing themselves, not as members of corporations or adherents of elite factions – entities no longer capable of protecting them – but in more general categories such as ‘commoners’ or ‘citizens’.

These three logics did not of course operate uniformly or with equal force everywhere; nor did they lead to the same outcomes. Exactly where and how they provoked confrontations between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ politics was certainly shaped by local political traditions as well as sheer contingency. Nothing in these general trends could predict that a newly appointed young pasha, perhaps moved by Sufi zeal, would decide to demand exorbitant taxes in 1821, or that the balance of Lebanese politics at that moment would lead to their being imposed on the north-central districts. But we can suggest that many broader similarities between widely separated political developments in the age of revolutions can be attributed to such logics, arising from the central dynamic of competing military-fiscal regimes.

Renegotiation

The hegemony of the bottom-up organization of plebeians and commoners rarely lasted long: elite rule soon reasserted itself. Yet it did not always do so simply in the old forms of top-down politics. Elite groups regained power partly via a process of negotiation and co-optation, in the course of which they blended the innovations of bottom-up politics with older political forms. This process, too, is visible in Mount Lebanon.

The politics of the emirate had traditionally been the business of emirs and shaykhs, not of commoners. When one of Emir Bashīr’s rival emirs asked some Druze shaykhs to join him and the commoners of the Jbayl district, they replied: ‘we will not be led by the Christian commoners of that country: it would be a disgrace for us’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It was probably to gain respectability in the face of elite attitudes like this that the first 1821 movement appointed a man of rank as titular head.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But the complex, divided nature of political authority in the Mountain meant that the elite did not instantly form a common front against the peasant collectivity: many were prepared to negotiate or ally themselves with them. Rival Shihābī emirs, their Druze supporters, and the Shia lords of the north were prepared to collaborate actively, and Abdallah Pasha was prepared to negotiate with them. Emir Bashīr had previously made a written alliance with the anti-tax rebels of 1800, securing their aid for his return to power.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In the summer of 1821, some of his faction seem to have made pacts with commoners which used the new language of popular interests and representation, alongside an older vocabulary of obedience. A pact sworn by a single family in July 1821 to a shaykh loyal to Emir Bashīr echoes the language of the commoner pacts: ‘we will be with the whole of the blessed commonalty (jumhūr al-ʿammiyya) … we will consider the good of the populace (ṣāliḥ al- jumhūr)’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

But the most elaborate covenant to come out of the interaction between elites and commoner movements was made in June 1821. After returning to the Mountain from his brief exile, Emir Bashīr gathered notables at the village of Sumqāniyya (where in 1697 the Druze elite is said to have met to elect his Shihābī ancestor as emir). Here he had a pact signed by representatives of the eight leading families of the tax-farming elite, plus ‘all the people’ of the Matn, Shūf, and Gharb regions of central-southern Lebanon. We should be sceptical as to the ‘all’: most chronicle accounts refer mainly to shaykhs or notables as participants. But they perhaps included some leaders of the first commoner league of Anṭalyās; its titular head, Shaykh Faḍl al-Khāzin, signed.Footnote ¹¹¹

The Sumqāniyya pact notes that ‘Circumstances in the land, the overturning of its condition and the dissension among its great men’, are bringing about ‘destruction and the ruin of the country’. Hence the signatories, the ‘sons of obedience’, have ‘bound ourselves by a bond’ to be ‘of one condition, one opinion, one hand … to set up the good (ṣāliḥ) of the country, remove injustices’, and ensure that ‘the outsider’ should not rule over it. If any ruling emir or tax farmer should commit injustices, they will remonstrate with him, and if necessary ‘rise together against him’. The country should pay only ‘the original Sultanic tax decreed from olden days’. The notables are enjoined to ‘walk according to the ancient customs of [their] forefathers’; transgressors and traitors to the pact are threatened with the action of the group ‘as one hand’, and the ‘wrath of God and his prophets’.Footnote ¹¹²

A later document which seems to be a renewal of this pact is still more explicit, laying down ‘the conditions of just rule’: if the ruler unjustly punishes one of their number, the other signatories will oppose this. If he persists, they will compensate the wronged party: ‘we undertake to share his loss among all (jumhūr) of us’.

Jumhūr here takes on a different sense from the one that it bears in the commoners’ pacts, encompassing not the ‘body of the commoners’ but the established elite, in their traditional order of rank, plus the notables of the commoners. Still, these two documents attempt to formalize a principle of strict watchfulness over the actions of the ruling emir – in financial matters especially – on the part of the elite and some of the common people of the Mountain. Claiming to codify earlier practice, ‘our old way and customs’, they nonetheless constitute a more formal ‘constitutional’ agreement than any that appear to have preceded them. Like so many elaborate covenants, they seem to have remained largely a dead letter. A few years after his re-establishment in power, Emir Bashīr decisively broke the power of many of the Druze notables in a move towards ‘top-down’ centralization. More immediately, in autumn 1821, he collected extra taxes – though we should note that he imposed them on the northern districts which had not been party to the Sumqāniyya pact, suggesting that it protected the southern and central districts to some degree.

This short-lived pact represents a formalized ‘negotiated’ solution to the problem created by a clash of top-down extractive regime and bottom-up commoner revolt. Though conceived wholly in the terms of a local political culture, it nonetheless fits into a larger contemporary pattern: the rash of Euro-Atlantic constitutions on the pattern of French and American revolutionary ones; the 1808 convention between the Ottoman Sultan and provincial notables; charters conceded by even staunchly monarchical regimes at the European Restoration.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Many such agreements, like the Lebanese one, were soon overtaken by events; but they belong to a broader pattern of ‘renegotiation’, designed to stabilize the political order after revolution, war, or other upheavals – or to forestall such disruptions. These renegotiated solutions, like the Sumqāniyya pact, tended to combine older understandings of politics with revolutionary innovations.Footnote ¹¹⁵ We can suggest that renegotiations, in their various forms, derived from the logic of a clash between the top-down politics of a military-fiscal regime, and the bottom-up politics of the common people. Some would go on to provide new forms of legitimacy for the unprecedented expansion of state power through the nineteenth century.

Confluences and conclusions

The innovative forms of language and of popular organization created by the 1821 commoner leagues would be blended, over the course of the nineteenth century, with European-derived ideas and forms. In 1840, many groups of Lebanese rose up against the oppressive rule of Mehmed Ali’s Egyptian state, a more ambitious military-fiscal project than any they had previously known: it sought not only to tax but to disarm and conscript them. In north-central Mount Lebanon, commoners followed the patterns of 1821, forming armed bands and assemblies and concluding a written pact with Druze allies at the church of Anṭalyās, meeting place of the first 1821 league.Footnote ¹¹⁶ European powers were coming to play a far larger role in Lebanese politics: the rebels, commoners and others, now sought to treat not only with Emir Bashīr and Ottoman authorities, but with British and French consuls and agents.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In exchanges with these, a novel political language was coming into use, involving terms such as ‘liberty’ and opposition to Egyptian ‘slavery’, as well as references to the recent Ottoman decree that heralded the Tanzimat reforms.Footnote ¹¹⁸ More tellingly, commoner rebels employed them in a proclamation addressed to other Lebanese, evoking both the French revolutionary wars and the Greek revolt: ‘the Greeks rose up before you, and attained absolute freedom from God’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Over the succeeding decades, European-influenced modes of political representation on the basis of religious sect intermingled with forms derived from Mount Lebanon’s earlier political culture. This blending would influence, among other things, an 1840 pact among the elite, mass meetings and petitioning in the 1840s and 1850s, a peasant rising in 1858, and sectarian Christian armed bands in 1860.Footnote ¹²⁰ As elsewhere in the Ottoman empire and across the non-European world, the growing influence of European states and greater familiarity with European intellectual culture led over time to the adoption and adaptation of political vocabularies and forms deriving from the Euro-Atlantic age of revolutions.Footnote ¹²¹ It was this confluence that allowed later writers to perceive Lebanese commoner movements from 1821 onwards as expressing French revolutionary or nationalist ideas, or to read pacts among the elite as forms of Lebanese democracy or national-sectarian power-sharing.Footnote ¹²²

Faced with the apparent diffusion of Euro-Atlantic political forms throughout the nineteenth-century world, one explanation points to the sheer domination of a specifically European-centred capitalist economy and bureaucratic state system, which encouraged political responses understandable in its own terms – undoubtedly a factor in Mount Lebanon from the 1840s. Another suggests that these Euro-Atlantic innovations were more radical and sophisticated than those elsewhere, owing to the greater intensity of the revolutionary processes from which they sprang. But neither of these necessarily tell us how these political forms came to seem plausible to other people. A possible answer has been suggested by Andrew Sartori, to explain the adoption of ‘Lockean’ concepts by early twentieth-century Bengali peasants. He points not to the inherent qualities or even the British-imperial prestige of these concepts, but to the fact that they described and explained a set of social conditions and practices – capitalism – which Bengali peasants were then confronting. Without necessarily knowing much of the original context of English liberal or Lockean ideas, Bengalis found them plausible within their own context.Footnote ¹²³

A similar suggestion could be made for the spread of Euro-Atlantic political innovations of the ‘age of revolutions’ into other regions. These areas, too, were participating in the shared dynamics outlined above: military competition, the top-down centralization of extractive states, bottom-up organization by the common people, and renegotiated elite responses. Particular Euro-Atlantic political forms, developed in response to these conditions, then appeared plausible to people confronting similar conditions outside the Euro-Atlantic zone. Yet the instance of Mount Lebanon calls our attention to a further possibility. Here, the shared conditions of military-fiscal competition led a distinctive local political culture to create its own response – a bottom-up movement and a renegotiated pact – analogous to Euro-Atlantic and other responses. Later in the nineteenth century, a ‘diffusionist’ dynamic began, as Lebanese adopted European-derived notions and forms of representation, nationality, and religious community. But this happened in a context not only of material conditions which were converging with those of the Euro-Atlantic zone, but also of locally produced ideas and practices which were themselves innovative responses to the new, shared conditions of commercialization and military-fiscalism. This possibility, as well as that suggested by Sartori, is worth considering in other cases where Euro-Atlantic ideas and political forms seem to have been ‘diffused’. Where a European-derived element is present (as in Mount Lebanon from 1840), historians may be tempted to see this as the source of all political innovation, rather than asking whether it is blended with an independent, parallel response to novel conditions. This is the heuristic usefulness of the 1821 case: it makes clear that such a response was possible in the absence of ideological diffusion.

This study of the instance of Mount Lebanon in 1821 has helped to outline a possible framework for the study of the age of revolutions. This framework involves accepting, in large part, recent historians’ geographical extension of the age of revolutions beyond the Euro-Atlantic zone; but it explains the parallel revolutionary patterns across this extended area – including within the Euro-Atlantic zone itself – in terms less of intellectual circulations than of shared politico-economic dynamics. Distinct political cultures might respond largely in their own terms to the common challenge of rising military-fiscal competition, with its tendency to pit top-down regimes against bottom-up political organization; or they might blend local forms with those borrowed from other cultures experiencing similar processes. In either case, many of the parallelisms between ‘revolutionary’ processes noted by scholars may be traced less to ideological circulation than to logics deriving from the shared process of military-fiscal escalation. This put three factors – ‘frontier’ lands, money or monetizable wealth, and military or otherwise mobilizable personnel – at a premium, while stripping away the negotiated forms which had interposed themselves between the military-fiscal extraction of wealth and its producers. This combination could, in certain circumstances, allow the emergence of bottom-up forms of politics in which ‘commoners’ organized for their own ends; and this, or the threat of it, could lead to the renegotiation of the political order. These parallel processes of politico-cultural innovation, along with the shared material conditions which underpinned them, then paved the way for the later appropriation of political innovations from the Euro-Atlantic zone which had experienced the ‘age of revolutions’ in its most intense form.

There remain unanswered questions, two of which seem especially important. First, how far can such a model extend geographically, and does it apply only very unevenly to different areas? Notions of unevenness might help us explain both the evident differences in outcome of revolutionary episodes themselves, and the contrasting trajectories of the relevant societies in the post-revolutionary period. Some peoples and regions, of course, must be seen as falling outside the model: but, rather than simply pointing to them as counter-examples, we should enquire why their political dynamics were different. Second, how unique were such processes to this this particular ‘age’? Many have argued that the age of revolutions needs to be seen in relation to earlier cycles, especially the ‘crisis of the seventeenth century’. Drawing such connections raises the question of ulterior causes lying behind the dynamics of military-fiscalism – to be found, it has been variously argued, in demographic trends, climactic events, or cycles of capitalist accumulation.Footnote ¹²⁴ It is in the direction of addressing such questions, and of testing shared frameworks and logics such as that proposed above, that I suggest the ‘global age of revolutions’ debate should now move.