Ian Coller Latrobe University, Melbourne, Australia Review of Jennifer M.

Dueck, The Claims of Culture at Empires End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule In recent decades we have become used to reading cultural histories of politics: it is refreshing therefore to read a political history of culture, and all the more so in such a charged context as the end of the French mandates in Syria and Lebanon. Jennifer Dueck looks at the struggles over this field of culture now frequently analysed in terms of the soft power theorized by Joseph Nye as it emerged out of the militarized, colonizing forms of power that held nineteenthcentury empires together. The field of players is, characteristically, multiplicitous and shifting across the period: organs of the French state; Francophone Catholic and Jewish religious organizations; local Christians, Muslims and Jews; the briefly rising star of the Fascist youth groups sponsored by Italy and Germany; the more durable ascendancy of American influence. The subject of the book is primarily the response of French-connected institutions and organizations to this complex field of challenge, and the ways in which Francophone culture itself became a field of struggle between those backed in various ways by the power of the French state, and the local Francophone elites who contested French control as often as they drew upon it. This is a complex story because it involves not only a multiplicity of players, but also a dual field of analysis. Syria and Lebanonwhile both parts of a larger field of the historical Levant (in Arabic, bilad al-sham) sharing an Ottoman history and an attendant religious plurality, if not pluralismtook very different paths to independence. The very creation of Lebanon placed the Christian and particularly the Maronite notability into a position of ostensible majority, although this was really a fiction based on the census carried out in 1932, and sustained by the existence of a very large Lebanese Christian diaspora. Conversely, Syriaalthough eventually subject to a seizure of power by members of the Alawi sectwas closely identified with Muslim Arabism throughout this period. The introduction to the book offers some general reflections on the question of culture, noting the difficulties surrounding the use of this term, and citing a whole series of scholars who have reshaped the field, from Geertz to Said. Dueck suggests that she will define culture as the negotiations and networks that grew up between public leaders who held, or coveted, a stake in cultural institutions in a region brimming with international strategic interest.(p.7) But this still leaves the umbrella question of what is cultural largely moot, referring equally to identity and symbols, to concrete institutions such as schools, and social practices like scouting and tourism. Indeed, the theoretical question is not raised again in the book, which in effect deals with cultural questions as a keyhole through which to observe political struggles and negotiations. In the process it achieves many insights into the multifaceted politics of transition, but Dueck rarely articulates exactly how this investigation changes our picture of the end of

the mandates, or in what ways it pushes beyond the work of other scholars such as Elizabeth Thompson and Keith Watenpaugh. In the opening chapter, the account of the Ottoman and French background to this period is highly problematic, with historical inaccuracies in the dating and interpretation of the capitulatory agreements (p.21). The book is divided into three sections: the first section, on the role of French schools and schooling in Lebanon and Syria, begins with the looming figure of Gabriel Bounoure, the official and intellectual who laid the keystone of French cultural influence in Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s, through an impressive manipulation of the multiple pieces on the cultural chessboard. For Dueck, this tolerant pragmatist approach was frustrated by a multiplicity of other French players, and more profoundly with the advent of the Vichy administration after 1940. Although she notes the significance of the internal French struggles over the position of the clergy, from the Third Republic to Vichy, this larger metropolitan context is discussed very little in comparison to the detailed analysis of the foreign affairs archives. The second section deals with Foreign threats to the status quo from the Fascist powers, and then from Britain and the United States in the post-war context: this is fascinating stuff, but it would have been helpful to consider to what degree this Fascist instrumentalization of culture served to ground the subsequent struggles. The third section of the book investigates scouting as a national and transnational practice of identity, from the Baden Powell and the Scouts de France - the competing French and British transnational versions of scouting to indigenous adaptations such as the Ottoman Scouts and the Muslim Scouts of Syria. This is the most compelling part of the book, opening up an original and fascinating field of national contestation and expression: a topic touched upon by scholars such as Watenpaugh, but fully deserving of a more extended study. But it also reveals some limitations of this approach. While using the archival documents to great effect to reveal political conflicts, it says less about the cultural dimension of scouting as a practice, about its symbols, networks and relationships to other modes of collective self-representation. Overall, this is a significant piece of transnational historical scholarship, but one that augments rather than alters our understanding of this period.