Taylan Paksoy

Project Description

This research examines the formation and fracturing of Lebanon's governing elite across the century separating the fall of the Shihabi Emirate in 1840 from the first American military intervention in the Levant in 1958, tracing how a distinctive class of cosmopolitan political actors constructed, adapted, and ultimately exhausted a mode of elite governance unique in the modern Middle East. Charting the successive crises through which a governing nucleus originating in the multiconfessional aristocracies of Mount Lebanon gradually incorporated coastal merchants, educated professionals, and ideologically driven politicians, the project argues that the 1958 crisis was not a Cold War imposition upon a passive Levantine society but the culmination of a century of failed elite amalgamation.

Publications