Research
Kristen' Alff’s current book project, Levantine Joint-stock Companies and the Shaping of Global Capitalism 1850-1925, focuses on the activities of several Beiruti family joint-stock companies engaged in land investment and trans- Mediterranean trade. In it, she argues that forms of sharecropping rooted in the Ottoman social formation were the most efficient for local capital accumulation. These techniques made the Levantine companies competitive on the global market and thus shaped the character of global capitalism before and after World War I.
Kristen Alff explores the local land tenure arrangements further in her second book project. In it she answers the question of how and why the Levantine companies made the largest land sales to the Jewish National Fund and other Jewish land purchasing agents in the 1920s. Tracing the Ottoman land laws and social practices in the Levant, Alff is the first to argue that state-backed political and economic power these companies acquired during World War I made the land sales possible.
Information in the record books and letters Kristen Alff found while researching her first book form the basis of her third book project, The Forgotten Black Gold: A History of Bitumen in the Levant, 1835-1945. In The Forgotten Black Gold, Alff combines analyses of business, geology, and infrastructure to show how this dense mixture of hydrocarbons, otherwise known as bitumen, was important to industrialization in the Middle East and beyond. Paints, shoe leathers, and varnishes for decorative pots, even the very first photographs created in Paris, all relied on what buyers called “Judea bitumen” (bitumen from the Dead Sea) for their creation. In fact, demand from parts of Europe, and from home, motivated Arab and Jewish companies in Beirut and Jerusalem to compete for concessions from the Ottoman and Mandate governments to mine bitumen in the Dead Sea region and parts of Syria. In turn, competition over bitumen-mining in the nineteenth-century Levant shifted conceptions of property rights from superficial ownership over what was above the ground, to ownership over what was also under the land and water. In shifting the focus to underground sources, global demand for bitumen also motivated companies to create the infrastructure necessary for new industrial forms of capitalism.
