Bare Needs: Palestinian Capitalists and British Colonial Rule

Abstract:
In British-ruled Palestine, Palestinian elites and British colonial officials attempted to define and regulate basic needs with varying consequences for economic thought and practices. In the 1930s, against the backdrop of armed rebellion and the Great Depression, Palestinian capitalists distinguished between needs and luxuries in order to shape a pan-Arab utopia as well as emerging forms of gendered subjectivities. As the decade wore on and World War II came to Palestine, these capitalists, with their emphasis on growth and capital accumulation, confronted a landscape of commercial paralysis and a crisis of supply. The scarcity of basic goods such as wheat, rice, and flour and the specter of political disorder also inspired the British colonial government to innovate new modes of economic management. Through institutions such as the Middle East Supply Center, British colonial rule shaped ideal territories. In Palestine, an ambitious rationing regime relied on new indices such as the “calorie” and the “cost of living” to determine each person’s “bare minimum,” assure “food for all,” and assess colonial rule. By tracing these instances of defining and regulating individual needs, this paper explores the commonalities and differences in Palestinian and British visions of progress, territory, and economic development. It reveals divergent but overlapping attempts to shape and develop the economy as an object of knowledge and a site of social management.