Infiltrating ecology: the rise of industrial agriculture in modern Lebanon, 1950–1960

This doctoral thesis is a study of agricultural history in 1950s Lebanon. It considers the early consolidation of the agro-industrial paradigm as both a material and an immaterial process. I argue that the American University of Beirut (AUB) was the torchbearer of this transformation in the country and region more broadly. AUB formalized anglophone agronomy as an ascendant knowledge system in an eco-epistemic context where Arabic otherwise prevailed. Entrenched in neocolonial agendas of the United States, the university promoted forms of empiricism that advanced the statist and militarized capture of ecology but not without resistance and syncretic negotiations. At the same time, the campus and university farm alike were where faculty and students as well as crops and livestock rehearsed the forms of interspecies relationality requisite for the permeation of agro-industry and its fossil fuel technologies. These relations became increasingly chemicalized, mechanized, and androcentric.
To the discipline of the environmental humanities, this study offers a fresh hermeneutic that foregrounds more-than-human relations across epistemology, historiography, agriculture, and ecopoetics. It also contributes a perspective on the ancient in addition to modern wells of knowledge and experience anchored in Arabic. Expanding on recent scholarship of environmental historians focused on the Mashriq (Arab Levant), this thesis uniquely centers education and culture while amplifying student, feminist, and decolonizing voices. To that end, agriscientific texts, pedagogical materials, student newspapers, university yearbooks, and poetry plus manuscript recensions from the archive interrelate, showing how dominant modes of knowing and inhabiting ecosystems are in fact historically contingent and anything but inevitable.