The "trace" of history behind the borders of the French Mandate in the Levant : geographical imaginaries and territorial formation in imperial context.
In 1933, A. Poidebard published La trace de Rome dans le désert de Syrie. The Jesuit's archeological work was in fact associated with a larger exploration momentum of the Syrian East, and with the demarcation of the border with Iraq, also completed in 1933. After 1919, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire introduced a profound reconfiguration of the Near East's political geography. In what became the Levant States, French administrators introduced new “international” borders, with the British mandates and Turkey, but also internal ones, as the French territories were soon divided into up to five different “states”.
Over the last decades, the partition of the Near East has come to epitomize colonial arbitrariness, and the regions’ borders are often presented as perfect illustration of “artificial” lines, drawn on an “empty map” by European administrators disregarding pre-existing spatial practices and territorialities. However, a throughout analysis of the border-making process, shows that French administrators were actually mindful of the region’s geography and of the history of its delimitations, and relied on several layers of geographical knowledge produced during the previous decades by European and Ottoman mapmakers, geographers, and administrators. In 1919, the map of the region was far from empty.
Antoine Poidebard’s exploration of the mandate’s borderlands illustrates the importance of the figure of the Roman Empire in the way the French apprehended their mission in the production of the Mandate’s territory, but at a larger scale, it also shows the close link between archeological and historical knowledge and border-demarcation. This paper wishes to present how the different historical spatial imaginaries – ancient, medieval, modern – inherited and extended by the French Mandate administration played a direct and indirect role in the border-making process, from imperial allocation in European capitals to demarcation and administration on the ground.
Mots clés : Spatial imaginaries|Border-making|Levant|French empire|Colonial spatialities
A104245LL