Fictions of Capital in 1870s and 1880s Beirut
Arabic readers in the late nineteenth century struggled to negotiate the contradictions of their position in the world economy: Beirut was at once a peripheral hub of speculation, a market for finished French textiles, and an industrializing source of the unrefined silk off which French factory owners profited. While Al-Muqtaṭaf, founded in 1876, was averse (at least in its Beirut years) to speculation and instead championed the local production of commodities in all their materiality, for Salīm al-Bustānī and Al-Jinān, it was becoming clear that finance, through the many fictions it enabled, was decisively changing the future of the region. Al-Bustānī offered late nineteenth-century Beirut and more generally readers of Arabic lessons in how the credit-driven consumption of material goods allowed the keeping up of appearances in his novels Budūr (1872), Bint al-ʿaṣr (1875, Daughter of the Age) and the early 1880s Sāmiyyah.