About the Event

Who, and perhaps more importantly what, is a worker? Starting in the 1870s government officials, company managers, political organizers, and laboring people in Greater Syria (today’s Lebanon and Syria) began to ask this question. Faced with labor struggles from Beirut to Aleppo and beyond, a diverse set of historical actors realized something in common: the category of the “worker” was becoming central to how people organized and oriented themselves in a world increasingly ruled by capitalist social formations. They also recognized that the answer to this question was not immediately available. It would be worked out through social, legal and intellectual struggles over the next half century. This talk explores the history of “the worker question” in Greater Syria between 1870-1939 by examining the work stoppages, newspaper debates, and legislative initiatives which attempted to define or manage workers. Brown Postdoctoral fellow in Labor History Ellis Garey argues that over the course of the late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman period, it became impossible for a wide range of historical actors to make sense of their social reality without reference to the status of people who labored.

About the Speaker
Ellis Garey holds a Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies from New York University. She recently joined Brown as the 2024-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow in Labor History. Her manuscript in progress, “Figuring Labor: The Emergence of the Worker in Greater Syria, 1870-1939,” attends to the emergence of “the worker” as both a social concept and as a historical actor in late-Ottoman and French Mandate Greater Syria. Her research has been published in The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and is forthcoming in the Radical History Review.