Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword: studying the mandates: past, present, future / Nadine Méouchy and Peter Sluglett -- Introduction / Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan -- Part I. The mandate states in the world: international institutions, transnational linkages -- Introduction to Part I / Andrew Arsan -- Globalization, imperialism, and the perspectives of foreign soldiers in the Middle East during the First World War / Leila Fawaz -- Between communal survival and national aspiration: Armenian genocide refugees, the League of Nations and the practices of interwar humanitarianism / Keith David Watenpaugh -- Compassion and connections: feeding Beirut and assembling mandate rule in 1919 / Simon Jackson -- Exporting obligations: evolutionism, normalization, and mandatory anti-alcoholism from Africa to the Middle East (1918-1939) / Philippe Bourmaud -- Education for real life: pragmatist pedagogies and American interwar expansion in Iraq / Sarah Pursley -- The mandate system as a style of reasoning: international jurisdiction and the parcelling of imperial sovereignty in petitions from Palestine / Natasha Wheatley -- Citizens from afar: Palestinian migrants and the new world order, 1920-1930 / Nadim Bawalsa -- French mandate counterinsurgency and the repression of the great Syrian revolt / Michael Provence -- Part II. Mandate states: governance, discourses, interests -- Introduction to Part II / Cyrus Schayegh -- Colonial gender discourse in Iraq: constructing non-citizens / Noga Efrati -- Mapping the cadastre, producing the fellah: technologies and discourses of rule in French mandate Syria and Lebanon / Elizabeth Williams -- Suspect service: prostitution and the public in the mandate Mediterranean / Camila Pastor -- The successful failure of reform: police legitimacy in British Palestine / John L. Knight -- The social origins of mandatory rule in trans-Jordan / Tariq Tell -- Colonial cartography and the making of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria / Asher Kaufman -- Rashid Rida & the 1920 Syrian-Arab constitution: how the French mandate undermined Islamic liberalism / Elizabeth F. Thompson -- The nation as moral community: language and religion in the 1919 King-Crane Commission / Lori Allen -- Part III. Mandate state-society interactions and societal action: politics, culture, economy -- Introduction to Part III / Cyrus Schayegh -- Development and disappointment: Arab approaches to economic modernization in mandate Palestine / Jacob Norris -- Throwing trans-Jordan into Palestine: electrification and state formation, 1921-1954 / Fredrik Meiton -- Abu Jilda, anti-imperial anti-hero: banditry and popular rebellion in Palestine / Alex Winder -- A massacre without precedent: pedagogical constituencies and communities of knowledge in mandate Lebanon / Nadya Sbaiti -- Hebrew under English rule: the language politics of mandate Palestine / Liora R. Halperin -- Divinely imprinting prints: or, how pictures became influential persons in mandate Lebanon / Kirsten Scheid -- Jews in an imperial pocket: northern Iraqi Jews and the British mandate / Orit Bashkin -- Sanctity across the border: pilgrimage routes and state control in mandate Lebanon and Palestine / Toufoul Abou-Hodeib -- Rebels without borders: southern Syria and Palestine, 1919-1936 / Laila Parsons -- Part IV. Conclusions -- Introduction to Part IV / Cyrus Schayegh -- The mandates and/as decolonization / Cyrus Schayegh -- Was there a mandates period? Some concluding thoughts / James L. Gelvin.