On Tuesday 10 February, Dr. Simon Jackson (University of Birmingham) will present a paper entitled ‘Drivers of History: Fords and Fordism between Beirut and Detroit, 1918-1939’ at the Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR) seminar (5.00-6.30pm, DS2.14). His paper will trace the trans-national discursive and material circuits that bound Beirut and Lebanon to Dearborn and the United States in the years after WW1, and place this story into historiographical context. Based on the writings of Lebanese nationalists, corporate documents and dealership records from Beirut, and on the economic archives of the French Mandate authorities, his paper will ask how Lebanese nationalism operated as an ideological effect of re-configured circuits of labor power and commodity production after World War One, and became established in the new system of class relations those circuits entailed in both Beirut and Detroit.

All welcome.