ABSTRACT
This essay examines Palestinian “men of capital” in British-ruled Palestine. It lays out their historical erasure as the product of settler colonialism; the historiographic dominance of the aristocrat, the comprador, and the middle-class hero; and how nostalgia, mourning, and the idealization of pre-1948 Palestine have flattened social life. Elites were not homogenous landowners but worked in commercial and industrial ventures. These men (and to a lesser extent women) shaped a broader Arab nahda, or renaissance, as an economic project. This essay maps out the regimes of calculation that realized national economy as a space of surveillance. It argues that attention to how these regimes unfolded could destabilize the conventional depiction of the colonial body as the agent and the colonized body as its ephemeral shadow.
