Masato Tanaka is a PhD candidate at Universität Heidelberg and a pre-doctoral research fellow in the DFG-funded Research Training Group Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, hosted at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. He holds a BA and an MA in Asian History from the University of Tokyo. His doctoral dissertation explores how political and economic liberalism found its resonance among the emerging middle-class professionals of late and post-Ottoman Levant, analyzing its far-reaching repercussions on the social fabric of local communities at the intersection of local, imperial, and global entanglements.

Dissertation Description

In the Shadow of the Merchant Republic: The Middle Class and Politics of Economic Development in Modern Lebanon, ca. 1860–1930

Dominated by the consortium of local politico-economic elites from diverse confessions that have pursued decades of open-door trade and laissez-faire economic policy, Lebanon in the twenty-first century, once called the Merchant Republic, resembles a microcosm of the contemporary world in the age of neoliberalism. My doctoral project seeks to locate the historical intersection of economic liberalism and religious pluralism at the emergence of the urban middle class in the region against the backdrop of Ottoman imperial reform and French colonialism. Focusing on Mount Lebanon and Beirut, I will explore how emerging economic professionals intermingled in the trans-imperial networks of urban nodes and articulated their visions of political economy and civilizational development in the wake of the communal violence of 1860. In doing so, I seek to analyze the emergence of ethnonational imaginaries and corresponding paramilitary forces in the Interwar Middle East as a long-term repercussion of the pursuit of the liberal economic order by the global middle classes.