Summary: The interwar period was an era of significant change in urban-rural relations throughout the world and witnessed an unprecedented use of technology in the agrarian and ecological spheres. Most notably, class specific urban movements posed as apolitical incorporated technocratic changes in the countryside as part of a nation-building project, place the romanticized peasantry as an object at the heart of these social transformations. In this episode, Sam Dolbee discusses one such movement based at the American University in Beirut during the 1930s, as middle class students and officials became involved in an ambiguous effort to transform the Lebanese-Syrian countryside in the shadow of French colonial rule.
