WWI in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora

By the time of the First World War, there were roughly 500,000 Lebanese and Syrians in the Americas. And as Stacy Fahrenthold argues in a new book entitled Between the Ottomans and the Entente, this diaspora played a critical role in the transformation of politics in Greater Syria over a period of incredible flux. In our conversation, we discuss how the diaspora embraced and sustained the revolutionary fervor of the post-1908 Ottoman Empire into the First World War, when loyalties to the Ottomans and their Entente adversaries were divided. After the war, this diaspora likewise sought to influence the outcome of the postwar map after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But what would be the fate of the Greater Syrian diaspora with the establishment of the French Mandates?