Merchants and miracles: global circulations and the making of modern Bethlehem

Bethlehem holds an iconic status around the world, but the town and its people remain little understood. With two key outputs in the form of a digital archive and a monograph, and an accompanying campaign of public engagement, this project brings to life Bethlehem's modern history of global movement and exchange. In so doing, it creates a new way of thinking about the role of global influences in Middle Eastern history. Between 1860 and 1930 merchants from the town circulated the globe, selling Bethlehem-made devotional objects such as crosses, rosaries and model shrines. Their creation of a Bethlehem 'brand' helped produce today's image of the sleepy hilltop village of the nativity. But it also brought unprecedented change to the real Bethlehem. As the town's residents adopted increasingly transnational lifestyles, they transformed tiny Bethlehem into one of the most globally connected, socially dynamic towns anywhere in the Middle East. This matters to wider understandings of the region because global dynamics in this critical period are usually presented as arriving from the 'outside' via European imperialism, Zionism, and western missionaries. By contrast this project reinstates Arab Palestinians as active shapers of the region's entanglement with globalisation. Recent scholarship has paid close attention to the mass migrations out of Ottoman Syria (which included Palestine) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - movements that laid the foundations of today's global Arab diaspora. But the impact of these migrations on local Middle Eastern society has not yet been systematically explored. Bethlehem provides the opportunity to do this, not just because its residents' migrations were inherently circular, but also because they served as 'pioneers' for hundreds of thousands to follow in their wake. People from all over the region mimicked their success selling 'Holy Land' objects, often feigning affiliation with Bethlehem and Jerusalem where none existed. As with the Bethlehem merchants, they largely hailed from small towns and tended to reinvest their new wealth back in their place of origin. By the turn of the 20th century a discernible migrant 'nouveau riche' had appeared across the Middle East, exerting a disruptive but hitherto undocumented impact on structures of class, family, gender and religiosity. The project's two major outputs will explore this interplay between global migration and localised social change from differing yet complementary angles. First, the digital archive will provide an open access, online resource consisting of thousands of images, video/audio recordings, and interactive 3-D models that allow users to trace the global networks that have shaped Bethlehem's development. Once the archive's initial collection is made publicly accessible it will expand through crowd-sourced contributions from Bethlehem and its diaspora. Second, a monograph using a 'global microhistory' methodology will build on materials collected in the archive to reconstruct seminal moments in the life of one merchant from the town that encapsulate the transformations wrought by Bethlehem's global interactions. The PI's partnership with Leila Sansour, an acclaimed film-maker from Bethlehem, will locate this work between and beyond the academy, using Bethlehem as a case study to shed new light on pressing public debates surrounding Middle Eastern migration and mobility. Today we are used to images of Palestinians being restricted in their movements, but we are rarely presented with any longer historical context. The project's outreach programme will address this gap by contrasting the hyper-mobility once enjoyed by Bethlehem with the grave problems the town faces today on the fault-lines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These activities will help restore Bethlehem's former sense of connectedness by bringing its unique story to new public audiences, as well as re-forging links across its global diaspora.