Chapter 4 examines the Jazira’s divided connection from 1918 to 1939 as the region was divided between the Republic of Turkey, French Syria, and British Iraq. It does so through a focus on locusts, refugees, and various interwar state-making projects. While all of the different states in the Jazira endeavored to differentiate themselves from the Ottomans, they undertook strikingly similar projects based on refugee resettlement and sodium arsenite, the new insecticide that each state wielded to kill locusts. The substance did not altogether end the reign of locusts in the region, but it marked a shift in envisioning the land without the insects. The change also coincided with an unprecedented autonomist movement advocating for a French protectorate of the Jazira, and the ensuing conflict encompassed all of the protagonists of Locusts of Power, from the Shammar and the Millî to Armenian genocide survivors and Assyrian refugees. The autonomist effort failed, and the Jazira became the foremost space of Syrian agricultural development, Ottoman dreams of prosperity finally coming to fruition.

Chapter 4 highlights the ways in which urban Assyrian intellectuals took advantage of Law 251 in their dealings with the state. In their magazines and clubs, they used accepted narratives to argue for greater cultural, political, and administrative rights. This campaign was pursued subtly in the press, but more vocally in popular culture. Assyrian intellectuals and singers also engaged with Arab and Kurdish intellectuals, contributing to a hybridized Iraqi sphere that cut across sectarian and ethnic divides, contributing to Assyrian intellectual discourses that extended far beyond Iraq’s borders.

Missionaries, finding that Islam and Judaism were impervious to their conversion efforts, concentrated on “improving” the non-Western Christians in the Middle East. The chapter traces the multiple Christian denominations stemming from pre-Islamic times and their status under Islam, including the Ottoman Empire. In the nineteenth century these Christians were receptive to Western educational efforts. Relations soured with the rise of nationalism and the drawing of territorial boundaries following World War I, resulting in the decline of the Christian population in the twentieth century.