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John Chalcraft, The Invisible Cage: Syrian Migrant Workers in Lebanon , Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). Pp. 336. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

There are some explanations for migration that many scholars take for granted. It is generally assumed, for example, that rural-to-urban migration occurs because of a decline in the socioeconomic conditions of rural areas or that violent conflict encourages labor migrants to return to their home countries. John Chalcraft’s contribution is a brilliant corrective to this conventional thinking and represents a thoughtful challenge to scholars to rethink how we understand labor migration in general and from Syria to Lebanon in particular. Chalcraft’s departure from traditional labor-migration frameworks centers on the notion of hegemonic incorporation, which sees labor migrants as enmeshed “within objectifying structures of accumulation by combinations of coercion and consent, repression and choice” (p. 3). In this framework, the structure–agent relationship is not deterministic but is shaped by multiple forms of agency and control. Migrant subjectivity is thus not entirely determined by structures but, nevertheless, reinforces them through the microlevel decisions that migrants take. It does so through the unintended consequences generated by “elective affinities,” a term used to refer to how individual choices forge long-term affinities. The book relies on ethnographic and social-history methods to highlight the dialectic between subjectivity and structure. These methods provide the space to traverse multiple and intersecting relationships at particular historical moments. As such, the chapters are organized chronologically, beginning with outmigration before 1939 and extending to the present day. The transition to a cash economy was formative in the incorporation of Syria and Lebanon into the global capitalist economy in the early 1900s. Shifts wrought by the cash economy were simultaneously subject to the structural changes generated by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the colonization of the region, and transnational capital accumulation. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Syrian migration was predominantly to the Americas. Migration occurred in response to deteriorating material conditions, as migrants wanted to acquire resources to regain economic independence back home. This discussion highlights transnational linkages between migrants and home-country economies, thus demonstrating that migrants are not always dispossessed and landless. By the 1930s, global economic depression had reduced incentives for transnational migration, and by the 1950s, Lebanon’s growing economy had turned the country into a migrant destination. This transformation contributed to the rise in Syrian migration to Lebanon after the 1950s. By the 1970s, there were approximately two Lebanese workers for every Syrian worker in Lebanon. Initially from border regions, these workers increasingly came from the eastern parts of Syria. Transformations in land ownership were important, as the Ba–thist redistribution of land led to a form of migration whereby sons and fathers migrated to try and earn cash to buy more land, tools, machines, and seed stock. These migrations paralleled other changes