Great Famine of Mount Lebanon
Between 1915 and 1918, Mount Lebanon, then a semi-autonomous district of the Ottoman Empire, suffered a famine that killed an estimated one-third of its population. Historians' figures range widely, often from about 100,000 to 200,000 deaths, because no reliable census was taken in wartime. The catastrophe reshaped the region's demography, accelerated emigration, and remains a deep memory in Lebanese history.
Before the First World War, Mount Lebanon had an economy that depended on imports. Its steep terrain could not grow enough grain for its people, so it relied on silk exports, remittances from emigrants abroad, and grain brought in from Syrian plains such as the Hawran. Since 1861 the district had enjoyed a special autonomous status, the Mutasarrifate, guaranteed by European powers. When the Ottoman Empire entered the war in late 1914, that arrangement was in danger, and the fragile trade networks that fed the mountain began to unravel.
Several pressures converged. The Allied naval blockade of the Syrian coast cut off sea imports and the silk trade. Remittances from abroad dried up as wartime finance collapsed. In 1915 swarms of locusts devastated crops and orchards across the region. The Ottoman military, under Jamal Pasha, requisitioned grain, animals, and transport for the army, and Ottoman authorities abolished the Mountain's autonomy and placed it under direct military control. Troops also restricted the movement of food, and speculation and hoarding drove prices far beyond what ordinary families could afford. Disease, especially typhus, spread among the weakened population and added greatly to the death toll.
Historians debate how much weight to give each cause. Lebanese nationalist accounts have long emphasized a deliberate Ottoman policy of starvation, pointing to the Ottoman restrictions and the political suspicion directed at Arab nationalists, including the executions of Lebanese and Syrian figures in 1915 and 1916. Other scholars stress the combined effect of the Allied blockade, harvest failure, and the chaos of wartime administration, and caution that intent is hard to prove. Most agree that both sides' policies contributed to the suffering. Relief was limited and unevenly distributed, though some missionary and charitable efforts saved lives.
The famine ended with the Ottoman collapse in 1918, when British and Arab forces advanced into the region. Its effects lasted. Villages were emptied, many orphans were left, and thousands more people emigrated, strengthening Lebanese communities in the Americas and West Africa. The experience colored political attitudes toward the Ottomans and strengthened support for a separate Lebanese entity. After the war, France was given a mandate over the area, and in 1920 it created Greater Lebanon, enlarging the old Mountain with fertile coastal and inland districts, partly in response to the earlier food insecurity. Today the famine is commemorated as one of the most traumatic episodes in modern Lebanese memory.