This article analyzes how imperial assault, colonialism, and its neocolonial successor, war, and occupation have codetermined the (de)valorization of agrarian production in the area that over the last century became South Lebanon. The geographical focus of these articles is on Jabel Amel and the formerly Israeli-occupied strip (1978–2000). At the center of this analysis of changing social and productive agrarian realities is tobacco across the last century. The article aims to contribute to the burgeoning body of academic work on agrarian questions in the Arab world and the agrarian question of imperialism. It also addresses a lacuna within the larger body of work on agrarian change and peasant studies with regard to war and occupation in creating place-specific value relations. This first part treats the period from the late Ottoman Empire until the eve of the Lebanese civil war in the mid-1970s.
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