Brushing the Political Economic History of Hashemite Jordan Against the Grain

Abstract

Bread in Jordan is more than food; it is a source of sustenance for the public and the Hashemite monarchy’s legitimacy and stability. Complementing José Ciro Martínez’s bottom-up account of bread subsidies as an embedded and affective state presence in everyday life, this study offers a political-economic history that traces the bread subsidy program’s emergence, durability, and eventual removal across decades of crisis and reform. This thesis argues that the subsidy emerged not as benevolence but as a necessity for Hashemite rule, and inquires into the nature of post-bread subsidy Jordan. The program was introduced within the political-economic zeitgeist of the 1974 mutiny of elite military units in al-Zarqa, as part of a broader transformation from a militarized welfare state to an oil-subsidized urban bureaucracy amid the 1970s oil boom and an expanding East Bank population. Over the past three decades, however, bread subsidies have become increasingly regarded as a state burden, rather than a tool, due to the prioritization of neoliberal economic reform, IMF loan agreements, and U.S. foreign aid. The goal of this study is to better understand the social underpinnings of Hashemite Jordan and to illuminate its statecraft after the 2018 removal of the subsidy program.