The famine on the mountain.
Between 1915 and 1918 Mount Lebanon starved — an Ottoman land blockade, an Allied sea blockade, a locust year in 1915, and requisitioned harvests. Estimates of the dead run from 100,000 to 200,000 out of a population of roughly 400,000, most of them Maronite, and it may be the highest proportional death toll of the First World War anywhere. Another third of the mountain emigrated, which is why the Maronite diaspora is larger than the Maronite homeland.
The famine of 1915-1918 is the central catastrophe in Maronite memory and until recently was little written about outside Lebanon. Its causes were compound: an Ottoman requisitioning regime, an Allied naval blockade, a locust plague in 1915, and the collapse of the silk trade that Mount Lebanon depended on. Estimates of deaths range from 100,000 to 200,000, with the American Red Cross putting it higher, out of a Mount Lebanon population of around 400,000. Emigration, already underway since the 1860s, accelerated sharply, and the great Maronite communities of Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Mexico and Australia date substantially from this period. Kahlil Gibran, writing from New York, campaigned for relief and wrote about the starvation directly.
The same ground, other faiths
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