"Histories of the Rural Middle East 1850-1950" Workshop organized by LOOP (Late Ottoman Palestinians), Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 16 June 2023 (original) (raw)
This workshop is a coproduction of researchers from two ERC-funded historical research projects which target rural regions of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East from different perspectives. BORDER, based at the University of Neuchâtel, uses the case of the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borders to highlight the centrality of borderlands and their mostly rural populations to state and nation formation across the Middle East. The Bochum-based research project ‘Late Ottoman Palestinians’, LOOP, uses Digital Humanities tools to explore demographic data and complementary sources on rural communities in late Ottoman Palestine and thereby aims to construct empirically based models of social and cultural dynamics on the eve of the modern Middle East. The workshop seeks to revisit major debates and discuss promising avenues for research in the field, while also unpack certain obstacles and limits that historians of the rural Middle East still encounter. In doing so, it focuses on the following questions: - On what scholarly discourses do recent historical studies of the rural Middle East draw, e.g., histories of marginality, territoriality, political economy, human capital formation, social network theory, or actor network theory? - How might the reinvigorated study of rural pasts change our view of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history as a whole? - What are the most promising perspectives, sources, and methodologies for the study of rural communities, rural areas, and imaginaries of the rural?
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Anthropology and history employ two entirely different research methodologies: anthropological research is based on face-to-face interviews and direct observation, while historians eschew all forms of non-documented information, and generally assume that only the written word and maps are reliable. Exploiting the different relative advantages of these two disciplines, together with GIS (Geographic Information Systems), it was possible to locate and situate historical events from different periods in the physical landscape in which they took place. Such a “mixed methodological approach” yielded information that would otherwise not be found. This is illustrated in a study of the development of rural estates in the Galilee, consequent on the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code in 1858.
The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine
Journal of Palestine Studies, 1981
Originally a chapter from my MA thesis written at the American University of Beirut in 1980, when studies on Ottoman Palestine were rarer than they subsequently became. The article may still have some use for those interested in Ottoman Palestine and its majority population of Arab peasantry.
The issue of regional connections and cooperation among the rural population in different parts of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century has thus far not received adequate attention. This article presents case-studies of several villages in the sub-district of Gaza, which submitted joint petitions about common concerns to the Grand Vizier in İstanbul. It examines the significance of these petitions and discusses their characteristics, uniqueness, and historical context. It then moves on to discuss other forms of regional cooperation and nuclei of regional identification among the rural population, which in part had previous roots, and explores their repercussions for the development of regional identity alongside more commonly known identities concomitantly held by Palestine's population at the time. The submission of joint petitions to İstanbul, it is argued, was one of the key manifestations of a tendency toward greater regionalism in some regions of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, an occurrence which was less likely to happen prior to the Tanzimat reforms. While the literature has primarily focused on the activity of the urban educated circles in the process of regionalization, this article presents a unique bottom-up perspective that underscores the everyday experiences, practices and mechanisms of cooperation in a rural region which is rarely investigated.
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