The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine (original) (raw)
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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?
PhD dissertation, 2016
This dissertation is a socio-historical statistical study of the implementation and adoption of Tanzimat-era land-tenure reforms in the Palestinian countryside. It addresses three main questions: (1) what was the character of rural property tenure in mountainous regions of Palestine; (2) to what degree were modernizing property-reform measures adopted by the rural populace; and (3) how did the reform affect rural property-tenure and economic wellbeing? The 1858 Land Code was one of a series of Tanzimat reforms that together formalized individual title to property and land tenure. Yet, due to the dearth of accessible documentation, little is known about the implementation of these reforms. Among historians of Palestine, in the absence of proof to the contrary there is broad consensus that the reforms failed. It is widely argued that villagers evaded land registration en masse, either because they did not understand the significance of the reform or feared that increased taxation or conscription would result from property registration. This study brings to light and analyzes a property-value and property-tax assessment register (Esas-ı Emlak) compiled in 1876 (1292 maliyye) for the villages and rural agricultural lands of the large Halilürrahman (Hebron) district, south of Jerusalem. It permits, for the ix first time, systematic investigation of the implementation of property-tenure reforms in Palestine at a district-wide level. This study demonstrates that many rural agriculturalists in rural Hebron had independent economic power and landed wealth above subsistence levels. Hebronites were invested in implementing modernizing reforms to protect their landed assets, which they registered with the emlak, property-tax commission as individual holdings and as communally owned properties. While it is commonly understood that traditional, communal land-tenure arrangements (musha') were disallowed after land reform, this study demonstrates how it was incorporated into reform and protected the rights of shareholders. It also argues that property-tenure reform needs to be understood as a process, not an event. Villagers have rarely figured as subjects of Ottoman histories. This study exploits the emlak register together with sharia court cases and 1905 Ottoman population registries to flesh out a picture of late-Ottoman villages, villagers, and rural society from below in southern Palestine.
Peasants and politics in the modern Middle East
War, State Economic Policies, and Resistance by Agricultural Producers in Turkey, 1939-1945 §EVKET PAMUK ^agriculture has always been considered a sector of the economy with special importance and vulnerability during wartime. For a number of reasons, war- time ...
136 Frantzman Kark Bedouin Settlement in Late Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine
During the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods the cultural and environmental landscape of Palestine changed dramatically. This was reflected in both urban development and rural settlement patterns. In the last decades of Ottoman rule much of the newly settled rural low country of Palestine, including the coastal plain and Jordan valley, was strongly influenced by Bedouin tribes, who were living in various states of mobile pastoralism. By the end of the British Mandate the majority of the Bedouin, with the exception of those living in the Negev in Southern Palestine, had become sedentary in one form or another. The Bedouin actively built about 60 new villages and dispersed settlements, comprising several thousand houses. The Mandate authorities estimated the population of these Bedouin villages to be 27,500 in 1945. Our paper examines who the inhabitants of these Bedouin villages were, tracing them from their nomadic and pastoral origins in the late Ottoman period to their final sedentarization under the British Mandate. We examine how Mandatory land policies and Jewish land purchases created legal and demographic pressures for sedentarization. In shedding light on these intertwined topics we illustrate the increasingly limited role the Bedouin played in the rural landscape due to constraints placed upon them and show how, as a result, their settlement was part of a change in the environment in the period.