From the pages of the Defter: A social history of rural property tenure and the implementation of Tanzimat land reform in Hebron, Palestine (1858-1900) (original) (raw)
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This paper will consider the objectives of the Ottoman Land Code, the Tabu Law of 1858 and the 1867 Law that permitted foreign citizens to acquire urban and rural land, and will assess their significance, impact, and success or failure in Palestine in light of the objectives. I will touch upon issues such as the abolition of the musha'a, land surveys, systematic mapping, land registration and land settlement. Special emphasis will be given to the dominant and important process of the privatization of landownership and the resulting phenomenon of large agricultural estates and estate buildings in Palestine and their impact on the land and landscape. The main catalyst of this process, and even of the establishment of new villages and new cities in the Ottoman Empire in general and in Palestine in particular, were the Ottoman Land Laws. By the end of Ottoman rule in Palestine private estates covered over a million dunams out of a total land area of 27 million metric dunams, compris...
Solomonovich and Kark - Land Privatization in Palestine Islamic Law & Society 22 2015
This article examines land privatization in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine through the extension of possession in miri lands, on the one hand, and its transformation into fee-simple property through change in land category classification (i.e., miri to mülk), on the other. Using primary sources, particularly Ottoman documents and correspondence of the German Consulate in Jerusalem, we analyze this process, as reflected in several cases involving foreign subjects and Ottoman authorities. We argue that privatization began as informal violations of the law, proceeded with the struggle of landholders against authorities who tried to reverse the process, and ended in victory for the landholders after the state ceded to their demands, inter alia, as a result of pressure from foreign nations and their consuls. Thus did de facto land privatization become de jure privatization.
A Review of Two Dissertations on Tanzimat-era Land Reforms in Palu and Hebron Districts
In this review, I am looking at the implementation of Tanzimat-era land reforms in two regions of the Ottoman State by examining two dissertations, one of which is studying Kurdish periphery, mainly Palu district, between 1840-1870 and the other is exploring Hebron district in Palestine between 1858-1900. I prefer to discuss these two theses separately since there are both methodological and bibliographical differences between the two studies. In addition, the regions investigated in these studies, Palu and Hebron districts, are different in a societal and political manner as well as historical background. Before dwelling on studies regarding land reforms, it is to be put these differences and pre-Tanzimat situation forward.
Land Privatization in Nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine
Islamic Law and Society, 2015
This article examines land privatization in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine through the extension of possession in miri lands, on the one hand, and its transformation into fee-simple property through change in land category classification (i.e., miri to mülk), on the other. Using primary sources, particularly Ottoman documents and correspondence of the German Consulate in Jerusalem, we analyze this process, as reflected in several cases involving foreign subjects and Ottoman authorities. We argue that privatization began as informal violations of the law, proceeded with the struggle of landholders against authorities who tried to reverse the process, and ended in victory for the landholders after the state ceded to their demands, inter alia, as a result of pressure from foreign nations and their consuls. Thus did de facto land privatization become de jure privatization.
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.
Rural Urbanization: the Commodification of Land in Post-Oslo Palestine
In this article, I argue that the conditions of the post-Oslo era contributed to the land commodification processes in Palestine. Instead of having the land at the very center of production and reproduction, rural Palestine has become a real-estate commodity stripped of its communal solidarity. Treating rural Palestine as an abstract commodity threatens the quality of life and time, and jeopardizes all these possibilities beyond the exchange value. In my opinion, the de-marginalization of rural areas can be achieved by the reversal of what i refer to as ”the colonial condition,” and by enhancing socioeconomic and cultural rural interdependency.
Continuity and Change
The essays in this edition address, for four periods and regions, the kinds of processes that could, in certain circumstances, have led to expropriation, that is the appropriation of land by wealthier parties and the enforced landlessness of former peasant landholders; however, in each instance presented here, the authors describe processes that did not in fact result in the forced and complete removal of peasant proprietors from their land. Instead, as three of the following articles show, namely those by Furio, Nadan and Schofield, a reduction in property rights could be as important an indicator of the expropriation of property rights as the more classical view of enforced landlessness and proletarianization. Furthermore, the sorts of conditions that might have led to expropriation or a reduction in property rights in certain contexts, did not necessarily result in any reduction in the pre-existing rights of peasant tenants, as is shown by Arnoux in his contribution to this edition. In all instances, the articles published here illustrate that those who might have chosen to expropriate, notably landlords, wealthier peasants, merchants and creditors, were not necessarily interested in appropriating peasant land. Rather, a regular receipt of rents was, most obviously, often as and more important in such contexts; as such, and again as will be explored in the following articles, these designs on peasant land typically led to a diminution of the property rights of the tenant but not their wholesale eviction from the land. This was not universally the case; in other parts of medieval Europe, to which reference will be made below, creditors sought out and expropriated the lands of their debtors. However, this was neither a universal process nor one that was dependent upon unique sets of prevailing conditions; instead, the persistence of, or introduction of, new institutional and economic structures and practices (such as seigneurial expectations, communal or familial convention, governmental legislation, the relative fluidity of capital, and the exercise of local norms of dealing) may all have combined, jointly or severally, to affect the degree to which land was retained by a diminished tenantry or wholly appropriated. The following articles illustrate the applicability of these contentions both for the middle ages, with studies of England and Wales, Normandy and Valencia, as well as modern Palestine. The idea that peasant landholders might be expropriated from their land by those with greater political and coercive power is a familiar one and is certainly
CONFRONTING A COLONIAL RULE OF PROPERTY: THE AL-SAKHINA CASE IN MANDATE PALESTINE
Arab Studies Journal (Vol xxvii, no. 1, Spring 2019), 2019
ARTICLES The struggles for and on land in Palestine are pressing concerns. The political realities of this ongoing struggle, combined with new critical approaches to law and settler colonialism, have made it an arena rich with scholarship. Yet despite the wealth of knowledge that has been produced, scholars continue to overlook perceptions of property and popular action in the face of dispossession. The experiences of villagers in al-Sakhina in the Beisan valley in the 1930s and early 1940s reveal how rural Palestinians gained and lost property rights, fought for tenancy rights and communal preservation, and eventually were able to secure access to alternative government-owned land. Building on previous work on the struggle for tenancy rights under British rule, 1 this article draws attention to how popular conceptions and strategies can reshape our temporal and thematic understandings of land and settler-colonial politics in Palestine. The legacy of the past is relevant to the present. Critical approaches to colonial and settler-colonial conceptions of land have revealed how a rule of property, with its universalistic rhetoric, Munir Fakher Eldin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University.