the Elites and the Peasants of Ottoman-Palestine, 1856-1908.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Translations and Measurements ......................................
Introduction ......................................................... ii
Chapter One: State Centralization and the Cohesion of the
Elite Class in Ottoman-Palestine, 1856-1908 .......................... 1
Chapter Two: Economic Changes and the Responses of the
Local Elites in Ottoman-Palestine, 1856-1908 ......................... 36
Chapter Three: The Effects of Political Centralization
and the Economic Changes on the Peasants of Ottoman-Palestine,
1856-1908 ............................................................ 80
Conclusion ............................................................... 120
Bibliography ............................................................. 125
Abstract
This thesis investigates how the local Muslim elites and peasant classes of Ottoman-Palestine responded to political centralization and economic changes, from 1856-1908. After 1856, the Ottoman state renewed its authority in this area and granted greater political control to the local Muslim elites to govern the population. The economic changes at this time included Ottoman- Palestine's integration into the world-economy and the expanded markets in the local and regional area. The thesis argues that these two developments afforded the elites more opportunities to appropriate the peasants' agriculture. Moreover, while the Jewish and Christian populations traded with Europe, the local Muslim elite concentrated on the local and regional trade.
Translations and Measurements The transliteration system follows the standards set by the Institute of Islamic Studies. Most of the translations are into Arabic, but some were necessary to translate into Turkish. Concerning place names, I have chosen the most familiar English designations rather than the less familiar Arabic names; for example, I have used Jerusalem instead of al-Quds. Most times I have tried to provide the reader with the Arabic equivalent, such as Marj Ibn 'Amir for the Plains of Esdraelon.
The following standards apply for the currency, weights, and measurements used in this paper: ratl: this unit of measurement corresponds to one pound or 454 grams.
dunum: 919 square meters, approximately 1/4 of an acre.
faddan: 4,201 square meters or just over an acre.
sa': 1.14 to 2.84 liters piaster (European term for kuru): Ottoman silver coin, introduced around 1688.
Charles Issawi has a comprehensive listing of currency, weights, and measurements in his Economic History of the Middle East (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
INTRODUCTION ii
After the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman-Palestinel underwent both state centralization and global economic integration.2 Both these developments occurred simultaneously and had far-reaching effects throughout this society. Specifically, these concurrent developments effected the relationship between two specific classes. One of these classes constituted the group with wealth and political influence- the elites; the other class encompassed the majority of the population, those who worked the lard as rural agriculturalists- namely, the peasants.The relationship between these two classes was one of hierarchical exploitation, so that the wealth and supremacy in society afforded the elites opportunities to appropriate the peasants' produce. The political and economic developments later in the nineteenth century accelerated this class conflict.
The Ottoman state's centralization policy and its global integration of its economy between the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 had the most significant effects on the elites' access and control of the peasants' surplus. Both Ottoman-Palestine's integration into the world economy and the penetration by centralized state forces in this region, however, began before this period. Immanuel Wallerstein notes in his "The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for Research", how in the previous two centuries an exchange of Ottoman primary goods for
iii
manufactured European products occurred. But he distinguishes this period from the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman empire ceased to be a "self-contained social economy" and had become a "peripheral area" of the metropole.3 In Ottoman-Palestine, as in the rest of the Fertile Crescent, the increasing exports to and imports from Europe materialised in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. During this time, however, Palestine's commerce remained minimal. For example, in 1825 Jaffa's total imports equalled 163,000 French francs with exports at 116,000 French francs ; imports and exports for the whole of the coast of Syria, on the other hand equalled 18.75 million and 12.7 million French francs in 1833.4 Beginning only in the mid-nineteenth century did greater European and regional demand for Palestine's agriculture (mostly wheat, barley, oranges, sesame) and other products (soap, earthenware) raise Palestine commerce to new unprecedented levels. Increasing exports were matched by the rise in imports, such as sugar, rice, coffee, cotton manufactured goods and petroleum.5 Though statistics for the period are limited, reliable tabulations confirm that the trade of Ottoman-Palestine was undoubtedly much larger and diverse in the second half of the nineteenth century than it was earlier.
As important as trade with Europe was to the economy of Palestine, the regional and local trade grew significantly after the mid-nineteenth century. Improved methods of transport, such
iv
as railway lines, steamships servicing major ports and more paved roads, increases in population and the lowering of the internal tariffs all encouraged merchants to concentrate on the local and regional markets. It is clear that commerce within the local and regional markets remained important to the Palestine economy throughout the nineteenth century.Only at the turn of the nineteenth century did greater trade with Europe, comprising both imports and exports, dominate the Palestine economy to the extent of producing a trade deficit.
Most of the increasing exports in Palestine's agricultural was the result of cultivation and the greater amounts of production which accompanied this.These improvements in Palestine's hinterland can be attributed to the Ottoman state's centralization policy to ensure greater control over the population. Even as early as the reign of Sultan Selim III (1761-1808), Ottoman initiatives included assembling a modern European-style army to re-establish Ottoman authority.In addition, the ephemeral Egyptian ruler of Palestine (1831-1840), Mehmet 'Ali, is considered by many scholars to have ushered in the "modern age" of Palestine, with his attempts to subdue the bedouin and rural large families which held influence in the plains and foothills areas.6 After the Ottomans regained Palestine in 1840, they pursued the Tanzimat Reform program to establish a rational and competent bureaucracy in the government of the provinces.
V
All these efforts, though, could not succeed until the end of the Crimean War in 1856. The disruptions and inconsistencies in the reform efforts of the previous decades were overcome when the Ottomans possessed the military resources after the war. After this period, the Ottomans regained control of the rural areas, subdued the bedouin and powerful rural families and extended their authority through other bureaucratic and administrative reforms. These efforts opened up large areas of land for cultivation and settlement; as a result, cultivators and merchants could respond to the new market changes in Europe as well as in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the centralization policy contributed to the local merchants, landowners, and to a lesser extent the peasants, abilities to respond to economic changes.
In conjunction with the pacification of the rural families, the state authorities entrusted political power to a new cadre of elites in the urban areas. Service to the state through the bureaucratic and religious spheres was now greatly valued, as these urban elites were awarded offices in new bureaucratic posts designed to promote Ottoman reforms and control. Moreover, a limited group of families not only dominated these posts, but the highest local religious positions as well.
With these positions, the families of the urban elite not only acted as the population's political and religious leaders, but these families also controlled land registration and tax farms. The burden of paying these taxes forced many peasants to enter land-tenure or financial agreements with urban residents
vi
with capital in order to begin planting. These agreements included borrowing money at high rates, repaying a loan through cash or providing a fixed or proportional sum of the crop, working as a tenant or leasing the peasants' land from the lender. A common occurrence in all these agreements was that the peasants' control of their resources of land and/or labour and/or yield, were undermined through the need to meet the elites' commercial ambitions.
If the elites were more anxious to appropriate7 peasant agriculture after the mid-nineteenth century, and state centralization facilitated this, the class conflict between the peasants and the elites worked in favour of the latter. But, acting as tax farmers, landowners and moneylenders were not the only factors which promoted the elites in their goals. As a result of the political and economic changes after the mid-nineteenth century, the urban elites coalesced into a more cohesive class, cognizant of their class interests and willing to protect their shared interests. The elites' common class consciousness was fostered through their ability to usurp political control away from the powerful rural families, and to control political leadership at the local level. These same elites were also the merchants who marketed the peasants products in the local and regional markets. In addition, they also acted as the tax collectors, moneylenders and large-scale landowners for most of the peasant population. Philip Khoury has referred
vii to this group of elites as the "landowning-bureaucratic class".8 The elites' common interests of appropriating the peasants' agriculture and the opportunities which arose after the mid- nineteenth century to control this agriculture, served to shape the elites into a class more coherent in its ambitions.
This thesis will concentrate specifically on how the class conflict intensified in favour of the Muslim urban elite. Previously, scholars have concentrated on the minorities (Christians, Jews and Europeans) who responded to the greater demand by European countries to Middle East agriculture.8 As Beshara Doumani has shown in his study documenting the scholarship of Palestine during the Ottoman period, most scholars ignore the indigenous community's actions in responding to these changes.10 Little attention has been paid to the Muslim elite who held political control at the local level and dominated, through landownership, tax farming and moneylending, the appropriation of the peasants' agriculture. In addition, the peasants of Ottoman- Palestine have virtually been ignored from the scholarship dealing with Ottoman Palestine in the nineteenth century. As a response to the lack of scholarship on these issues, this thesis concentrates on the responses of both the elite and peasant classes to the economic and political changes during the second-half of the nineteenth century.
In Chapter One, this study will investigate how state centralization promoted the elites into political and religious offices and granted them greater political influence over the
viii population. These Muslim elites became the political and religious leaders of society and used their offices and positions to promote their class interests. Chapter Two will concentrate on the economic changes after the mid-nineteenth century. Through their political control, the Muslim elites could dominate tax farming and landownership. Most importantly, these Muslim elites were the ones who oriented this agriculture toward the important local and regional trade centres while the minorities engaged in commerce with Europe. For these three reasons: political control; an ability to appropriate peasant agriculture and through the position to trade within the local/regional markets, the Muslim elite class formed a separate and distinct class in society after the mid- nineteenth century period.
Chapter Three investigates how these twin developments effected the majority of the population-- namely, the peasants. Ultimately, the rural producers' ownership of their resources of land, labour and their yield was compromised to meet the commercial ambitions of the elites.
ix Endnotes for Introduction 1. In this paper, Ottoman-Palestine is defined as the sanjak (sub-province) of Jerusalem which formed a independent sanjak or mutasarrifiya in 1887, including the qadas (district) of Jerusalem, Hebron, Ghaza and Jaffa. The qadas of Jamin, Baru Sa'b and Jimayn encompassed the sanjak of Nablus while the qadas of Acre, Haifa, Nazareth, Safad and Tiberius comprised the sanjak of Acre. The sanjak of Nablus was ruled from the wilayat (province) of Damascus and the sanjak of Acre was ruled from the wilayat of Beirut. The three sanjaks of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre combined with the wilayas of Beirut and Damascus during the late nineteenth century roughly refers to Syria-Palestine in this paper. See adjoining maps.
2. We follow the arguments of Immanuel Wallerstein and his theories on the incorporation of the Ottoman empire into the world economy elucidated by the various scholars in The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy ed. Huri Islamoglu-Inan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See especially the introduction by Huri Islamoglu-Inan, "Introduction : 'Oriental despotism" in world -system perspective", 1-24.
3. Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for Research", Review, II, 3 (Winter 1979): 397-398. For Wallerstein the difference is one of quantitative change in commerce. Wallerstein reaches this conclusion by referring to numerous scholars and their work. See Hurl Islamoglu and Caglar Keyder, "Agenda for Ottoman History", Review, I, I (Summer 1977):53 quoted in Walterstein, "Ottoman Empire", 397.
4. Charles Issawi, "The Trade of Jaffa, 1825-1914", Table 2 "Trade of Jaffa". ed.Hisham Nashabe, Studia Palaestina: Studies in Honour of Constantine K.Zurayk (Beirut: Institute for Palestine).
5. Ibid, 44 and Table 1 "Average Unit Values of Selected Syrian Exports and Imports".
6. See Chapter One.
7. It seems that Roger Owen was the first to use the term "appropriation" to describe the elites' control of the peasants' surplus. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914, (London: Metheun Press, 1988).
B. Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 5.
9. Examples of this scholarship are: Moshe Ma'oz, Ottoman Reform in Syria and Palestine. 1840-1861, (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), the articles in Studies on Palestine During the Late Ottoman Period, (ed.) Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975). One recent example is Ruth Kark, Jaffa: A City in Evolution. 1799-1917 which mainly focuses on the growth of the Jewish community in that city, even though the author claims to study the entire population. See the review by Beshara Doumani in International Journal of Middle East Studies Humber 4 (November 1992):682-684.
10. "Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History", Journal of Palestine Studies Volume XXI Humber 2 (Winter 1992):5-28.
1
CHAPTER ONE: State Centralization and the Cohesion of the Elite Class in Ottoman-Palestine, 1856-1908.
Introduction: After the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire's policy of state centralization in Ottoman-Palestine created a new cohesive class of elites; this class' wealth, political and religious leadership, and social standing were directly related to this policy. One policy of centralization was to eliminate the rural shaykhs who controlled the plains and coastal areas. These shaykhs' wealth from tax farming and their control of the rural areas had reached the extent of nearly negating the suzerainty of Ottoman rule in parts of Palestine. The second main intention was to divert political responsibilities to the urban areas through the creation of councils and state appointed officials at the sanjak (sub-province), gada' (district), and village levels.
Two important achievements resulted from these efforts: One achievement after the Ottomans regained control of the rural areas was the expansion of cultivable areas in the plains and coastal lands. Combined with the legal changes to landownership, the local Muslim elites, and as we will see below other groups as well, purchased large tracts of property. The second result was the Muslim elites' domination of the new political offices in the urban areas. This amassment of property in conjunction with the control of local political offices provided the Muslim elites new and extensive opportunities to appropriate the peasants' agriculture.
Furthermore, the new corps of elites who arose after the mid-
2 nineteenth century recognized their common class interests in controlling the peasants' surplus and worked to further these goals.
The elites' class objective to appropriate the peasants' agriculture is a primary criterion in defining the elites as a "class". As E.P.Thompson argues, a class is recognized in opposition to another group: People find themselves structured in determined ways (crucial, but not exclusively, in productive relations) they experience exploitation (or need to maintain power over those when they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interests, they eminence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as a class, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the historical process.'
According to this definition, before the mid-nineteenth century, a class conflict that existed in Ottoman-Palestine was based on the elites' exploitation of the peasants' agriculture. After state centralization, however, the elites were provided opportunities to work more cohesively as a class to accomplish this objective. The elites' control of both religious and political offices, and their penetration into the rural hinterland through money lending, tax farming and large-scale landownership forged these common class interests. Ultimately, state centralization intensified the class conflict in favour of the elites.
The political context of the elites was the patron-client relationship between themselves and the peasants.This relationship existed between two parties, unequal in their wealth and ability to influence politics, involving the exchange of goods and/or services, such as a landowner leasing his land to a peasant.2 Albert Hourani refers to the Ottoman authorities' use of
3 the elite patrons to govern the population as the "politics of notables".3 These elites were required to act as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled and to represent the interests of the local population to the central authority.
The elites used this access to government to further the interests of their own family members and clients. During the Ottoman rule in Palestine, factional rivalries existed between elite families for the highest local religious and administrative posts. Consequently, the elite families managed to usurp political and religious leadership for their own kin and clients. In Philip Khoury's study of nineteenth century Damascus, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, he refers to these elite families with their "exclusive" and privileged access to property and administrative posts as the "land-owning bureaucratic class"; he observes that this combination of property and political control resulted for the elite families in "unrivalled power on the local scene".4 As will be shown, the Ottoman's control of the local areas promoted both the elites' role as patrons and their monopolization of political control amongst a limited number of families.
The Establishment of the Land Regime: Two-hundred years after the Ottoman's initial conquest of Syria-Palestine, Istanbul recognized the need to adapt their original methods of governing this province to the political changes encountered during the previous two centuries. Approaching the early eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire stretched into the 4 three continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. During this period, one of Istanbul's chief political concerns was its deployment of troops. One policy was to direct the military towards expansion into central and eastern Europe; the other policy was to defend against Austrian expansion from the west and Russian expansion from the north, in the area around the Black Sea. This dual defensive and expansionist policy eventually affected the governing of the empire's Arab provinces.` As Hourani rightly reminds us, any discussion of the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces after the eighteenth century must be judged within this context.° With an army preoccupied with battles far from the Arab provincial borders, the traditional methods of dispatching the military to assert Ottoman authority could no longer succeed, one exception being Aleppo. That city's proximity to Anatolia allowed it be governed with greater central authority. To resolve the problem of the absence of central authority in the areas of the Arab provinces, Istanbul commissioned those elites at the local-provincial level with greater responsibilities and duties. As the Ottoman occupation of Syria-Palestine reached its second century, the Sultan's concern with maintaining large garrisons dwindled as the importance of the regular collection of taxes and their remittances to the state treasury became imperative.' Initially, Istanbul entrusted the responsibility of tax collection to the sipahis (Ottoman cavalry), who collected taxes within the timars ("fiefs") the state had granted them; in return, the sipahis were bound to perform military
5 duty when called upon.5 For various reasons, this system failed to meet its ends, and by the eighteenth century the importance of the sipahis, as well as their timars, was "fading".9 Halil Inalcik emphasizes the importance of maintaining state control over the peasants and their agriculture: The principal characteristic of the classical Ottoman land system was direct state control of the peasant and the soil, a system which had grown up to meet the needs of an absolutist administration, in which the state's main concern was to ensure the revenue of the timars.10 The failure of this system necessitated a replacement that could ensure both the collection of taxes as well as the enforcement of Ottoman authority. The Ottomans commissioned these responsibilities to the provinces' local elite inhabitants through the iltizam tax farming system. Introduced in Palestine during the eighteenth century, this system leased state-owned miri" land to local multazims (tax farmers), such as merchants, 'ulama (religious scholars) and Ottoman officials, and required them to fulfil the twin duties of collecting taxes and maintaining security in their respective mu'qata'a (region).12 The walis (Provincial Governors) also farmed out tax farms to members of powerful rural families, whose leaders became known as shaykh al-nahiyas (rural- district chiefs). The possession of an effective military force to carry out these duties qualified individuals as tax farmers.° As Amnon Cohen skilfully notes, the leasing out of a mukata'a by the wali was therefore both an administrative and a fiscal act; the recipient, the multazim, represented Ottoman authority in his mukata'a as well as bearing the responsibility for the collection of taxes and its yearly remittances to the wali.14 and
6 This system allowed the tax farmers to lease (tasarruf) the land to the peasants and to collect and profit from the collection of taxes (mashadd maska). Many local Ottoman officials and rural shaykhs profited lucratively from the collection of taxes. By endowing the multazim with the control of the land and the peasantry, the iltizam system contributed to the empowerment of its elite members of society.
As one scholar comments on the effects of the iltizam system on the elites, it had evolved the a'yan (local elite) in the latter part of Mahmud II's reign (1808-1839) from the ruins of the timar system as a group of urban and rural landowners, artisans and merchants, to a group roughly possessing "class" characteristics.° The incursion of the state into the peasants' lives through the iltizam system promoted the elites to the role of "social brokers" and intermediaries, who recognized their collective interest as the appropriation of the peasants' agriculture. After the mid- nineteenth century period, the Ottoman's greater penetration into Palestine elevated the elites' role as intermediaries and provided greater opportunities for them to extract the peasants' agriculture.
Before this period, the elites in Ottoman-Palestine used three forms to monopolize political power and to establish their roles as intermediaries on behalf of the government:
(i) One role predominant in the urban areas was through the religious establishment-such as the (religious scholars), ashraf (descendants of the prophet) and other holders of religious-administrative offices.
(ii) Second were those offices which demanded military skills, such as beat, aghwat (military commander) and those appointed as mutassalim (governors of districts) (iii) Those appointed to administer the rural areas as shaykh al-nahiya (district chiefs) 10.
7 Along with these various means to acquire power, the geo-politics or regional patterns also influenced the composition of this group. In the Galilee mountains or along the coastal plains, the unstable political situation and the repeated invasions from outsiders help to explain the absence of an entrenched autonomous leadership. The well rooted state authority in the more populated central mountain region (Jabal al-Khalil/Hebron, Jabal al-Quds/Jerusalem, Jabal al- Nablus), however, deterred the recurrent bedouin attacks and military invasions.
In these regions where the state's authority was solidly rooted, the elites acquired religious or military posts to assist governing the population. The Jerusalem religious establishment exploited the sanctimonious religious character of that city to act as distinguished caretakers for the Sultan as well as spiritual leaders for the local population. The elites of Jerusalem concentrated on the locally prestigious religious administrative positions and disregarded any pretence to possessing military strength or authority in the rural areas. In stark contrast to their counter-parts in al-Quds, the "politics of notables" relationship in Nablus depended on military posts and offices rather than religious ones, with extensive influence in rural areas. Local elites in this city commonly filled the ranks of the office of mutassalim and controlled militias in their rural areas, used both for keeping order and collecting taxes."
During the Sultanate of Mahmud 11 the Ottomans concentrated their efforts to resolve the issue of central authority in the
8 provinces by aiming to curtail local authority, to extend the military reforms of the previous Sultan Selim III and to introduce new administrative reforms at the local level. With the new European styled Nizam-i Cedid army, introduced in 1826, the Sultan planned to restore imperial authority (just as he had done successfully in Rumelia and Anatolia and later in 'Iraq and Kurdistan) to those provinces which had in the last two centuries established local authority strong enough to challenge that of the state's. However, after 1826 the Ottomans remained preoccupied with the Greek War, while the destruction of the fleet at Navarino weakened their military strength even further."' Consequently, the state could not afford the troops necessary to fully regain control in Syria-Palestine.
Moreover, Egypt's Muhammad 'Ali's invasion of Syria-Palestine in November 1831 delayed Sultan Mahmud II's plans even further.
Many scholars will contend that the policies of the Egyptian occupying power eventually contributed to the regeneration of Ottoman suzerainty in Syria-Palestine. As one scholar explains, the Tanzimat reform program did not exist as a "direct continuation" of Egyptian policies, but did exist as a result of "essentially similar considerations."''} Both the Ottomans and Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Muhammad 'Ali and governor of the conquered territory, recognized that the greatest threat to imposing their central command were the rural shaykhs. The shaykhs not only possessed their own armed forces and loyal followers but most importantly controlled the flow of the
9 peasants' taxes. Ibrahim Pasha planned to strip the rural shaykhs of their sources of power and to integrate them into the central government apparatus as a means to maintain greater influence over them.20 These Egyptian designs at curtailing local authority not only threatened the interests of the rural shaykhs but also conflicted with the interests of the urban notables.21 Consequently, the Palestinian chiefs and urban notables- from both the Yamani and the Qaysi groups- rebelled in 1834 to expel the Egyptians. The extent to which the Egyptians alienated the elite of Palestine is evident in the support and the sanction the afandiya (religious elite) of Jerusalem provided for this rebellion.22 The revolt against the Egyptians reveals the extent this group of urban and rural notables had structured their social positions and financial interests in the Ottoman system and rule. Greater Political Leadership: When the Ottomans recaptured Syria-Palestine from the Egyptians in 1840, Istanbul continued the Egyptian scheme of regaining central authority with its TanzIniNt reform program."
The TanzImat era generally refers to the period of reforms initiated from the 1839 Hatt-i Serif until the 1876 Constitution. One of the chief aims of the reforms was to resolve the questions of central authority in the provinces and to create a rational bureaucracy. One scholar studying Lebanon during the nineteenth century conveys his reluctance to describe the numerous aims and debatable achievements of the Tanzimat program in convenient simple terms.24 Yet, the Tanzimat reforms did follow a systematic plan
10 concerning the legal and the administrative governing of the provinces, with the intent to redefine and strengthen the central government's position.
In both the 1839 (Hatt-i Serif) and the 1856 (Hatt-i Humayun) edicts, Istanbul recognized the need to abandon the traditional- autonomous modes of governing the Arab provinces which they had relied on during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In place of these institutions, the Ottomans sought new institutions to promote and to preserve central authority.25 Concomitant with this need to replace centrifugal institutions with centripetally oriented ones is what Stanford Shaw considers the "most important aim of the Tanzimat", that is, the policies of state centralization in the governing of the provinces.26 To succeed in revitalising Ottoman authority in the provinces, central direction, central authority, and central control all became fundamental features of this new program, as well as characteristics of all the policies during this new age in Ottoman history.
In order to apply these new policies, Istanbul first confronted the issue of the existing land regime and its relationship to those structures which granted those groups authority over the land and the peasantry. To accomplish this, both the 1839 and 1856 edicts promised to abolish the iltizam system. In fact, two edicts were previously passed in 1850 and 1852 demanding the abolition of this system; but these attempts resulted in the same ends as all official documents demanding the end of tax farming during the TanzImat period: theory never became
11 practice.27 According to Kemal Karpat, after the introduction of the Tanzimat, the state had to cope with three related problems concerning land: (i) To assure a steady cultivation to augment state revenues. (ii) To put an end to individual claims to miri lands. (iii) To establish a new regulatory land registration.2 Reflecting the spirit of the Tanzimat, the Istanbul government wished to extend its control over the miri land that had over the years slipped from state control and fallen into local dominance. Of course, securing state ownership would be a promising start to ensuring the full remittances of taxes. This solution, however, rested on the assumption that state ownership (raqaba) was secure.29 Karpat's views that the state aimed to recover land lost to "private ownership" and to preserve the state's title to the land reflects the consensus of scholarly opinion on this issue. Soon, however, the Ottomans realized that the exploitation of the iltizam system and the new land regime it had bred were too deeply entrenched to reverse the common practice of converting iltizam assigned mini lands into "private property".30 Thus, most scholars have argued that the 1858 Land Code (Arazi Kanunnamesi) was introduced to secure the state's control over the land.31 By only recognizing officially registered land, Istanbul expected that all land-holders would list their property with the state; consequently, taxes could be collected more efficiently and completely. In 1858 the Tapu Law attempted to enforce the registration and the precise classification of land, requiring that
12 all cultivators who possessed tasarruf of a land to register this land under title deed, and hence be recognized as miri owners.32 An attempt at registration began two years later with the defterhane (Land Registry) in which the cultivators were given title deeds outlining the location and limits of their holding."
Traditional scholarship points to the Code's failure in reaching its initial goals by documenting the expansion of large landownership in Ottoman-Palestine. One claim put forward to explain the Code's failure is that wealthy individuals could manipulate certain provisions, such as a liberal inheritance policy and the permission to register an unlimited size of property. As Doreen Warriner claims, eventually miri titles became synonymous with mulk ownership.34 The similarity between miri and mulk ownership is shown in provisions 112 and 113 of the Code, in which miri lands were expanded and the transfer (intikal) of state lands was made similar to that of mulk. Furthermore, in 1869 the civil laws were codified in the Mejelle Code. This allowed miri lands to be transformed into mulk land, which transformed ownership from the state to the individual. Ten years after the Land Code, the user was also granted the right to mortgage or sell the land to pay debts. In addition, inheritance of tasarruf was now extended outside of immediate families to include distant relatives.35 Though these aspects of the Code did promote the amassment of property by the wealthier members of Ottoman-Palestine, it is the peasants' reluctance to register the land which is noted as a
13 fundamental reason for the Land Code's failure. Peasants avoided registering their land with the state to elude greater taxation and the threat of conscription. While these claims certainly are not erroneous, they nevertheless need modification.36 In his Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, Haim Gerber reaches conclusions concerning landholdings contrary to the standard thesis discussed above.37 These conclusions regarding the fallahin will be discussed at length in Chapter Three. But it is necessary to mention here that in nearly all the requests Gerber found for the registration of property, the applicants were, contrary to the standard interpretation, those who occupied and worked the land.38 Rather than dismiss the claims of large landownership, Gerber specifies these claims, arguing that much confusion exists concerning the elites' geographic distribution of property. This amassment of land did not occur in the mountain regions where the majority of the population resided, but in the sparsely populated plains area.39 Prior to that period, from fear of bedouin attack, the plains remained largely uninhabited and uncultivated, while the central mountain regions, like the qada' of Jerusalem, held the concentration of the population. Only after the Crimean War in 1856 did the Ottomans have the resources to "recapture" the plains from the bedouins and the rural shaykhs, a move which resulted in increased populations and greater areas of cultivation. In April 1859 the governor of Jerusalem, Thurayya (Turkish Sureyya) Pasha, pacified the hills of Nablus after storming 'Arraba, the location
of the fortress of the 'Abd al-Hadi family, amongst the most power 14 rural family in Nablus. The regions of Jabal al-Quds and Jabal al- Khalil were similarly retaken after this governor moved against the Lahham family in 'Arqab, and the nazir (chief) of Jabal al-Khalil, Salame al-'Amr, leader of the most powerful family in hills of Hebron. Only after these rural shaykhs were subjected to Ottoman authority could the elites acquire large tracts of property in the plains area of Ottoman-Palestine.4 The availability of these lands occurred during the same period of Palestine's incorporation into the world economy. Suddenly, the possibility for greater cultivation yields combined with greater demand for Palestine's agricultural products resulted in land becoming a commodity- both for commercial and real estate/speculative purposes, issues to be discussed at length in Chapter Two.'" With land as a commodity, land-ownership became the essential avenue for wealth after the mid-nineteenth century, and the 1858 Land Code provided its legal mechanism. After the mid- century, the combination of land as a commodity and the provisions of the 1858 Land Code promoted large-scale landownership in the plains areas of Ottoman-Palestine.42 Gerber mentions the tactics the residents of Ottoman- Palestine used to amass large tracts of property. In his research he found that in 1871 the Ottoman government appointed a committee of inquiry to conduct a land survey in the district of Acre. This survey investigated the status of all agricultural land in the region to more effectively enforce official registration. Those cultivators who occupied lands which were not registered were
15 notified to register the land officially and pay the proper taxes, or find their lands put up for public auction. The survey also recommended that unoccupied land be put up for auction. It seems that the ultimate purpose of this survey was to find buyers for unexploited, vacant state land, which Gerber regards was actually a "policy" of the Ottomans.'" He concludes that it was through this process of the sale of uncultivated state land that the elites managed to amass large-scale properties.
Abraham Granott even writes of how uncultivated land belonging to bedouins fell into the possession of the state, and then into the possession of the elites. As a result of the greater control of the country-side after the mid-nineteenth century, the state used the mahlul Law to confiscate bedouin, as well as peasant, occupied lands left uncultivated for three years.44 The mahlul Law regarded land as ownerless if left uncultivated for three years. Most likely, it was the mahlul law which was invoked to dispose the land of the villagers of al-Tirra. These villagers had transferred their ownership in 1907 to Haifa families when they were unable to pay their debts. The state considered the remaining traditional land as uncultivated state land and gladly sold it to wealthy urban residents at a greater price.'" The wealthy residents of Palestine purchased extensive tracts of uncultivated lands, such as in al- Tirra or in Acre, only after state centralization penetrated the weakly governed plains and coastal regions of Palestine.
Though exact statistics on the extent of this land ownership are unavailable, the available figures do corroborate the claim 16 that a limited group of families possessed a large portion of available land. Granott cites a register from the second decade of the twentieth century which states that 144 large estate owners were in possession of 3,130,000 dunams , or an average of 22,000 duanms for each of these families. In addition, these large estate owners comprised 250 Arab families, who owned a total of about 4,143,000 dunams. This figure averages to 16,500 dunams per family, which is equivalent to nearly all the land owned by Arab peasants in Palestine.46 The penetration of the state into Ottoman-Palestine did not only open up vacant lands for the elites to purchase, but, as importantly, state centralization also elevated the elites' roles as intermediaries to greater proportions. This "politics of notables" relationship flourished after the introduction of the Tanzimat reforms, as Istanbul recruited local elites to administer the reforms and perform other bureaucratic duties. The elites used these offices and the political tradition of factionalism to further the interests of their own clans and to consolidate the political control of society in the hands of a privileged and limited group of families. As will be shown below, though the elites worked within a factional system of politics, they also recognized common class objectives and used these political offices to promote their interests.
In 'Adel Manna's "Continuity and Change in the Socio-Political Elite in Palestine During the late Ottoman Period", he recognises the elements of continuity and change in the composition of the
17 Palestine elite after the introduction of the TanzfmNt, explaining that not all the old urban notables and rural shaykhs attained a place in the new corps of elites. In Ghaza, the most prominent local elite family, the Husaynis, monopolized the senior religious positions of na'ib (deputy judge), mufti(jurisconsult), nagib a/- ashraf (marshal of the descendants of the Prophet). However, some of the old 'ulama' families of Ghaza, such as the Skayk, al-Saqqa, and al-Nakhkhal families , did not adapt to the new liberal bureaucracy and lost their high-ranking positions. By eschewing careers in the new bureaucratic offices, these families became uninfluential concerning the governing of local affairs.
Ghaza's traditional elites' reluctance to participate in the new political system allowed a new corps of elites to emerge in this city.Most of these new elites used their wealth from commerce to attain positions in the new secular-bureaucratic administration. One example is the al-Shawwa family of Ghaza. This family is reported to have had 100,000 duanms of land in their possession. Their wealth in land, and most likely the trade of its agriculture, afforded members of this family opportunities to hold posts in the local administrative councils, to become mayors of the city as well as its preeminent political leaders during much of the twentieth century. Both the Husayni and Shawwa families also monopolized extensive irrigated areas, and were active in the production of textiles, pottery and soap. Both these families are exemplary of the new cadre of elites after state centralization penetrated Palestine: both families owned large
18 areas of land, engaged in commerce, and controlled their local religious and/or administrative offices.47 The period after state centralization also advanced the political activity as well as the commercial interests of the elite of Jerusalem. With an elite traditionally willing to work with the central authorities, the Tanzimat reforms only served to further consolidate the political evolvement of the afandiya of Jerusalem. In conjunction with the near elimination of the bedouin threat and the weakening of the rural militias, these Jerusalem notables could now even extend their influence, through landownership, to the lands in which they had been shut-out from in the past. The two prominent Jerusalem families of Khalidi and Husayni exemplify the ability of the afandiyas to further their political and economic strength after the Tanzima.
Though the Khalidi family were not great landowners, they were distinguished religious scholars. Members of the Khalidi family regularly held the position of the bashkatib and the na'ib of the shari'a court during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One member of this family, al-Shaykh Raghib al-Khalidi (1863-1941) was appointed president of the Shari'a Court of Appeal. One of the most well known members of this family, Ruhi al-Khalidi (1861-1913) was elected from Jerusalem to the Ottoman Parliament in 1908 and in 1912 and served as its Vice-President in 1911.48 The Husayni family's prominent status in Jerusalem was attributed to their status as ashraf (descendants of the Prophet).
This family is reported to have owned 50,000 dunams of land,
19 including extensive plantations in the Jericho district. This family was also active in both religious and secular-bureaucratic careers. The Husaynis were the traditional custodians of the al-Nabi Musa (Prophet Moses) festival and shrine and muftis (those who pass legal opinion) of the city. Members of this family also were delegates to the Ottoman Parliament, administrators in the central government at Istanbul as well as mayors when Jerusalem became a municipality in the early 1880's.49 Both families used the political changes after the mid-nineteenth century to extend their "politics of notables" role from exclusively comprising careers in the religious sphere to careers in secular positions. The Husayni family was more successful in extending its influence to the rural areas through its expansive possession of property.
The Nablus elites' traditional reliance on military strength as a means to hold political power could no longer continue during the Tanzimat period. Istanbul's intent to reassert central authority and establish a rational bureaucracy naturally eliminated the Nablus rural shaykhs from this equation. As a result of these political changes, the Nablus elite were barred from holding the posts of aghwat and shaykh al-nahiyas,andcommanding any military forces. State centralization also undermined Nablus' traditional elites' sources of revenue in tax farming.The responsibility of collecting taxes was taken away from the powerful rural families and transferred to the bourgeoising urban elite in Nablus."
This urban elite was mostly composed of two main groups: one
20 comprised the new merchant families who established their wealth in trade or soap production after the mid-nineteenth century period; the other consisted of some of the traditional rural families who adapted to the new political offices. The families of Shaka'a Zu'aytir, al-Masri and Hammad are examples of merchants using their new wealth to attain political leadership. Another member of this group, Hajj Tawfiq Hammad, was elected to the Ottoman Parliament as a delegate of his district and many of the mayors of this city were chosen from this group. The 'Abd a-Hadi family was one traditional family which was successful in adapting to the changes after the mid-nineteenth century. This family owned 60,000 dunams of land between Jenin, the Gilboa Hills and Afula, and were noted as the premier soap merchants of the city. Members of this family also held positions in the local administrative councils. Compared with the predominance of the religious establishment in Jerusalem, the political elite of Nablus can certainly be described as "pluralistic".5 Clearly, a new corp of elites arose in Ottoman-Palestine after 1856.
The re-emergence of state authority after this period initiated a multi-causal process which eliminated many of the powerful rural families from the political scene and opened the plains and coastal regions for cultivation and settlement. The new elite after the mid-nineteenth century took advantage of this development to purchase large tracts of land. As Chapter Two will show, this land was mostly used to grow agriculture for the European and regional markets.
21 State centralization and the pacification of the powerful rural families did not only result in greater landownership for the new elites. The policies of state centralization also included the establishment of a more rational and competent bureaucracy at the local sanjak, qada', and village levels of administration. Istanbul established councils in the urban areas to administer at these levels and to institute the state's reform policies. Consequently, political leadership and administrative control acquired an urban rather than a rural milieu.
The Wilayat Law (Law of the Provinces) of 1864 and the Administration Law of 1871 ushered the urban elites into political activity.52 These two related laws employed the urban elite into the ranks of local administration posts by recruiting them to fulfil official duties. Previous to the 1871 Administration Law, Ottoman administration at the local level was ineffective and weak; to rectify this, the 1871 Law included areas the 1864 Provincial Law overlooked. The Provincial Administration law of 1871 outlined those bodies which were to participate in local government: the general assembly (mecalis-i 'ummi) of the wilayat, the administrative councils (mecalis-i idare), to be found at the sanjak and qada' levels, as well as the councils at the two lowest administrative ranks- the nahiyas and the villages (ihtiyar meclisi).53 The responsibilities of these councils included a wide range of administrative and judicial business : the majlis al-qada and
the majlis al-sanjak of Jerusalem dealt with waqf issues of all
22 kinds, but most importantly with land issues, such as issuing tax farms, tapu certificates and declaring mahlul land." This council's control concerning land issues reveals the extent the urban elites could influence government at the local scene to appropriate the peasants' agriculture, either through tax farming or land ownership. The 1871 Law also introduced state appointed officials at the two lowest levels of administration. This law appointed mukhtars (village headman) in the stead of the village shaykh and the mudirs (nahiya/subdistrict chiefs) in the stead of the nahiya shaykhs. Through controlling the countryside, the Ottomans incorporated the rural leaders into the state structure.
With these official posts, the rural autonomy of the shaykhs came to an end and the urban elites could act in unison with these new state appointed rural officials to control the peasants' agriculture .55 During the latter part of the nineteenth century, these councils became the urban elites' most important vehicle for their monopolization of political control at the local level. Though the Ottomans did not record the members' family names, secondary information has led Gerber to conclude that membership was not the prerogative of certain individuals, but of the traditional elite families as well as a new corps of elites."56 The Ottoman practice of recruiting the elites is evident in the Beersheba qada'. In this area the Ottomans sought the support of tribal leaders for the establishment of the district by promising to grant them posts in the local council.57 This traditional reliance on the "politics of
23 notables" relationship, which was strongly rooted within the practice of factionalism, had steered political control into the hands of a fixed number of elite families.
One scholar even argues that the council's sole purpose was to act as a convenient leverage for the Ottoman authorities to control the local elites.58 The factional-segmented politics of the time easily enabled the Ottomans to use the majlis for these ends.Gerber agrees with this observation and adds that the Ottomans not only intended to maintain an equilibrium between the elites and the Ottoman authorities, but also an equilibrium between the families themselves.59 Through controlling the membership of the councils, appointment was grafted only by the mutasarrif (Governor) of the sanjak , the Ottomans could reward those elites who contributed to Ottoman authority on the one hand, and punish those who acted against this authority on the other. One example is how the mutasarrif Tevik Bey divested the Husayni family during the late nineteenth century of certain key posts. These posts were given to the next most prominent family, the Khalidis. Though a Khalidi in Istanbul was known to have exerted pressure to take these steps, the motivating factor seems to have been the rise in power of the Husayni's and the feuding between the two families.60 Though rivalries between elite families existed in the councils, the state relied on these families to administer the new reform policies after the mid-nineteenth century. As a result of
the state's recruitment of the elites', the Jerusalem majlis acted
24 as a political arena for the four or five most prominent Jerusalem families/factions.61 A contemporary observer, David Urquhart, writes on the extent of the elites' usurpation of the Jerusalem majlis posts: "It seems that the point has been passed where a check was desirable over the Pasha, and that now the danger lies in the majlis" .62 Even if the council members could not always manipulate the councils to the extent that they hoped", these posts served the elites' interests in two ways. First, the councils provided the elites with political control over the peasant population by controlling tax farming and land registration. Secondly, these councils encouraged the elites to work together to further their ambitions as a class. As examples will be shown in Chapter Two, the Muslim elite acted as a class to protect their access to the rural hinterland. The elites who sat on the councils attempted to maintain tax farming amongst themselves, and attempted to obstruct other groups, such as foreigners or minority members, from establishing links with the hinterland. These elites recognized their common class interests in controlling the land and the agriculture and used the councils to further those shared objectives.
As important as the domination of the administrative posts were to the urban elites' control of political leadership, the influential religious positions they held similarly contributed to their monopoly of political control. At the end of the eighteenth century, Jerusalem families attained high posts, like the Khalidi
25
family member who served as saraskar (military judge) of Anatolia.
The attainment of these higher religious posts, however, seem to have dwindled by the late Ottoman period.64 The Ottoman-Palestine elite never relied on these types of imperial posts, but traditionally sought posts at the local-provincial level for a source of wealth and prestige. As mentioned, the Jerusalem elite were historically "barred" from the rural-hinterland and established their wealth through inheritance, family waqf, and religious services." The monopolization of these posts became even narrower as the elite families adopted a liberal policy of inheritance which passed posts from father to son or to nearest kin; as one qadi (religious judge) regularly commented on the merits of this system, "particularly (because] it was the function of your father and grandfather.66 Religious offices and their circulation amongst a limited number of elite families was particularly beneficial to those elites residing in dar al-Islams' third holiest city. As mentioned above, throughout the nineteenth century, a few urban elite families repeatedly usurped the highest religious-judicial and religious-administrative posts at the local level. The religious elite of Ottoman-Palestine were fortunate to have so much religious prominence bestowed in their land, specifically Jerusalem. Through the control of the many religious festivals, such as the al-Nabi Musa festival, and the revered shrines, this elite established themselves as Ottoman-Palestine's "natural leaders".67 According
to one scholar, it was easier for the falldlun (peasants) to accept
26
the leadership of these religious elites, as middle-men between the rulers and the ruled, rather than the leadership of the secular administrators." In fact, these two groups should not be seen as separate, acting in concert only periodically. Rather, the elites who filled both the local secular and religious posts were, "one and the same [from the same families], just as were their constituent members." 69 This trend of the elites filling posts at the local-provincial level is also reflected in their educational patterns. In Ruth Roded's study of the Syrian elite during the late Ottoman period, she found that even though religious education was the most popular choice (62%), elites adapted to the new secular administration by increasingly choosing an Ottoman secular education. These elites' choice of a secular education rose from 21% to 53% after 1908.70 This rise in secular education after the Young Turk coup is most likely a result of the Arab urban elite recognizing the importance the new government placed on creating a secular-bureaucratic administration.
In another relevant study, J.S.Szyliowicz found that the Arab administrators served most careers at the local-provincial level.
In one survey of those working in the central administration during the periods (- -1839), (1840-1876) and (1877-1908), he found that those administrators with origins in the Arab countries represented 5%, 7% and 5% respectively, while those Arabs serving in the provinces for the three periods equalled 83%, 69% and 60%
respectively.71 From both scholars' statistics, a trend towards
27 occupation at the local provincial level is clear. As Chapter Two will show with various examples, the great influence on government these elites held at the local level served their objectives of controlling the peasants' rural surplus.
Yet, holding an administrative-bureaucratic or a religious post was not the only way the elites entered the service of the state; they also did this through contracting bids for tax-farming (iltizams). Near the end of the Ottoman period in Jerusalem, we find iltizams of roadway khans, of shops owned by waqfs, of custom duties at the Jordanian bridge, an iltizam of a fishing tax in Jordan and many others.72 According to Gerber, throughout the period of late Ottoman Jerusalem, this iltizam system formed the economic basis for many of the Jerusalem elite.73 Those who would make bids for a contract were required to list the name of a source who could guarantee an income; of these names, four or five of the most prominent families repeatedly appear, as well as a few other lesser known names. These names appear in the minutes of the Jerusalem Council and clearly show that the iltizam system involved and interested families at the elite level.74 The involvement of the elites in governing the population through non-religious or administrative activities reveals the extent the state relied on the elites.
Summary: Early in the nineteenth century, the elite families of Ottoman-Palestine, especially those of Jerusalem, concentrated solely on religious careers, while the rural shaykhs, such as those
28 in the Jabal Nablus, governed the mountain hinterland. However, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Tanzimat reforms issued in the provinces introduced new bureaucratic- administrative responsibilities at the local-provincial level. New opportunities arose for those Muslim elites in the urban areas to administer the reforms. This shift towards the greater participation of the elites in governing the local affairs of the province allowed the urban Muslim elites to seize greater political control at the local level.
State centralization also included the reassertion of control in the rural hinterland. After these areas were pacified, the elites purchased large tracts of property in the plains and coastal regions. For the Jerusalem elite, penetration into the rural hinterland through landownership and tax farming was an activity they had been barred from for the last two centuries. The elites' dominance of political offices and their greater access to the rural hinterland facilitated this class' abilities to appropriate the peasants' agriculture. The elites could now recognize their shared interests and act in unison to protect and promote those common objectives.
The elites' position as a class was not complete until the Ottoman Empire's integration into the European economy, after the mid-nineteenth century. State centralization allowed the elites greater political control over the peasants and the ability to benefit as a class from the economic changes. This ability to dominate the local political and religious leadership of their
29 society, to amass large tracts of property, and to usurp tax collection privileges, would ultimately allow the elites to control the peasants' agriculture. As a result of these developments, the elites differentiated themselves from two other groups in society. On the one hand, the elites confronted the Ottoman central authority, who wished to divert the peasants' surplus to Istanbul as revenue. On the other hand, the elites intensified their class conflict against the peasants, who sought to avoid forfeiting their produce. Discussing how the elites responded to state centralization and global economic integration can demonstrate how the elites acted as a class to further their interests in the class conflict.
30 Endnotes: Chapter One 1. E.P.Thompson, "Eighteen-Century English Society: Class struggle without class?", Social History Volume 3, Number 2 (1978): 149. See also Hanna Batatu's discussion of applying classic sociological class analysis to the Middle East context, "Class Analysis and Iraqi Society", Arab Studies Quarterly Volume 1, Number 3 (Summer 1979): 229-234.
2. Rene Lemarchand and Keith Legg, "Political Clientelism and Development: A Preliminary Analysis", Comparative Politics Volume IV (1972): 151-152. See also John Duncan Powell, "Peasant Society and Clientelist Politics", American Political Science Review 64 LXN (1970): 412-413. See Salim Tamari or the Ottoman-Palestine context; in addition, he writes that the factional system of politics "deflected" the class interests of the peasants. "Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History", in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (ed.) Roger Owen (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982), 177.
3. Albert Hourani, "Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables", Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (eds.) William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1968). 41-68.
4. Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 5.
5. The above historical sketch is indebted to Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 225-228 and by the same author, "The Changing Face of the Fertile Crescent in the XVIllth Century " Studio Islamica VIII (1957): 88-122.
6. Hourani, History, 225 7. Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the 18th Century: Patterns of Government and Administration 'Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1973), 76; and Hourani, History, 226.
10. Kemal Karpat, "The Land Regime, Social Structure, and Modernization in the Ottoman Empire", Beginnings, 74.
9. See the seminal work on Ottoman-Palestine in the eighteenth century on where the decline of timars occurred in Ottoman-Palestine and at what dates. Cohen, Palestine, 295-310 and 224.225 for a discussion of the remaining vestiges of the timar system into the nineteenth century.
10. Helil Inalcik "Filaha" in the Encyclopedia of Islam (new edition), 907. Quoted from Karpat, "Land Regime", 74.
11. There were five categories of land during this period: (1) mulk: privately owned land, in which raqaba (right of absolute ownership) and tasarruf (right of usufruct of the land) belonged to the holder of a mulk title.(2) mini: rumba belongs to the state, but tasarruf belongs to the individual. Miri land is heritable, leasehold ownership which is leased to the individual. (3) waqf: land which is dedicated for some pious purpose. (4) matruka: land reserved for some public purpose. (5) mawat: dead or uncultivated land. Doreen Warriner, Land Reform and Development in the Middle East: A Study of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Second Edition. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 100. These are the land categories Warriner defines when discussing the 1858 Land Code's land classifications; however, Haim Gerber writes that, Even a cursory perusal of the land law 11858 Land Code] indicates that in its essentials it closely resembled the classical Ottoman land laws, and in fact, the basic definitions into five land categories was identical. Moreover, the legal definitions of miri and mulk land in this law were precisely the same as they had been since the fifteenth century.
Haim Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987), 69.
12. Cohen, Palestine, 180. In Cohen's study, he writes that the "basic tax" paid to the Ottoman treasury by the Palestine saniacks was the miri tax, which was a fixed sum the pasha (Governor) would pledge for his elayet based on a collected fixed sum total of what each multazim owed. Cohen, Palestine, 197 and 204. Gerber writes that the tax collection system underwent changes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, which allowed the 'ushr (tithe) tax to be levied more widely. He adds that Cohen had not
31 discussed the 'ushr because this tax was not prevalent in Palestine during the eighteenth century, since taxes were collected on a fixed sums and not on a percentage- 10X as the ,ushr charges- of the total crop. Haim Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem 1890-1914 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1985), 226-227. Gerber concludes that the tithe had been the nominal law, but in practice much more was actually collected. Karpat mentions that in a preliminary measure to the 1858 Land Code the Ottoman authorities established the 'ushr, whereas in the past this tax had moved between 10X to 50%. Karpat, "Land Regime", 87. Beginning near the middle of the nineteenth century, the tax most peasants paid was the legal 10%; yet, it was changed to 12X later in the century. Gerber, Ottoman 226-232.
13. These shaykh al-nahiyas were not only entrusted to collect taxes, but were also obliged to provide protection from bedouin raids, build fortifications, attend to public works, agriculture and commerce as well as provide justice through the turf laws. Cohen, Palestine, 122 and Butrus Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem in the Tanzimat Period: The New Ottoman Administration and the Notables", Die Welt des Islams XXX (1990): 5. Though the military men and officials dominated most tax farms in the rural areas, the merchants and 'ulama' of the urban areas, however, had a larger share of the local urban tax farms. In addition, the 'ulama' were administrators of important awqaf (religious endowments), which provided them with capital to invest in business ventures and tax farms. Hourani, History, 237.
14. Cohen, Palestine, 191.
15. Karpat, "Land Regime", 80.
16. This section on the various careers of the elites and the regional differences of the elites is completely indebted to 'Adel Manna', "Continuity and Change in the Socio-Political Elite in Palestine During the late Ottoman Period", in The Syrian Land in the lath and 19th Century, (ed.) Thomas Philip (Berliner Islamstudien, 1992), 69-77. We should quickly note that unlike Damascus, Aleppo or Cairo, Palestine did not possess large local garrisons, which undermined the opportunities of commanders (aqhwat) to make their fortunes. Ibid, 71. Also, in central Palestine, from Hebron to Jerusalem to Nablus, no fewer than 18 nahiyas were in existence, each with its ruling clan. James Reilly, "The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine", Journal of Palestine Studies, 40 (1981): 92.
17. Cohen, Palestine, 191. The religious establishment in Jerusalem controlled no militias and were thus unable to collect taxes; this job was left to the mutassalim and his lord- the Governor of Damascus, as well to the powerful chieftains who were appointed as shaykh al-nahiya. As a result of this relationship, the Jerusalem elite were arbitrators in the Qays-Yamani feuds unlike the bakat and aghwat of Nablus who participated in these conflicts. Manna', "Continuity and Change", 77. The rural chieftains were mainly a result of the ottoman's gradual lose of control, which brought migrating Turkoman, Kurdish and especially Arab Bedouin chiefs from Syria and Trans-Jordan to acquire more and more Ottoman responsibilities in the Nablus, the Jerusalem and the Hebron Districts. Cohen, Palestine, 285; see also Hourani, "The Changing Face", 94-96. This independence allowed the position of the shaykh al-nahiya to be passed through inheritance. Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem", 5. An example of their military sirength is that at the start of the 1834 rebellion against Ibrahim Pasha, 1000 soldiers were unable to crush the revolt. Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem" 5-7; concerning their strength see also Alexander Scholch, "The Decline of Local Power in Palestine After 1856," Die Welt des Islams XXIII-XXIV (1984): 459-460.
18. In addition the Ottomans exhausted great resources fighting the Russian-Turkish War of 1828-1829, and quelling rebellions in the Balkans and regaining Ottoman authority in Baghdad. Moshe Ma'oz, Ottoman Reform in Syria and Palestine 1840-1861 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 11.
19. Shimon Shamir, "Egyptian Rule (1832-1840) and the Beginning of the Modern Period in the History of Palestine", in Egypt and Palestine: A Millennium of Association (868-1948), (eds.) Amnon Cohen and Gabriel Baer (Jerusalem: Ban Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish communities in the East and Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Eretz Israel, 1984), 230.
20. Shamir, "Egyptian Rule" 219. The Egyptian schemes included conscripting locals into the Egyptian army, thus weakening the military strength of the local big families. Ma'oz, Ottoman Reform, 14. M. Abir, "Local Leadership and Early Reforms in Palestine, 1800-1834", in Studies on Palestine During the Late Ottoman Period, (ed.) Moshe Ma'oz, (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975), 309-310; and for a discussion of the destruction of local fortresses, Shamir, "Egyptian Rule" 220 and 220-230 for how the Egyptians used the majlis al-shura (local councils) to neutralize the power of the "feudal" shaykhs.
21. The Egyptians secularized the judicial system, subsequently stripping the afandiya of Jerusalem from an influential position, as well as a lucrative one. Abir, "Local Leadership", 308 and Ma'oz, Ottoman Reform, 14.
32 22. See Abir, "Local Leadership", 309-310 of who participated in the rebellion and their particular motives.
23. For a discussion of the council established in Jerusalem after the Ottoman reconquest of Syria see Abu- Manneh, "Jerusalem", 13-14. This was the first instance of how the urban notables acquired greater privileges and influence over the rural shaykhs, as well as influence over other towns in the sanjak. Sec also Carter Finley, "The Evolution of the System of Provincial Administration as Viewed from the Centre", in Palestine in the Late ottoman Period: Political Social and Economic Transformation (ed.) David Kushner, (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1986), 5 and Gerber, Ottoman Rule in the Province of Jerusalem, 1890-1914 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1985), 122.
24. Samir Khalaf, Persistence and Change in 19" Century Lebanon: A Sociological Essay (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1979), 64.
25. Khalaf, Persistence, 64-65 and Ma'oz, Ottoman Reform, 21; see also Roderic H. aavision's comments concerning this edict's intent. Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876 (New York: Gordian Press), 40 and 73.
26. Quoted in Khalaf Persistence, 65.
27. Division, Reform, 55; Khalaf, Persistence, 78. After the Crimean war, tax farming was restored on 20 December, 1855. To prevent a repetition of tax farming becoming abused, mukata'as were reduced to individual villages, and tax farmers were prohibited from holding mukata'as in adjacent villages or sanjaks; this attempt, however, also failed. Stanford J.Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey Two Volumes, Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey. 1808-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 2: 96. See Gerber, Ottoman Rule 160-169 for a discussion of the failed state emanet system of tax collection in the sanjak of Jerusalem.
28. Karpat, "The Land Regime", 85.
29. 'bid, 86.
30. Ibid.
31. For examples of this argument see Abraham Granott,The Land System: History and Structure (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952), 87; Karpat, "The Land Regime", 86; Gabriel Baer, "The Evolution of Private Ownership in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent", in The Economic History of the Middle East. 1800-1914, (ed.) Charles Issawi, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), 83. See also Peter and Marion-Farouk Sluglett, "The Application of the 1858 Land Code in Greater Syria: Some Preliminary Observations" in Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East, (ed.) Tarif Khalidi (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1984), 409-421. Ma'oz claims that the Code intended to reverse the trend towards large land ownership. Ottoman Reform, 162. Warriner, however, interprets the Code as an instrument to empower the fallah (peasant), arguing that the Code actually intended to grant the title directly to the cultivator, "...to establish a form of peasant ownership as against the tribal shaykhs". Doreen Warriner, "Land Tenure in the Fertile Crescent", Economic History, 73. Also, the Land Code was intended as a revenue raising device to repay the European loans. Warriner, "Land Tenure", 73, also Karpat, "The Land Regime", 86 and Slugletts, "The Application", 414.
32. Warrincr, "Land Tenure", 73; also Karpat, "The Land Regime", 87; Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 20.
33. Only after 1871 was land registered; prior to that date no official registration with deeds existed for the Palestine case. Stein, Land Question, 20.
34. Warriner, Land Reform, 68.
35. Karpat, "The Land Regime", 88 and Granott, Land system, 87.
36. Gerber has been critical of the traditional literature. One criticism is that the translation of the Code is sometimes incorrect; this mistranslation, according to Gerber, does not allow scholars to see the conservative nature of Code, which reflects the actual agrarian laws of fifteenth and sixteenth century Ottoman Kanuns. Origins, 68-73. He also criticizes Granott's dependence on the British Mandate period records, which result in "hastily arrived at conclusions...". Ibid, 75. See Granott, Land System, 39-41 for
33 examples of his chance on Mandate records. Gerber also criticizes scholars for depending on J.Weulersse work about the Alawite and Harrah regions. [bid, 73 note 19.
37. The author uses archival material from the protocals of the Administrative council of Jerusalem, for the years 1906/7, 1907/8, 1911/12. In the 5000 documents he found, several hundred were dealing with land problems and registration. Almost all relate to the qada' of Jerusalem, since every council dealt with the cases within its own jurisdiction. In addition, the Jerusalem Council was also the Council of the san ak, and so it dealt with special or controversial cases from other areas. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 202.
38. lbid, 215-218.
46. See Chapter Three for a discussion of demographics.
40. Alexander Scholch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882: Studies in Social. Economic and Political Development (Washington, D.C: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993), 197-240. Translated from Palestina im Umbrunch 1856-1882 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1986), by William C.Young and Michael [.Gerrity. See also Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem" 34-36 and Ma'oz, "The Impact of Modernization on Syrian Politics and Society During the Early Tanzimat Period", Beginnings, 343. Scholch lists the most important clans and discusses the rural shaykhs. "The Decline" 460-462. Shamir Sharon writes that bedouin raids impoverished the peasants, and they were forced to pay protection money to nomad shaykhs as late at the 20th century. Quoted from Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Morning in Palestinian Nationalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 12.
41. For information of how speculation worked see Granott, Land System 55 and 78; see also Ma'oz, "The Impact of Modernization", 347.
42. In fact, Karpat explains that the failure of the Code and the existence of large landownership also occurred because of the combination of the liberal ideological currents after the Tanzimat. After this period, he argues that a liberal economy, fundamental changes to social and political relations, and a poorly administered bureaucracy, made it "virtually impossible to establish a land system which would have assured a continuous state ownership." Karpat, "Land Regime", 88.
43. Gerber, Social Origins, 80. The most famous example of this is the purchase of a large tract of property in the Plain of Esdraelon, approximately 200,000 dunams according to contemporary observers, to Alfred Sursuq, the head of a Christian family from Beirut. Though the purchase price was tow, we should not forget the conditions attached to this sale which obliged the owner to bring previously marshy and uncultivated property into the business cycle. Gerber, Origins 80-81. The Slugletts provide a similar example of the five individuals who acquired de facto ownership of Bludan on the "condition" to ensure both cultivation and tax collection. "The Application", 415. But, we should also take note of Gerber's comments where he claims that the Sursuq example should not be exaggerated. The entrepreneurship of the Sursuq's was not shared by all their elite contemporaries, and that "more energetic encouragement was needed to achieve such results." Origins, 80 note 42.
44. Granott, Land System, 76 and Gerber, Ottoman Jerusalem, 218.
45. James Anthony Reilly, "A Survey of the Social and Economic History of Late Ottoman Palestine, 1858- 1914", (Unpublished Master of Arts Thesis, Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1980), 62. 1 would like to thank Professor Reilly for lending me this copy. See also Granott, Land System, 55 and 76-78; and, John Reudy, "Dynamics of Land Alienation", in Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, (ed.) Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 24; Gerber, Social Origins, 80. Only vacant lands included fees for registration, while Article 78 of the Land Code specifically mentions that peasants possessing land for over ten years could register land gratuitously. Gerber, Social Origins, 72. We can conjuncture that the Ottomans anticipated a large-scale sale of uncultivated and ownerless lands and expected to profit from this. See Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 126 concerning the acquisition of large tracts of land never owned before in the country-side.
46. See also the table listing the number of large estate owners with the areas possessed by them in the qadas of Ottoman-Palestine. Granott, Land 38-3g.
47. This section is heavily indebted to Manna" s, "Continuity and Change", 72-85. For a list of families who owned large tracts of property, see Granott, Land,78-84.
48. Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 26.
34 49. ibid 28.
50. Though the Ottomans were unsuccessful in their attempts at abolishing the iltizam system, they did manage to modify the tax collecting system and allow for greater efficiency. This new system was now collected by the multazim in six bi-monthly payments; also, the potential tax farmers were now required to compete for tax farms through bids (muzayede). The bids for each crop had to be submitted by a fixed date in which the bidder (talib) deposits a guarantee, and if the council accepted his name, it would be recorded in the land registry; he would then be checked and the amount of his iltizam awarded would depend on the value of his guarantor's holdings. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 160-164. The wealthier urban elites could compete more effectively than the rural shaykhs could for the possession of the tax collection privileges. In the end, the urban residents maintained tax farming as a prerogative amongst themselves. Yehoshua Porath, "The Political Awakening of the Palestinian Arabs and their Leadership Towards the End of the Ottoman Period", Studies on Palestine, 362.
51. Manna', "Continuity and Change", 82.
52. For a discussion of the history of the 1864 Law, its provisions concerning the administrative- jurisdictional changes to the administrative areas of the empire, and for a discussion of the new designations for those holding office in these new administrative areas see Finley, "The Evolution", 6.8 and Shaw, History, 89. Max.Gross has translated the 1864 Wilayat Law in his, "Ottoman Rule in the Province of Damascus, 1860-1909", Volumes I and II (Ph.D Georgetown University, 1979), 541-554.
53. In Gerber's studies of the independent sanjak of Jerusalem in the late Ottoman period, he found that the state could only properly establish administrative councils at the middle ranks, meaning those found in the capital of the sanjak and the large towns, while it had difficulty setting up the majlis-i ummi of the wilayat; furthermore, the nahiya and the village administrations were not as prevalent as the regulatory texts indicated they should have been. Ottoman Rule, 93; also Finley, "The Evolution", 8 and Ruth Kark, "The Jerusalem Municipality at the End of the Ottoman Rule", Asian and African Studies 14 (1980): 117.
54. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 123-126, and Finley, "The Evolution" 10-11. Membership into the councils was through nomination rather than election. Though legal changes were introduced in 1875 and made the list of nominees a choice of the local population, nomination from higher level-administrative positions remained the norm. Finley, "The Evolution", 10-12. Candidates to this council were required to have paid no less than 500 pisters (5 English pounds). Muslih, Origins, 23.
55. Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem", 36-37. For examples of the co-operation of the rural leaders with the urban elites to appropriate the peasants' agriculture, see Chapter Two. For a discussion of the elected nahiya majlis and the responsibilities of the mudir see Finely, "The Evolution", 13-14. For mahalle (villages and various quarters) of towns and cities, the laws on Provincial Administration called for the election of a mukhtar (headman) and council of elders (ihtiyar milk). Election requirements included,"age, good repute, and the payment of at least fifty kuru per year in direct taxes". Finely "The Evolution", 14 and Shaw, History 91. Voting regulations were similar to the nahiya requirements: voting rights were granted to male residents over twenty-five years of age who were Turkish subjects of upright character, possessed certain property, and paid an annual tax of at least 50 piasters. The requirements necessary to sit on council were even narrower: the potential member needed to be an Ottoman subject, aged thirty and over, whose taxes on property amounted to over one hundred piasters per year. Kark, "The Jerusalem Municipality", 123.
56. Though the Ottomans did not record family names, certain secondary information has helped provide a list of the sanjak of Jerusalem councils' members: Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Khalidi, Shukri al-Nashashibi, Rashid al-Nashashibi and Faydi al-'Alami. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 132.
57. According to Gerber, this is the only other majlis other than Jerusalem that we have any information about. Ibid, 132 and 237-238 on how the establishment of this new municipality quelled the power of the bedouins.
58. Gerber quotes E.Karal, Ibid, 133.
59. Ibid.
35 60. Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem", 38-43. Elites in society were the only members able to serve on the councils because the posts did not provide an income. Gerber, ottoman Rule, 133-134. Gerber writes that the mutasarrif negated those appointees he considered dishonest or he disliked, while he rewarded those he became friendly with and "made great efforts to secure them titles and decorations." Ibid, 134.
61. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 135.
62. Quoted in Ma'oz, ottoman Reform, 97. Ma'oz writes that David Urquhart was an "ardent supporter of majlis system", but we must also remember that the comments endemic to any travel literature is its tendentious nature. Kark's raises this point when discussing which European powers either supported or acted against the municipal councils. Kark, "The Jerusalem Municipality", 140.
63. The members could, either by influence or by bribery, exempt their young relatives from conscription. Ma'oz, Ottoman Reform 98. Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem", 38. Examples of how the elites could not manipulate the majlis see Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 135-136 and 161-164.
64. Gerber conjunctures that maybe the Mamluk system of colleges that Jerusalem was famous for began disintegrating. Ottoman Rule, 109. Before continuing, we should not give the impression that religious education was totally abandoned. In fact, Ruth Roded found that 30% of those in an Ottoman administrative career received a religious education only, and in the judiciary and educational administrations this number jumped to 56% (Table 3). The author explains that because of a low number of graduates from the new educational institutions, the state turned to the other educated group in society, the madras graduates. Roded, "Social Patterns Among the Urban Elite of Syria During the Late Ottoman Period, 1876-1918", in Palestine, (ed.) Kushner, 148.
65. Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem", 3. As he comments latter in the paper, the Jerusalem elite differed from their counterparts in Damascus because the Jerusalem elite did not derive its nobility from wealth, landownership or para-military, but from a "classical kind- of service and descent." Ibid, 14.
66. Abu-Manneh, "Jerusalem", 14. See the quote of shaykh Yasin al-Khalidi, chief secretary (bashkatib) of the shar'i court of Jerusalem in 1864 on the same page. In Table 4 of Roded's study of the Damascus elite, 86% of the Religious dignitaries and 67% of the Religious administrators continued their family career (Table 4), while 63% of the former and 52% of the latter inherited their religious post from a member of their family (Table 5). Roded, "Social Patterns", 162.
67. Johnson Islam , 15. The Nabi Musa festival drew crowds from all over the country, and the Husayni family was given patronage of this festival by the Ottomans, which they later used in the Mandate period as "emotive backdrop for national demonstrations". Ibid, 15. Porath writes that the mufti was "able to win national status" because the mufti was the central personality in the Nabi Musa celebration, as well as the traditional administrator of the waqf for the al-Nabi Musa mosque near Jericho. "The Awakening", 367.
68. Johnson, Islam, 15.
69. Ibid, 15.
70. Roded, "Social Patterns". Table 1, 161.
71. J.C. Szyliowicz, "Changes In the Recruitment Patterns and Career-Lines of Ottoman Provincial Administrators During the Nineteenth Century", Ma'oz, Studies, 263. Roded's statistics reveal that 58.2% of those studied remained in their home province, while a position in Syria or another Arab province were the next two most popular locations, 14.3% and 13.3% respectively. Roded, "Social Patterns", Table 11, 164. Gerber lists a few Arabs who reached high positions at the local-provincial level. See Ottoman Rule, 109-110 and Porath, "The Political Awakening", 365-368.
72. Gerber Ottoman Rule, 110-112.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid, 111.
CHAPTER TWO: Economic Changes and the Responses of the Local Elite in Ottoman-Palestine, 1856-1908.
36
Introduction: Many internal- local, provincial- as well as imperial factors account for Ottoman-Palestine's response to the economic changes after the mid-nineteenth century. This chapter will briefly sketch the economic changes which took place after 1856, concentrating on those export products, both agricultural and handicraft, which were destined for European, local, and regional markets. Analysing the composition of those exports and their destinations can reveal the individuals who participated in this economy at the managerial level.Albert Hourani characterizes this group as the "organiz[ers] of production". They were those who advanced capital to landowners or cultivators, decided what they should produce, and who bought, processed, and then exported the agriculture.'
To "manage" the export aspect of this economy a successful participant needed to appropriate the peasants' agriculture. The local, mostly Muslim, elite were more successful at this by acting as tax collectors, landowners or moneylenders. Their access to the rural hinterland afforded them the opportunities to trade in the local and regional markets. The local Muslim elite in Ottoman- Palestine dominated this aspect of commerce, while the local European and native Christian elite population dominated the maritime trade with Europe. This chapter will closely examine how the local Muslim elite class came to control peasant agriculture as export products for the local-regional markets. Furthermore,
37 determining how this class appropriated the agriculture, /Jveals their success against the peasant class for control of the rural produce.
As outlined in Chapter One, these urban men with capital used their new political offices as a device to establish political dominance. As a result of their political and growing economic power, the urban elites of Ottoman-Palestine were unified into a "merchant-landowning-officeholding" class, united in their ambitions to appropriate the peasants' agriculture.As a class, these urban elites recognized both their foes and their allies in their mission to control the peasants' agriculture: their foes always included the peasants, and at times the state served either as an ally or a foe. Furthermore, the formation of the elites as a class intensified their exploitation of the rural surplus. As this thesis argues, the twin forces of political centralisation and economic changes after the mid-nineteenth century provided greater opportunities for the new elite class to become victorious in the class conflict.
Various local changes occurred which allowed the local elite to respond to the economic changes after the mid-nineteenth century. One factor which helps to explain how handicraft and agricultural merchants were able to respond to the market demands is the improved methods of transportation initiated after greater central state control was established. By the first decade of the twentieth century the 1,400 kilometres of railroads in Syria- Palestine, the construction of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railroad in
38 0 1892, and the greater availability of paved roads served to facilitate important local and regional trade. Throughout the Middle East, increased commercial activity also took advantage of steam and combustion engines serving the major Mediterranean ports. These improvements in transportation linked the main Ottoman- Palestine centres with the other main port and inland cities throughout the Middle East.' As Faruk Tabak writes, the imports and exports which expanded with the flourishing inter-regional trade altered, the mercantile map and commercial networks of the Arab provinces: great trunk roads and ports of shipment and disembarkation, as well as the arterial roads of inland commerce, changed with the increasing rhythm and volume of trade.'
The greatest contributing factor which encouraged the elites to engage in commerce, though, is rooted in the relationship between the expansion of cultivable areas and the increase in the volume of agriculture, witnessed throughout Syria-Palestine after the mid-century. As noted in Chapter One, the Ottomans waged a campaign after 1856 and regained control of the plains and foothills from the bedouins and powerful rural families. The revived central authority allowed the Ottomans to gradually counter these recalcitrant groups. Once these groups were brought under control, the Ottomans even pursued a sedentarization policy and promoted the settlement of tribes in the scarcely populated lands in Marj Ibn 'Amir from the north to the west from Beisin and Jenin north of Nablus to Haifa.4 As Beshara Doumani carefully notes, we should no longer distinguish between the dichtomony of settled and
nomadic populations, but rather, differentiation between those who
39 engaged in the production of produce, and those who had control of the surplus.5 In this economic system, the bedouins found room to participate and the elites, as merchants, could respond to the demands of the market.
The southern lands of Palestine are an example of how the commercial community favoured a peaceful hinterland. Cereals could not have reached the importance they had without increased security in cultivatable areas, as in the qada' (district) of Ghaza in the south. The following data compiled in an American consular report for 1882 reveals the importance of the southern lands for cereal cultivation. According to this document, 150,000 to 200,G00 acres of cereals were sown during the last ten years in the districts of Jerusalem, Hebron, Jaffa and Ghaza.6 According to Roger Owen's estimates, however, Jerusalem and Hebron were in the less fertile hill country while Jaffa cultivated no more than 20,000-25,000 acres of cereal; therefore, most of the cereal cultivation must have taken place in the Ghaza region.' Only after the Ottomans established their authority in this region could the regular cultivation of cereals begin, as well as flourish to the extent that it had. The Ottoman government recognized this region's contribution, through cereal cultivation, to Palestine's economy by declaring Bi'r al-Saba' a qada' in 1900.8 The merchant community took advantage of these newly opened lands to meet the market demands for cereals.Barley, mostly produced in the Ghaza region, was a valuable export crop which was
in great demand by the breweries in England, Scotland, and 40 Germany.9 Marwan Buheiry cites one source which claims that the annual production of this crop from 1890-1900 regularly exceeded 40,000 tons on average a year in Ghaza alone, which represented three-quarters of Palestine's total export of this cereal. He adds that Ghaza's average value of barley export to England (35,000 tons worth L 180,000) was nearly twice the annual average value of Jaffa's export of oranges to all countries (L 97,000 yearly average for 1901-1905); "Barley", he states, "was therefore the leading export item."10 Furthermore, Owen's tabulations show that barley exports from Ghaza alone exceeded all the cereal exports from Aleppo/Alexandretta combined." After the Ottomans established greater central authority in the southern lands, local merchants were in a position to respond to the new market demands following Ottoman-Palestine's integration into the world economy.
Though barley showed strong export production later in the nineteenth century, the export of wheat remained dominant throughout that century, either for export to European or to local and/or regional markets. This demand by Europe provided the native Christian merchants with the opportunities to engage in commerce. Though compilations for the ethnic affiliations of traders for our study does not exist, some information is provided through a list of Jaffa's leading firms and their owners, cited in the correspondence of a British consulate in 1906.12 For the section on "Wheat Exporters," the author of the report cites as Jaffa's leading exporters: "Salim Tamari and sons, George and Alexander Qassat, and Michel Bairuti and Naib Bairuti"; all three were of
41 Christian origin. The greater volume of wheat to service the new markets in Europe gave these Christian merchants the opportunities to engage in commerce.
This trade to Europe decreased during the second-half of the mid-nineteenth century.Wheat exports to the new markets, particularly to Europe, ranked wheat as one of Palestine's leading exports during the years from 1850 to 1860. During the 1870's, however, wheat exports from Jaffa began to taper off, and in the 1880's wheat no longer registered as one of the three leading exports at the port of Jaffa." Wheat production remained strong in the export economy of Palestine because, as will be shown, wheat merchants adopted a trade strategy to suit Palestine's incorporation into the world economy.
As Gad Gilbar explains, we should not assume that wheat production decreased during the last years of the nineteenth century. Rather, the exports during the 1850's and 1860's represented the surplus after local consumption was satisfied. During the latter part of the 1870's onward, greater wheat and barley production in America rendered Palestine wheat unprofitable for export." For example, the yearly average value of wheat exports from Jaffa equalled 9,980 between 1885-1891, yet between the years 1892-1905 wheat for export only registered four times." The greater competition in the world market forced many wheat merchants to abandon the European market.
Though wheat for export to Europe remained low, exports of this produce to the local and the regional markets grew serving the
42 increasing population. Syria-Palestine's population increased from 1.5 million in 1836 to 2.8 million in 1895, while Palestine alone registered 700,000 in 1914 compared to 450,000 people in 1875. With these increases in population wheat producers could find a ready market at home just as easily.16 Though the British vice- consul would report in 1899, "Wheat--no surplus for export", the indigenous community had already taken the initiative to adapt to the new economic and social realities. Rather than compete in the world market against American grain exports, local merchants concentrated their efforts on the greater local and regional demand. At the turn of the century, this demand for wheat was so great, or that local production was insufficient, or for other reasons outside the scope of this study, flour as an import product begins to enter Palestine's ports." As other examples will show, merchants relied on the export of agricultural products to the important local and regional centres. As will be shown below, the Muslim local elites could appropriate a great portion of this agriculture and its commerce.
Another agricultural crop important to the export market in the second half of the nineteenth century was the citrus crop. Just as the cereal agriculture benefitted from the increased areas of cultivation and new and expanded markets, citrus growers were able to expand the size of orchard acreage and increase the yield. A British report in 1873 comments on the "continuous planting of new trees" and claims Jaffa possessed 420 orchards, while an SAmerican consular authority in the early 1880's estimates that
43 Jaffa could boast 500 gardens, averaging between 2 and 6 acres with a total sum of 800,000 trees." Gilbar estimates that orange orchard acreage nearly rose by five times from 7,500 dunums in 1880 to 33,000-35,000 dunums in 1913.19 Both Christian and Muslim Arabs owned orange groves in Jaffa, the main centre for orange production in Ottoman-Palestine. The Muslim group included afandiya (high ranking clerics), shaykhs (village leaders) from surrounding villages, and heads of semi- nomadic tribes. The Christian owners of orange groves included former residents of Beirut who now settled in Jaffa.20 Jaffa's Vice Consul representatives used their political influence to purchase gardens. One map of the city in the 1870's indicates that the Vice-Consuls As'ad J. Khayyat and Haim Amzalak (British), Philbert (French), Bishara al-Saghir (Dutch) and Murad (German) were all owners of orange gardens.21 Jewish investment in this sector only came at the turn of the century. In 1900, 2000 dunums out of a total of 14,000 dunums of citrus orchards were in Jewish hands, but this figure rose to one-third of total ownership by 1914.22 During the period under study, Christian and Muslim Arabs owned a great portion of the orange groves.
Through their ownership of orange groves, Christian and Muslims could participate in its export. The quantity and the value of the orange export quickly followed the expansion of production. In 1862 Jaffa exported 50,000 cases (L 5,000), but in 1890 this rose to 200,000 cases (L 83,000) and to 1.6 million cases in 1913 (L 298,000).23 A noteworthy trend that orange exports 44 reveal, as with wheat exports, is that a great percentage of the export trade occurred in the regional market, a trend which is often forgotten concerning Palestine's export trade as a whole.
During most of the nineteenth century, many reports confirm that Jaffa's oranges were first marketed at home, roughly one-sixth, and the remainder taken to Egypt and Anatolia on Greek ships." Through their ownership of orange groves, Muslim merchants could dominate the orange trade to the regional markets.
During the mid-1870's, the orange exports to Europe on a large scale placed much of the maritime trade with local Christians. At this time, the increasing European demand for Palestine's oranges rendered it as one of the three leading export items from the Jaffa port. Nearing the turn of the century, both French and British consular reports claim that nine-tenths of the orange exports were destined for British ports, which represented the port of Jaffa's leading export item and one-third of its total income from exports .25 This greater demand from Europe allowed the Christian merchants the opportunities to dominate its trade. These Christians merchants possessed certain advantages not available to the Muslim merchants. These local Christians had access to credit from merchants in Europe, which allowed them to pay advances to farmers and grove owners on anticipated yields.26 The dominance of Christians in the export of oranges to Europe is corroborated by the British Consulate letter referred to above. In this report, we read that the largest orange exporters to Liverpool" included
45 mostly Christian families: Gabriel Araman, Da'ud Zarifa and brother, Nasri Talawas, Bishara Diblias, 'Arkatanji and brother, Eddy Fortalis.25 Both their ownership of orange groves and the increasing demand from Europe afforded the Christian population the means to engage in the maritime trade of oranges.
Olives constitutes the third most important crop to discuss, and those were used mainly for the manufacturing of oils and soap. In 1872, a British consular report mentioned the increase of olive plantations all along the coast from Jaffa no:7th to Latakia. Olive oil was a main ingredient in soap, and most estimates agree that one-half of the olive oil was reserved for soap manufacturing, one- quarter for local consumption (eating and burning), and the remainder for export.29 This discussion of soap manufacturing and its importance to the Palestinian economy during the second half of the nineteenth century is related to the larger issue of the contribution of the handicrafts industry to the economy of Ottoman- Palestine. The handicraft industry is a useful example of how local merchants depended on the local and regional trade to market their products. A brief outline of the general trends that the handicrafts industry followed after the mid-century and how this industry adapted to economic integration merits discussion.
Traditionally, scholars have agreed that the handicraft industry perished with the onslaught of European competition." Recently, however, others have rebutted this argument and have modified its generalizations.31 All scholars, nonetheless, agree
that some traditional industries did suffer when competing with the
46 superior technological advantages of the West; one example is the introduction of gas lamps in the streets of Damascus in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which undermined much of the traditional candle industry; also, the import of cheaper glass-ware from Europe in combination with the ubiquitous empty petroleum cans soon began to replace the Palestinian manufactured earthenware." Clearly, Ottoman-Palestine's integration into the world economy threatened the existence of some of the traditional industries.
The textile industry is the most conspicuous of the handicraft industries mentioned in the consular reports and in the recent scholarship concerning the subject. This industry is exemplary, according to the traditional argument, of the demise of the local handicrafts when faced with European competition. Buheiry writes briefly of thr unequal relationship the Palestinian economy faced when exporting raw materials, like cotton, and importing greater quantities of cheap European products, such as cotton manufactured goods.33 Though we can trace a general decline in the handicrafts industry beginning in the nineteenth century, especially in those sectors with heavy European competition, such as weaving, spinning, glass-blowing, tanning and pottery, we should not exaggerate this decline or see it as a complete or immediate devastation, as contemporary European observers have claimed.34 Rather than view the handicrafts industry as having experienced a complete demise, it should be recognized that much of the handicrafts sector survived and even succeeded by marketing their products to
47 particular local groups or to markets within the region.
Ironically, the most notable example of this scheme is the textile industry, which began catering to the lower classes in villages and ignoring the wealthier classes, who purchased cheaper European textile products.33 The handicrafts industry is a useful example of how the Ottoman-Palestine economy adapted to incorporation into the world economy, through reorientating its marketing by relying on local and regional markets to avoid direct competition with European products.
The handicrafts industries in the three urban centres of Hebron, Ghaza and Nablus36 illustrate this point further. During the period under consideration, Hebron was famous for its glass- ware, such as coloured lamps, bracelets, earrings, and necklaces. Gradually these items began to face the competition of European products, mainly from Bohemia, which were sold in the shops of Egypt and Syria as well as in Jerusalem and Nablus. The glass industry survived these challenges by following the pattern of the textile industry: it sold to the poorer sectors of the population through local Jewish peddlers, to regional markets, to bedouins, and to Near-Eastern and Eastern-European visitors. In 1886 a French report estimated that the four glass factories in Hebron brought a return of 60,000 French francs a year.37 Ghaza is another centre which responded to the incorporation into the world-economy by focusing on the local and regional markets.This town's industrial production was composed of weaving, pottery and the manufacturing of soap, all marketed in 48 Palestine, while soap was exported mostly to Egypt. In the 1880's, the town's sixteen workshops, three ovens, and four wheels manufactured jugs, bowls, small lamps and earthenware pipes. While the pottery industry of the Dardanelles, considered the most important centre in the Ottoman Empire, decreased by 50% from 1867 to 1900, the main centres in Palestine, like Ghaza, Ramle, and Hebron, remained strong by marketing to their native population.38 Nablus, during the second half of the nineteenth century, became the leading centre of production and trade in Palestine. During the 1856-1882 period, Nablus became the chief centre for the manufacturing of olive-oil, soap and cotton goods. The textile industry in Nablus during this period was considered the most important in the region. Even after the American Civil War and the downward trend of cotton exports became apparent throughout Syria- Palestine, cotton from Nablus found a market, selling locally in Palestine, and regionally in central Syria and Trans-Jordan.39 The city, together with Ramie and Lydda, also formed one of the most productive centres for soap and oils (olive and sesame) in Palestine. The production of soap seems to have been the most valuable to the economy of this city, equalling 24% of Syria's total soap production in 1908.4° Most of Nablus' soap was not consumed locally, but exported mainly to Egypt and Anatolia. Lying on the north-south Damascus-Jerusalem-South Palestine route and the East-West trade route from the coast to the east of the Jordan, Nablus' geography contributed to its ability to market its products.'"
49 The export trade of the agricultural and handicraft products studied thus far reveal the importance of the local-regional trade for Ottoman-Palestine's merchants. Apart from the improved methods of transportation and the increased population, other factors attracted these merchant to the local-regional market. The changes to the import and export taxes provided one incentive for the commercial community to trade within the regional markets. The gradual rise in import taxes on European products, from 2% in the sixteenth century to 8% in 1907, coupled with the gradual decline of export duties from Ottoman ports, standing at 12% ad valorem in 1861 and decreasing by 1% annually, where it stood and remained from 1869 onwards, significantly contributed to those local merchants' ability to participate in the economy.42 The Ottoman government's decision to abolish internal custom tariffs in 1874 also encouraged the commercial community to concentrate its activities within the Syria-Palestine region.These changes provided the local merchants with more opportunities either to compete with European imports or to export their products to the regional markets.
During the period under study, the Muslim merchants were forced to contend with Ottoman-Palestine's integration into the world economy. In 1862 the American Consul in Jerusalem described exports from Palestine as "insignificant", and that most exports travelled along the Mediterranean, with only a small amount exported to Trieste, Messine, Marseilles.43 However, according to
Owens' calculations, already by the years 1836 to 1838 half the 50 value of Egypt's and Syria-Palestine's sea-borne trade was with Europe.44 Moreover, according to the tabulations of most scholars studying the trade patterns of Ottoman-Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century, trade with Europe was quickly on the rise.45 During the years 1884 to 1913, imports to the Jaffa port multiplied by four times, and exports from that port increased by 6.6 times.46 Europe encompassed a great portion of these increases. In 1885 Europe shipped b 205,000 (71% of total imports) of goods to Jaffa and received 84,000 (63% of total exports) worth of goods from that port. In comparison, in 1908 Europe imported L 461,000 (57%) of goods from Jaffa, and received 4, 309,000 (55%). On the eve of W.W.I., the rise in trade with Europe reached the extent of creating an import surplus at all the four ports of Acre, Haifa, Jaffa and Ghaza.47 Though during the second-half of the nineteenth century trade with Europe represented a great portion of the commerce of Ottoman- Palestine, the regional markets, however, remained valuable to the Palestine economy. The importance of this intra-regional trade to the economy of Palestine is, however, too often overlooked. As shown above, Muslim merchants began to search for markets within the region and to remain active in commerce." Unfortunately, there are only scanty reports of the internal trade of Palestine.
The importance of Turkey's and Egypt's role in the regional trade of Palestine has already been mentioned. Reports of trade activity with the surrounding areas in Lebanon and Syria, and with the bedouins east of the Jordan and in the Hauran are common, though we
51 are without reliable statistics for either. Referring to a different area, James Reilly's calculations of the commercial statistics of British reports for the years 1885 to 1908 show that Ottoman markets (including Egypt) were the destinations of over half of Damascus' annual exports, even at times reaching three- quarters or more.49 What is most revealing is that a great deal of internal trade activity took place, a point which has been overlooked by scholars who usually stress Palestine's maritime trade with Europe.
Understanding the importance of the regional trade to the Palestine economy can help us to understand how the commercial community reacted to economic changes and to identify its local participants. In order to participate in this economy, merchants understood the centrality of agriculture to the economy. The local Muslim elite, however, became the managers of this economy by dominating both a large portion of the appropriation of the agriculture and its trade within the local-regional area. As shown above, Christians and Jews did participate in lucrative commercial activity, but these minorities could not rival the Muslim elites' abilities to appropriate the agriculture.
Through the integration into the new world economy did the minorities establish themselves as an important group for a particular segment of trade in Palestine. Minorities heavily represented those who conducted the maritime trade with Europe; Christians and Jews spoke Arabic and Turkish; they were familiar with Middle Eastern commercial practices; minorities were also 52 eligible for the barat (protection of European consulates) and had the privilege of paying low custom duties.50 As shown with the citrus and grain trade, the minority groups were able to make links with the European consuls and trading firms, acting as intermediaries between the two economies.51 area of the Eastern Mediterranean, the British Consul in Baghdad noted the rising activity of minorities in commerce, commenting that, "The wealth of Baghdad is rapidly passing from Mohammedans to Christians and Jews"." Issawi regards this trend of the increased participation of minorities in the economy as a result of a shift in trade routes. He argues that with greater trade with Europe, transportation moved from caravans to steamships, which hurt the inland towns of Kayseri, Konya, Diyarbakir, Erzurum, Aleppo, Damascus, and greatly benefited port cities such as Salonica, Izmir, Beirut, and Alexandria, cities where Jews and/or Christians were an important minority or majority."
In these coastal cities, the minorities used the new transportation facilities to make links with Europe. Coupled with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the steamship lines made regular contacts with the Mediterranean coast and minority members became local agents of French, Austrian, Russian and British shipping lines servicing the eastern Mediterranean. These steamships were mostly European owned, could service the coast faster than the mostly Muslim owned sail ships and, most importantly, the steamers could carry greater volumes of cargo: in 1891 379,721 of a total of 400,000 tons leaving the Jaffa port and
53 808,000 of a total of 820,000 tons of cargo in Haifa were from steamships. The use of steamships began during the 1830's, and by the 1870's five shipping lines had made contact with Jaffa, as well as Egypt, Asia Minor, Russia, Austria and France.54 By acting as agents for these shipping companies which serviced the routes between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, minority members dominated the maritime trade with Europe.
Though minorities did elevate their involvement in commerce, they could not compete with the dominance of the local Muslim elite. The Jewish community in Ottoman-Palestine is such an example. Beginning in 1882, Jews from Europe immigrated to Palestine on a large scale, mostly escaping the pogroms in Russia.
At this date, the Jewish population in Palestine was 24,000, rising to 85,000 in 1914. On the eve of the Young Turk Revolution, the Jewish population represented 10% of the total population 70-80,000 of a total of 650,000. A majority of the new Jewish immigrants concentrated in the urban areas, such as in the four Holy cities as well as in Jaffa and Haifa.55 As Neville Mandel comments, "Benefiting doubly from the millet system on the one hand and the Capitulations on the other, they quite consciously set about laying the basis for an independent Jewish existence in Palestine"; soon the new immigrants who settled in the cities engaged in commerce, and became artisans.56 Since most of the new Jewish immigrants were Russian subjects, they were protected under the Capitulations and could obtain permits for internal trade within the empire, as well as for land
54 purchases.57 By 1908, Jewish immigrants had settled in twenty-six colonies, totalling 400,000 dunums (Palestine had approximately 27 million dunams in total). Many of the colonies were established in the north, in the sanjaks of Acre under the auspices of the wilaya (province) of Beirut, where land purchases seemed more flexible." Even though examples of the local Ottoman officials obstructing Jewish land purchases do exist59, Jewish residents nonetheless bought land to participate in commerce. The growing of grapes for the production of wine, and to a lesser extent the cultivation of cereals, were successful agricultural activities the Jews immigrants participated in .6° From the turn of the century until the eve of W.W.I, wine was valued as the third largest export product from the Jaffa port, while in 1913 the orange exports from the Petak Tikvah colony reached 15% of Palestine's total orange exports.° Near the end of the nineteenth century, the new Jewish immigrants of Ottoman-Palestine had established a firm commercial base, especially in Jaffa. The increase in the number of shops and warehouses leased to Jews by Arab Christians and Muslims reveal the extent Jews had entered the commercial life of Jaffa.`' Moreover, in 1897 commerce represented 34% of the occupation of Jews in Jaffa, in 1905 33%, and, with a growth of other industries and an increase in population, by 1916 commerce employed 13% of the Jewish residents in that city.° As Issawi asserts, the minorities were instrumental in participating in those sectors of the economy that 5 had expanded most rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth
55 centuries: aside from foreign trade with Europe and America, various branches of finance, mechanized transportation, and modern industry also expanded.64 The list of Jaffa's leading firms corroborates this claim; the major importers of paint and enamel and agricultural machinery and implements included Jewish families such as: Leon Stein and Haim Aharonson, as well as Rokah, Alonzi and Chelouche.° Through their protected status, the Jewish residents of Ottoman-Palestine were able to purchase land for the cultivation of crops for export. More importantly, this status also afforded them the opportunities to make contacts with Europeans and to participate in the flourishing maritime trade with Europe.
Though the Jewish community made these inroads, Christian and Muslim merchants had already solidified their positions in Jaffa and forced Jewish traders to content themselves with minor trading activities. Even with the increased Jewish population, and the new stores, warehouses and firms owned or leased by Jewish residents, Ruth Kark writes that by the early twentieth century, "Nonetheless, major commercial ventures continued to remain in the hands of local Arabs, Christian and Muslims".66 One contemporary source claims, "in all the large transactions, especially the numerous exports valued at millions of francs, our brethren have no part."67 Another observer complains of the absence of Jews from soap manufacturing and its export, the importing of fruits, textiles and silk and other products which "are engaged in by the inhabitants 0..
this country whose forcefulness and dominance frighten off the
56
Jews."" According to Kark's account, most Jewish observers attributed this absence to the Jews settling only late in Palestine."
Though minorities did manage to take advantage of greater trade with Europe, commerce in the local and regional market remained mostly a Muslim venture. Though the coastal cities did provide new commercial opportunities for minorities to exploit, the Muslim merchants also took advantage of these new opportunities to expand trade within the regional market. It follows that we can even take issue with Issawi's claim that the formerly predominant regional trade "dwindled to a trickle" as near the end of the nineteenth century trade with Europe and the United States represented 90% of Middle Eastern trade.'° However, referring again to the figures for the destination of Jaffa's exports, in 1885 exports to Europe and America represented 63% of the total, while to Egypt and Turkey exports represented 37%; in 1908, exports to Europe, and to Egypt and Turkey equalled 57%, and 40% respectively. But, in 1913 exports to Europe fell to 48% of the total, at par with Egypt and Turkey at 47%.71 Clearly, from the end of our period of study in 1908 and beyond to 1913, Egypt and Turkey continued to represent a larger portion of Jaffa's exports. The rise in Jaffa's trade within the region can be attributed to more steamships servicing the Mediterranean coast. The statistics used to calculate Jaffa's trade only refer to the maritime trade; the increase in the trade with
Egypt and Turkey indicate that steamships provided Muslim merchants
57 with greater access to ports within the region, such as Alexandria, Izmir and Istanbul.fl Those individuals who could acquire the agricultural produce for export to regional markets indicates who controlled and managed this economy.Unlike the peasants, and bedouins to a lesser extent, who were similar in the role as the producers of agriculture, the wealthy elite local Muslims of Ottoman-Palestine were alike in their ability to acquire this produce. Either as tax farmers, land owners, or moneylenders, this elite class invested their own resources to take possession of the agriculture and direct it to the demands of the market. While the local Christians and Jews steered this surplus through the maritime trade with Europe, the local Muslims controlled a great portion of the appropriation of the rural surplus and its export to the regional markets.
Christians and Jews did have access to the rural hinterland as tax collectors and/or land owners and/or moneylenders. Their Muslim counterparts, however, succeeded in obstructing local minority groups from making extensive links with the peasants in the hinterland, thereby dominating most of the rural surplus for themselves. Writing on the Fertile Crescent as a whole during the nineteenth century, Tabak argues that this area witnessed an absence of European colonization. As a result, he claims that agricultural production was reorganized under the new lines of supervision of an indigenous commercial landowning class who 0responded to the new market demands.73 After the mid-nineteenth
58 century, this form of production existed in Ottoman-Palestine. As discussed above, state centralization facilitated large-scale landownership, and new markets opened in Lurope and expanded within the region. As a result, the Muslim elite could act as the chief appropriators of the agriculture, either as landowners and/or tax collectors and/or moneylenders, and export the produce to the markets within the region.
Linda Schilcher discusses the local elites, ability to use their access of the rural surplus to suit the increased demands. Concerning the dry-farming grain trade in Syria, she finds that the critical feature in this trade was not the conversion of thousands of small subsistence production units into surplus producing units, rather the increase in the size of the managerial unit.She regards this managerial unit system as analogous to the German "Verlagssystezn", or the "putting-out" system, in which the peasant depends on the entrepreneur for capital, implements and remuneration.74 The entrepreneur, or investor, however, did not necessarily have to own property but did have to coordinate the steps between the acquisition of agriculture from the peasants and the demands of the market.
Quoting from a study of 'Abd al-Karim Rafiq, Schilcher notes that the entrepreneur in this system is termed shaddid who appropriated the surplus either as land owner and/or merchant and/or moneylender and/or tax farmer and/or supervisory "cultivators".75 Ya'akov Firestone discusses this system of appropriation in his study of the sharika (partnership) contracts 59 for Northern Samaria (roughly the qada' of Nablus during the Ottoman period) for the years 1853-1943.76 He writes that those with resources were able to appropriate the agriculture through the valid Islamic principle of sharika contracts, which he terms the "farming-out system". The investor in the sharika contract fulfilled the same role as the shadd5d. In a sharika contract between an investor (one with capital) and peasant, the Muslim jurists validated the enterprise by securing the notion of "sharing".77 The device which made these contracts legal was that the investor lent half the capital to the working partner, or peasant, which the latter proceeded to invest in the business on his own behalf. The Muslim jurists considered the capital of the person who did not work (investor) invested capital in the other's possession, which the peasant would repay in time; thus, the investor receives his profit through the yield of the harvest.78 Through this system, Firestone has shown how investors used these contracts to respond quickly to the market demands for grain after the Crimean war.79 The most common form of sharika was a capitalist or landed proprietor taking on a worker for a share of the produce, or a landowner with a farmer, or an investor with a working partner." In most sharika contracts, the landowner provided advance seed and a non-interest loan. After harvest, the produce would be distributed first to the state, second to the landowner to repay the loan and the value of the seed, and the remainder would be divided equally between the landowner and the peasant." Either in
60
the examples Firestone gives of contracts concerning the grain trade, cattle, husbandry, planting of olive trees, or camel and motor transport for hire, common factors are apparent: All these enterprises required an owner with resources in land and/or cash to invest in the peasants' labour and receive his (investor's) payment through the yield. This system is analogous to the role of shadddd and allowed the local elite to respond to the market demands after the mid-century.
In the sharika contracts the investor did not need to own the land, yet landownership was an important aspect of the appropriation of the rural surplus for various markets. The local Muslim elites dominated a great portion of land ownership in Ottoman-Palestine and obstructed European and Christian competitors. Local Christians and Europeans, however, were not excluded from this activity. We already mentioned the ability of the new Jewish immigrants to secure for themselves property in the sanjak of Acre.In addition to the Jewish community, the Christians, either native residents of Palestine, or of the neighbouring areas (Lebanon), also established links with the hinterland through land ownership.Especially in the northern coastal region of Palestine, Christian families took advantage of the greater security to purchase property along the northern coastal region and inland plains. The Tayyan family of Jaffa is reported to have owned 40,000 dunums, while in Haifa the Greek Orthodox families of al-Hakim, Khoury and Nassar, as well as the
Manronite family of al-Bustani, were known to have been large
61 elandowners."
The most noted example of Christian landownership in Palestine is the Beiruti Greek Orthodox Sursuq family. The Sursugs purchased, along with the other Beiruti Christian families of Butros, Tuwayni, and Farah, as well as the Khoury family, the northern portion of the plains area Marj Ibn qmir (Plain of Esdraelon). The Sursugs possessed the greatest share of the land, which in 1872 included 230,000 dunums, encompassing twenty villages with a population of 4,000 fallahin (plural of fallah). Granott describes that the peasants not only encountered the Sursugs as landowners, paying rent as a fixed price per faddan, but also as their tax collectors and money lenders." In the second-half of the nineteenth century, Christian families such as these used land ownership, particularly in the northern coastal region, to establish links with the peasants and their agriculture, mostly grains and citrus crops. After solidifying their access to this agriculture, the Christian families also dominated its trade to the European markets."
As illustrated in the previous chapter, the local Muslim community, however, remained the dominant landowners in Ottoman Palestine. Moreover, this elite used their political influences to block any serious incursions by the minorities into the hinterland. The local Muslim elite are known to have attempted to hinder the Bergheim family's land claims. This German Jewish family were bankers, factory owners and merchants in Ottoman-Palestine. The Bergheims, however, were neither natives or Ottoman subjects, which
62 made it more difficult for them to protect their investments. When this family acquired the land of Abu-Shusha for the amount of that villages' tax arrears, they were constantly preoccupied with defending the land from threats by both the peasants of the village and the upper class."Though Europeans, such as the Bergheims, Christians and Jews could purchase property and engage in commerce, the local Muslim elite class regarded such activity as counter to their own class interests. As discussed in Chapter One, the new "landowning-officeholding-merchant" class recognized the potentials which came from the greater access to the rural hinterland. Consequently, this class attempted to obstruct other competitors for possession of the peasants' agriculture. Working in unison as a class, the Muslim elite expressed their intentions to dominate all forms of access to the rural hinterland. Through their expanded political influence on the local scene, the Muslim elite sought to dominate a great portion of landownership and to obstruct minority members from establishing access to peasants' agriculture.
The actions of one Nablus majlis al-shura (local administrative council) demonstrates the local Muslim elite's attempts to use their political offices for these ends. In Doumani's socio-economic study of Nablus from 1800-1860, he discusses a new Ottoman law which outlined that all zukhair (commodities collected as kind) were to be auctioned off and sold to the highest bidder. Bids were now to be included from European or American representatives, and merchants, most likely many of
them Christians, from the coastal cities like Beirut, Acre and
63 Jaffa; inevitably, this rose the price of the commodities. Doumani reports of the interesting battle between the Nablus majlis al- shura and the Ottoman authorities in March 1852, after the majlis protested the new regulations. The collection of grains and other commodities stirred just as much commotion in the Nablus majlis al- shura."
Ideally, all the soap manufactures and merchants who dominated the offices of the majlis' wanted to preserve the autonomy of decision making and pricing in their hands."' More importantly, through their political influence, the members of the council attempted to dominate the rural surplus amongst their own class members. Though the Muslim elite could use their new political positions to attempt to exclude others from taking possession of the peasants' agriculture, they could not block Christian and Jewish landownership.Nonetheless, the urban Muslim elite dominated a great portion of landownership in the plains and coastal regions.
Though landownership provided various opportunities for the elites to exploit the rural agriculture, they, however, used the more common method of tax collection to accomplish this. The shadd-id, as tax farmer, acted as a supervisor and entrepreneur who directed the agriculture towards the markets. The tax collector used usufruct (tasarruf), the right the state granted the tax collector in exchange for revenue collection, and exploitation (mashadd maska), which was the means by which the land controller
could make a profit, to exploit the land and agriculture. Again,
64 the shaddad, as tax collector, did not need to own the land, but merely used mashadd maska rights to appropriate the agriculture." Haim Gerber's study of tax farming practices in Ottoman- Palestine illustrates how the elites used this institution for agricultural exploitation." He differentiates between tax farming in the central mountain areas and in the coastal plains. In the mountain regions, such as in the qada al-Quds, either because less cash crops were grown there or greater administrative control, fewer individuals were willing to invest in tax farming. The plains and coastal regions, though, being more fertile and regularly growing a greater volume of crops, attracted wealthy elite families to tax collection. In the areas of the Jericho valley, the Nazareth sub-district and Ghaza, the tax collectors were the qa'immaqam and wealthy local elite families with influence in the councils. This groups' power and aim to control the peasants' agriculture made reports of exploitation, which are less true in the mountain areas, a common occurrence. Using mashadd maska rights, the shaddad, as tax collector, favoured the plains areas over the mountain areas since the plains yielded greater volumes of produce, especially those which were in demand by the market.
As a result of the peasants' need to meet their tax obligations, moneylending in Palestine became a popular commercial activity. As Peter and Marion-Farouk Sluglett mention, taxation was a percentage of the crop, but in times of low agricultural prices the ordinary cultivators were forced to sell the remainder
65 of their crop, regardless is the price they received met their subsistence levels." Consequently, oppressive tax assessments, low agricultural prices, or insufficient capital to begin farming, forced peasants to reluctantly approach a moneylender.
The various money lending schemes in two areas, the first located just outside of Palestine in the qadP al-Salt and the second in the Nablus sanjak, illustrate how local elites used money lending schemes to appropriate the agriculture for commercial purposes. With its new security and fertile areas, the qa0aa' al- Salt offered a profitable area for merchants to invest in land and agriculture; the depression in the Mediterranean trade in the 1870's made the al-Baka' area even more attractive for investments.91 Wealthy investors from Damascus, Jerusalem and Nablus used three non-interest bearing loans, frequently mentioned in the Islamic court registers, as a means to make contact with the peasants and to appropriate their harvest."
Eugene Rogan's calculations of those engaged in these activities show that mercnants, mostly Muslim and from Nablus, dominated this activity." The accolades these merchants are awarded with in the court records reveal their unparalleled social status in al-Salt.`' During the nineteenth century, Nablus was the leading commercial centre in Ottoman-Palestine and in Rogan's samples the six leading , erchant moneylenders in al-Salt were all Muslim and from that city, representing 32.5% of the total capital loaned in al-Salt." The predominance of merchants from Nablus in
the composition of moneylenders in al-Salt emphasizes the motive 66 these merchants were attracted to this area. Rogan's study of the assets at death of one of the former notables of Nablus who settled in al-Salt illustrates how these lenders used the moneylending activities as a mechanism for trade and investment.
The estate deed at the time of the death of Da'ud Afandi b.al- sayyid 'Abd al-Rahman b.'Abd al-Rizaq Tugan reveals that moneylending was just one commercial activity this lender took part in. Da'ud Afandi was a moneylender who at the time of his death was owed: piasters 39,383 (243 outstanding loans) and in salam contracts he was owed 13,533 measures (Sc') of wheat, 3,062 measures of barley and 2,227"3 ratl of cooking butter. This inventory indicates that Da'ud Afandi was a merchant trading mostly in grain and other products. This point is reaffirmed as we investigate Da'ud Afandi's stock on hand: his inventory included stocks of wheat (6,000 sam worth Piasters. 15,277"20) and barley (809 sa' equalling Piasters. 1,213"20)."
Clearly, Da'ud Afandi's inventory reveals that moneylending was one mechanism used to assure a regular supply of wheat, barley and butter from al-Baka' for their trade within the region. State centralization had pacified the area; in conjunction with the fertility of the land and the new market demands, the qada' al-Salt became an attractive area for moneylending schemes. Similar to tax farming and landownership agreements with the peasants, the moneylender could act as shadad to assure a regular supply of produce for trade within the region.
In Doumani's study of Nablus during the mid-century, he found
67 that this advance purchasing system acted as the most efficient mechanism for merchants seeking olives for the manufacturing of soap. Just as most peasants, the peasants of Nablus searched for loans to pay their taxes; a letter by the gE'immaqSm of Nablus to the governor of Jerusalem explains this clearly and how the salam contract system worked: When...this case was examined, we found that the villager's claim that this oil is only for the benefit of the shaykhs is untrue. Instead, what was ascertained from the report of the old and wise men of ...Jaba'-who were appointed by the people of the village to pursue their case- is that when the miri [tax season] opened, they could not pay the taxes owed by their village because the olive season was not yet at hand...Because of this, and as is the usual practice among people of the villages, it was necessary that they sell their future crop of olive oil in advance for reduced prices through salam [contract] for the amount of miri due from their village for it is well known that the oil season does not come until the middle, or just after the middle of the year. They received from one of the merchants an advance sum of 34,966.3 Piasters for 953 jars of oil [in order to pay] the 1266 [taxes] and the oil will be delivered to the forementioned merchant from the oil harvest of 1267/1850.97 For the residents of Nablus, they were at a great disadvantage, because taxes were collected during the grain harvest, a few months prior to the olive picking season. As the letter mentions, the peasants were forced to regularly resort to the salam contract system to meet their tax obligations. This link with the hinterland was even more accessible after the Egyptian occupation, when salam contracts were no longer drawn up between a traditional notable or a middle man from the city, but between a merchant and a peasant. Eventually, merchants carved out spheres of influence in the Nablus hinterland.'
The close connection with the hinterland resulted in an innovation in soap production at the coordinating/managerial level. Unlike the traditional mode of organizing soap production, the post-mid century period witnessed a wealthy individual, or closely associated individuals like two brother, for instance, to coordinate the different levels of production. These individuals
68 closed the gap between the different stages of production and became the money lenders, oil merchants, soap manufactures, traders, entrepreneurs and landowners." This concentration was a result of merchants increasingly becoming landowners and soap factory owners, such as the Abd al-Hadi family. This group strengthened its position even further as they held offices in the local councils. This cohesion between the merchants, manufactures, politicians, and religious functionaries as a group or class united by soap production and wealth is representative of the larger coalescence among the local elite after the mid-nineteenth century."
The ability to appropriate the rural surplus forged the local Muslim elite, as tax collectors, landowners and money lenders, as well as political and religious leaders, as a group united by their economic and political positions.A tax-strike in 1851 by the majlis of Nablus illustrates this cohesion of individuals joined together by specific economic issues." As Doumani argues, the most important aspect of the tax strike was that the soap merchants and members of the majlis al-shura acted as a class, in which the elites recognized their class interests and acted collectively to protect these interests. The specific economic issues brought together the unity of those who reached the elite levels of economic and political power in Nablus. As Doumani comments: ['Me economic concentration was accompanied by a political centralization whose nodal points were the emergence of rich landowners and the rise of merchants to political prominence. Uniting all these groups was a coupon class position versus the peasantry, and a material base that depended on direct access to and control of the rural surplus."
69 Summary: After the mid-nineteenth century, the local and regional markets had a great demand for Ottoman-Palestine's agricultural products. The elites fulfilled their role as shaddad by dominating a great portion of the agriculture.Entering into financial arrangements with the peasants, through sharika contracts, or acting as moneylenders or tax-collectors, these elites could coordinate the marketing activities and bring the peasants' agriculture to the new markets. The Muslim elites could manage the two critical steps in this process: both the appropriation of the agriculture and the trade within the region. Thus, the political and religious leaders joined with the wealthy merchants to create a "landholding-officeholding-merchant" class of wealthy investors united by their capacities as shaddads and the leaders of society.
Though local Christians and Jews found greater interest in commerce after trade with Europe increased, the Muslim group also greatly benefited from the economic changes. Moreover, it was this group who managed the local and regional economy. The increasing imports to Palestine, when we examine their composition, reveal that the elites in Palestine possessed a greater wealth and luxury. Later in the century, imports of sugar, coffee, rice and "fancy- goods" appear more regularly."
Doumani recognises two contradictions with the elites acting as both merchants and political leaders.This contradiction
demonstrates the collective class position of the elites against
70 ethe Ottoman authorities. The members of the majlis al-shura in Nablus were appointed as local bureaucrats hired to implement the state's reforms; yet, some of these reforms were aimed to undermine the wealth and strength of those merchants who also sat in the councils. A second contradiction is that the local political leaders- either as state bureaucrats in the majlis, or appointed village mukht-Ers, or filling the ranks of the religious administration- relied on the prestige and legitimacy of serving the Sultan. Yet, these same elites also repeatedly conflicted with the central authorities to preserve their prestigious political positions as "natural leaders" in society and to guarantee their appropriation of the rural surplus."
The wealthy investors reached this status by exploiting the rural produce from the peasants. As a result, either through tax farming, various forms of landownership agreements with the peasants, or especially through moneylending schemes, the peasant, as many reports indicate, would face indebtedness by the end of the century and the rift developed further between the dominant class and the peasants. With agriculture being the prize these two class' were battling over, the elites had clearly recognized that they had to control the peasantry. As will be discussed in Chapter Three, the elites presented the peasants' resistance to the elites' encroachments as illegal acts directed against the state's authority and legitimacy.
In one example, after the villagers of 'Asira al-Shamiyah refused to meet their loan obligations to a moneylender, the
71 village shaykh entered with cavalrymen demanding payment, and faced violent opposition by the peasants. The next Chapter will investigate this incident further, but it should be noted here that the head of the local council explained to his superior, Governor of Jerusalem, that the violent reactions of the peasants were "insolence towards the government", while ten villagers were taken to prison "min aji al-tarbiya" (so that they could be "educated"). Realizing that the state depended on the peasants' agriculture, the elites allied with the state by characterising the resistance of the peasants, not as resistance to extortion or debt collection by force, but as resistance to state suzerainty. As Doumani explains, the concentration of wealth and the commercialization of land created a disempowered peasantry when facing the united interests cf rural shaykhs, merchants, newly urbanized large landowners and the Ottoman state." Let us now turn to a discussion of how the twin processes of greater central authority and economic integration affected the peasantry of Palestine.
Endnotes: Chapter Two72 1. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 276.
2. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World, 1800.1914 (London: Metheun Press, 1981), 246. In 1869 Palestine had 217 kilometres of carriage roads and at the end of the Ottoman period the important towns of Ghaza, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, Haifa, Tiberius and Nazareth were all linked by carriage roads; however, transport by camels and donkeys was not uncommon. James Anthony Reilly, "A Survey of the Social and Economic History of Late Ottoman Palestine, 1858.1914" (Unpublished Master of Arts thesis. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1980), 76. See also Table 11 "Mechanise Transported by Train, Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway, 1906-1913 (in tons)" and Table 12 "Major 'Provincial' Roads, 1910", in Gad Gilbar, "The Growing Economic Involvement with the West, 1882-1914", in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political Social and Economic Transformation (ed.) David Kushner (Jerusalem:Yad lzhak Ben-Zvi, 1986), 204. Alexander Scholch, "European Penetration and the Economic Development of Palestine, 1856-82", in Studies in the Economic and Social History of PaLestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (ed.) Roger Owen, (London, 1982), 45. Charles Issawi, "The Trade of Jaffa, 1825-1914", in Studia Pataestina: Studies in Honour of Constantine K.Zurayk (ed.) Hisham Nashabe (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1990), 47-49.
3. Faruk Tabak, "Local Merchants in Peripheral A-eas of 64; Empire: The Fertile Crescent during the Long Nineteenth Century", Review: Fernand Braudel Center Volume XI Number 1 (Winter 1988): 200 and see 205-20i.
4. Haim Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890-1914 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1985), 174. Professor James Reilly suggests that the settlement of the tribes was perhaps a sedentarization policy. Personal communication, 29 October, 1993. An indication of the increasing bedouin participation in the economy is the increasing exports of sheep, which reveals the involvement of bedouins and semi-nomadic peoples in the export economy of Palestine. Alexander Scholch, "The Economic Development of Palestine, 1856.1882", The Journal of Palestine Studies Volume X Number 39 (1981 Spring): 48. Bedouins also contributed to liohron's economy; though glass-ware was the most important economic activity in Hebron, viticulture, goat breeding and these products' trade with bedouins in the regions to the south and east of Jabal al-Khalil remained important. The bedouins marketed their products- sheep wool, camel hair and hides- in the town of Hebron where they were locally processed. Scholch, "European Penetration", 52.
5. Beshara Doumani, "Merchants, Socioeconomic Change and the State in Ottoman Palestine: The Nablus Region, 1800-1860" Volumes I and II. (Unpublished Ph.D, Georgetown University, 1990), 328. See his discussion of the participation of the bedouin in the soap industry of Nablus, Ibid.
6. Owen, Middle East in the World, 176. The late nineteenth century traveller Vital Cuinct suggests that there may have been 228,000 hectares (540,000 acres) of cultivated land in the southern districts around Hebron, Jaffa and Ghaza. Quoted from Ibid, 245. A British consular agent wrote at the end of the century concerning this regions' potential for cultivation: It is to be hoped that the harvest of Ghaza and its neighbourhood will be of the best, especially as the districts belonging to the Bedouins of Ghaza are very fertile, and more highly thought of than any other districts throughout the whole of Palestine, because of their productive qualities.
Quoted from Marwan Buheiry, "The Agricultural Exports of Southern Palestine, 1885.1914", Journal of Palestine Studies Volume X Number 4 (Summer 1981): 68.
7. Owen, The Middle East in the World, 176.
8. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 23-25; Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 68.
9. Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 68.
10. Buheiry uses the British Foreign Office Annual Series Trade an4.1 Commerce of Palestine for the mar 1906, Ibid.
11. In 1893-7 Ghaza exported 19,603 tons of barley in total compared with Aleppo/Alexandretta's (A/A) of 11,00 tons; in 1898.1902 Ghaza exported 32,000 tons with A/A 5,000 tons; from 1903-10 China averaged 35,000 tons yearly, yet, A/A aye aged only 11,700 tons. Owen, Middle East in the World, 260. See also Scholch Table 1.2 "Average Annual Export of the Main Articles from Jaffa, Haifa and Acre", "European Penetration", 57.
73 12. Ruth Kark, Jaffa: A City in Evolution, 1799-1917 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-2vi Press, 1990), 270.
13. We have no stets for Northern Palestine's wheat exports latter in the century. Since Jaffa was the main port for southern Palestine's (the sanjaks of al-Duds, including the three qadas of Jaffa, Ghaza, Hebron and two nahiyas of Bethlehem and Remola) agricultural export, trade of northern Palestine went through either Acre or Haifa. In addition, the port at Acre exported wheat from northern Palestine as well as from the Huron; two-thirds must than have originated from the Huran and one-third from northern Palestine- such as the districts of Acre, Nazareth and Tiberius. Scholch, "European Penetration", 13 and lssawi, Fertile Crescent, 311-312.
We are at a disadvantage to measure the export of wheat and grains as thoroughly as we wish since statistics for Ghoul were not tabulated until the late nineteenth century and statistics for Northern Palestine are sparse. As mentioned, such of the exports of Ghaza travelled through Jaffa. Concerning the extant literature, it seems that the majority of the wheat trade travelled through the northern ports of Acre and Haifa, approximately five times more than Palestine's southern port. This seems clear in SchoLch's compilations in Table 1.2 for the average annual exports of wheat during the 1870's. In fact, Northern Palestine reserved 40% of cultivated area for wheat. If we included the 9% reserved for barley and the 7% for dura, Northern Palestine allotted 56% of its total cultivated area to cereals. Scholch "European Penetration", Table 1.2, 57 and Table 1.8, "Estimate of the average proportion of Northern Palestine's cultivated area devoted to certain crops, 1858-62", 61.
14. Gilbar, "Growing Economic Involvement", 128.
15. Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 70, Table 2 "Total Value of Exports from Jaffa, 1885-1905"; and see Issawi, "Trade of Jaffa", 44.
16. Haim Gerber, "The Population of Syria and Palestine in the Nineteenth Century" Asian and African Studies Volume 13 Number 1 (March 1979): 63-64; Gilbar, "Growing European Involvement", 198. In Ben-Arieh's demographic study of the population of the twelve largest urban areas in Palestine, these doubled in size between the years 1880 to 1920 form 120,000 to 230,000. Also, the population of the scarcely populated areas on the coastal plains to the north of Jaffa in 1922 reached 200,000, or 1/4 of Palestine's population which settled on the Maritime plain. Quoted from Owen, Middle East in the World, 264.
17. Gilbar, "Growing Economic", 194 Table 4 "The Three Major Import Items, Jaffa Port, 1879-1913"; also Issawi, "Trade of Jaffa", 44.
18. Owen, Middle East in the World, 177.
19. Gilbar, "Growing Economic", Table 6 "Acreage of Citrus Orchards, 1880, 1900 and 1914", 200.
20. Kark, Jaffa, 71. See also the observation of one Jaffa resident of the late nineteenth century concerning the immigration and settlement of Beiruti merchants. ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Gilbar, "Growing Economic", 200; see also Kark, Jaffa, 250.
23. Gilbar, "Growing Economic", 191, and Table 7 "2: Torts of Oranges, Jaffa Port, 1879-1913", 200. Jewish investment in this sector only came at the turn of the century and rose to represent one-third of ownership by 1914. Technological innovations even explains why exports increased faster than the rate of cultivated areas; while available land (orchard acreage) increased by four times, exports rose by eight times. After 1900, irrigation by petrol pumps replaced the traditional method of water wheels. Gilbar, "Growing Economic", 193 and Issawi, "Trade of Jaffa", 45.
24. Owen, Middle East in the World, 177; Scholch, "Economic Development", 49; Issawi, "Trade of Jaffa", 45.
25. A French agent calculated this for the years 1885-1900, and the British Consul McGregor in 1913 also made calculations concerning the destination of Jaffa's oranges. Scholch, "Agricultural Exports", 73 and 80. In comparison of values, soap exports from Palestine between the years 1885-1894 were L 58,100 with oranges equalling about the same at L 57,200; yet between 1895-1904 the average yearly value of soap equalled L 67,670 while oranges surged to L 81,700. Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 70, Table 2 "Total Value of Exports from Jaffa, 1885-1905". The increase demand for Jaffa's oranges from British consumers during the tatter part of the nineteenth century explains why Britain, though only second to Egypt in total exports- L 67,769 on average from 1885-1905 compared to Egypt's L 69,331- exceeds Egypt in the years 1901-1905. During those latter years, Britain's annual average of imports from Jaffa equalled L 91,900 with Egypt behind at L
74 62,600. Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 71, Table 3 "Total Value of Exports from Jaffa Per Country".
26. Kark, Jaffa, 263-264. For the other advantages Christian, as well as Jewish, merchants possessed, see below in this chapter.
27. In 1913, Jaffa's orange export to Liverpool equalled 51% of the total orange exports: 825,455 cases out of a total of 1,608,570 cases. Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports". 80.
28. Kark, Jaffa, 270. One long time resident of Jaffa mentioned that the name Nasri TaLawas should actually read Talamas.
29. Issawi, "Trade of Jaffa", 45.
30. An example of scholarship supporting the traditional argument, see 'Abd al-Karim Gharayiba, surixo fi al-Ourn al Tasi' 'Asher (Cairo: Dar al-Jil, 1961/62).
31. For works which represent this argument, see Donald Quatuert, "Ottoman Handicrafts and Industry in the Age of European Industrial Hegemony, 1800-1914", Review XI Number 2, (Spring, 1988): 69.78; Abdul-Karim Rafeq, "The Impact of Europe on a Traditional Economy: The Case of Damascus, 1840.1870", in Economic et Societes dans l'Empire Ottoman fin deu XVII'-de'hut du XX' siecle., (eds.) J.Bacque-Grammont and P Dumont, (Paris: N.R.S.), 419-32. Kais Firro, "The Impact of European Imports on Handicrafts in Syria and Palestine in the Nineteenth Century", Asian and African Studies 25 (1991):31-53. Most of these titles were taken from another work which represents a revisionist account of the textiles industry. Jams; A. Reilly, "From Workshops to Sweatshops: Damascus Textiles and the World Economy in the last Ottoman Century." Review, Volume XVI Number 2 (Spring, 1993):199-214.
32. Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 63-64.
33. Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 74.
34. Gilbar, "Growing Economic", 199. Firro, "The Impact", Table 1 "Import of Textiles through Jaffa port, 1886-1912 (selected years)" shows a steady rise of imports of textiles through the Jaffa port equalled in 1886 340,00 French francs, representing 6.6% of total imports, rising to 6,835,000 French francs in 1912, or 24.4% in of the total imports. For the downward trend of cotton production and exports see Scholch, "European Penetration", 14-15.
355. Kurd 'Ali writes in his tableau of Damascus in the 1920's: These textileL formerly constituted the clothing of all the people of the country, rich and poor, men and women. But now little is spent on them for the people have become accustomed to European clothing. However, they are still used by most of the people of the countryside, who make gowns of them (qaftan). The fabrics] are exported to Anatolia, Egypt, Hijaz, Iraq, and the merchants of that industry are generally considered rich.
Perhaps the wealthier urban residents regarded the European cloth as "more fashionable". See especially the similar comments of a contemporary French observer quoted in Owen, Middle East in the World, 94; also Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 64. For Ow example of Damascus see James Reilly, "Damascus Merchants and Trade in the Transition to Capitalism", Canan n Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire XXVII, April/avril (1992): 17.
36. Much of our discussion below is based on Scholch, "European Penetration".
37. The marketing of grapes, either dried or as a syrup, destined for buyers both inside and outside Palestine, was also noted as a success. The success of grapes is attributed to the large areas of vineyards near Hebron; in 1880 this was estimated at 800 hectares around the town while Jerusalem's and Bethlehem's averaged 500 hectares. !bid, 52.
38. Kirro, "Impact of European", 52 and Scholch, "European Penetration", 53.
39. Scholch, "European Penetration", 49-51.
75 40. As is with other industries, statistical evidence is scare, yet the trends are clear that the soap factories tripled: from the first quarter of the nineteenth century with 9 operational factories, to 1860 with 15, and 30 factories by 1882. A W.W.I visitor's account claims Nablus owned 29 factories, describing 23 as large and the rest small. Doumani, "Merchants", 296; also Gilbar, "Growing Economic" 201 Table 9 "Centers of Soap Production in Syria and Palestine, 1908".
41. Doumani, "Merchants", 249.
42. Scholch, "Economic Development", 49.
43. Quoted in Reilly, "Survey", 67.
44. Owen, Middle East in the World, 97.
45, the export and import tabulations we have referred to in this paper were derived from the following works: Owen, Middle East in the World, Scholch "European Penetration" and "Economic Development"; Issawi, "Trade of Jaffa"; Gilbar, "Economic"; Kark, Jaffa and Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports".
46. Kark, Jaffa, 276-277.
47. 1n 1913, both these European import and export values multiplied, equalling L 623,000 (49X) and L 365,000 (48X) respectively. For the 1885 and 1913 figures see Gilbar, "Economic Involvement", 191. For the 1908 figure, see Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 72. Concerning the statistics for Jaffa's trade deficit, se.? Gilbar, "Economic Involvement", 192 Table 3 and Ruth Kark, "The Rise and decline of coastal towns in Palestine", in Ottoman Palestine 1800-1914: Studies in Economic and Social History, (ed.) Gad Gilbar (E.J. Brill Leiden 1990), 78 Table 2.3.
48. See also Owen, Middle East in the World, 99. For the Damascus case, James Reilly writes that after the opening of the Suez Canal and regular steam-ship lines had made contact with the main ports, the trade through Damascus between Baghdad and Mecca suffered; yet, Damascus's trade with other Ottoman provinces and Egypt grew considerably as these merchants made new links with the ports of Beirut, Alexandria and Izmir. As that author writes, "Despite temporary declines, the cumulative outcome was not a decrease in the volume of trade but a significant rerouting of it away from older channels." Reilly, "Damascus Merchants and Trade", 12-20. Palestine's merchants also had access to these new ports and commercial routes.
49. Reilly, "Damascus Merchants", 19 Table 3 "Damascus's Trade with other Ottoman Provinces, 1885-1908". The composition of imports in Damascus in 1862 is very revealing: European imports (2,978,000 francs) ranked fourth after those origination from the Damascus Province (6,911,429 francs), Baghdad (3,277,000 francs) and Lebanon (3,000,000 francs). The author conjunctures that Damascus engaged in trade with the tribes in the vicinity of the Province and in the Hauran. Schilcher, "Grain Economy", 201.
50. Tabak, "Local Merchants", 207. The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1838 allowed foreign merchants to trade and travel freely, to maintain direct contacts with producers, and to demand that commercial disputes be decided in special tribunals, not in Islamic courts under Islamic law. Hourani, History 274 and Reilly, "Damascus Merchants", 5. As Robert Haddad has shown for Christians in Syria, this group paid lower custom duties than the unprotected Ottoman subjects and avoided arbitrary tax levies by local authorities. Quoted in Charles Issawi, in "The Transformation of the Economic Position of the Millets in the Nineteenth Century", Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Volume I The Central Lands, (eds.) Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishing, 1982), 273.
51. Reilly, "Damascus Merchants", 11.
52. Issawi, "Transformation" 270.
53, Issawi, "Transformation", 270-271. In Acre the Muslim population was 65%; in Haifa Muslims represented 33) and Christians and Jews equalled 61%; in Jaffa Muslims were 63% and Ghaza 965. Kark, "Rise and decline", 75 Table 2.2 "Population by r-ligion in the coastal cities, 1895-96".
54. These companies were: the French shipping companies, the Austrian Lloyd eompany, the North Lerman Lloyd company, the Peninsular Oriental company and others run by Italians, Russians and Egyptians. Kark "Rise and :lnzline", 81 Table 2.4 "Number and tonnage of Ships visiting the ports of Palestine, 1895 and 1913" and Kark, Jaffa, 220 and 274 and the table "Maritime activity in Jaffa by type of ship and nationality, 1835- 1913". At the end of the nineteenth century, more vessels called at Acre than at Haifa, but these were of lower tonnage. Scholch, "European Penetration", 46.
76 55. Neville J.Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 29. Kark, Jaffa, 185 and 144 with the table "Jewish arrivals and departures from Jaffa port February 1913 to end of March 1914".
56. Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 31.
57. The Askenazi population placed themselves under the protection of the Europeans following 1840 when Europeans established resident consulates in Jerusalem. Reilly, "Survey", 105 and Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 5-6.
58. Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 21 and 29.
59. For examples of this see Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 1-31 and Kark, Jaffa, 127-131.
60. The colonies at Rishon le-Ziyyon and Zikhron Ya'aqov, located south of Jaffa and south of Haifa respectively, both had large wine cellars. Mandel also writes that the colonies founded in the north, from 1900 onwards, concentrated on wheat and cereals. Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 29. See also Kork, Jaffa, 248- 250.
61. Gilbar, "Economic Involvement", 197-198. Owen, Middle East in the World, 271.
62. An 1871 Ottoman document reveals that Jaffa possessed 188 shops and warehouses, 322 stalls and small shops, 6 khans, that building activity took place outside the area of the old wall, which had been torn down. Most accounts attest that these shops and warehouses were leased by Christian and Muslims to Jewish immigrants. Kark, Jaffa 260 and 270. Also the new Jewish immigrants took advantage of the vacant land north-east of the town. The prices of this land soared from an average of 30 to 50 francs per dunam in the 1888/90's to an average of 300 to 600 francs during the first and second decades of the twentieth centuries and the price per dunam for lands for citrus growing neared 1,500 to 2,500 francs. Ibid, 188 and 248.
63. Kark, Jaffa, 191. Professor James Reilly suggests that the decrease in 1916 may be a result of the effects of W.W.I. Personal communication, 29 October, 1993.
64. Issawi, "Transformation", 270-271. Issawi quotes a list of importers who had branches in England showing 19 names of importers who bought through 30 Commission Houses and 5 banks- all were Jewish. Ibid.
65. Kark, Jaffa, 270.
66. Kark, Jaffa, 269.
67. Eisenstadt, 1891, quoted in Kark, Jaffa, 268.
68. Goldman, 1899, quoted in Ibid, 269.
69. Ibid.
70. Issawi, "Transformation", 271.
71. Gilbar, "Growing Economic", 191 and Buheiry, "Agricultural Exports", 72.
72. Reilly, "Damascus Merchants", 17. 73 . Tabak, "Local Merchants", 207-208. 74. Schilcher, "Grain Economy", 185-186.
75. This word comes from shad. During the sixteenth century in Syria, the control of a single village could be granted to one supervisor by the state, with the village divided into small production units connected to the market through their parallel relationship with this supervisor or his agents. The term shad survived into the late Ottoman period and beyond. As will be seen below, the shaddad could make agreements with the peasants by providing them seed and other capital goods, or money; in addition, he was responsible for providing day labourers, threshers, transport of the goods and ploughmen during harvest. [bid, 186-8.
77 76. Ya'akov Firestone, "Production and Trade in an Islamic Context: Shairka Contracts in the Transitional Economy of Northern Samaria, 1853-1943 (Part I)", International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 ('975): 185-209.
77. Firestone writes that the sharika "is the generic term employed in Muslim law for all relationships characterized by shareholding in joint economic interest and connoting cooperation and a degree of mutual aid." !bid, 186.
78. The Muslim jurists thus considered that they both contributed equal shares, one partner did all the work and the other provided all the capital; profits were divided in proportion to their shares in the capital. 'bid 198 and 298-199 for an example of a contract.
79. Ibid, 186.
80. 'bid, 187.
81. !bid, 225.
82. Muhammnd Y. Muslih The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 30.
83. Granott, Land, 80-81 and 39.
84. See above for the examples concerning Christians involved in the export of wheat and oranges to Europe. I would like to thank Professor Reilly for reminding me of the close relationship between the agriculture grown on the coastal areas (grains and citrus) and its export to the European market. Personal comnunications, 29 October, 1993.
85. This dispute began when the Bergheims refused to pay the bakshish, a considerable fee, which the land registrar (Umar Effendi al-Husaini) demanded in the context of the original registration. The struggle with peasants began when they realised that they were to become agricultural workers, after they had forfeited 153 titles to the land to Bergheim. A villager of AbuShusha later murdered Bergheim in 1884. Scholch, "European Penetration", 25-26. See Chapter Three for further discussion concerning this issue. Other examples of the Muslim elite blocking minority access to the hinterland, though outside our geographic area, arc in 1866 all the contracts between immediate producers and moneylenders or merchants extending money were annulled in Damascus. Similarly, in Aleppo, a French consul wrote that the local government "...rejected all claims of creditors, especially when these creditors were foreign subjects." Tabak lists examples of local Muslims obstructing minorities from the rural hinterland and the peasants' surplus. In the witavat of Damascus in 1863, the Government of Damascus prohibited cash on delivery sales with the intention to "interfere with the operations of foreign merchants." For further examples see Tabak, "Local Merchants", note 43.
86. Doumani, "Merchants", 359-369. Even after the tax collection was completed, the tax col'errors joined the other merchants in the city to horde the taxes collected in kind and st"red these when p,-ices were low or sold when prices were high. Max Gross, "Ottoman Rule in the Province of Damascus, 1860-1909" Volumes 1 and II (Ph.D Georgetown University, 1979), 17 note 40.
87. ibid., 367-369. Doumani found that the composition of one of the first majlis al-shura included almost exclusively soap manufactures and merchants. ibid., 153-161.
88. Schilcher, "Grain Economy", 188.
89. Gerber tells us that tax farms were now subject, in principle, to regular administrative bids (muzayede) and were now collected by the multazim in six bi-monthly payments. A bid for each crop was submitted by a fixed date by law, and the bidder (talib) deposited a guarantee and the amount of his iltizam was depended on the value of his or the guarantor's holdings; therefore, the multazim bore the cost of the investment. The auction was held a short while before the ripening of the crop. See Gerber, Ottoman Rule, 160-164 for a discussion of the procedure for obtaining an iltizam. In 1913, almost 90% of the state's direct income came for agriculture, which according to Stein, the tithe represented more than half. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 16.
78 90. Peter and Marion-Farouk Sluglett, "The Application of the 1858 Land Code in Greater Syria: Some Preliminary Observations", in Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East (ed.) Tarif Khalidi (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1984), 415. One other possible reason peasants sought out money lenders was the gradual moneterization of the Local economy and the need to pay their taxes in coin; also, farmers attempted to expand their holdings. Eugene Rogan "Moneylending and Capital Flows from Nablus, Damascus and Jerusalem to gads' al-Salt in the Last Decades of Ottoman Rule", in The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century, (ed.) Thomas Philip (Berliner lslamstudien: 19'12), 248.
91. Ibid, 240.
92. The three non-interest bearing loans Rogan studied were the following: Iqrar loans which represents the exchange of liquid capital for limited rights of possession over immovable collateral (rahn). Bay' bi-l- wafa' loans were transactions in the loan of coin against immovable collateral contracted as a temporary sale. The most common loan Rogan found was salam Shari, which was composed of money loaned against movable collateral, primarily agricultural products. Literally, the term salam shar'i means "lawful advance purchase" which allowed the lender to exchange his liquid capital for the future delivery of primary foodstuffs- wheat, barley, and same (cooking butter)- at reduced prices. See ibid, 242-244.
93. Muslim lenders held a slight majority over Christians (70 of the 124 cases, or 56.5%); those from Nablus transacted 48 loans, or 397. of the total studied. Sec !bid, 246 Table 11 "Origins of Lenders and Borrowers (1885-90)". The Loans surveyed are Iqrar and Wafa loans in the Islamic court register of al-Salt (Wafa-CR). 243. Christians did take part in moneylending, showing that Christians were not excluded from creating links with the hinterland. Christian treasury officials partauk in 13% of the loans and 127. of the capital. The occupations of most of these lenders were as merchants, both Christians and Muslims. See Table Iva "Moneylending Activity of Christian Treasury Officials as preserved in the Iqrar and wnfa-CR samples (1885-90)" As a group, the Christian merchants, known as khuwajas, held 33% of the total capital loaned in certain samples. Table IVb "Moneylending Activity of Christian Khuwaja". ibid.
94. Fiyad Afandi al-Nablusi, one of the most prominent merchant-moneylenders in al-Salt, received a eulogy which read, "Pride of trustworthy merchants al-sayyid Fiyad Afandi son of the deceased chief ('umadi) of the illustrious and respected merchants al-sayyid Madan Afandi al-Nablusi". :bid, 251. Through his use of the court records of Damascus and Hama, Professor Reilly found that such praises were cmamonly applied to: merchants, 'ulama' ashraf, and high government officials. As he argues, this clearly indicates that merchants were regarded as amongst the elite of nineteenth century society. Personal communication 29 October, 1993.
95. Table IVc "Moneylending Activity of Leading Muslim Merchants" using Iqrar and Wafa-CR loans. ibid., 251. The Muslim tujjar, Christian treasury administrators and khuwajas, sixteen men in total listed in the Tables 1Va-c, represented 63% of the loans in the lqrar and Wafa-CR samples, and 77% of the total capital loaned. ibid 250-251.
96. Rogan indicates piasters by P and paras by the inverted double corneas: e.g 41/2 piasters. P. 4"20. Ibid, 241 note 9. Rogan describes the inventory of another grain-merchant/moneylender in al-Salt. Hajj 'Abd al-Qadi Jughbayr died in 1895 leaving P. 120,000 in loans outstanding, plus 15,000 se' of wheat in salem contracts. In his grain stores he horded 7,000 s'S, of wheat and 2,000 at barley, at the time of his death. In addition to his grain trade activity, his wealth also included P.40,000 in Damascene and Beiruti goods. As on example of out-standing loans, Fiyad al-Nablusi went to court 24 times, and 23 times the debtor did not appear. The list of what al-Nablusi was owed includes P. 21,191; 21 salem contracts for wheat totalling 10,432"75 g'5'; 7 salam contracts for barley totalling 667 sa'; and 5 salam contracts for 27 1/2 ratl of same. Ibid, 253 note 25.
97. Doumani "Moneylending" 270-271.
98. Doumani, "Merchants", 259. The Bishtawis operated salem contracts directly with villages and through urban intermediaries. They had salem contracts with eight villages: 'Asira, Rafidya, 'Aqraba, Beirut, Adhmut, Salem, Jnisinyah and Belt Dajan. !bid, 322.
99. At the bottom of the production scale were peasants who produced the olive oil, the bedouins who gathered, processed and delivered the gill and then the transporters and menial workers. After this group were the middlemen who mediated between the producers- the peasants, bedouins and workers- and those with the access to the rural surplus- such as the merchants, tax farmers, soap factory owners, Lary+. landowners, superintendents of awcf5f. 'bid, 323-324.
79 100. Doumani writes that at mid-century the entire membership of the majlis al-shura was c)mposed entirely of soap factory owners, except for the two persons representing the Christians and Samaritan communities. Ibid, 357-359.
101. This tax strike began when the Ottoman government announced new customs regulation on oil and soap in 1846. Not only did this undermine the local control over the flow of commodities, but it also cancelled the previous tax exemptions by soap merchants. The tax strike began in 1851 when Nablus soap merchants refused to pay all or part of their taxes. The taxes on soap were very valuable to the government; in 1841 a document detailing the tax structure of Nablus ranked the revenues for soap production well beyond those of any other sources. Ibid, 369-380.
102. !bid, 381-382.
103. Owen, Middle East in the World, 179; Giltar "Growing Economic" 195 and 205 and Scholch, "Economic Development", 55.
104. Doumani, 398-400.
105. For the response of the Nablus mailis to peasant pleas of injustice and Doumani's comments see Ibid, 277-283.
80 CHAPTER THREE: The Effects of Political Centralization and Economic Changes on the Peasants of Ottoman-Palestine, 1856-1908.
Introduction: While the wealthier and politically elite stratum of society greatly benefitted from political centralization and economic changes, the financially and politically weaker members in society, the peasants (tannin, plural of falln), regarded these two forces difficult to adapt to. These peasants could not protect the social and political structures which in the past provided them with at least minimum needs for a subsistence survival. During the mid-nineteenth century, greater penetration of the state and merchant capital into the rural hinterland gradually undermined the peasants' existence.The state appointed rural officials, tax collectors, large landholders living in urban centres, merchants and moneylenders, were all manifestations of these two political and economic developments. This group, composed mostly of the local Muslim elite, worked to weaken the rural social and financial structures that the peasants had depended on for centuries. Near the end of the century, the peasants of Ottoman-Palestine were unable to escape the consequences of these developments: the appropriation of their land, their labour, and their produce. Such developments had been the classical root of the class conflict between the peasants on the one hand and the elites, as well as the state, on the other.
Though this class conflict had existed prior to the mid- nineteenth century, the political and economic developments which occurred after this period intensified this conflict in favour of
81
the politically superior forces in society over the subordinate ones. CGnsequently, the peasants' trauitional forms of survival were gradually crippled to allow the elites, and the state, to succeed in their missions. After the mid-century, the peasants' favoureC form of land-tenure, the small-scale subsistence farm, was threatened, indebtedness to moneylenders and heavy tax burdens were increasingly ubiquitous, and landlessness became more prevalent. All these developments rendered the peasants more vulnerable to the new alliance among the urban elites, the rural shaykhs and the local state officials to increase the peasants' output.In addition, it is important to evaluate how the peasants reacted to these developments as an overall indication of how they viewed the changes in their society.
First, it is necessary to discuss the geographic location of the peasants. Even in the closing years of Ottoman rule, the demographic map of Palestine, just as in other parts of the Middle East, had located the majority of the population in the rural areas, engaged in agricultural production. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the total population of Syria-Palestine reached approximately 3.5 to 4 million people, with one million living in towns with a population over 10,000; the remainder of that population inhabited the rural areas.' While the major cities and towns, such as Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem and others, multiplied their populations throughout the nineteenth century, the majority of Ottoman-Palestine's residents remained in the hinterland and sought their livelihood from this environment. Alexander Scholch has
E2 compiled population statistics for the years 1871 to 1872 for the cities and na-hiyas (sub-district) of Ottoman-Palestine, and has shown that two-thirds of the population inhabited the rural areas.2 The majority of the population remained in the rural areas well into the Mandate period.3 In addition, it is also necessary to define which members in society constitute the "peasantry". Most scholars would agree with Clifford Geertz and Eric Wolf who both summarize the peasantry as those subordinate rural cultivators in a society who work the land and are forced to surrender part of their produce to the dominant forces in society.4 James.C. Scott adds that it is not enough to understand this group only in regard to the Marxist dialectic of the relationship to the means of production. For Scott, studying the peasants includes studying how the peasants themselves understood the structures invading their lives, such as the state, the land tenure system, or tax collection for examples As that author comments, it is important to study the "concrete experience of a class as it lived".6 Scott maintains that the common ,txperiences of the peasants in their social relations- with the state, the elites and each other- and the symbols this class uses to express these relations reveal a great deal about how the peasants view their own identity, their concepts of justice and their expectations of other individuals and groups in society. He writes concerning the definition of a peasant,
Rather than view peasants solely as a class in relation to their But the central point to be emphasised is that the concept of class, if it is to be found at alt, is to be found encoded in concrete, shared experiences that reflects both the cultural material and historical givens of its carriers.'
83
means of production, Scott attempts to extend the ways we can understand a class by studying their shared experiences and their responses to those experiences which dominated their lives. Stressing the shared experiences of this class can provide a more comprehensive understanding of how the twin political and economic forces after the mid-nineteenth century affected the peasants of Ottoman-Palestine. Though the peasants as a class were overwhelmed by these changes, this study, however, will not classify the peasantry as passive actors who quiescently witnessed these changes without objection. As the scholarship of Scott reveals, the peasants are capable of both recognising the threats to their lives and discovering ways to resist these threats and changes.
In Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant, he discusses how peasants recognize the threats to their lives. He argues that peasants, as a subordinate group in society, are engaged in a class conflict with the superior group for possession of the agricultural resources. The constant threat of losing this conflict forces the peasants to determine their actions in terms of the "subsistence ethic". In this ethic, the peasantyaim to maximize their actions and efforts to maintain a subsistent level of living, rather than falling below it.8 This common experience all peasants shared etched out the larger parameters of the peasants' concept of a "moral economy". The parameters of the "moral economy" included their notions of justice, equality and what constituted rightful and wrongful appropriation of agriculture.Basically, in the
84 "moral economy" the peasants understood that they possessed moral rights and obligations from the superior forces in society, either state or elites. For example, the maximum the peasants could expect was for these superior groups to guarantee them a subsistent level of existence in time of dearth, while the minimum meant that the elites or state could not rob them of their subsistence reserve.9 Scott quotes Barrington Moore on this development: This experience (of sharing risks within the community) provides the soil out of which grew peasant mores and the moral standard by which they judge their own behaviour and that of others. The essence of these standards is a cruel notion of equality, stressing the justice and necessity of a minimum land (resources) for the performance of essential social tasks.1G For the peasants, the "moral economy" meant maintaining a minimum subsistent level of existence, despite the exploitation by the elites. Recognizing how central the class conflict was to the identity of the peasant, Nathan Brown, in his study of the Egyptian peasantry, reasons "Peasant culture is antithetical to elite culture because the latter presents little more than the appropriation of the peasants' surplus."
Once the peasants recognize the "moral economy" they attempt to resist those actions which undermine this principle. Though many scholars have traditionally regarded examples of peasant resistance as only violent outbursts or organised rebellionsn, Scott more accurately has found that the majority of peasant resistance is the everyday mundane forms of resistance: foot- dragging, evading debts owed to tax collectors or moneylenders, limited forms of violence, fleeing, and other tactics. In these tactics, the peasants express their objections to the nexus of the class conflict with the elites and the state; thus, in the words of
85
one scholar, "Everyday forms of resistance' are to a large extent responses to 'everyday forms of oppression' or domination." Through these forms of resistance, the peasants demonstrate their objection to the appropriation of their agriculture by the superior forces in society.
The peasants' ultimate aim in their resistance was to minimize or elude as much as possible the loss of their agriculture. It follows that the peasants did not aim to trample down the systems which exploited them, nor were they "anarchists", but, as Eric Hobsbawm writes, they were "working the system...to their minimum disadvantage".15 The peasants recognised what actions were realistic and unrealistic, and rather than to confront or to overturn those institutions which propagated oppression and domination, the peasants sought only to mitigate and to lessen the oppression in their lives.The tactics of they used were characteristically without coordination or planning, non-violent, and were within the peasants means, such as defaulting on a loan, or concealing part of their crop from tax collectors.
As this thesis argues, the local elites, as well as the local state authorities, used economic integration and political centralization as exploitative ends to further their self-serving class interests; ultimately, they aimed to subjugate the peasantry, to undermine their resources of land and labour, and to usurp the product of their resources, their yield. These elites acted either as urban merchants, land owners, moneylenders, or state
representative tax collectors, meaning those who possessed a
86 dominant holding of land and/or capital in society to control the peasants' agriculture. one way the peasants lost their crop was through the forced collection of taxes; the burdens of meeting their tax payments and the peasants' low level income forced many peasants to borrow money. As a result, a second means the elites also used to appropriate the peasants' crop was by using exploitative moneylending schemes, in which many peasants repaid their loans either through forfeiting a portion or fixed sum of their crop, or, their property, which was the most onerous option to rural cultivators. The third scheme took advantage of the increasing appearance of peasant landlessness and the difficulty this group faced raising sufficient capital to begin cultivating. As a result of the impoverishment of the peasants, they were forced to enter land-tenure or financial agreements with landowners or urban investors. In these agreements the peasants' control over their resources of land and labour was compromised to meet the commercial ambitions of the investor; consequently, the peasant could not exploit for their own benefit their own resources of land and/or labour.
The newly cohesive urban elite, allied with the state, used primarily these three avenues of tax collecting, moneylending and land-tenure and financial arrangements as part of their "class warfare" against the peasants. During our period of study, the peasants, however, attempted to resist many of these incursions, and the majority of this class managed to retain a small landholding and to remain within the levels of a subsistence
87 existence.
Tax collection became one of the state's and the urban elites', as multazims, most efficient means for the appropriation of agriculture. Though we do read from many contemporary observations and travel diaries of how burdensome the collection of - 7 taxes had become for the fallahin, we should take into account Haim Gerber's study of tax farming in the sanjak (sub-province) of Jerusalem. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, that author distinguishes between tax farming practices in the central mountain region with those in the plains and coastal regions.Since potential candidates for tax farms considered tax collecting a commercial venture, these candidates regarded the less fertile central mountains region, dominated mostly by small landholders, as a poor commercial investment in comparison with the more fertile plains and coastal areas of Palestine."' With the classical relationship between the state and the local elite, acting as tax farmer, failing near the close of the nineteenth century, the local Ottoman officials resorted to an unprecedented tactic to collect taxes: the state chose to bargain with the peasants themselves for the collection of taxes. Either to assure a less exploitative sum from forcibly being collected or, more likely, to assure themselves a "truer" remittance, the Ottomans reverted to the practice of "self-farming" when they failed to find bidders for iltizgms.17 This "self-farming" system allowed the villagers the recourse to dispute any unfair taxes levied against them. Brown would
88 categorise most of the resistance peasants undertook as "Communal Action", in which, a large group or community takes the initiative to enforce their political will." Gerber accounts one example in which the multazim delayed coming to the threshing floor in order to force the villagers to sell the crop at a lower price; the disgruntled villagers petitioned this act resulting in the tax farmer being reproached by the local council.19 The villagers, rather than accept the actions of the multazim, chose to protest what they regarded as unfair treatment; in this case they used the legal mechanisms of the state, a petition to the local council, to annunciate their protest.
In another instance, the villagers of Baytuniya appealed to their local council that the multazim threatened to collect too high an amount. The local majlis responded to the peasant demands by assigning two expert assessors to decide the issue; the villagers, however, physically barred the assessors from completing their duties. After the mudir (sub-district chief) of Ramallah had requested the council's assistance, such as dispatching cavalrymen, the council would only agree to send one of its members to verbally warn the villagers of their actions.20 This example of peasants obstinately refusing to pay their taxes highlights how some peasants in Ottoman-Palestine could react and resist the superior forces in their society. First, it is important to note that the villagers of Baytuniya objected to the tax assessment as being "too high". Following their interpretation of the "moral economy", these peasants did not challenge the s89 state's right to collect taxes, rather they only challenged the amount of the collection. This intent tc implement a more lenient assessment followed the aims most "everyday forms" of resistance take, which was to lessen and to mitigate, not to deny, the encroachmen_ of the state into the peasants' lives. Secondly, the peasants resorted to means which were within their ability, such as writing a petition or asserting their presence through limited violence and intimidation. Those villagers who farmed taxes themselves found that it provided them with an added means for resisting and lessening the exploitive class ambitions of the elites.
In comparison with the central mountains region, the ubiquitousness of cash-crops in the coastal and plains areas transformed this geographic region into a more attractive area for tax farming. As discussed in Chapter Two, the reports of the crippling collection of taxes, such as iltizEms for an entire village(s) awarded to one multazim, is a common scenario appropriate mostly to the Jericho valley or the Nazareth clada'.' In his study of the collection process for a ten year period for a farming area near Ramleh, located on the coastal plains, Samuel Bergheim found that the 'ushr (tithe) rarely averaged under one- third of the crop.22 Similarly, the peasants in the Ghaza area were paralysed from protecting their harvest. Moreover, these peasants could not receive the assistance of the authorities because those authorities or elites acted as their tax farmers. It was not unusual for the peasants of Ghaza to helplessly surrender
90 50% of their As an example of the extent of the frustration and the complete mistrust the peasants of Ghaza viewed their local majlis members on the issue of tax collecting, they immediately petitioned their complaints and objection to the Jerusalem majlis, rather than to their own local council.24The Ghaza villager's choice to direct their complaints to the Jerusalem majlis, which was the Ghaza council's superior, was their form of resistance intended to publicly condemn the Ghaza elites in overstepping the bounds defined in the "moral economy".Scott refers to this type of resistance as "ideological resistance".23 One scholar, following Scott's work, writes that ideological forms of resistance are mostly aimed to "shame or deter the exploiter".'-6 By eschewing their local elites, the Ghaza peasants undertook a political action by collectively and publicly expressing their frustration of the material experiences they had all shared and suffered under.
Almost all peasants, though, faced similar disadvantages and distresses at tax collecting time. If the peasants' village was not bargaining with the authorities or had no recourse to the local council, the assessor could deliberately increase or decrease the value of the crop and force the peasants to pay a higher sum than needed. Also, sometimes grain harvests were taken to a central village for the estimate, which might place the yield far from local markets and prevent the falrdhin from receiving the best price; or, the tax collector would arrive only after several days, thus leaving the crop on the threshing floor exposed to birds,
91 insects, rats as well as rain and thieves.27 Throughout our period of study, most peasants regarded tax collection as another threat in their lives which placed them precariously close, if not existing below, the minimum standards they believed the "moral economy" entitled them. But, after the Ottomans recaptured the plains and coastal areas, and the Palestine economy oriented towards the new markets, the elites were given a greater impetus to appropriate the peasants' agriculture. After this period, the peasants' were more vulnerable to the combination of the elites' penetration into the hinterland, through tax collection, and their new commercial ambitions.
The crippling burden of paying their taxes forced many peasants to undertake loans. The peasants reluctantly, but inevitably, resorted to moneylending when planting season began or at tax collecting time. During the late Ottoman period, taxes were paid in kind, but reports do appear periodically of the demand for taxes to be paid in coin, forcing the peasants to approach a moneylender.28 The collection of taxes was so burdensome to the peasants because it forced them to relinquish a fixed portion of their crop regardless if the remainder was sufficient to meet their subsistent level of existence.
To meet their tax obligations and elude the push towards pauperism, peasants were forced to enter moneylending arrangements with urban elites. In the vinage of Jaba', one unnamed merchant paid the taxes of a village for two years consecutively through a salam contract in return for a set number of jars of olive-oil at 92 a fixed price. The moneylender exploited the peasants' desperation by paying them a low price for the oil: in the first salam contract he paid 36.7 piasters per jar for a total of 953 jars, yet he paid only 23 piasters for 1,330 jars for the second salam contract, or one-third less than the previous price. The remainder of oil the peasants possessed was probably only enough for personal consumption, with little surplus remaining for the market.29 In another example, the inhabitants of Ashdod in 1887 owed the government L 400 in gold. The peasants were so earnest, or more accurately so desperate, for a moneylender that they were willing to mortgage 3000 dununis of land for four years, on condition they were able to remain as cultivators on it. These villagers were also willing to pledge one-quarter of their crop as interest payment, an amount greater than the total amount of the loan, or representing 100% as interest payment." The oppressing responsibility of meeting their tax obligations forced the peasants into such agreements.
In addition to tax collectors, the peasants' yield was also subject to exploitation by many other sources, forcing peasants to approach a moneylender even after harvest time. According to an 1881 observation, the peasants' yield also became the property of the wag! representative, the moneylender, the hired worker (karat) if one was employed, the village priest, the barber, the local dervishes, and even the poorer residents of his village received a share. If the failabin were industrious or shrewd enough to conceal part of their crop, they managed to keep enough for their
93 own family until the next harvest; if they failed, they most likely sought out a moneylender in the city only a few months after the harvest.."
The peasants also turned to moneylenders during planting season.In Eugene Rogan's study of loans drafted in the gads' (district) al-Salt discussed in Chapter Two, he traced the peasants' motives for borrowing 186 loans between the years 1885- 1890 and 1896-1897. Though Rogan's study refers to a neighbouring area, his conclusions are nonetheless worth noting. Rogan reached the conclusion that the harvest period, between May to July, represented the lowest activity, while the highest activity occurred during the planting season between the months October through January, which equalled 75% of the loans drafted.;' The high costs required to begin planting are described in an 1889 observation. This account estimates that L 16 was required for working a faddan of land, which included the cost of a yoke of oxen, implements required for the cultivation of the crops, which were mostly wheat, barely and dura, as well as the wheat needed for subsistence until the next harvest arrived.33 The inability of the peasants to meet the high costs at planting time forced many peasants to search for a moneylender.
For whatever reason the peasants contracted a loan, they entered as tie weaker party in this relationship, as the contemporary accounts of indebtedness, impoverishment and, for some peasants, landlessness indicate.The high usury rates and
exploitative loan schemes, while providing the moneylender with a
94 quick profit or a large share of the peasants' surplus, steered the peasants towards destitution. Most borrowers were unable to find manageable or reasonable usury rates. A French tourist who visited Syria-Palestine between 1875 to 1880 found moneylenders setting rates as high as 200% to 300% for producing seed. Interest rates though were usually compounded monthly from 2% to 3%, or even 5% monthly; in addition 1% per week was not an uncommon rate .34 These ruinous usury schemes were remarked upon by two contemporary Muslim observer. In his Wilayat Beirut, Rafiq Tamimi wrote that during W.W.I he recognised debt to urban merchants, landowners and politicians as the major problem facing the peasantry of Jabal Nablus. Muhammad 'Izzat Darwaza wrote that during the close of the Ottoman period all the soap factory owners, probably from Jabal Nablus, commonly and regularly lent to peasants and small traders at rates between 15% to 35%.35 The European observer C.R. Conder wrote in 1877 in his Tent Work in Palestine that interest rates even fluctuated between 40% through 50%.36 Despite the fact that European and even Arabic sources provide varying accounts of interest rates, all accounts do unanimously agree that the rates were burdensome to the borrowers. This impoverishment of the peasants, through high interest rates, quickly led to indebtedness and landlessness, and is all summed up in the falldh's language that he lived his life "from threshing floor to threshing floor".37 In all the moneylending agreements peasants entered in with oinvestors, the peasants' resources of land and labour were
95 ultimately undermined in the investor's bid to appropriate the peasants' crop. For the gadl" al-Salt, Rogan studied three principal loans moneylenders from Syria-Palestine lent out to rural agriculturalists.0 One type was the Igra, which was a loan of liquid capital in exchange for limited rights of possession over immovable collateral, such as a vineyard, for a fixed period of time. The Islamic court would have expected the lender to exploit the rahn (collateral, land) as long as the principal remained unpaid or to allow the borrower to work the land for the duration of the loan period, as 7/79 lenders had done. However, in the majority of cases (72/79) the lender made an arrangement with the borrower outside of the Islamic Court to maintain the borrower on the land for a share of the yield, as a means for the lender's profit.39 This arrangement demoted the cultivator to essentially the rank of tenant on his/her own land. In this arrangement the lender repaid the principal by providing a share of the yield. The surplus the moneylender obtained became his profit.4° Another means moneylenders found to extract the peasants' surplus and to exploit their weaknesses was through the Bay'hi--1--wafts' loans. These were loans in coin in exchange for immovable property contracted as a temporary "sale".Though the borrower could bargain with the lender for the duration period of the "sale", Rogan found that the values of the properties the peasants provided as rahn exceeded the average loan (P. 2,137"30) by P.
450"20 or an average of 21%.41 Wan' loans are a good example of
96 how loans were contracted under duress, which the moneylender could exploit to undermine the peasants' ownership of land, labour and yield.
From existing contemporary accounts, it seems that the third type of loan, the salam contract system, could trap the peasants into a dependent relationship with the moneylender. The narration by a women from the village of Beit Jala, whose family had contracted a loan from a soap merchant when they could not pay their taxes, is exemplary of how many peasants lost their crops to moneylenders: He (the woman's father in law) pledged his olive trees for 500 Piasters, and wrote a bond upon himself to pay fifteen jars of oil to Suleiman Assel'; and if there is any deficient, he has to pay two jars of oil next year for every one. That year was also a bad one, and our olives were stolen, and we had only three jars of oil; so Suleiman wrote a bond upon my father-in-law for twenty-four jars of oil for the next harvest, and if any were deficient, two were to be given for every one...We now owe him still eighty jars of oil."' All these moneylending schemes, either high usury rates, or loans in exchange for movable property (salam contracts), or immovable property (Iqr,ir or Bay'bi-l-wafP), had the common effect of transforming the peasants' ownership of land and/or labour and/or yield. The moneylenders exploited the peasants' needs, and in exchange for a loan these lenders received control of the peasants' resources. These three resources became avenues for the moneylenders to use for their own commercial ambitions.
The peasants could not even rely on their own village mukhtar (village-headman) in their dealings with urban moneylenders, since the mukht-a-r was in alliance with these usurers to extract as much of the peasants' yield as possible. Though the Ottomans integrated the village shaykhs (village-chiefs) into the administrative 97 structure, the new mukhtar and mudir (sub-district chiefs) still maintained much of their previous influence since they were bound to the shaykhs of the past by kinship or economic ties.'" With the mukhtar's loyalty residing with those wealthy individuals, the mukhtgr would not act as an honest broker between the fallahin of his village and the moneylender, or tax collector.
The mukhtar now sought the most optimum rate for these men and not for his own villagers. In return for his services of contracting a high rate of interest or a profitable salam contract, or assessing and collecting a high tithe and land tax, the mukhtar or village shaykh received a share of the dividends from the moneylender or tax collector..' The mukhtar realized that his role as intermediary could be a lucrative commercial position. Reports even exist that the mukhtUrs discouraged the self tax farming system so that they could remain partners with the multazims for a share of the peasants' harvest.'" Clearly, state centralization had destroyed the peasants' traditional reliance on his rural leaders, as these leaders established alliances with urban men of capital to take possession of the peasants' agriculture.
In a society dominated by mostly subsistence agriculture, the gradual parcelling out of the peasants' produce undermined their only source of livelihood. But the farmers' crop was only a product of their two resources: land and labour. According to the peasants, maintaining sovereignty over these two resources could ensure they remained within the parameters of the "moral economy". By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the peasants' most valuable
98
resource- land, was threatened, forcing many peasants to abandon a land-tenure system, the small-scale subsistence farm, they had traditionally preferred. The introduction of the 1858 Land Code, and the threat of indebtedness leading to landlessness were two forces which undermined the peasants' control of their property. Moreover, the urban elites recognised the peasants' precarious hold of their land and entered into land-tenure agreements with the peasants to ensure themselves a greater share of the rural surplus.
The 1858 Land Code had varying effects in the different geographic regions of Ottoman-Palestine. As documented in Chapter One, wealthy urban residents registered large tracts of properties in the plains and lowlands areas, but small landownership persisted throughout most of the central mountains region. Not all small cultivators, however, adapted to these legal changes to landownership, and, as will be shown below, many felt disadvantaged to cope with these new regulations. For the peasants, as well as for the bedouin, "ownership" of property was based on the principle of taparruf (right of usufruct) in which villagers possessed the right to cultivate the soil each individual resided on, without any need for title deeds.46 Most of the rural inhabitants of Ottoman- Palestine believed that land registration would also be accompanied with greater taxation and conscription. To elude these burdens, the poorer peasants who flocked to the plains and coastal areas, such as those villagers in the Sharon and coastal plains, denied any ownership of properties to save on the cost of the deeds.47
This registration fee amounted to 4% to 5% of the value of the
99 land, and for most small-scale farmers this value was beyond their reach." The peasants' evasion from registering their land was a form of "everyday resistance" to a state initiated centralisation policy which they could not trust. Their shared experiences reminded them that centralisation would only result in greater taxation, conscription and further encroachments into their lives.
Without holding title to the land, the peasants were severely handicapped in confronting the interests of merchants and moneylenders. The absence of any legal title to the land restricted the cultivator from borrowing money, since most moneylenders used the peasants' land as mortgage, such as in the Iqr-ar and the Wald.' loans. Even the Ottoman Agricultural Bank required the peasants' to place their land as collateral for a loan; if the peasants defaulted, their property would be auctioned to the best offer." Even though borrowing could lead to indebtedness, many peasants relied on moneylenders and their capital to begin the planting season, pay off taxes or even to pay for a marriage.5° Without this legal title, the peasants remained landless and were forced to lease land as a tenant for a source of livelihood.51 But the growth of land-tenancy did not only occur because of an absence of land registration, but also because of the burdensome debts the peasants incurred.
The inability to elude indebtedness forced many peasants to sell their land and legal registration, if this existed, to moneylenders as a from of debt payment.In Doreen Warriner's
100 words, this created a "parasitic land lord class"." During the late 1870's, a combination of a bad harvest and the distress caused by the Ottoman-Russian War (1877-1878) resulted in indebtedness and forced the impoverished peasants to sell their holdings to urban merchants and moneylenders. Even earlier in 1872, the Gcrman- Jewish family took advantage of the peasants' distress and their failure to meet their tax obligation when they acquired the land of Abu-Shush in return for erasing its inhabitants' tax-arrears; fifty-one peasants relinquished 153 titles in this deal."
The growing trend towards landlessness paralleled with the spread of large landownership inevitably introduced the common arrangement in the plains and coastal areas of lease-holding. The Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari writes that the growth of share-cropping relations are to be expected in any society in which patronage relations exist between one dominant figure (owner of land and/or capital) who exercises control over a weaker party (landless or poor peasant).54 During our period of study, landownership was generally divided between three groups: First was the large landowners with wealth and political power who rented out their land for a fixed annual sum or a percentage of the harvest, ranging between 30% to 70%. second was the small and medium scale size landowners whose hold on the land was constantly threatened because of their vulnerability to indebtedness.The third group consisted of members who were at one time probably composed of the latter group but lost their legal title to the land through indebtedness." The I0/ increasing frequency of indebtedness along with the trend towards landlessness among the last two groups forced many peasants to enter land-tenure and financial arrangements with urban residents who possessed the resources of land and/or capital necessary for the cultivator to engage in agriculture.
In all the land-tenure and financial arrangements the peasants, either landowning or landless, engaged in with the elites, a recurrent pattern we have discussed throughout this work is repeated: the peasants' weaker position in society and the difficulty that they had in adopting to economic changes, allowed a small elite urban group to appropriate a significant amount of the peasants' produce.
The most popular form of land-tenure agreement throughout the Middle East was the "farming-out" system discussed in Chapter Two. If share-cropping is defined as basically a tenant who leases land from a landowner or borrows capital in return for a share of the harvest, than the "farming-out" system is analogous to the share- cropping system. The peasants in these agreements essentially are tenants of the investor. Just as in the sharika contracts discussed in Chapter Two, the peasant repaid the "loan" of the investor's (landowner, moneylender) through his labour and the "fruits of his labour".56 In this agreement, the peasants could not profit from the full extent of their own labour, which was used to satisfy the investor's profit. Similar to the Ilgra'r and Wat:1' loans discussed above, the peasants in most share-cropping arrangements were working to repay the "loan", or rent, as well as
102 to provide the investor with a profitable proportion of the crop.57 After the mid-nineteenth century, these systems were closely related to urban moneylending on the one hand, and the commercialisation of agriculture on the other hand. The fusion of these two developments occurred when urban moneylenders provided the peasants with the capital to respond to the new market demands for Palestine's agricultural produce. As discussed in Chapter Two, urban merchants, multazims, landowners and moneylenders, acting as shaddad, were the co-ordinators between the cultivator and the market, between what was grown and what was demanded, just as Linda schilcher illustrated for the wheat grown in the Huran area. Scholch also provides the example of how after 1852 in Acre and Jabal Nablus Palestinian peasants quickly responded to the French demand for sesame. Most peasants were easily convinced to convert their fields to this crop because growing sesame demanded less labour than cotton and was less dependent on the uncertainties of the weather."
In his Peasants, Politics and Revolution, Joel Migdal has argued that peasants orientating their cultivation to the market would transform control over their own livelihood. The greater emphasis on the market would transform the peasants, lives from living in a "closed village", which is mostly an autonomous self- serving agricultural unit, to an "open village", which lacks autonomy because of the dependence on the market.59 A further consequence to "open villages" would be the coalescing between the rural and the urban areas. In this relationship, the former 103 becomes more dependent on the latter's capital, which the growing frequency of peasant indebtedness to urban moneylenders indicates. This trend occurred in those geographic regions where landless peasants depended on those with the resources of land and/or capital, such as in the coastal and plains areas.
The peasants recognized that their dependence on the land- tenure and financial arrangements did not guarantee them the minimum standards for existence. As was mentioned, the peasants repaid their loan or rent either through a fixed amount or a proportional sum of the crop. In the peasants' bid to maintain a decent level of subsistence, the peasant would evaluate the risk of these arrangements and how the risk was distributed. When the peasants forfeited an amount of the crop, they were not guaranteed with a subsistent level of existence. For example, let us assume that a peasant grows 20 bushels of wheat and the family needs ten bushels of wheat to meet basic subsistence levels; yet, if rent is set at a fixed rate at 12 bushels of wheat or a proportion of the crop at 60% of the yield, the family falls below the level of subsistence.° Given that landlessness and indebtedness were frequent observations by the end of our period of study, we can assume that these land-tenure and financial agreements had became more popular. The intensified class conflict which spurred these arrangements was quickly eroding the "subsistent ethic" the peasants had relied on. Rather than working to meet the needs of their own family, peasants who engaged in these arrangements were usually working to satisfy the commercial ambitions of the
104 investor.
Examples do exist of how peasants reacted to these arrangements. One example is the peasants from the village of Abu Shusha, who handed Peter Bergheim their titles to the land in exchange for him clearing their outstanding back taxes. These peasants had assumed that they could remain on the land and continue to farm the musha' (collective farming) system; yet, the Bergheims began to manage the estate themselves and the villagers soon realized that they had become labourers for an European landowner. Consequently, in 1884 Peter Bergheim was murdered by some of the inhabitants of the village of Abu Shusha.61One scholar studying "everyday forms of resistance" claims that individual incidents of violence can be called protests if the motive includes sending a message.62 In this example, the message was the peasants' resentment of becoming merely labourers cultivating their crops for others. Moreover, we should properly recognise the murder not as an act of "disorder", but a political message to "restor[e] order".63 The peasant who committed the crime and the villagers who provided the tacit support were upholding the rights and the expectations in society that they believed they were entitled to: Primarily, their right to cultivate land for their own profit.
Though contemporary reports of the landlessness are abundant, and cash-crops gradually begin to occupy a greater percentage of the overall agricultural economy in Ottoman-Palestine, most peasants during our period of study remained small-scale landowners 105 engaging in only subsistence agriculture. Studying the economic history of the Ottoman empire after economic integration began, Sevket Pamuk writes that a share of any commodity in the total value of exports, such as cash-crops or raw materials, rarely exceeded 12%.64 Though, this is less true in the Ottoman-Palestine case where orange and soap exports from the port of Jaffa for the years 1888 to 1914 represent a combined average of 50% of total exports.65 Most cultivators, however, rarely engaged in cash-crop cultivation nor did they become economically dependent on the European or the regional market. These subsistence farmers worked the land mostly for themselves and for their families, not for merchants, large-scale landowners or the market.
The tenacious tradition of small-scale landownership prevented forces after the mid-nineteenth century from uprooting these peasants from their holdings. Even with all the threats to their continued possession of their property, small landownership continued to prevail in our period. A report documenting the growth of large landownership for the second decade of this century showed that 144 persons held title to 3.13 dunums of land, or an average of 22,000 dunums each family. Two million dunums of this total, however, were situated in the sparsely populated and poor fertile soil areas of the gadais of Ghaza and Bir al-Sab'. The central mountains region, however, possessed both the density of the population and the greatest area of tilled land. In 1895 Vital Cuinet estimated that one-tenth (22,000 square kilometres) of the land in Ottoman-Palestine was tilled, the lowest occurring in the
106 qada of Ghaza with 200 sq. km/11,400 sq. km (1.89%), followed by the qada-' of Hebron with only 200 sq. km/5,800 sq. km (3.5%) tilled. The plains area in the qada' of Jaffa had 900 sq. km/2,600 sq. km (35%) under cultivation, with the largest amount of tilled land situated in the qada- al-Quds where peasants exploited 900 sq. km out of a potential 2,200 sq. km of land (45%).66 The central mountains region possessed the greatest area of tilled land because it also possessed the greatest area of small- scale landownership. A 1909 Ottoman report for the three sanjaks of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre corroborates this observation. This report shows that 16,910 families cultivated 785,000 dunums of land, or an average of 46 dunums per family. In the sanjaks of Jerusalem and Nablus 67% and 63% of the inhabitants respectively, tilled less than 50 dunums of land, which Granott remarks that "such an area was reckoned at that time only a small landholding."67 In Gerber's study of the sanjak of Jerusalem, he found that in nearly all the requests for the registration of property, the applicants were those who occupied and worked the land.In fact, in these protocols of the qada`' of Jerusalem majlis, he found no evidence for the absence of registration, nor for the registration of large tracts of property.6K In another relevant study, Gerber discusses a land survey taken by the qada' of Jerusalem in the years 1876, 1886 and 1907. In this survey dealing with immovable property, he did not find a single case of the registration of land in the name of a city notable, a moneylender, an absentee landlord. nor by any other 107 claimants made by the traditional literature. In addition, his research also found that in fifty cases of land registration, the average plot size was 26 dunums and in twenty-three of the cases the land holding ranged from 1 to 17 dunums, or an average of 7 dunums.69 The amalgamation of large properties in the hands of a few clearly eclipsed the central mountains region, which was the traditional home to a well-rooted small-scale landowner population. The commercialisation of agriculture which began to forcefully penetrate Palestine's hinterland near the mid-century could not fully undermine the geopolitical and historical forces which had created the reality of small-scale landownership.
These small-scale landowners mostly cultivated crops for their own consumption. The most popular crops sown in the Palestinian hinterland between the middle of the nineteenth century and W.W.I were wheat and barley. Some reports indicate that 75% of all the cultivated land had been sown with grain; in addition, 56% of the cultivable land in Northern Palestine was reserved for the growing of cereals.7° Though the integration into the world capitalist economy could naturally undermine subsistence farming, John-Crosbie estimated in his 1930 British Mandate report, a period in Palestine's history when the pace of economic integration had quickened, that 80% of all crops grown were for home consumption:71 In another geographic area, Linda Schilcher writes that grain represented 50% of the average daily food consumption and 90% of the personal intake for the majority of residents in Syria; in addition, wheat and barley composed the primary staples of the
108 majority of the inhabitants' diet, and as well occupied the largest share of cropped area and employed the largest segment of the population. A fitting Syrian adage to summarize the extent grain dominated the lives of the peasants is "fi al-sham kulli shi min al-qamh" (In Syria, everything is frOM wheat).72 The persistence of subsistence agriculture reveals a great deal about Palestine's incorporation into the world economy. Though Ottoman-Palestine's economy had steered towards this general trend, the process of incorporation could not use large-scale landownership to develop a cash-crop economy to respond to market demands. Rather, small-scale landownership and subsistence farming remained imbedded in Palestine's land-tenure structure; if peasants chose to market their crop, they either marketed it themselves or sought an urban intermediary. As Schilcher writes, though share- cropping and moneylending arrangements with the peasants could reduce them to a pauper's level, the peasants managed to maintain a land-tenure system and method of production to their advantage.73 This mode of production provided the peasants with some semblance of protection against the ready exploitation of the investors and the state, as well as against the whimsical trends of the world market. Beshara Doumani shares this observation, remarking that even though share-cropping arrangements did exist for many peasants after the mid-nineteenth century, the "rooted pattern" of small land-holdings prevented urban capitalists from becoming large landowners in significant numbers until the Mandate period.74
109 If the small-scale cultivators could elude the burdens which threatened their preferred mode of production, there are even indications that the peasants had experienced personal gain. The British Consul Finn observes this after the grain boom in 1856 and, and his colleague British Consul Khayyat writes that peasants bought English goods and that their women were adorned with gold and silver.75 Many rural agriculturalists could even supplement their subsistence income with other work doing jobs as masons, building labourers or carpenters in response to the urban construction boom, or as hired labourers for neighbouring farmers during harvesting.76 The peasants in Ottoman-Palestine, however, did not reach their millennium. Indebtedness and the quick slide to landlessness always threatened their livelihood. The intensification of the class conflict and the symmetrical interests of the state and the local elites after the mid-nineteenth century severely disadvantage the peasants in controlling their resources of land and labour. One Palestinian intellectual Afif l.Tannous commented on this in 1935: The fellah until recently has been the subject of oppression, neglect and ill treatment by his own countrymen and the old political regime. The feudal system played havoc in his life, the effendi class looked down upon him, and the old Turkish regime was too corrupt to be concerned with such a vital problem."
As that author argues, the peasantry were alienated from the superior forces in society. Both the urban elites and the local state authorities worked to subjugate the peasantry and to control their yield.
A petition by the villagers of 'Asira al-Shamiyah is a good
110 example of this alliance between the rich peasants, rural shaykhs, urban merchants and local government officials uniting to establish a hold on the peasants' produce.7g The villagers petitioned the Governor of Jerusalem in February 1852 that they had cleared all their tax obligations yet the shaykh of the naiya had demanded an additional sum of money, he had also arrested ten villagers. The Governor requested the head of the Nablus majlis to explain the "foul misdeeds which necessitated their imprisonment..." Mahmud Belk 'Abd al--Nadi justified the action because the villagers had refused to provide the olive-oil merchant the agreed amount of oil jars as specified in the salam contract; in addition, the shaykh of the ndhiya, al-Jarrars, entered the village with Ottoman cavalrymen and, after demanding payment, the villagers responded with limited violence and caused some damage to the cavalrymen who accompanied al-Jarrar.
Doumani outlines the alliance against the villagers, writing that the local shaykh joined forces with the moneylender to ensure full payment as outlined in the contract, a common characteristic amongst local village officials. The shaykh's loyalty to his new ally even included his willingness to use intimidation and extortion on his own villagers. The governor of Jerusalem had also presumed the villagers' guilt and showed his solidarity with the Nablus majlis al-shura in this affair, as indicated by referring to the incident as the "foul misdeeds of the peasants".79 The alliance between the shaykh, the moneylender and the Nablus council is exemplary of the chances which occurred after the
111 mid-nineteenth century had coalesced these desperate groups together. Early in the nineteenth century, the rural shaykhs's family, the Jarrar, had been enemies of the Tucians and other rural shaykhs during the struggles in Jabal Nablus at that time. After political centralization arrived to Ottoman-Palestine, these families held the same political offices and became allies. By addressing their petition to the governor of Jerusalem rather than to the proper local authorities, the peasants of al-Asira took notice of their shaykhs' disloyalty and his new alliance with the urban elites.
Furthermore, the petition is also revealing as a source which shows how the peasants understood their social relations with the elites. The petition reads as follows: (We) the destitute...of 'Asira village...have paid all that is required from us in miri (taxes) in cash and kind bara (penny) after bara...and the account books of the treasury are cleared of all that was or could be (required of us). A few days ago, Ahmed al-Yusif (Jarrar)- (on the basis) of his power, influence and lack of fear from the rule of law- demanded from us, in a criminal and corrupt manner, a sum (of money and crops) for no legitimate reason. He has crossed the line and broken the rules of (decent behaviour) and just regulations. (as a part of his illegal behaviour) he sent cavalrymen, picked ten persons from among us and imprisoned them in Nablus. They have been imprisoned for no satisfactory reason. Since this overstepping of bounds is a matter contradictory to your (sense of) justice, we have found the courage to petition your Munificent Highness, and beg that you issue an order to Mahmud Beik 'Abd al-Nadi, the qg'immadlm of Nablus (instructing him) to go over the miri books. If a barn or the smallest measure of crops are found to be owed by us, we will bring it over. If nothing (owed by us) is found, then our people can be reassessed for the disposition of your justice does not condone or allow...a person, such as the above mentioned, to imprison our people (just to satisfy) his aim for bribery. Our just government has the power to remove the above mentioned.
Signed: the Poor of 'Asira in the Nablus District."
This petition provides a primary source of evidence of how peasants conceived of justice and their relations with the state and the elites. In the petition the peasants repeatedly affirm that they had met their tax obligations with the state, and therefore, the actions of their local shaykh al-Jarrar's extortion was an insult to the accepted standards of the law, if not outright "bribery"."" Concerning the shaykhs' illegality, these
112 peasants write that he acted "(on the basis) of his power, influence and lack of fear from the rule of law"; that he demanded from the peasants in a "criminal and corrupt manner", contrary to the rules of "(decent behaviour) and just regulations" and to "your [the Governor's] (sense of) justice". The peasants were clearly upholding a normative view of justice which was propagated by the state. In this "social contract", the state would protect the peasant from outside harm while the peasants would comply by paying taxes. Antonio Gramasci (founder of the Italian Communist Party, died 1937) would indict the peasants for accepting this elite ideology because, according to him, the elites controlled the "ideological sectors" of society which could manufacture the hegemonic consensus of an elite self-serving ideology."
Yet, Scott argues that the peasants are not duped into complying with these ideologies, but grudgingly accept them because ignoring or challenging them would be unrealistic. To minimise their losses, the peasants extract the "positive aspects" of these ideologies, which Scott refers to as the "euphamization of economic power".He argues that all these state and elite ideologies illicit the support of the peasants by convincing them that the prevailing system is ultimately just.Therefore, the hegemonic view of the social relations the elites or state propagate contain inherent elements which the peasants can confront the state with." As Scott writes, The most common form of class struggle arises from the failure of dominant ideology to live up to the implicit promises it necessarily makes. The dominant ideology can be turned against its privileged beneficiaries not only because subordinate groups develop their own interpretations, understandings, and readings of its ambiguous terms, but also because of the promises that the dominant class must make to propagate it in the first place."
113 In fact, the Ottoman state had made it public that the extortions and illegal confiscations were no longer to be tolerated. In 1850 the governor of Jerusalem issued an edict against such acts and the majlis al-shura of Nablus sent copies to all thirteen muhassils (tax collectors); in addition the inhabitants of 213 villages in Jabal Nablus were advised that complaints should be addressed to the Nablus council.85 The peasants acknowledged that the state promised to protect them; subsequently, the peasants challenged the state to uphold these promises when the presence of the state acted as a means for their protection.
Summary: It appears that the peasants of Ottoman-Palestine faced an alliance of the state and the local elites after the mid-nineteenth century in the bid to appropriate the peasants' surplus. The intensified effort and alliance of these two groups was solidified as a result of the twin forces of political centralization and economic integration, which placed the peasants in a further weakened position in the class conflict. These political and economic changes manifested themselves through tax collectors, moneylenders, land owners and rural shaykhs. This united group ultimately undermined the peasants ownership of their resources of land, labour and their yield. The success of their goals is evident in the frequent reports of indebtedness, landlessness and share-cropping agreements.
The frequent occurrence of the "everyday forms of resistance"
114 are indications that the peasants recognized how the new alliance had destroyed their concept of the "moral economy". The petitions, limited violence, murders, evasion of registering property and abandoning traditional leaders all signal the peasants' objection to the actions of the state and the elites, particularly to issues concerning the peasants' ownership of land, labour and the yield.
115 Endnotes: Chapter Three 1. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914 (London: Methuen Press, 1981), 244.
2. Alexander Scholch, "Table 1: Administrative division of Palestine and the number of households (khanes) in the cities and nahiyas according to the Syrian province-salnamo for the year A.H. 1288 (A.D. 1871-1872)", Palestine in Transformation. 1856-1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development. Translated by William C.Young and Michael C.Gerrity (Washington, D.C: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993), 20-23.
3.Even if we refer to the population statistics compiled during the Mandate period, a period in Palestine's history when the trend towards the growth of the urban population was even greater, the predominance of the rural population over the urban is still apparent. In Mandate Palestine's first modern census in 192?, the British concluded that 65X of Arab Muslims lived in the rural areas John Reudy, "Dynamics of Land Alienation", in The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, (ed.) Abraham Abu-Lughod (Evanston: North Western University Press, 1971), 120. Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine:Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 155. In 1931 this number drops down to 53% of the inhabitants. Abraham Granott, The Land System in Palestine: History and Structure (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952), 181. In only nine years, the rural population changed from 65% of the population to 53%, indicating the great pace of migration to the urban areas. In addition, many of the European observers at the time noted the disappearance of the plague, which easily afflicted the susceptible peasant population. Sec the comments of E.W.G Masters made in 1918 quoted in Haim Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890-1914 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1985), 42-43.
4. Eric Wolf's definition found quoted in John Waterbury, "Peasants Defy Categorisation (AS well as Landlords and the State), in Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, (eds.) Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), 2. Clifford Gecrtz's definition found in Joel.S.Migdal, Peasants, Politics and Revolution: Pressures Toward Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 24.
5. James.C.Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 42-45.
6. [bid 43.
7. [bid 44.
8. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in South East Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 2-7.
9. Ibid, 33.
10. Ibid, 6.
11. Nathan Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt: The Struggle Against the State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 16.
12. Examples of this are Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Landlord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Ceacon Press, 1966); Jeffrey Paige, Agrarian Revolt. Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975); Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). In the Middle East context see the articles in Kazemi, Peasants and Politics.
13. Andrew Turton, "Patrolling the Middle-Ground: Methodological Perspectives on 'Everyday Peasant Resistance'", Journal of Peasant Studies Volume 13 Number 2, (January 1986): 37.
14. Brown, Peasant, 216.
15. Quoted in Scott, Weapons, me.
116 16. mainly due to these reasons, iltizams were rare in the Jerusalem and the Hebron regions during the late Ottoman period, and at one time thirty-eight villages in the oadai of Jerusalem remained without bidders. Gerber, Ottoman, 164.
17. In this system, the tax season was divided into the winter and the summer. Two mailis appointed assessors (muhammin) drew up estimates of the 'ushr to be collected, presenting one to the Local mailis and the other tO-71-1.7acht3r of the village. The villagers reviewed this estimate and were given time to submit objections, after which the peasants would produce the agreed amount to the state. Gerber, Ottoman, 164-165.
18. Brown, Peasant, 7 and 111-126.
19. Gerber, Ottoman, 166-168.
20. Gerber, Ottoman, 167-168. At least for the saniak of Jerusalem, Gerber found that contrary to most beliefs, gendarmes were not dispatched regularly to aid tax-collectors; in fact, he found not a single case, revealing that many cultivators in this area may have been spared this authoritative response by the state. The changes to the tax-farming system also allowed the peasant in the Jerusalem saniak to pay, after some legal changes, the legal 12% tithe of the harvest. According to the calculation of the population and total tax revenue for the province of Jerusalem, that author concluded that the collection of taxes was heavier for the year 1774 compared with 1907, where he showed that taxes had increased less than 1% per annum, while prices had risen by two or four times. !bid, 230-231.
21. Ibid, Ottoman, 168.
22. Quoted in James Anthony Reilly, "A Survey of the Social and Economic History of Late Ottoman Palestine, 1858-1914", (Unpublished Master of Arts Thesis Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1980), 95.
23. Gerber, Ottoman 168-169.
24. !bid, 169.
25. Scott Weapons ,xvii and 18-22.
26. Milton J.Esman, "Commentary", in Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, (ed.) Forrest D.Colburn (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989), 222.
27. Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 16-17.
28. The American consular agent in Haifa wrote in 1885: As the Turkish Government has issued an order and has made it to be a law, that the tithes which have hitherto been paid in products, should be abolished and place there of (sic) a fixed tax in money be paid, whether the crop be good or bad, has had a very depressing influence on the fellahins (sic), the most of them being deeply indebted, they are not able to raise money enough to pay the taxes...
Quoted in Reilly, "Survey", 94; see also Gerber, Ottoman, 161 and Stein, Land Question, 16.
29. Beshara Bernard Doumani, "Merchants, Socioeconomic Change and the State in Ottoman Palestine: The Nablus Region, 1800-1860", (Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, Georgetown University, 1990), 272.
30. Granott, Land, 60.
31. Granott, Land 62-63.
32. Eugene L.Rogan, "Moneylending and Capital Flows from Nablus, Damascus and Jerusalem to dada' al-Salt in the Lost Decades of Ottoman Rule", The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century ed. Thomas Philip (Berliner Islamstudien, Bd.5, 1992), 244-245.
33. Gronott, Land, 295-296.
34. Granott, Land, 68-69.
35. Doumani, "Merchants", 264.
117 36. Granott, Land, 59.
37. Ibid, 59.
38. Rogan found that 90 of the 124 borrowers in the loans were agriculturalists. "Moneylending", 244.
39. !bid, 242.
40. One example of this arrangement is revealed through a dispute in which a widow claimed her husband provided as rahn half of their vineyard of grape arbour in a loan with a moneylender; unbeknownst to her, and most likely not written in the contract, her husband had also promised half of the revenues of the vineyard to the moneylender. !bid, 242-243.
41. ]bid, 243. In his study, Rogan notes a Piaster with P. The Piaster was divided into forty porn, indicated by the inverted double commas: e.g 41/2 Piasters= P. 4"20.
42. Doumani, "Merchants", 269-270.
43. James Reilly, "The Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine", Journal of Palestine Studies Volume X Number 4 (Summer 1981): 94.
44. Granott, Lard, 16 and Stein, Land, 17.
45. Granott, Land, 57-58. We should also add that if the villagers leased the land from a large landowner, the landowner's representative (wakili) was also reported to collect between 8% to 15% of the yield. Granott, 293.
46. Reilly, "Survey", 46.
47. Granott, Land ,72-74. Peasants also registered their lands in the name of three or four people, usually patriarchs of each hamula (large family) in the village, or even in the name of deceased relatives. Reilly, "Survey", 55. The fallah also took up the crippling habit of registering his land or selling his land, including full official registration if this existed, to urban elites who promised to act as intermediaries and to protect them against tax farmers and the state. One Palestinian writer, A.L Tobawi, comments on this fictitious pledge. Ouoted in Stein, Land, 21.
48. Reilly, "Survey", 53. Contemporary accounts tell us of the sorrowful methods some peasants resorted to raise the money for registration, such as chopping down their olive trees to sell its valuable wood it towns; sadly, the loss of their olive crop from this one tree could render the peasant into debt. Reilly, "Survey", 54.
49. Granott, Land, 60.
50. A popular adage in Palestine reflects the dilemma the father of the bride faced at the time of his daughter's marriage, "He who marries on borrowed money, his children pay the debt". Granott, Land, 65. Doumani also writes that many textile merchants depended on weddings to lend and sell their products. Doumani, "Merchants", 245.
51. Though in a different period of history, a 1932 British Mandate report indicated that less than five per-cent of the peasant populations' land was mortgaged. Stein, Land, 21.
52. Doreen Warriner, "Land Tenure Problems in the Fertile Crescent", in The Economic History of the Middle East. 1800-1914: A Book of Readings (ed.) Charles lssawi, 77.
53. Alexander Scholch, "European Penetration and the Economic Development of Palestine, 1856.82" in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (ed.) Roger Owen (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), 22. The number of deeds given up indicates that peasants had more than one deed. See the discussion of peasants owning more than one deed in Haim Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East, (Boulder: Lynee Rienner Publishers, 1987).
54. Salim Tamari, "Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History", Owen, Studies, 188.
118 55. Granott, Land 180 and Reilly, "Survey", 58 cites Khalil Abu Rujayli, "Al-Zirea al-'arabiyya fi filastin qabl qiyam dawlat isra'il". Shu'un filastiniyya 11 (July 1972):29. We could also add to this list fallahin who owned land but who leased additional plots from a Large landowner; these plots were mostly located at a certain distance from the village in the central mountains region. Those landless peasants who leased land also erected their home and established entire villages in these leased lands, indicating their permanent fate. Granott, Land, 295.
56. Brown, Peasant, 120.
57. Granott, Land 288.
58. Alexander Scholch, "The Economic Development of Palestine, 1856-1882", Journal of Palestine Studies Volume X Number 4 (Summer 1981): 42.
59 . Joel S.Migdal Peasants Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton: Prineeton University Press, 1974), 34-37.
60. Scott, Weapons, 44-46.
61. Scholch, "European" 25-26. Scholch also discusses the "vehement protests" of the peasants of the village of Yazur, after some of the village lands were given to the founders of the agricultural school Mikveh Israel in 1870. Ibid, 26.
62. Forrest Colburn, "Introduction", Colburn, Everyday xi.
63. Brown, Peasant, 111 and 115.
64. Quoted in Faruk Tabak, "Local Merchants in the Fertile Crescent during the long Nineteenth Century", Review: Fernand Broudel Center Volume XI Number 1 (Winter 1988), 207.
65. Gad Gilbar, "The Growing Economic Involvement with the West, 1882-1914", ed. David Kushner Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political Social and Economic Transformation (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Beh-Zvi, 1986), 196.
66. All these figures are cited in Granott, Land, 36.
67. !bid, 38. A contemporary European observer, Herbert Auhagen, an agronomist, found that 20% of the Galilee (north Palestine) and 5O( of Judea (central mountains region) were under peasant ownership while the rest of the land remained with large estate holders. Ibid.
68. Gerber, Ottoman, 215-218.
69. lbid 216.
70. See Chapter Two; also Reilly, "Peasantry", 83-84.
71. Henry Rosenfield, "From Peasantry to Wage Labour and Residual Peasantry: The Transformation of an Arab Village" in Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East: An Anthropology Reader Volume II, (ed.) Louise E.Sweet (New York: The Museum of Natural History, 1970), 146-147.
72. Linda Schilcher, "The Grain Economy of Late Ottoman Syria and the Issue of Large-Scale Commercialisation" Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East, (eds.) Caglar Keydar and Faruk Tabak (Albany, State University of New York, 1991), 174.
73. Schilcher, "Grain", 194-195.
74. Doumani, "Merchants", 265.
75. For quotes see Scholch, "Economic", 53 and Granott, Land, 45.
76. Owen Middle East in the World, 22 and Granott, Land, 188.
119 77. Stein, Land, 25-26.
78. This section is greatly indebted to Doumani's comments and observations. ,Merchants", 275-284.
79. Scott writes extensively of how dominant groups refer to the resistance of pennants as "criminal" and "shameful", an issue outside the scope of this study. Scott, Weapons, xvii-22.
80. Doumani, "Merchants", 275-276.
81. Ibid, 280.
82. Quoted in Scott, Weapons, 39-40.
83. Ibid, 304-339.
84. Ibid, 338.
85. Also, in 1841 the wali of Damascus sent a edict ordering the cancellation of all illegal taxes, and end to peasants selling their crops below one-third of the value. This edict also forbade the confiscation of animals for free transportation and the eviction of those unable to pay their debts. 1bid, 280-281.
120 Conclusion The policy of centralization and the economic changes that took place between 1856 and 1908 advanced the class ambitions of the elites of Ottoman-Palestine. These concurrent developments helped to unite the elites in their ability to control the peasants' produce. State centralization had contributed to this development through various means. First, after subduing the powerful rural families, the Ottomans granted local political control to the new elites in the urban areas. State centralization had awarded political control to a limited class of powerful families, who maintained their power through local religious posts, positions in local councils, and through influence over issues such as land registration and the control of tax farming. Second, the Muslim elite class was the most successful group in the appropriation of the rural surplus. To accomplish this, the elites employed tax farming, land-tenNre and financial agreements, as well as engaging in moneylending. Third, the elites acquired the ability to market this agriculture to the local and regional markets. As the minority merchants concentrated on the trade with Europe, the Muslim merchants conducted a large trade within the regional market.
After the mid-nineteenth century, the Muslim elites who held political influence, could acquire peasant agriculture and respond to the market demands and act as shaddad. This class was more united, and thus more able, to promote its interests than its
predecessors. These new elites were unified through their new
121 political offices, their ability to penetrate into the rural hinterland and through their capacity to take advantage of the new economic opportunities. Unlike the elites of the past, these new elites recognized that their common class interest was to control the peasants' produce and use their political influence in order to protect and to preserve these interests.
Near the end of the nineteenth century and very early in the twentieth century, social changes started to undermine the supremacy of this group.1 The reforms which had created the alliance between the state and the elites at the mid-nineteenth century would gradually create new social realities. By the turn of the century, the new schools, the proliferation of bureaucratic positions, and positions available to locals in the Ottoman army would create a new group which failed to align its interests with the traditional elites and their politics. Rather, the teachers, journalists, army officers, and government officials that began to appear in greater numbers felt disadvantaged within the traditional political structure.
Rashid Khalidi writes that this group could not attain the careers and the political positions the traditional elites had monopolized in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As a result, this disenfranchised group sought more radical ideologies to annunciate its political aspirations and to criticise the status quo. Thus, it was this group which tended to identify more with Arabism after the 1908 Young Turk coup rather than to identify with the C.U.P government, the choice of the local elites.
122
Furthermore, Khalidi demonstrates that the support of Arabism was tied to those merchants who resided along the coast and traded with Egypt, Britain or France so as to seek their imperial support. 2 In their "Eastern Mediterranean Port Cities and their Bourgeoisie", Resat Kasaba, Caglar Keyder and Faruk Tabak argue that the merchants which traded with Europe represented a rival bourgeoisie in opposition to the entrenched dominant elites. 3 According to those authors, this group promoted nationalist movements before W.W.I, in which the new press, cultural groups, and new schools were "concrete manifestations" of this latest social transformation. 4 The peasants, however, during the period of this study and thereafter, remained powerless to protect their common interests. Though instances do appear of peasants protecting their crops from wrongful appropriation by a tax collector, most peasants were unable to do so. Just as harmful to the peasants' livelihood, were the land-tenure and financial agreements that the peasants reluctantly entered into with the elites. Ultimately, the peasants compromised their ownership of their resources of land and/or labour and/or produce to fulfil the demands of the landowner and/or moneylender and/or "partner" in a sharika contract, or another type of agreement. Gradually, the peasants exposed their opposition to their conditions through the practice of "everyday forms of resistance". By petitioning, by delaying to turn over their crop to moneylenders or to state officials, and by staging limited forms of violence, the peasants were manifesting in their "own words" and
123 through their own actions their objection to those who sought to ccAtrol their produce and manipulate and exploit their weak position in the class conflict. Ultimately, though, the inability of the peasants of Palestine to influence political events in their immediate surroundings and their reliance on the traditional urban- elite leadership can partially explain the failures and catastrophies this population would experience when confronted with the Jewish/Zionist challenge.
/24 Endnotes: Conclusion 1. The following arguments are based on Rashid Khalidiss works, "Society and Ideology in Late Ottoman Syria: Class, Education,Profession and Confession", ed. John P.Spagnolo Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Persoective Essays in Ho.rour of Albert Hourani, (Oxford: Ithaca Press, 1992) 119-131. Also see "Social Factors in the Rise of the Arab Movement in Syria", ed. Said Amir Arjomand From Nationalism to fleYdiUtiohary Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984) 53-70 2. Khatidi, "Social Factors", 66-67.
3. Resat Kosaba, Caglar Keyder and Faruk Tabak, "Eastern Mediterranean Port Cities and their Bourgeoisie: Merchants, Political Projects and nation-States", Review, X, I, (Summer 1986): 121-135.
4- 1121.4. 133-
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