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The route from informal peasant landownership to formal tenancy and eviction in Palestine, 1800s–1947

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2021

Amos Nadan
Amos Nadan*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Exogenous intervention in land ownership began with few court judgments prior to the weighty Land Code in 1858; but it was especially this law which officially overturned the status quo by permitting registration of cultivated land in the names of non-cultivators. This changed the rules of the game for the peasantry in Palestine. Informally, yet practically, peasants had been the de facto owners of almost all cultivated lands in Palestine for generations. Following the landmark intervention of 1858, non-peasants seized the opportunity to acquire economic assets. They purchased and confiscated peasant lands or manipulated registration of peasant lands into their own names, and the peasants often became their tenants. The additional purchase of lands by Zionist settlers in latter years, compounded by rural demographic growth, intensified this pressure. By 1930, three-quarters of Arab peasants in Palestine cultivated lands they no longer formally owned, while others were pushed to migrate to cities.

French abstract

French Abstract

Quelques jugements de tribunaux antérieurs au Code foncier ottoman de 1858 témoignent d'un début d'intervention exogène sur la propriété foncière paysanne en Palestine. Mais c'est surtout cette loi pesante qui y a officiellement renversé le statu quo, en autorisant l'enregistrement de terres cultivées au nom de non-cultivateurs. Cette législation a bouleversé les règles du jeu pour la paysannerie locale. Jusque-là, depuis des générations, informellement mais dans la pratique, les paysans étaient propriétaires de facto de presque toutes les terres cultivées en Palestine. À la suite de cette mesure décisive de 1858, les non-paysans saisirent l'opportunité d'acquérir des biens économiques. Ils achetèrent et confisquèrent des terres paysannes ou bien manipulèrent leur enregistrement à leur propre nom. Les paysans sont souvent devenus leurs locataires. L'achat de terres par les colons sionistes, aggravé par la croissance démographique rurale, a intensifié cette pression. En 1930, les trois quarts des paysans arabes de Palestine cultivaient des terres qu'ils ne possédaient plus officiellement, tandis que d'autres étaient contraints de migrer vers les villes.

German abstract

German Abstract

Auch wenn es durch einzelne Gerichtsurteile bereits vor dem gewichtigen Landgesetz von 1858 zu auswärtigen Eingriffen in den Landbesitz gekommen war, so wurde insbesondere durch dieses Gesetz der Status Quo formal umgeworfen, indem es die Registrierung bewirtschafteten Landes durch nicht-bewirtschaftende Personen erlaubte. Für das Bauerntum in Palästina änderten sich dadurch die Spielregeln. Wenn auch nur informell, so waren die Bauern zuvor praktisch seit Generationen im Besitz fast des gesamten bewirtschafteten Landes in Palästina gewesen. Doch im Anschluss an die richtungsweisende Intervention von 1858 ergriffen nicht-bäuerlichen Interessenten die Gelegenheit, Grundvermögen zu erwerben, indem sie Bauernland kauften oder konfiszierten oder die Registrierung von Bauernland in ihrem eigenen Namen manipulierten, wodurch die Bauern dann zu ihren Pächtern wurden. Der anhaltende Landkauf durch zionistische Siedler, der durch das ländliche Bevölkerungswachstum verschärft wurde, erhöhte den ökonomischen Druck so stark, dass spätestens 1930 drei Viertel der arabischen Bauern in Palästina Land bebauten, das ihnen formal nicht mehr gehörte, während sich die übrigen gezwungen sahen, in die Städte abzuwandern.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , August 2021 , pp. 233 - 256
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 The term ‘peasants’ in this paper refers to settled cultivators who were usually engaged in part-subsistence, part-surplus, labour-intensive agriculture. They were often described as ‘poor’. A number of accounts suggest that most Arab agriculturists in Palestine were peasants of this kind during both the Ottoman and Mandate periods. For example, Wilson, Charles Thomas, Peasant Life in the Holy Land (London, 1906)Google Scholar; Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists in Palestine and the Fiscal Measures of Government in Relation Thereto, by W. J. Johnson, R. E. H. Crosbie et al. (Jerusalem, 1930)Google Scholar; ’Arrāf, Shukrī, al-Qarya al-’Arabīya al-Filasṭīnīya (Ma’liyā, 1996)Google Scholar.

2 E.g. Ruth Kark, ‘Consequences of the Ottoman Land Law: Agrarian and Privatization Processes in Palestine, 1858–1918’, in Raghubir Chand, Etienne Nel and Stanko Pelc eds., Societies, Social Inequalities and Marginalization: Marginal Regions in the 21st Century (Cham, 2017), 102–3. Baer, Gabriel, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East: Studies in Social History (Abingdon, 1982), 59, 265, 289–90Google Scholar.

3 These interviews were primarily conducted for my PhD dissertation, later published as a book: Amos Nadan, ‘The Arab rural economy in Mandate Palestine, 1921–1947: peasant under colonial rule’ (PhD thesis, LSE – London School of Economics and Political Science, 2001). Amos Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate: A Story of Colonial Bungling (Cambridge, Mass, 2006).

4 Claudia R. Williamson and Carrie B. Kerekes, ‘Securing private property: formal versus informal institutions’, Journal of Law and Economics 54 (2011), 537–72.

5 Jean-Philippe Platteau, ‘Allocating and enforcing property rights in land: informal versus formal mechanisms in Subsaharan Africa’, Nordic Journal of Political Economy 26 (2000), 55–81.

6 Marc F. Bellemare, ‘The productivity impacts of formal and informal land rights: evidence from madagascar’, Land Economics 89, 2 (2013), 272–90.

7 Ariel Salzmann, ‘An Ancien Régime Revisited: “Privatization” and political economy in the eighteenth-century ottoman empire’, Politics and Society 21, 4 (1993), 396.

8 Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 11, 245. Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Jerusalem, 1946), 225–6. Raja Shehadeh, ‘The land law of Palestine: an analysis of the definition of state lands’, Journal of Palestine Studies 11, 2 (1982), 84.

9 Especially mulk, waḳf [a.k.a. waqf], maḥlūl, matrūk [a.k.a. matruka] and čiftlik [a.k.a. jiftlik].

10 Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London, 2007), 11–45.

11 Ibid. Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, 1984). Muḥammad Mājid Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Ḥazmāwī, Milkīyat al-arāḍī fī filasṭīn, 1918–1948 (’akkā: mu'assasat al-aswār, 1998). Gabriel Baer, Mavo layahasim ha'agrariyim bamizrah hatikhon (Jerusalem, 1971), 53–8. Ruth Kark, ‘Consequences of the Ottoman land law’, 101–20. Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists in Palestine, 21. Dov Gavish, Qarqa vemapa: mehesder haqarqa'ot lemapat erez yishra'el (Jerusalem, 1991), 7–25. Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration 1939–1948 (New York, 1991), 15.

12 Uri Davidovich, Naomi Porat, Yuval Gadot, Yoav Avni and Oded Lipschits, ‘Archaeological investigations and OSL dating of terraces at Ramat Rahel, Israel’, Journal of Field Archaeology 37, 3 (2012), 192–208.

13 See the Map Archive of the PEF. Also, see description of the hill country with the dominant olive industry and fruits prior to the Land Code at Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, 1995).

14 See broadly, ʿAlī Naṣūh al-Ṭāhir, Shajarat al-zaytūn: tārīkhhā zirāʿthā, ʾamrāḍhā, ṣināʿthā (Amman, 1947).

15 Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles, Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria, and the Holy Land: Including a Journey Round the Dead Sea, and Through the Country East of the Jordan (London, 1845), 55–6.

16 Salzmann, ‘An Ancien Régime Revisited', 397.

17 Ibid.

18 Amy Singer, Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural administration around sixteenth-century Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1994), 12.

19 Salzmann, ‘An Ancien Régime Revisited', 401.

20 Amnon Cohen, ‘Mīrī’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (consulted online on 8 September 2019).

21 The specific aspects of family and village ties are in need to be studied even more; yet even scattered information seems to suggest much solidarity and mutual assistance in daily operation and in time of trouble existed in the villages of the Levant, and specifically in Palestine. E.g. Afif I. Tannous, ‘Group behavior in the village community of lebanon’, American Journal of Sociology 48, 2 (1942), 231–9. Henry Rosenfeld, ‘Processes of structural change within the Arab village extended family’, American Anthropologist 60, 6, part 1 (1958), 1127–39. Ahmed Mohammed Mis'ad Hussein, ‘Arraba: a study of political, commercial, and social positions, 1804–1918’ (MA thesis in Arabic, An-Najah National University, 2010). ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ʿArrār, Qarya bayt jibrīn – min silsila alqurā al-filisṭīnīya al-mudamara raqam 20 (Ramallah, 1995). ʿAṭiyya ʿAbd Allāh ʿAṭiyya, ʿAyn kārim ilḥaqīqa waiḥalm: dirāsāt wakhwāṭir (Amman, 1993).

22 Amnon Cohen, ‘Mīrī’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (consulted online on 8 September 2019).

23 Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the 18th Century: Pattern of Government and Administration (Jerusalem, 1973), 216–7. Moshe Ma’oz, Ottoman Reforms in Syria and Palestine, 1840–1861 (Oxford, 1968), 56–59. Fred M. Gottheil, ‘Money and product flows in mid-nineteenth century Palestine: the physiocratic model applied’, in David Kushner ed., Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political, Social and Economic Transformation (Jerusalem, 1986), 220–1.

24 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 157–8.

25 Maḥmūd Yazbak, Madīnal al-burtuqāl Yāfā: ḥaḍārah wa-mujamaʿ 1700–1840 (Beirut, 2018), 204–26, 262–81.

26 Kenneth M. Cuno, ‘Was the land of Ottoman Syria miri or milk? An examination of juridical differences within the Hanafi School’, Studia Islamica 81 (1995), 121-52.

27 I.e. Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 158.

28 See broadly: Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law administration and production in Ottoman Syria (London, 2007), 107–236. Susynne McElrone, ‘From the pages of the defter: a social history of rural property tenure and the implementation of tanzimat land reform in Hebron, Palestine, 1858–1900’ (doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2016).

29 Ron Shaham, ‘Christian and Jewish waqf in Palestine during the late Ottoman period’, Bulletin of the School of Asian and African Studies 54 (1991), 466-7.

30 Ibid., 460–72. Yitzhak Reiter, Islamic Institutions in Jerusalem: Palestinian Muslim Organization under Jordanian and Israeli Rule (The Hague, 1997). Salim Tamari, ‘Waqf endowments in the old city of Jerusalem: changing status and archival sources’, in Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire eds., Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840–1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City (Leiden, 2018), 490–509.

31 On ownership and investment on mushāʿ see Amos Nadan, ‘Colonial misunderstanding of an efficient peasant institution: land settlement and Mushāʿ tenure in Mandate Palestine, 1921–47’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 46, 3 (2003), 320–54.

32 Roderic H. Davison, ‘Tanẓīmāt’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (consulted online on 9 September 2019).

33 Amnon Cohen, ‘Mīrī’.’

34 Michael Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan (Leiden, 2000), 35.

35 Susynne McElrone, ‘From the pages of the defter: a social history of rural property tenure and the implementation of tanzimat land reform in Hebron, Palestine, 1858–1900’ (doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2016). Attila Aytekin, ‘Agrarian relations, property and law: an analysis of the land code of 1858 in the Ottoman Empire’, Middle Eastern Studies 45, 6 (2009), 935–95. See also Martha Mundy, ‘Qada’ ‘Ajlun in the late nineteenth century: interpreting a region from the ottoman land registry’, Levant 28 (1986), 84–7.

36 R.C. Tute, President of the Land Court in Jerusalem, The Ottoman Land Laws: With a Commentary on the Ottoman Land Code of 7th Ramadan 1274 (Jerusalem, 1927), 61–5. Warwick P. N. Tyler, State Lands and Rural Development in Mandatory Palestine, 1920–1948 (Brighton, 2001), 7. Stein, The Land Question, 10–3.

37 Discussed below.

38 Roderic H. Davison, ‘Tanẓīmāt’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (consulted online on 9 September 2019).

39 Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948 (New York, 1991), 15. Martin Bunton, Colonial Land Policies in Palestine 1917–1936 (Oxford, 2007), 33. Note that Bunton correctly observes that there is little evidence to support these arguments of deep fear causing such manipulations.

40 Haim Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (London, 1987), 72–3. Martin Bunton, Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 33. See previous note in regard to lack of supporting evidence.

41 Susynne McElrone, ‘From the pages of the defter: a social history of rural property tenure and the implementation of tanzimat land reform in Hebron, Palestine, 1858–1900’ (doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2016), 119, 133–5, 161.

42 Mahmoud Rajeh Mohammed Abu Al-Wafa, milkiya al-ʾarāḍī fī qaḍāʾ ǧinīn, 1858–1918 (An-Najah National University: MA Thesis on Land Ownership in Jenin, 2013), 191–2.

43 Michael Provence, ‘Ottoman and French Mandate Land Registers for the region of damascus’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 39, 1 (2005), 32–45. Mundy and Smith, Governing Property.

44 Vanessa Gueno, ‘La bureaucratie ottomane locale et ses usagers Exemples de conflits ruraux dans le qaḍāʾ Homs en Syrie Moyenne à la fin du xixe siècle’, in Vanessa Guéno and Stefan Knost eds., Lire et écrire l'histoire ottoman (Beirut, 2015), 147–71.

45 Michael Provence, ‘Ottoman and French Mandate Land Registers’.

46 Shua Kisilevitz et al., ‘The Arab village of Qālūnyā: an archaeological, historical and social synthesis’, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, 9, 1–2 (2021), 64–84.

47 Rajā Sumrīn, Qaryatī qālūnyā: al-arḍ wal-judhūr (Amman, 1993). For discussion of the uniqueness of that book, see Rochelle A. Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford, CA, 2010), 88–9.

48 Rajā Sumrīn, Qaryatī qālūnyā: al-arḍ wal-judhūr (Amman, 1993), 68; and interview with Rajā Sumrīn, uploaded by ‘Palestine Remembered.com’ in 2011 (especially two hours and 50 minutes from the beginning. See also after one hour and 48 minutes). Accessed online on 25 September 2019 at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmKIhdjJRxE

49 No exact date is mentioned. However, since the accusation was about not joining the military of Ibrahim Pasha on request 50 years earlier, and knowing that Ibrahim Pasha rebelled against the Ottomans and controlled the country between 1831 and 1841, 50 years later means between 1881 and 1891.

50 Yahushua Yellin, Memories of a Jerusalemite, 5594–5668 [1834–1918 AD] (Jerusalem, in Hebrew, 1924), 172–4.

51 See broadly Stein, The Land Question. Note that the British conquered the country during 1917/1918 and the official Mandate from the League of Nations was granted only a few years later. Still, in due course, the phrase ‘Mandate Palestine’ was used in the literature as a synonym for ‘British Palestine’ which rarely appears.

52 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, 12–6, 286–8.

53 See broadly: Stein, The Land Question. Dov Gavish, Qarqa vemapa. Erik Eliav Freas, ‘Ottoman reform, Islam and Palestine's peasantry’, Arab Studies Journal 18 (2010), 196–231. Ruth Kark, ‘Consequences of the Ottoman land law’, 101–20.

54 Gad G. Gilbar, Kalkalat hamizraḥ hatikhon ba'et haḥadasha (Tel Aviv, 1990), 195–6. See also The Jewish Agency for Palestine, ‘The Palestinian Arabs under the British mandate’, Palestine Papers 4 (1930).

55 Deborah S. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (New York, 2000), 1–80, especially 44.

56 Zvi Sussman, ‘The determination of wages for unskilled labour in the Advanced Sector of the Dual Economy of Mandatory Palestine’, Economic Development and Cultural Change 22, 1 (1993), 99.

57 Yuval Elizur, Loḥama kalkalit: me'ah shnot ‘imut kalkali byn yehudim le'aravim (Jerusalem, 1997), 80–3.

58 Sussman, ‘The determination of wages’, 95–113.

59 NA (The National Archives, UK)/CO/733/290/8, February 1933, Secret, Cabinet, ‘Policy in Palestine: Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies’, 1.

60 Stein, The Land Question, 52–60.

61 Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine, 237–45.

62 The Jewish Agency for Palestine, Land Settlement, Urban Development and Immigration: Memorandum Submitted to Sir John Hope Simpson, C.I.E., Special Commissioner of His Majesty's Government, July 1930 (London, 1930), 33–5.

63 Charles S. Kamen, Little Common Ground: Arab Agriculture and Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1920–1948 (Pittsburgh, 1991), 173–93.

64 Martin Bunton, ‘Inventing the status quo: ottoman land-law during the Palestine Mandate, 1917–1936’, International History Review 21 (1999), 56.

65 Geremy Forman and Alexander Kedar, ‘Colonialism, colonization, and land law in Mandate Palestine: the Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat Qisarya land disputes in historical perspective’, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 4, 2 (2003), 491–539.

66 Amos Nadan, ‘Revisiting the Anti-mushāʿ reforms in the Levant: origins, scale and outcomes’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2018), 595–611.

67 Tute, The Ottoman Land Laws, 17.

68 Ibid., 18.

69 The same two methods of registering repartitioned mushāʿ are mentioned for the Hebron area under the Ottomans in McElrone, From the Pages of the Defter. See also Mahmoud Rajeh Mohammed Abu Al-Wafa, ‘Milkiya al-ʾarāḍī fī qaḍāʾ ǧinīn, 1858–1918’ (An-Najah National University: MA thesis on Land Ownership in Jenin, 2013), 191–2.

70 Martin Bunton, ‘Inventing the Status Quo’, 38–9.

71 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists (Johnson–Crosbie), 44–5, 55.

72 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, 277–90. See more: Amos Nadan, ‘Reconsidering peasant communes in the levant, c. 1850s–1940s’, Economic History Review 74, 1 (2021), 34–59.

73 Shukrī ’Arrāf, al-Qarya al-’Arabīya al-Filasṭīnīya (Ma’liyā, 1996), 78.

74 Stein, The Land Question, 71.

75 Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production (Cambridge, 1987). Fatma Müge Göçek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford, 1996), 87–116.

76 Gad G. Gilbar, ‘The muslim big merchant-entrepreneurs of the Middle East, 1860–1914’, Die Welt des Islams 43, 1 (2003), 1–36.

77 This statement is explored below. For theoretical remarks on interlinked transactions, see Frank Ellis, Peasant Economics: Farm Households and Agrarian Development, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1993), 156–60. Debraj Ray, Development Economics (Princeton, 1998), 561–72.

78 Amos Nadan, ‘The competitive advantage of moneylenders over banks in rural Palestine’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48, 1 (2005), 1–39.

79 John Derek Latham, ‘Salam’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (consulted online on 23 September 2019).

80 Government of Palestine, Report by Mr. C. F. Strickland of the Indian Civil Service on the Possibility of Introducing a System of Agricultural Co-operation in Palestine (Jerusalem, 1930), 10.

81 Government of Palestine, The Banking Situation in Palestine with a Commentary on the Co-operative Society Movement, by F. G. Horwill (Jerusalem, 1936), 80.

82 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 86. Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, 175–7.

83 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 86–7.

84 Charles Thomas Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holy Land (London, 1906), 73–5. Elihu Grant, The People of Palestine (Philadelphia, 1921, reprinted 1976), 90–1, 145–6. Also: Interview with Nimir Qasim Muṣtafa from ʿEin Mahil (18 August 1999). Mr. Muṣtafa (b. 1910) spoke about his childhood in the Ottoman period and his life under the Mandate. In the latter period he was a fallāḥ and shopkeeper; from 1937 he was also the mukhtār of his village.

85 Interview with Sālim Muḥammad Abū Aḥmad (known as Abū ‘Afif ‘al-hishis’) from Nazareth. Abū ‘Afif (b. 1923) is the son of a family of owner-cultivators and landlords from Tel ‘Adas. During the Mandate period the family moved to Nazareth, where they continued to lease lands and also established a mercantile business, lending money to peasants (21 August 2000). Interview with Muḥammad Aḥmad Abū Aḥmad (a.k.a. Abū Riyāḍ) from Nazareth. Abū Riyāḍ (b. 1918) was a butcher and merchant of animals and meat during the Mandate period. Interview with Muḥammad Ḥassūna from Abu Ghosh. Al-ḥajj Ḥassūna (b. 1929) was a peasant who was also employed as wage labourer in Jerusalem during the Mandate period (31 July 1999). Interview with Aḥmad Husayyn Gadir (Abū Ṣalāḥ). Al-ḥajj Abū Ṣalāḥ (b. 1924) is Bedouin in origin, from the Gadir tribe. During the Mandate he was a semi-nomadic agriculturist and was also employed in the Palestine Police. The interview was held in his tent next to Bīr Maksūr (18 August 1999).

86 Barclays Archives (hereafter Barclays)/0080-4411. A file with minutes by the Local Board of the Anglo Egyptian Bank from June-December 1927.

87 Barclays/0080-0159 and Barclays/0080/0158. The files of the Local Board of the Anglo-Egyptian Bank with monthly balances for Egypt, Sudan and Palestine, for several years between 1925 and 1935, with separate figures on cotton advances in Egypt and oranges in Palestine.

88 Barclays/0080-4411. A file with minutes by the Local Board of the Anglo-Egyptian Bank from June to December 1927.

89 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 95–181.

90 Interview with Yūsuf and Fārūq Yaʿqūb from Nazareth, the grandsons of ʿAbdallāh Yūsuf Yaʿqūb, merchant and moneylender, 25 March 1999; they, esp. Fārūq Yaʿqūb, the older brother, had worked with their grandfather in his business.

91 Mashad's Register of Rights (1943). This was shown to me by Mr. Mohammed Mar’ī.

92 Interview with Abū ʿAbdallāh.

93 Interview with Yūsuf and Fārūq Yaʿqūb.

94 Great Britain, Colonial Office, Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development, by Sir John Hope Simpson (London, 1930), 68. Government of Palestine, The Banking Situation in Palestine with a Commentary on the Co-operative Society Movement, by F. G. Horwill (Jerusalem: Palestine Government Printer, 1936), 80.

95 Examples from interviews: Interview with Abū ʿAbdallāh, from Mashhad village, 6 April and 17 August 1999. Abū ʿAbdallāh (b. 1921) was the son of a mukhtār, who lived during the Mandate period and later became mukhtār of Mashhad. Interview with ʿAlī Abū Yūsif Zuʿabī from Daḥī (at the time of the interview he already lived in Nazareth). Mr. Zuʿabī (b. 1923) was a peasant in the Mandate period (26 March 1999). Interview with Nimir Qasim Mustafa.

96 Interview with Yūsuf and Fārūq Yaʿqūb.

97 Example from interview with Yūsuf and Fārūq Yaʿqūb. Interview with Sālim Muḥammad Abū Aḥmad.

98 Interview with Sālim Muḥammad Abū Aḥmad.

99 For example, NA/CO/733/290/8, February 1933, Secret Cabinet, ‘Policy in Palestine: Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies’, 1. Interview with Yūsuf and Fārūq Yaʿqūb.

100 Interview with Yūsuf and Fārūq Yaʿqūb.

101 Ya’akov Firestone, ‘Cash-Sharing Economics in Mandatory Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1975, 3-23 and No. 2. 175-94. Ya'akov Firestone, ‘Production and trade in an Islamic context: sharika contracts in the transitional economy of Northern Samaria, 1853–1943’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975), 185–209. E.g. from interviews: Interview with Ya'aqūb Nāṣir Wāḳim from Ramah. Mr. Waqīm (b. 1908), a son of a peasant family, worked as an agriculturist in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods (6 April 1999). Also: HaHagana Archives, Israel/105/178, ‘‘Ain Mahel: Intelligence Report’.

102 E.g. interview with Al-’Othmān Sālim Maṣrāwa. Mr. Maṣrāwa (b. 1918) worked as a peasant on his family farm until his village, Safūriyya (north), was destroyed in the 1948 War (30 August 1998).

103 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 136–7.

104 Ibid., 151, 292.

105 Ibid., 89, 292.

106 Ibid., 151.

107 Credit risk and creditworthiness of borrowers are intertwined with other factors. Still, the above aspects seem to be the most relevant to the present discussion. For more about risk factors, see, for example, Fight, Andrew, Credit Risk Management (Oxford, 2004), 70–83Google Scholar.

108 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 137.

109 Interview with Muḥammad Maṣrāwah (known as Bayrūtī) from Reina. Al-ḥajj Maṣrāwah (b. 1929) was a peasant in Safuriyya during the Mandate Period (19 August 1999).

110 Stein, The Land Question.

111 The name has been withheld by the author.

112 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists (Johnson–Crosbie), 21.