Summary
The process, traced in Chapter 4 of Rediscovering Palestine, by which land in Jabal Nablus that was technically state (miri) land, held by peasants in usufruct, was in practice mortgaged, sold and converted into full private property (milk) — a traffic driven by moneylending and debt defaults and already well advanced decades before the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219, lines 3220-3279).
Details
- Most agricultural land beyond settlements’ perimeters technically belonged to the state: peasants held usufruct rights so long as they did not let the land lie fallow for more than three years, passed the right down by inheritance, and paid taxes such as ushr (tithe, also called miri); a minority school of Muslim jurists, represented by Khayr al-Din Ramli (1585-1671) and Ibn Abidin (1784-1836), argued away most legal obstacles to private ownership of such lands (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
- Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century court cases show peasants disposing of nominally state lands as if they were private property by mortgaging, renting or selling their usufruct rights; a mid-January 1724 Askar case shows an urban moneylender controlling two pieces of timar land for seven years after a peasant defaulted on a debt of 25 piasters and a basket of rice worth 0.25 piaster (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
- State lands had actually been converted into full private property in Jabal Nablus since at least the late 1830s, in two waves of registered purchases initiated by the Abd al-Hadi family in 1836-1840; on May 27, 1838 dozens gathered in the Nablus court to witness the sale of several large properties to Muhammad Abd al-Hadi for 29,500 piasters (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- Merchants became heavily involved only from the 1850s; many of their later purchases were former state lands in the “dry belt,” and many were appropriated directly as a result of defaults on olive-oil Salam contracts, with the whole urban legal apparatus — court judge, mufti, Advisory Council, governor and subdistrict tax collectors — mobilized to enforce debts (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- On August 1, 1852 the Jaffa merchant Khawaja Khalil Mitri bought state lands in Kafr Bayta as fully private property from two brothers indebted to him and to a Nabulsi merchant, deducting 4,420 piasters they owed him and 1,420 piasters owed to the Nabulsi from the 10,000-piaster price; the purchase, six years before the 1858 land code, was not registered in the Nablus court (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- An 1855 decree relayed to Nablus warned that property transactions not registered in the Islamic court would be null and void and the parties punished; the warning was not heeded, and Doumani argues the 1858 land law was not an initiator of new land-tenure relations but a recognition of the need to contain and streamline already ongoing processes (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Ottoman Land Code of 1858, Salam, Rural middle class, Jabal Nablus, Mawat