Politics of notables

Summary

Albert Hourani’s 1968 framework, in “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” explaining how native elites mediated between local inhabitants and the central Ottoman government; Doumani treats it as insightful but incomplete for Jabal Nablus (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 148-171).

Doumani: the framework does not yet situate the political role of notables within the material, social and cultural contexts in which they operated, and does not allow agency for those outside public office, particularly merchants and peasants (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 148-171).
Interior merchants occupied a crucial mediating position — through village-level knowledge, credit advances, organization of production for export, management of markets and trade routes, and domination of retail and small-scale manufacturing — that Doumani presents as the underlying basis, or economic and cultural counterpart, to the politics of notables (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 148-171).
Chapter 2 works the supplement out in practice: merchants without political office reproduced the networks that moved goods, credit and services through personal ties, gift giving and religiously coded reputation, and by the later nineteenth century those networks incubated a different breed of urban notable under the Egyptian invasion and the Ottoman reforms (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1173-1230, lines 1492-1556).

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