Summary
Doumani’s term — “for want of a better term” — for the well-to-do villagers of Jabal Nablus whose land and capital resources set them apart from both the majority of peasants and the ruling rural families, and who played the mediating and defining role in the circulation of merchant capital, the commoditization of land and the erosion of the subdistrict chiefs in Chapter 4 of Rediscovering Palestine (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).
Details
- Differentiation was not a modern phenomenon, but the changing political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grew and consolidated this group: its members concentrated landholdings, purchased the labor of other peasants and/or leased lands in sharecropping, engaged in rural moneylending and trade, acted as intermediaries for urban merchants, and eventually established residence in Nablus in significant numbers (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).
- The Rummani family of Bayta is the chapter’s opening example: at least six of its men operated a wide network of Salam contracts for olive oil and sesame, sold to urban soap-factory owners and grain merchants, and also made non-interest-bearing loans (qard) (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).
- Members of this class reproduced urban merchants’ business practices and institutions at village level — including Salam moneylending and silent partnership companies (sharikat mudaraba) — and appropriated orthodox, urban Islam and Islamic law to construct and protect their networks, expanding their social space at the expense of both poorer peasants and the ruling clans (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279, lines 3280-3339).
- Their partnerships cut across geographical, kinship and religious boundaries; a company of May 19, 1849 divided profits among a capital-owning religious leader of Kafr al-Labad and partners from Burqa, one of them a Christian, who invested 4,000 piasters in oil, wheat and barley through salam contracts (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- The class’s coming of age was one of the factors behind the second wave of peasant litigation in the Nablus Islamic Court from the late 1850s, as its members turned to the city’s legal apparatus to assert their growing power and protect the properties they were accumulating (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
- A rich Jaba villager’s 1864 lawsuit shows the reversal of historic roles the class made possible: he had enrolled his own subdistrict chief, Shaykh Ibrahim Jarrar, as his agent in a 5,000-piaster mudaraba partnership and sued him in the Nablus court for the principal plus half the profits (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3280-3339).
- In the chapter’s Conclusion, members of this class “were heavily involved in moneylending, in the purchase and concentration of landholdings, and in the formation of business partnerships for speculation and trade in agricultural products,” and the power of the subdistrict chiefs was being eroded by its expansion long before the chiefs’ military defeat by the Egyptian forces and marginalization by Ottoman reforms (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3340-3372).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Salam, Rummani family, Jabal Nablus, Commoditization of land