Summary
The advance-purchase moneylending system through which, in Doumani’s account, merchants of Jabal Nablus secured agricultural commodities — above all olive oil — for the purposes of manufacturing and investment, detailed in Chapter 4 of Rediscovering Palestine (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 207-233, lines 3028-3099).
Details
- Private family papers provide the look at how salam was used to secure agricultural commodities (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 207-233).
- Chapter 4 of the book also discusses moneylending’s impact on the commoditization of land, the urbanization of the rural sphere and the rise of a middle peasantry (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 207-233).
- The principle: an immediate advance of money for the future delivery of movable collateral, usually foodstuffs, at a reduced price fixed at the time of agreement, the agreed amount to be delivered in kind regardless of the market price at harvest; the advance could contain a substantial (illegal) hidden rate of interest tied to the waiting period’s length — in an early January 1828 contract, Ahmad Agha Nimr advanced 10.25 piasters for every jar of oil to be delivered ten months later, even though each jar’s open-market price averaged 23 piasters (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).
- The Hanafi school’s rules require the capital be advanced when the contract is drafted and that the commodity’s type, quantity and quality be specified, along with the date and place of delivery and whether the commodity was grown on irrigated or rain-fed land; contracts were drafted in a majlis al-aqd (contract assembly), anywhere two people sat down together, and are found in no central Ottoman archives and in no Islamic court or Advisory Council records, though lawsuits in both refer to them — the evidence is the Nimr family’s private papers, supplemented by lawsuits, inheritance estates and peasant petitions (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).
- Peasants could not legally challenge contracts that technically fulfilled Islamic law’s conditions: only one of the dozens of salam disputes registered in the Nablus Islamic Court between 1850-1870 mentioned usury, and in that case (Awarta, January 20, 1862) the defendant could not prove the charge and lost when the plaintiff swore no usury was involved (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).
- Salam use diversified in the nineteenth century: the Nimr family’s traditional production contracts for its Yusufiyya soap factory; a simple retail grain merchant’s network of dependency among eighteen Salim peasant families by 1861; contracts by poor artisans and small retailers for minuscule amounts; speculation and investment in production for overseas markets; and collective contracts by entire villages to pay their taxes (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).
- The Jaffa merchant Khawaja Khalil Mitri’s May 1851 sesame salam with Abd al-Rahman al-Khalil of Aqraba — 2,997 piasters for 81 kayla, transport paid by the merchant and one-third of the profit promised to the peasant — shows salam under conditions where an outside merchant had to offer incentives; Nabulsi oil merchants’ contracts, by contrast, were “usually characterized by low prices, no profit sharing, and constant threat of enforcement by government officials and subdistrict chiefs” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3100-3159).
- Whole villages contracted collectively for taxes because the rigorously enforced tax season was timed to the grain harvest, months before olives matured: Jaba’s two contracts with a single unnamed oil merchant gave 953 jars at 36.7 piasters per jar for the 1266 (1849-1850) dues and then 1,330 jars at approximately 23 piasters per jar for the 1267 (1850-1851) taxes, a hidden interest calculated into the falling price (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3100-3159).
- Defaults on olive-oil salam contracts became a direct route to the Commoditization of land: in the Aqraba case of early April 1864 a debtor who had spent four months in prison asked the court to let him sell part of his lands to two Hashim soap merchants to pay 3,333 piasters and 30 jars of oil (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- Peasant petitions precipitated by salam enforcement — Jaba (fall 1851) and Asira al-Shamiyya (early February 1852) — were addressed directly to the governor of Jerusalem, bypassing the Nablus Advisory Council, and argued in the Tanzimat’s own terms of equality before the law and the state’s duty to protect tax-paying citizens (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3100-3159, lines 3280-3339, lines 3340-3372).
- Chapter 4’s Conclusion records a qualitative nineteenth-century change in salam’s “pervasiveness, uses, and social bases”: the contracts secured olive oil in advance for the rapidly expanding soap industry, served coastal and Nabulsi merchants organizing commercial production for overseas trade, and, combined with taxation, accelerated the expansion of merchant capital and a market economy into the countryside’s farthest reaches (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, Jabal Nablus, Rural middle class, Commoditization of land, Khawaja Khalil Mitri, Rummani family