Summary
The Ottoman program of reforms unveiled in 1839, with a second wave in 1856 including the 1858 land code, aimed at modernizing the armed forces, centralizing political power and increasing revenues from agricultural production, trade and manufacturing (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 621-676).
Details
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The program required more knowledge about and greater control of the empire’s subjects: population counts, conscription, direct collection of taxes and political institutions facilitating direct central control, including the regulated and expanded Advisory Councils (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 621-676).
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Doumani’s periodization criticism: most books on the modern history of Palestine begin in 1882, and the rest almost always with the Egyptian invasion of 1831, said to have initiated a modernization haltingly continued by the Tanzimat in 1839 and 1856 and sealed by European Jewish settlers in 1882 — a scheme whose corollary is that indigenous inhabitants played little or no role in shaping their history (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 172-189).
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In Jabal Nablus the reforms were filtered and reshaped by a local ruling elite, a religious leadership and a merchant community composed entirely of native sons, as the Nablus Advisory Council’s 1849-1850 fight over its own composition shows (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 621-676).
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Chapter 4 shows peasants taking up the reforms’ ideology against the local elite: the Jaba and Asira al-Shamiyya petitions bypassed the Nablus Advisory Council for the governor of Jerusalem and echoed the Tanzimat’s main thrust, equality before the law, representing their rulers as public servants with a limited mandate and themselves as tax-paying citizens entitled to the state’s protection (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3340-3372).
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Doumani’s general conclusion from the petitions and the land regime: Ottoman reforms and policies of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century “were just as much responses to as initiators of changes in the political economy of the regions under their control” (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, Nablus Advisory Council, Muhammad Ali Pasha, Jabal Nablus