Beshara Doumani

Summary

Author of Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (University of California Press, 1995), a social history of Ottoman Palestine built chiefly on the Nablus Islamic Court records, the Nablus Advisory Council records and private family papers (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1-36, lines 190-206).

Doumani states the book’s aim as writing the inhabitants of Palestine into history from the documents they generated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and contributing to a rethinking of Ottoman history by foregrounding provincial life in the Ottoman interior, especially merchants and peasants shaping urban-rural relations (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 66-79).
His formative research was in 1986-1988, with further archival work in 1991 and much of the writing in 1993 while on leave from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 66-79).
He is also the author of “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21:2 (Winter 1992), cited throughout the Introduction’s notes, and of “The Political Economy of Population Counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, circa 1850,” IJMES 26 (1994), pp. 1-17 (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 199-380, lines 677-843).
His Georgetown Ph.D. dissertation is “Merchants, the State, and Socioeconomic Change in Ottoman Palestine: The Nablus region, 1800-1860” (1990) (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 199-380).

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