Jabal Nablus

Summary

The city of Nablus and its hinterland as a single, discrete social space: in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries Palestine’s principal trade and manufacturing centre and its leading economic centre, encompassing close to 300 villages by the mid-nineteenth century, whose deeply rooted city-village economic networks were the material foundations of its autonomy under Ottoman rule (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 138-147, lines 410-495).

Details

• There was no Ottoman administrative unit called Palestine; in the book “Nablus” names the city alone and “Jabal Nablus” the city and its hinterland combined (Introduction, notes 1-2) (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 199-380).

• Its three zones are the eastern slopes, the central highlands and the western slopes; the western slopes hold the most fertile lands, including Marj Ibn Amir, the most fertile plain in Palestine, and the central highlands held the largest number of villages and the steadiest population density in Palestine (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 459-495).

• Jabal Nablus was often called jabal al-nar (mountain of fire) and played a leading role in the 1834 revolt against Egyptian forces, the 1936-1939 rebellion against British rule and the intifada that exploded in 1987 (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 410-445).

• It contributed more than any other Palestinian region to financing the Damascus pilgrimage caravans during the first half of the eighteenth century, and much of the money filtered back to its merchants and artisans as payments for provisions, escorts and transport (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 410-445).

• Its administrative arrangement of 1723 — seven subdistricts besides the city — remained essentially unchanged until the end of Ottoman rule in 1917; in 1850 it formally consisted of the sanjaqs of Nablus and Jenin plus nine subdistricts totalling 213 villages (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 496-526, lines 577-620).

• In 1867 al-Balqa, with Salt as its central town, was appended to Jabal Nablus, which was officially the mutasarrifiyya of Jabal Nablus and al-Balqa until al-Balqa was detached in 1888 (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 577-620).

• Its boundaries, per Chapter 1’s notes: Marj Ibn Amir to the north, the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan west and east, and no natural boundary to Jabal al-Quds, the line drawn through the lands of Kafr Malik, Sinjil, Dayr Ghassana and Rantis (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 844-1172).

• In Chapter 2 the region appears as a single social formation woven together by merchant networks: Nablus’s textile merchants carved the countryside into geographic spheres of influence — the largest concentration of the Arafat family’s customer villages lay in Mashariq al-Jarrar — and peasants used their merchant as a “key to the city” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1366-1491, lines 1492-1556).

• The mother villages spawning daughter settlements are listed in Chapter 1’s notes: Tubas, Bayta, Dayr al-Ghusun, Ya’bad, Qabatya, Aqraba, Kafr Qaddum, Dayr Istya, Kafr Thuluth, Attil and Umm al-Fahm (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 844-1172).

• By the 1830s, if not earlier, Jabal Nablus had become the largest producer of cotton not only in Palestine but in Greater Syria as a whole: Table 4 gives Nablus 4,500-5,000 qintars in 1837 against 500-600 for Aleppo (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2167-2330).

• In 1837 a full three-quarters of the entire harvest of Jabal Nablus was exported to the port of Marseilles, France (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2167-2330).

• Integration was uneven: cotton was only grown in the coastal areas and the plains, whose villages were more involved in trade with Europe than the primarily olive-producing villages of the central highlands and the eastern subdistricts (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2390-2529).

• Olive oil was Jabal Nablus’s number one agricultural product and cash crop, and there was not a single village in the region in which it was not one of the top three commodities produced; Chapter 4 shifts focus to the central highlands’ olive villages, whose assimilation into the world economy proceeded more slowly than the western slopes’ grain and cotton villages (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099, lines 3340-3372).

• By the mid-nineteenth century a merchant-dominated elite — a fluid alliance of influential merchants, key ruling families and top religious leaders — had emerged, its elements united against the peasants because almost all were heavily engaged in moneylending and soap manufacture (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3028-3099).

• Peasant use of the Nablus Islamic Court came in two waves — a small wave in the late 1830s after the Egyptian occupation, dominated by land disputes, and a flood from the late 1850s, dominated by moneylending (especially Salam) lawsuits, with peasants increasingly suing peasants and peasant women bringing inheritance cases against male relatives (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).

Related pages

Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Nablus, Jenin, Acre, Arafat family, Khan al-Tujjar, Kiswa, Timar, Politics of monopoly