Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900

Summary

Beshara Doumani writes the inhabitants of Ottoman Palestine into history through the documents they themselves generated, using Nablus and its hinterland — Jabal Nablus — to rethink both Ottoman history from below and the modern history of Palestine. In the parts read so far (Preface, Introduction, Chapters 1-3 in full with their notes, and the main text of Chapter 4), he argues that features usually credited to outside intervention after 1831 or 1882 — commercial agriculture, a rural money economy, peasant differentiation, commoditization of land and ties to the world market — were already present in Jabal Nablus, that interior merchants were the linchpins connecting peasants, artisans and ruling families and mediating access to the rural surplus for both the Ottoman state and European businessmen, and that Jabal Nablus’s layered autonomy under Ottoman rule was undermined less by external conquest than by the commercialization its own success produced (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 138-198, lines 671-676).

What the file is

• The file is the UC Press E-Books Collection Archive version of Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), © 1995 The Regents of the University of California, with the preferred citation giving http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft896nb5pc (lines 1-36).
• Access basis: publisher-free, from the UC Press e-books site given in url.
• The text copy (5900 lines) has no page markers; locators are line numbers. The original is the publisher’s HTML e-book.
• Structure of the whole book, from the table of contents (lines 36-64): Preface; Abbreviations; Note on Translation and Transliteration; Maps; Introduction; 1. The Meanings of Autonomy; 2. Family, Culture, and Trade; 3. Cotton, Textiles, and the Politics of Trade; 4. The Political Economy of Olive Oil; 5. Soap, Class, and State; 6. Conclusion; Appendices; Plates; Glossary; Select Bibliography.
• Transliteration follows the International Journal of Middle East Studies system, with diacritics omitted except ayn and hamza in the middle of a word or name (lines 126-129).

Section by section

Preface (lines 66-79)

The book attempts to write the inhabitants of Palestine into history from the documents they generated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to contribute to a rethinking of Ottoman history by foregrounding provincial life in the Ottoman interior, especially the role of merchants and peasants in shaping urban-rural relations. The historiography of Palestine is dominated by nationalist discourses on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli divide, built on a premise of sharp discontinuity caused by outside intervention; the book calls for a rediscovery of Ottoman Palestine through long-term processes and the agency of its inhabitants. Research in 1986-1988 and 1991 and writing in 1993 are recorded, with acknowledgments centred on the employees of the Nablus Islamic Court, the network that gave access to private family papers — including Husam al-Sharif’s arrangement to photocopy Ihsan Nimr’s collection and Lubna Abd al-Hadi’s showing the records of the Nablus Advisory Council (majlis al-shura) — and on Judith Tucker, Hanna Batatu and Hisham Sharabi.

Abbreviations; Note on Translation and Transliteration; Maps (lines 80-137)

The abbreviations fix the book’s local-source base: NICR (Nablus Islamic Court Records), JICR (Jerusalem Islamic Court Records), NMSR (Nablus majlis al-shura Records) and NIMR (Ihsan Nimr, Tarikh Jabal Nablus wa al-Balqa, 4 vols., Nablus, 1936-1961), alongside journals including IJMES, JPS and MES. The translation note states the aim of an accessible, intimate portrait, avoiding Ottoman Studies jargon and preferring English terms. Three maps are listed: Southern Syria; Jabal Nablus, circa 1850; and Nablus Old City in the late nineteenth century.

Introduction (lines 138-366)

“Palestine and the Ottoman Interior” (lines 140-147): during the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries Nablus was Palestine’s principal trade and manufacturing centre, anchoring dozens of villages in the hill regions from the Galilee to Hebron. The study investigates how merchants built and reproduced local and regional networks, organized agricultural production for overseas trade, and gained access to political office and to land and soap factories; how they competed with foreign and regional merchants in the coastal cities; and their discourse with Ottoman officials seeking the state’s share of the rural surplus. For peasants, who left far fewer clues, it traces their role in urban-rural commercial networks, the coming of age of a middle peasantry, and peasant initiatives from petitions to violent confrontations as evidence of identity, attachment to the land and notions of justice and political authority. The two stated goals are a bottom-up view of Ottoman history and a rethinking of the modern history of Palestine by writing its inhabitants into the narrative.

“Toward a History of Provincial Life in the Ottoman Interior” (lines 148-171): Nablus and its hinterland formed the discrete region of Jabal Nablus, one of scores of similar interior regions that were at once the material core and the political periphery of the Ottoman world — their inhabitants’ opinions carried little weight in Istanbul, but their resources and productive capacity were crucial to the empire’s tax base and provisioning. Two dominant trends in Ottoman Studies (central archives with the state as unit of analysis; provincial capitals such as Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut) both show that survival depended on access to and control of the peasants’ agricultural surplus and the merchants’ trading activities in the interior; interior towns and hinterlands were not passive spectators in that struggle. The dominant modern narrative of piecemeal incorporation into the European orbit tends to relegate interior regions to a periphery’s periphery, and the decline thesis has been persuasively challenged since the early 1970s. Against Gabriel Baer’s claim that Arab agriculture did not change its traditional character throughout the nineteenth century and that cash crops were rare, Doumani argues Baer confused traditional methods with subsistence agriculture: with traditional means suited to the hills, Palestine — as Alexander Schölch showed from consular reports on trade through Jaffa, Acre and Haifa — produced large surpluses and exported wheat, barley, sesame, olive oil, soap and cotton in 1856-1882, with exports exceeding imports of European machine-made goods. The 1856-1882 leap presupposed an already commercialized agriculture, a monetized economy, an integrated peasantry and willing investors; institutions assumed to be products of externally imposed capitalist transformation existed before European hegemony. Ottoman administrators imposed no uniform policies until the 1860s; contradictory fiscal and administrative arrangements coexisted, and implementation channelled through local elites constantly reformulated them. Albert Hourani’s 1968 Politics of notables framework explains elite mediation but does not situate notables in their material, social and cultural contexts or allow agency to merchants and peasants. In Greater Syria local and regional commerce was as important in daily life as trade with Europe; interior merchants dominated the networks that were linchpins connecting producing peasants, processing artisans and ruling families, connected interior regions to each other, and alone made it possible for European businessmen and the Ottoman government to gain access to the surplus — through their village-level knowledge, credit advances to peasants, organization of production for export, management of regional markets and trade routes, and domination of retail and small-scale manufacturing. Interior merchants thus occupied the mediating position that is the economic and cultural counterpart to the politics of notables.

“Rethinking Ottoman Palestine” (lines 172-189): inquiry is skewed by Palestine’s religious significance and by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Western Holy Land image concentrated writing on the Biblical, Crusader and modern periods and ignored hundreds of years of Arab/Muslim rule; both nationalist camps, reaching opposite conclusions, share for the Ottoman period (1516-1917) the same assumptions — most Arab nationalists viewing it as oppressive Turkish rule stifling Arab development, many Zionist historians representing pre-immigration Ottoman Palestine as economically devastated, politically chaotic and sparsely populated — both rooted in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western literature bent on “discovering” the Holy Land from a supposedly stagnant empire, which portrayed inhabitants at best as Biblical icons and at worst as obstacles to modernization. As of writing, only two monographs in English deal specifically with Palestine in the eighteenth century and none covers the seventeenth. Periodization embodies the assumption that change is externally imposed: most books begin in 1882, the rest with the Egyptian invasion of 1831, then the Tanzimat of 1839 and 1856 and European Jewish settlement in 1882, with the corollary that indigenous inhabitants played little role. Attention went to beachhead cities — Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem — over the interior hills where the majority lived. Jabal Nablus, in the heart of Ottoman Palestine, was the most important interior city and Palestine’s primary centre for regional trade and local manufacture, and its homogeneous Sunni Muslim population’s dynamics approximated overall Palestinian trends more than the coastal cities’ or Jerusalem’s. Merchant families, cohesive and resilient across generations, generated more documents than any other social group, so specific families can be tracked over long periods. Beginning in the early eighteenth century bridges the artificially disconnected traditional and modern stages: the supposedly modern features were present before the Egyptian occupation (1831-1840), the Tanzimat or Jewish colonization, and so-called traditional forms survived well into the twentieth century. Fernand Braudel is quoted on the Turkish and Christian Mediterranean breathing with the same rhythms.

“Sources” (lines 190-206): the study draws most heavily on local sources. Central Ottoman archives and European consular reports and travel accounts portray inhabitants as objects to be ordered, taxed, conscripted, counted, ruled, observed and coopted; local sources show them as subjects who voluntarily appeared before the Islamic court judge, petitioned the Advisory Council and entered private contracts. For Jabal Nablus the combination is fortuitous: Nablus was neglected by Western officials and travellers (James Finn, British consul in Jerusalem, is quoted that no one from his land had remained even a few days in the district) and, as capital of a significantly autonomous hill region with no foreigners in military or bureaucratic posts, lay outside detailed Ottoman supervision until the mid-nineteenth century. The Nablus Islamic Court records are supplemented by the Advisory Council records of 1848-1853 — covering the political, administrative and fiscal areas outside the court’s scope — and by private family papers (business contracts, account-books, waqf endowments, personal correspondence, property disputes), both used here for the first time. The central government’s vantage point is present inside the local sources: private papers include original appointments, land grants and firmans, and the court, which also functioned as a public-records office, copied hundreds of letters from Istanbul and from commanders and governors of Damascus, Acre, Sidon and Jerusalem into its registers. Cautions follow (lines 199-206): court and council records are encoded with their institutions’ discourse; the Islamic court was above all the guardian of mostly urban property and served mostly the propertied urban middle class, with peasants greatly underrepresented before the 1860s; the records are used mostly as literary texts, valued for unintended information and for their assumptions and omissions, and are not quantified, since most disputes and inheritance cases never reached the court. Council letters were careful constructions by appointed mediators presenting superiors a carefully edited image of Jabal Nablus while creatively interpreting the centre’s demands locally. Published autobiographies and oral history are used only within narrow limits, mined for cultural and work practices and cross-checked, not treated as definitive records of pre-twentieth-century events.

“Approach and Methodology” (lines 207-233, in the Introduction’s notes sequence as printed in this text copy): the chapters are organized around the “social lives” of four commodities — textiles, cotton, olive oil and soap — meaning the social relations embedded in their production, exchange and consumption. The textile story (Chapter 2) is about culture and trade and city-hinterland relations, centred on a case study of the Arafat family of textile merchants. The cotton story (Chapter 3) explores politics and trade and Nabulsi merchants’ tensions with regional and international competitors in the Tanzimat era; Jabal Nablus was the largest producer of cotton in the Fertile Crescent by the early nineteenth century, and the chapter also examines European competition’s impact on Nablus’s textile industry. Olive oil and soap (Chapters 4-5) raise four questions: how merchants appropriated the olive-oil surplus, including through the Salam advance-purchase moneylending system and its effects on commoditization of land, urbanization of the rural sphere and a middle peasantry; how that appropriation was enforced, with peasant petitions showing a merchant-ruling family alliance by the mid-nineteenth century and peasant notions of identity, state justice and political authority; how olive oil’s transformation into soap was organized, through partnerships between factory owners and oil merchants, with a case study of the Yusufiyya soap factory and the Bishtawi family estates; and what the social basis of soap production was, including the changing composition of factory owners and council-government correspondence on soap taxes and tax-in-kind olive oil as a view of Ottoman reforms molded from below. Together the stories trace Jabal Nablus’s journey from semiautonomy to integration on four levels — local, regional, imperial and international. Grains, though key products, are excluded because the sources contained very little on the grain trade (Introduction note 33). The Introduction’s notes include the book’s working definition that there was no Ottoman administrative unit called Palestine and that the name is used for the Mandate-defined territories (note 1), and that “Nablus” names the city alone and “Jabal Nablus” the city and its hinterland (note 2).

1. The Meanings of Autonomy (lines 367-676; notes continue past line 843)

The chapter opens with two epigraphs on Nablus’s self-governing chiefs, restlessness and insurrection against the Pasha of Damascus, and on Nablus as the gateway of trade between north and south and between Jaffa, Beirut and the trans-Jordanic districts. Napoleon’s failed 1799 adventure in Palestine and the mobilization against the French besieging Acre frame the chapter through a poem by Shaykh Yusuf Jarrar, mutasallim of Jenin District, exhorting Jabal Nablus’s leaders to unite. The poem praises the Tuqan, Nimr, Rayyan, Qasim, Jayyusi, At’ut, Hajj Muhammad, Ghazi, Jaradat and Abd al-Hadi families in that order, casts the danger entirely as a threat to Islam and to women, stresses local identification (“Oh! you Nabulsis…advance together on Acre”), and never mentions Ottoman rule, the sultan or the empire — although all the leaders had been inundated with firmans announcing the invasion and calling for soldiers and money, whose origin the poem leaves as “from afar.” The poem exposes the chapter’s two tensions: the bureaucratic construction of Jabal Nablus from above versus self-rule developed from below, and the region’s cohesive social formation and shared identity versus the factionalism of multiple territorially based centres of power.

Palestine’s relationship to the central government was distant: except for token garrisons in Jerusalem and some coastal towns, there was no permanent military presence; Palestine had strategic value as a land bridge but no exceptional material importance, and tax collection was so troublesome that from the early eighteenth century the governor of Damascus or his deputy led the annual Dawra tax tour a few weeks before Ramadan — even then taxes were rarely paid fully or on time. Jabal Nablus had a reputation as the most difficult region in Palestine to control. Against the first firman of December 21, 1798 (which estimated 100,000 fighters in the mountains of Nablus and Jerusalem and their outlying parts), the leaders of Jabal al-Quds and Jabal al-Khalil personally pledged fighters before the Jerusalem court judge under pain of a large fine, while Jabal Nablus’s leaders treated the firmans as opening bids, petitioning their share down from 4,000 to 3,000, 2,000 and finally 1,000. A firman of mid-November 1800 accepted 110,000 piasters in place of the remaining 1,000 men — 40,000 by Shawwal 8 (February 22, 1801) and the rest by mid-Shawwal — but the money was never sent, at least not in full, despite threats of punishment for “insubordination,” “corruption” and “stupidity”; some leaders instead looted and burned three caravansaries on the Damascus-Cairo highway — Khan Jaljulya, Qalanswa and Ayn al-Asawir — where the mutasallim of Nablus had stored supplies for the returning Ottoman armies. Doumani stresses these acts were not a challenge to Ottoman rule: the leaders operated willingly within the Ottoman system, drew legitimacy from annually renewed appointments, took the French invasion seriously (Nabulsi fighters handed the French their first defeat in Palestine, and, according to Nimr, entered besieged Acre), and refused chiefly to hand fighters to Ottoman commanders or join the Egypt expedition. The burning was a calculated act in the internal struggle between the urban Tuqan family camp and the rural Jarrar clan camp, meant to embarrass and undermine the mutasallim Khalil Beik Tuqan; Shaykh Yusuf’s poem projected its author as first among equals, celebrated decentralization by praising many factions in ranked order, and advanced unity through cultural solidarity and local identification rather than political hegemony, especially not an urban family’s. Since the second half of the seventeenth century Jabal Nablus had been undergoing internal integration — the city’s creeping domination over its hinterland — driven by commercial agriculture’s increased importance as the primary source of wealth and mobility, and by two larger dynamics: flourishing trade networks emanating from Nablus under Ottoman rule, and, from the eighteenth century, incremental incorporation into the European economic orbit through commercial cotton production for export to France.

“Jabal Nablus as a Social Space” (lines 410-445): since its origins as a Canaanite settlement Nablus has been locked into a permanent embrace with its hinterland; the material foundations of autonomy were the deeply rooted economic networks between city and villages, and the cultural fountains of identity the dynamics of urban-rural relations, especially between merchants and peasants. Comparable social spaces — Jabal Lubnan, Jabal Amil, Jabal al-Druze, Jabal al-Khalil and Jabal al-Quds — explain the strong regional identifications still important in Greater Syria. Hebron was largely an extension of its hinterland; Jerusalem stood somewhat aloof because of external infusions attracted by its significance; Nablus lay between, with vital hinterland connections, a large manufacturing base and substantial regional trade networks, and a hinterland holding some of Palestine’s richest agricultural lands and its largest, most stable concentration of villages and people. Jabal Nablus — often called jabal al-nar (mountain of fire) — played a leading role in the 1834 revolt against Egyptian forces, the 1936-1939 rebellion and the intifada that exploded in 1987.

“The City of Nablus” (lines 410-445): the city, resembling in Shams al-Din al-Ansari’s words a “palace in a garden,” owed its large population and manufacturing to water: twenty-two springs channelled into fountains, mosque courtyards, gardens, tanneries and dye and pottery establishments and the rich’s homes, with aqueducts feeding irrigation canals and grain mills down the 1,220-meter-long valley. “Little Damascus” sums up the city: both were water-blessed “dry ports” of the interior, with strong manufacturing, commercial-hub roles and cultural life dominated by conservative, entrenched merchant communities and family politics. Unlike Damascus, Nablus’s population was homogeneous: except for a few hundred Christians and Samaritans, virtually all were Sunni Muslims. Christians, the largest minority, mostly artisans and merchants, were mostly Greek Orthodox, the rest becoming Protestants around the mid-nineteenth century through Reverend Bowen’s Church Missionary Society activities. Samaritans numbered 150 to 200 throughout the nineteenth century. Nablus was neither a metropole nor a provincial capital; its terrain preserved autonomy but made it unsuitable for international trade, while it was ideally situated for the intraregional and interregional trade that mattered more: Nabulsi merchants travelled regularly to Jaffa, Haifa, Acre and Gaza, to southern Lebanon, Nazareth, Safad, Jerusalem and Hebron, and to Salt, Jabal Ajlun and Hauran. Cairo and Damascus were the most important interregional destinations, mostly for bulk goods: roughly three-quarters of Nablus’s soap was shipped to Cairo overland through Gaza and the Sinai and by sea through Jaffa and Gaza, while rice, sugar, spices and linen, cotton and woolen textiles were imported from Egypt, and cotton, soap, olive oil and medium-grade textiles went to Damascus against silks, textiles, copper and some luxuries. From the early sixteenth century networks to Damascus and Cairo were supplemented by secure trading posts in the Hijaz and Gulf and in Anatolia and the Mediterranean islands, with steady relations also with Aleppo, Mosul and Baghdad. The annual pilgrimage caravan (qafilat al-hajj) from Damascus to Mecca and Medina was the key variable in Jabal Nablus’s fiscal and political relationship with the central government: for a brief period in the early seventeenth century the governor of Nablus, Farrukh Pasha Ibn Abdullah, was amir al-hajj and built the Wikala al-Farrukhiyya, one of the city’s prime commercial properties. Taxes on Jabal Nablus and most of Palestine were earmarked for the caravans’ costs — Jabal Nablus contributed more than any other Palestinian region in the first half of the eighteenth century — and much of the money filtered back as payments for locally produced provisions, armed escorts and transport, so part of the peasants’ taxes never left the city’s treasury but paid artisan guild leaders who produced provisions on commission: a routine transfer of rural surplus into the city’s manufacturing, trade and transportation sectors, purchased at market prices, as the leather water-pouch makers’ (qirabiyyin) united 1853 demand to raise each pouch’s price from 16 to 21 piasters shows. Autonomy combined with central weakness probably encouraged growth, since much surplus was reinvested locally; precisely during the period of so-called Ottoman decline, from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, Nablus emerged as Palestine’s key centre for regional trade, manufacturing and the local organization of commercial agriculture, and a leading participant in trade with Europe, especially cotton export. Ottoman population counts put the city at approximately 5,000-7,000 in the mid-sixteenth century and more than 20,000 in 1850, possibly Palestine’s largest city at the time, with growth steady rather than in dramatic waves. The city’s health depended on access to the rural surplus: it lay at the mercy of two mountains with no natural defences, its wall weaker protection than the leading families’ compounds, and armed peasants and fortified villages bore the brunt of fighting. Urban rhythms followed the agricultural calendar; there were no sharp city-country dividing lines. Peasants poured in through the eastern and western gates to sell and buy; the two east-west thoroughfares held the Khan al-Tujjar textile market and the Wikala al-Farrukhiyya, the five central mosques, the fortresslike compounds of the Nimr, Tuqan and Abd al-Hadi households, and the soap factories, baths, tanneries and workshops, across the six quarters of Yasmina, Gharb, Qaryun, Aqaba, Qaysariyya and Habala. Subdistrict chiefs’ kursi-village dwellings, built by Nablus master-builders, consciously imitated urban forms (after Suad Amiry).

“The Hinterland of Nablus” (lines 446-495): Palestine’s size, diverse terrain and rain-fed agriculture precluded large-scale farming and a monocrop economy; peasants, approximately 80 percent of the population, drew varied income from every topographical feature, and until the last decades of Ottoman rule most were small landholders concentrated in the hill regions, where horticulture, especially olive groves, was a way of life. Villages of a few dozen to a few hundred inhabitants held an average of two to four clans (Hamulas): patrilineal descent groups whose elders settled disputes under the unwritten customary law called ‘Urf, which differed significantly from the urban application of Islamic law (shari’a) and reflected the “tribalization” of peasant society. Peasant society thus had its own internal cultural and legal autonomy: before the mid-nineteenth century peasants rarely used the urban Islamic court, and a council letter of February 18, 1853 to the governor of Sidon cited urf traditions and “stupid customs” to explain why suspects from Jamma’in village could not be released despite lack of proof, because peasants were members of clans insisting on collective rights. Villages were knit into wider networks: large clans had branches in several villages, villages specialized in products such as watermelon, pottery or baskets, urban merchants carved geographical spheres of influence passed from father to son, the Qadriyya Sufi order had branches in larger villages, and villages clustered into subdistricts (nahiya), each with central kursi villages. In the mid-nineteenth century Jabal Nablus’s social space encompassed close to 300 villages, from Haifa and Jaffa in the west to Ajlun and Balqa beyond the Jordan in the east and from the Galilee to the Ramallah and al-Bireh hills. Its three zones are the eastern slopes (below-sea-level descents, earlier-maturing wheat and barley, stream-powered mills and irrigation in Wadi al-Badhan and Wadi al-Far’a, large merchant and leading-family investment from the 1820s, the smallest number of villages, a hybrid bedouin-peasant livestock existence illustrated by Tammun in Mashariq al-Jarrar, whose men moved around the Ghur grazing lands while women made cheese, clarified butter, woolen rugs, tents, ropes and cloth bags, and whose petition sought relief from clarified butter (samn) as taxes-in-kind); the western slopes (the most fertile lands, the Jenin-Tulkarem-Qalqilya triangle, the Marj Ibn Amir plain — the most fertile in Palestine, famous for grain, tobacco, watermelons and cotton, astride a main Damascus trade route and a battlefield from the pharaohs to World War I including Hitten in 1187, contested in the eighteenth century between Jabal Nablus’s rulers and Zahir al-Umar and concentrated in a few large landowners’ hands in the nineteenth — the Arraba plain with Arraba, Qabatya and Ya’bad, forests, charcoal and the most prized cheese from Ya’bad, and Arraba as home of the Abd al-Hadi family; coastal cotton cultivation, in which Jabal Nablus’s cotton was considered Greater Syria’s best and the region its largest producer, mostly exported to France, Egypt or Damascus, making the zone the first to experience peasant differentiation, commoditization of land and expanded moneylending); and the central highlands (the largest number of villages, the steadiest population density in Palestine, the backbone of Nablus’s autonomy, the oldest continuously inhabited settlements, “mother” villages spawning “daughter” khirba settlements that western travellers mistook for evidence of decline when many became permanent villages in the nineteenth century, terraced horticulture, and the olive tree’s centrality: Jabal Nablus has produced Palestine’s largest olive-oil harvests since ancient times, the oil serving as food, soap stock, lamp fuel and medicinal ointment, the crushed pits (jift) as fuel, and the oil itself as “liquid capital” deposited in underground oil wells from which holders could draw oil or money). Braudel is quoted on the Mediterranean trinity of wheat, olives and vines.

“Boundaries in Time and Space” and “The 1657 Campaign” (lines 496-526): four turning points are set out — the 1657 Ottoman campaign restoring central control and introducing a stable group of ruling families; the sieges of Nablus in 1771 and 1773 by Zahir al-Umar; the Egyptian occupation of 1831; and the destruction of Arraba in 1859 — whose cumulative effect reduced the hinterland’s autonomy relative to the city and Jabal Nablus’s and Palestine’s autonomy vis-à-vis the Ottoman state. After Marj Dabiq (August 23, 1516) the Ottomans kept the Mamluk arrangement: Palestine was divided into districts attached to Damascus province, the text saying “five districts” and then listing Safad, Nablus, Jerusalem (Quds al-Sharif), Gaza, Ajlun and Lajjun; Jabal Nablus had four subdistricts — Jabal Qubla, Jabal Shami, Qaqun and Bani Sa’b — reflecting long-standing divisions, with the Jayyusi clan, rulers of Bani Sa’b since the fifteenth century, reconfirmed and entrusted in the late sixteenth century with guarding the Damascus-Cairo highway between Qaqun and Ras al-Ayn fortresses. Rural chiefs’ power rested on violence or its threat, fortresslike kursi compounds, peasant militia, patronage networks, marriage into key clans and arbitration under urf. The Ottoman bureaucracy coopted local leaders: subdistrict divisions were flexible fiscal shells maximizing revenue at least political cost, each chief directly appointed by the governor of Damascus, the annual appointments largely ceremonial as the post of shaykh al-nahiya became hereditary. The 1657 expedition — mostly Arab local militia (yerliyya) from central Syria, its cavalry officers (sipahis) paid with timar or za’ama land grants deliberately dispersed and annually renewable — pacified Jabal Nablus but failed to prevent the officers establishing a local power base: the leaders settled in Nablus, passed grants to descendants, sold, rented and farmed out their rights, diversified into manufacture, trade and urban real estate (Nimr is quoted on their acquiring every kind of property), built fortresslike homes, and melted into the local population. The Nimr family, originally subdistrict chiefs in the hinterlands of Homs and Hama, received the lion’s share of the grants, gained the posts of mutasallim and mir alay, and intermarried and partnered with rich merchant and ulama families. The Jarrar clan moved from al-Balqa to Marj Ibn Amir in Lajjun district around 1670, basing economic power on what became Jenin district and political power on their peasant militia and the Sanur fortress, and were the only subdistrict chiefs until the 1820s to achieve the post of mutasallim, albeit briefly. The Tuqan family, originally from northern Syria, emerged as the Nimrs’ competitors around 1700, came closest to centralizing all Jabal Nablus and held the mutasallim post longest; Hajj Salih Pasha Tuqan (d. 1742) served in the pilgrimage caravan’s military contingent, was appointed mutasallim of Jerusalem in 1709 and later of Tarabzon, and returned in 1723 as governor of Gaza, Nablus and Lajjun districts; Tuqan-Nimr intermarriage was followed by a rift, exacerbated by interference from Damascus governors and Acre rulers, unmended until the 1820s. A 1723 tax report by the deputy mutasallim Umar Agha Nimr to Salih Pasha Tuqan’s representative shows the subdistricts had grown from four to seven — Bani Sa’b retaining its name under the Jayyusis; Jabal Qubla split into Jamma’in, Jorat Amra and Shaykh Mansur; Jabal Shami and Qaqun into Wadi al-Sha’ir, Sha’rawiyya and Jarrar — two of them named after their ruling clans, and the expansion absorbed much of Ajlun and Lajjun, districts created for strategic reasons (pilgrimage-caravan and Damascus-Cairo highway protection, for the Qansuh then Furaykh households and the Turabay household respectively) and combined in the mid-eighteenth century with Jenin as capital, Lajjun becoming Jenin district around 1800. The 1723 arrangement remained essentially unchanged until 1917, and the Nimr-Tuqan-Jarrar triumvirate kept a relatively strong grip until 1831 and usually united against outside conquest; the biggest challenge came from Acre.

“The Rise of Acre” (lines 527-576): officially Jabal Nablus remained attached to Damascus province from 1516 until 1849/1850, then to Sidon province, then to Beirut province in 1887/1888, but Damascus governors — rotated annually, militarily limited and busy with the pilgrimage caravans — held it tenuously, while Acre’s rulers, Zahir al-Umar (d. 1775), Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (d. 1804), Sulayman Pasha al-Adil (d. 1819) and Abdullah Pasha (d. shortly after Acre’s surrender and his exile to Egypt in 1831), wielded real power in much of southern Syria, holding Acre’s governorship effectively for life, appointing successors and often rendering fiscal and administrative assistance in Palestine at Damascus governors’ request; in the late 1820s Abdullah Pasha convinced the central government to reassign Nablus district to Sidon province after the Damascus governor argued it would cost more to force Jabal Nablus’s arrears than they were worth. Acre’s rise belongs to the empire-wide emergence of autonomous power centres under weak central control after the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) and the Russian wars from 1768: regional households such as the Jalilis in Mosul, the Mamluks in Egypt and the Shihabs in Mount Lebanon shared political centralization, greater urban access to the rural surplus, virtual monopolies on key commodities and growing trade with and dependence on industrializing Europe. Zahir al-Umar, a Galilee native who began as a minor tax collector, built power over 1730-1775 on a partial monopoly of the cotton, grain and olive-oil export trade to Europe and the military force its profits bought. The Jarrars, whose territories lay between northern and central Palestine, bore the first brunt: in 1735 they were defeated over Marj Ibn Amir and Nazareth and their leader Shaykh Ibrahim was killed, and Nazareth passed into Zahir’s domains. Zahir allied temporarily with Russia and cooperated with Egypt’s Mamluks, who with his help invaded Greater Syria in 1771 and 1773, the years he twice besieged Nablus — episodes in Acre’s century-long campaign (1730-1830) to contain and partially reduce Jabal Nablus’s social space, ending in military stalemate but intended as reminders that Acre, not the Ottoman government, was the source of political authority. Nabulsi leaders maneuvered between Acre (real power) and the Ottoman authorities (appointments and legitimacy), and Acre’s governors controlled Jabal Nablus mainly by divide and conquer until 1831. The sieges boosted the Tuqans, who in 1766 had put Mustafa Beik Tuqan in as subdistrict chief of Bani Sa’b in place of the Jayyusis — the first time an urban household directly controlled part of the hinterland by forcing out a rural clan — a move no accident, since Bani Sa’b controlled a key stretch of the Damascus-Cairo highway, Nablus’s access to Jaffa, and a cotton-producing district in a time of vigorous cotton-trade expansion; the Jarrars opposed the urban-domination process and Zahir sought a monopoly on the trade of the integration process, and urban control of the countryside was eventually completed by merchants through moneylending and trade networks rather than military power and tax collection. In 1771 the Damascus governor Muhammad Pasha Azm appointed Mustafa Beik Tuqan mutasallim of Nablus; the Jarrars let Zahir’s forces pass to besiege Nablus while the Tuqans, helped by the Nimrs, defended the city, casting the Jarrars as anti-Ottoman and the Tuqans as loyal defenders of the sultan. Under al-Jazzar, who paid taxes on time, made himself indispensable and became governor of both Sidon and Damascus provinces, the Tuqans generally had his support while the Jarrars suffered unsuccessful campaigns against Sanur in 1790 and 1795. Sulayman Pasha al-Adil parcelled support among Jarrars, Tuqans and Abd al-Hadis; under Musa Beik Tuqan (1801-1823) the Tuqans’ drive for hegemony by violence and intimidation, with Ottoman-blessed mercenaries in a hastily built fortress in Junayd, embroiled Jabal Nablus in the civil war of 1817-1823 and ended with the Tuqans defeated and Musa Beik poisoned on November 20, 1823. The victorious anti-Tuqan coalition of Jarrars and Qasims, with occasional Nimr help, won the battles but lost the war: struggles henceforth revolved around the mutasallim post and hinterland contenders established residence in or near the city; in 1825 Sanur fortress was destroyed by Abdullah Pasha’s and Amir Shihab’s combined forces with Ottoman blessing, and in 1831 Greater Syria fell to Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt.

“Egyptian Rule, 1831-1840” (lines 577-620): the Egyptian occupation is the dramatic moment most widely credited with a radical break with the past; Doumani’s more cautious assessment is that it accelerated rather than precipitated ongoing trends, while introducing new dynamics such as city councils and controls on the peasantry through conscription and disarmament. Muhammad Ali Pasha (1805-1848) built Egypt’s power on expanded agricultural production and trade with Europe and a large modern army along the French model; under his son Ibrahim Pasha the outnumbered Egyptian army defeated the Ottoman forces in 1831, the sultan sought Russian help, and the European states entered the fray, firmly posing the Eastern Question. Britain negotiated the Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention in 1838, opening the Ottoman interior to European businesses, while indirect incursions under cover of protecting religious minorities intensified; the Egyptian authorities encouraged European involvement, allowed consulates in Damascus and Jerusalem, and promoted commercial agriculture and overseas trade under a centralized political and legal infrastructure. Administrative control was channelled through the new urban Advisory Council (majlis al-shura), staffed by religious leaders, rich merchants and political figures, accelerating urban domination of the hinterland. Rural leaders first cautiously welcomed Ibrahim Pasha, then resented exclusion from the councils and being ordered to implement disarmament, conscription and the ferde head tax in cash on all adult males over fifteen. The first of the resulting revolts, in Palestine in 1834, was led by Qasim al-Ahmad, chief of Jamma’in subdistrict, and crushed; Qasim and his two oldest sons were executed and other leaders executed, exiled or removed, dealing Jabal Nablus’s political autonomy a major blow. The occupation also marked the rise of the Abd al-Hadi family: Ibrahim Pasha picked Shaykh Husayn Abd al-Hadi as his right-hand man for southern Syria and promoted him to governor of Sidon province, which in the 1830s included almost all of Palestine. Jabal Nablus’s social space expanded into Acre’s former domains — in 1851 Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi, district-governor of Nablus, and his cousin Salih Beik Abd al-Hadi, district-governor of Haifa, appointed shaykhs of seven villages in Bilad al-Haritha between Bisan and Nazareth, and Yusuf Abd al-Hadi invested heavily in rebuilding villages of Shifa’amr subdistrict as part of his iltizam (tax farm) holdings. Table 1 gives the administrative composition of Jabal Nablus in 1850 from the council records (NMSR, pp. 76-77, 167): the sanjaqs of Nablus (Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi) and Jenin (Yusuf Sulayman Abd al-Hadi, 45 villages) and nine subdistricts — Mashariq al-Jarrar (28), Bani Sa’b (27), Jamma’in east (21) and west (25), Sha’rawiyya east and west (west, 23), Wadi al-Sha’ir east and west (west, 24) and Mashariq Nablus (20) — totalling 213 villages; the village-count cells for Sanjaq Nablus, Sha’rawiyya (east) and Wadi al-Sha’ir (east) are blank in the HTML original, and the printed figures sum to the stated total of 213 (computed). The expansion proved temporary: the European powers that forced Ibrahim Pasha’s retreat in 1840 lavished attention on Jerusalem, which by the 1850s emerged as Palestine’s political and administrative centre, while Jaffa and Haifa became economic beachheads for trade with Europe; Nabulsi merchants turned to the east bank of the Jordan as a frontier for merchant capital, and in 1867 the middle portion of Ajlun district, al-Balqa with Salt as its central town, was appended to Jabal Nablus, officially the mutasarrifiyya of Jabal Nablus and al-Balqa until al-Balqa was detached in 1888.

“Ottoman Centralization and the Fall of Arraba” and Conclusion (lines 621-676): the Tanzimat program unveiled in 1839 aimed at modernizing the armed forces, centralizing political power and increasing revenues, requiring population counts, conscription, direct tax collection and institutions for direct central control; because Muhammad Ali had already taken similar measures, the way was paved, and the Ottomans regulated and expanded the Advisory Councils, kept the population disarmed, revived conscription, maintained the head tax, conducted population-count campaigns in the late 1840s and initiated the second reform wave in 1856 including the 1858 land code. The vacuum after the 1840 Egyptian retreat took two decades to fill, punctuated by upheavals from below as peasant clans competed for land and water amid expanding production, population growth and increasing demands on their surplus. The council’s December 26, 1849 letter of defiance over its own composition — against a January 1840 imperial edict’s guidelines, with all-Muslim membership and an additional member, the naqib al-ashraf Muhammad Murtada Afandi Hanbali, appointed head of the council although the rules stipulated the qa’immaqam — insisted “there is no one in these parts who is qualified to run this institution other than the ones who are members of it at the present,” and the eventual compromise list, submitted four months later, still left Hanbali attending and signing while the authorities turned a blind eye. The episode illustrates both the extent and the limits of mid-nineteenth-century autonomy: reforms were filtered and reshaped by a native-son elite, yet such detailed supervision would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier, and the council members never questioned the council’s legitimacy — collectively a heterogeneous group of religious, ruling and mercantile families, all actively involved in trade and soap manufacturing, they represented a new type of local notable with a stake in the institution that projected their power locally. Control of the mutasallim post shifted between Tuqans and Abd al-Hadis; when the Crimean War (1854-1858) distracted the empire, factional conflict became a bloody conflagration, and soon after it ended the Ottoman campaign destroyed Arraba, the Abd al-Hadis’ fortified home village, permanently reasserting central control: after 1859 the mutasallim would no longer be a native son. The brief campaign’s decisiveness shows the ruling households of the seventeenth century had already been weakened by internal struggles and by blows from Acre’s rulers, the Egyptian occupation and Ottoman centralization, and their material base in control of the peasantry and its surplus had been undermined by merchants rising into political office and control of land and soap factories. The Conclusion restates the layers of autonomy Shaykh Yusuf’s 1799 poem assumed — rule by native sons, loyalty to Jabal Nablus ranked far above loyalty to the empire, mutual defence, and the region’s division into territorially based autonomous enclaves — together with the city’s stability and the rural sphere’s relative autonomy (subdistrict chiefs answerable to Damascus, not to Nablus’s mutasallim, until the 1830s; armed peasants who were free agents, sometimes voting with their feet, in closely knit smallholding village communities). These layers were no obstacle to development: population grew, borders expanded and Jabal Nablus became Palestine’s leading economic centre despite Acre’s containment pressures. Ironically its success undermined its autonomy: commercialization of agriculture, spurred by regional markets and trade with Europe and deepened by merchant capital and market relations reaching the hinterland’s farthest reaches, undermined peasant autonomy, and the city’s growing control precipitated the Tuqan hegemony struggle. The main beneficiary was the merchant community, whose strong local and regional networks carved the hinterland into geographic spheres of influence, undergirded Jabal Nablus’s stability as a social space and knit city and hinterland into a distinct, cohesive social formation — the subject of Chapter 2. Chapter 1’s notes 1-42 fall in this part (lines 677-843) and continue past line 843; they document, among other things, the poem’s source in NIMR 1:210-211, the firman and petition records in NICR vol. 6, Mills’s observation that “No district in Syria has been more turbulent and less manageable to the Turkish government, than that of Nablus and the surrounding villages,” the caution on Nimr’s Acre-entry story that “No confirmation of this claim was found” and that it may have originated in a similar 1832 incident, the near-absence of Jews in Nablus (only three Jewish individuals in thousands of court cases between 1798 and 1865), and the Samaritan scribes’ and treasurers’ near-monopoly of those city-government positions in the first half of the nineteenth century.

1. The Meanings of Autonomy — notes, continued (lines 844-1172)

The remainder of Chapter 1’s notes completes the documentation set out in part 1. They fix the region’s boundaries (Marj Ibn Amir to the north, the Mediterranean and the River Jordan west and east, and no natural southern boundary, the line drawn through Kafr Malik, Sinjil, Dayr Ghassana and Rantis), the mother villages (Tubas, Bayta, Dayr al-Ghusun, Ya’bad, Qabatya, Aqraba, Kafr Qaddum, Dayr Istya, Kafr Thuluth, Attil and Umm al-Fahm) and the cyclical spawning of daughter settlements. On the Timar and za’ama grants they give the official revenue scales (a timar no more than 20,000 akjas a year, a za’ama up to 100,000), the survival of the arrangement in form into a list of timar holders dated June 29, 1852 (NMSR, pp. 223-225), the Nimr household’s retention of timar villages in southeastern Jabal Nablus for more than 200 years, a mid-January 1724 case of a peasant losing his land to a middleman who had paid his dues to the timar holder in advance (NICR, 4:58), and the 1724 payment by Muhammad Agha Nimr of one lump sum of 2,000 piasters on behalf of all 52 timar and za’ama holders to avoid military duty (NICR, 4:341). The post-1657 leading families are sorted by orientation: Tamimis, Jawharis, Khammashs and Mir’is in the religious hierarchy; the ancestors of the Bishtawi, Nabulsi and Sadder families in the merchant elite; Nimrs, Shafi’is, Sultans, Akhramis, Bayrams and Asqalans keeping a military orientation. Two corrections of other historians are recorded: al-Abbasi mistakenly omitted Bani Sa’b from the 1723 tax-report list and Nimr was mistaken in claiming Umar Agha Nimr was then mutasallim of Nablus — the document shows he was Salih Pasha Tuqan’s deputy — while on the Sha’rawiyya subdistrict the same 1723 document shows Nimr was right against Amnon Cohen, casting doubt on Cohen’s entire discussion of the Lajjun district. The notes also record that Acre was considered a life-grant (malikana) by the Ottoman government (Ibrahim Awra, Tarikh, p. 308), that the struggle with the Tuqans exposed the Nimrs’ already very limited political role — after the Egyptian occupation they quietly turned to business and real estate — and that Rustum notes the 1834 conscription order demanded the largest share from Nablus. The Nablus Advisory Council notes name the council’s members as listed on December 18, 1849 — the mutasallim Sulayman Beik Tuqan, the judge Muhammad Sulayman Khalidi from Jerusalem, the mufti Ahmad Abu al-Hida Khammash, the naqib al-ashraf Muhammad Murtada Hanbali, Abd al-Wahid Khammash, Muhammad Shehada Khammash, Abd al-Fattah Agha Nimr and As’ad al-Tahir — and record that in the twelve listings of members up to June 1850, Samaritan and Christian community members were never mentioned, although they appeared regularly after that date.

2. Family, Culture, and Trade (lines 1173-1556; notes begin at line 1558 and continue past line 1686)

The chapter unpacks the family-knit local and regional trade networks of Nablus’s textile merchants through a case study of the Arafat family, which produced textile merchants for over a dozen generations. It opens with the December 1810 bankrupt death of Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq Arafat, a wholesale textile merchant who left a wife, thirteen children and a large debt: his court-registered inventory shows 82 coffee cups, 65 varieties of textile products in his warehouse, 102 individuals who owed him small amounts — including 39 peasants from at least 20 villages — and a short list, mostly soap producers, to whom he owed large amounts. The pattern is the chapter’s in miniature: most textiles by volume were imported from Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Damascus, the two primary destinations for Nabulsi soap, and textile merchants financed their imports partly by buying soap in Nablus and selling it in Egypt or Damascus; peasant customers stayed a night or two in the merchant’s house choosing wedding wardrobes, payment postponed until harvest. Palestinian merchants had no direct access to political office until they infiltrated the Advisory Councils in the 1840s; culturally constructed networks were their strategy for facilitating trade and agricultural production, and neither tighter central control by 1860 nor global-economy forces undermined them — centralization brought them to the surface, and competition initially intensified them. Against the assumptions that city and country were separate worlds and peasants passive victims of merchant capital, Doumani argues the negotiated networks survived into the twentieth century because they met needs beyond economic intercourse: patron-client relations often masked exploitation and undermined horizontal peasant solidarity, but their ideological underpinning was a perceived fair and just exchange premised on honesty, trust and honor, expressed in gift giving, visits, reciprocal favors and kinship ties, and their constant renegotiation left peasants room to define each exchange’s parameters and to resist — by changing patrons, not paying debts, relocating, or violence.

“Textile Merchants” (lines 1201-1238): clothes were valuable property, maintained carefully and passed between generations; inheritance-estate registrations in the Islamic court always began with the deceased’s clothes, itemized, priced and condition-noted, and on average clothes were worth far more than furniture and household goods in estates of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century; expensive clothing was a form of savings, especially for women. The 1860 dispute over Umm Dawud’s clothes — her mother accusing her widower Abdullah, a middle-class Christian textile merchant, of appropriating the best of them; Abdullah answering that they belonged to his deceased mother, who had lent them to Umm Dawud to wear, not possess, as Umm Dawud had lent clothes to her daughter-in-law; the priest and the secular head of the Christian community drawn in; a crowd ringed around a pile of clothing — ended with the husband awarded most of the disputed items, the remaining clothes still worth 3,600 piasters, then the average price of a bayt. Gifts of clothes also established authoritative relations between household women, a gendered hierarchy Abdullah turned to his advantage against his mother-in-law’s assertion of an individual property right. Textiles signified status, wealth, rank, identity and place of origin, and textile merchants were central to id al-fitr, id al-adha and life events — birth, first school day, graduation, safe return from pilgrimage, and above all weddings — each celebrated with a new wardrobe, a Kiswa. A peasant letter to Hajj Isma’il Arafat from Jaba village dated April 7, 1901 orders a whole piece of red dima for id al-adha, payment to follow the Holiday. Textile merchants alone were called simply “merchant” (tajir); they formed the largest subgroup of the merchant community and dominated Khan al-Tujjar, the city’s most prestigious commercial real estate, described by Muhammad Izzat Darwaza from his father’s and grandfather’s memory, called “the finest arcade in Palestine” by Mary Rogers, and praised by John Mills as a clothing emporium stocked from Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Manchester and Nablus itself. The khan’s central location divided the city into “easterners” and “westerners,” labels still used, enacted in the young men’s game of “catch” there during Nabi Musa festival preparations. For the Prophet’s birthday the textile merchants decorated the khan collectively with carpets, silk-covered walls, flowers and sweets, and passed out free candy-covered almonds (mlabbas) after evening prayers. Tentative statistics from 51 wholesale-merchant inheritance cases, 1800-1860, put textile merchants at 40 percent — twice the next three groups combined — oil and soap specialists at about 20 percent, grain at 10 percent, leather at 7 percent and precious metals and currencies at 7 percent, the rest in livestock, dried fruit, raw cotton and other goods; most merchants in fact dealt in at least three commodities, textiles, oil and grains among them.

“The Arafat Family,” “The Making of a Family Name” and “Social Status and Marriage Patterns” (lines 1239-1284): Najib Arafat’s “All or most of the Arafats are textile merchants; they have not transcended this fate” is read as pride in continuity and as an element of twentieth-century Palestinian nationalism’s affirmation of identity. The family’s textile line runs from Ahmad al-Shahid (late seventeenth-early eighteenth century) through his great-grandson Abd al-Razzaq (d. 1810) and his three brothers, and forward to Sayyid Sa’id Arafat (d. 1847), Kamal al-Din Arafat (twice mayor of Nablus, 1912 and 1915) and, as late as 1960, Tawfiq Arafat, then Nablus’s largest textile merchant; the strongest line descends from Muhammad Arafat through his great-grandson Hajj Isma’il, six of whose seven sons became textile merchants working from two large stores in the Wikala al-Farrukhiyya. The Arafats catered to the mass market, above all hinterland peasants: Abd al-Razzaq’s 65 textile types were quilts, pillow and mattress covers, scarves, handkerchiefs, silk belts, head kerchiefs and bolts of cloth sold by the arm length (dhira), with none of the woolen coats and gold-embroidered jackets made for the urban upper classes. Family names were not used by most of the population — a man was x son of y — and only high-ranking political and religious families (Tuqan, Nimr, Jarrar, Jayyusi, Hanbali, Jawhari, Smadi, Bustami) held stable names over centuries; for merchants and respected artisans a name was a form of property tied to the household (dar), at once an extended family and a physical courtyard house of rooms (buyut) pooling income, restructured by every birth, marriage and death, and under continuous pressure to reproduce a strong male line, often at the expense of female members married off for alliances or deprived of inheritance. The Arafats branched off from the “sons of al-Shahid” (awlad al-shahid): the al-Shahid brothers endowed their Qaryun-quarter household as a joint family waqf in 1737; Arafat son of Abd al-Majid, a hajj by the 1720s who fathered four successful sons, established his own household in the Yasmina quarter and endowed it as a waqf; his sons were called the “sons of Arafat,” and their sons and grandsons consciously kept Arafat as a fixed family name regardless of their father’s name — the introduction of a new family in the economic, political and social sense, and an act of exclusion toward the other al-Shahid descendants. Cultural capital — an honored position — was as crucial as material capital and was the glue of the networks, accumulated through religious status: education, marriage into scholarly families, mosque service, charity (zakat) and Sufi membership. Hajj Isma’il is remembered by his granddaughter Saba Arafat for providing dinner for mourners and their friends, his son Ahmad for free bread for the poor every Friday, and Ahmad’s son Tawfiq for a Ramadan banquet for his neighborhood’s poor. The dominant marriage pattern was intrafamily, protecting property from fragmentation; outside marriages preferred partners combining high religious status with soap-factory ownership and, to a lesser extent, the textile trade — Abd al-Razzaq married into the Hanbali and Fityan families, and the Arafats also married into the Bashsha, Qadi-Shwayka, Shammut, Sadder, Tamimi, Tuffaha and Bishtawi families. In the mid-nineteenth century the number of Arafat shaykhs declined markedly while the title sayyid — descent from the Prophet, carrying exemption from certain taxes — was applied to almost all of them, a claim Doumani says was highly likely invented, as it was for a number of wealthy merchant families then; the Arafats’ Hanbali connection, the family dominating the post of naqib al-ashraf, probably helped. Because soap export financed textile import, outside marriages favored merchant households whose regional networks concentrated on Egypt — Balbisi, Kawkash, Ghazzawi, Jardani, Bishtawi, Jurri, Darwish-Ahmad, Hanbali, Tamimi and Tuffaha — who formed a network of their own through joint ventures, co-owned commercial real estate, and service as each other’s legal agents and witnesses; until the 1840s Egypt was the primary source of imported textiles and the largest market for Nabulsi soap, as it had been since Mamluk times.

“Regional Trade Networks” (lines 1285-1365): direct contacts with merchants from India, Baghdad, Mosul and Aleppo were marginal; Nabulsi trade was regional, within the Ottoman Empire, concentrated on Cairo and Damascus. In the estates of Abd al-Razzaq, his brother Abdullah (registered 1805) and his grandson Sa’id (d. 1847), goods by origin ranged from Damascus dima and saya and local thiyab baladi to North African fezzes, Beirut silk, Aleppo alaja, English malti and Indian cashmere, but by volume and value Egyptian cloth dominated — dimyati, ziftawi, wati, ashmuni, mahallawi, sirsawi and mawaldi, imported in bundles (farda) and dyed and tailored in Nablus. A lawsuit of August 7, 1812, in which Sayyid Abdullah Qutub of Jaffa sued the Arafat brothers’ estate beneficiaries and five other textile merchants over 730 piasters of customs and storage costs his father had allegedly been forced to pay during al-Jazzar’s siege of Jaffa a decade earlier — dismissed for want of witnesses — shows the system’s workings: Egyptian textiles came by sea to Jaffa, where merchants’ agents cleared them and arranged overland transport; merchants banded together from full partnerships to joint-shipping agreements — the chief reason for these collective arrangements, aside from the need to pool capital, was to share risks; credit was imperative because moving cash across dangerous terrain was impractical, and trade’s profits gave political strongmen a stake in its continuation; and agents were relatives and acquaintances — the Qutubs originated from Bilbays in Egypt, like the Balbisi and Darwish-Ahmad families among the defendants. Merchants pooled money and sent partners to Egypt, maintaining offices, homes and warehouses in Cairo and Damietta staffed by themselves, relatives or local agents, and preferred to send one of their own; sudden death abroad triggered complicated lawsuits, often at the expense of women and children. The August 1864 dispute over the estate of the soap merchant Hajj Hasan Safar — a guardian claiming 630,000 piasters for a minor son — confirms Cairo was then the major market for Nabulsi soap, with three agents there against one each in Jeddah and Damietta, the agents paying customs, storing the soap and deciding buyers and the timing of sale, on which profit or loss usually turned. Soap was the critical link in the Egypt textile trade: bought low in Nablus and sold high in Egypt, it avoided depleting liquid capital, kept well, transported easily and was much esteemed in Egypt, which absorbed about three-fifths of Palestine’s soap production in the 1830s and averaged roughly three-quarters of Nablus’s production throughout the Ottoman period. By Hajj Isma’il’s generation (d. 1903/1904) the network pointed north: he bought and sold primarily Syrian and British textiles, operated individually rather than in joint ventures, invested less in dyeing and weaving, and diversified by buying a soap factory from Mahmud Hashim. His son Najib (b. 1901) recalled buying from Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, Jaffa and Jerusalem, with most non-Syrian goods from England, from two two-story shops facing each other in the Wikala al-Farrukhiyya whose upper floors were rented to tailors. Muhammad Izzat Darwaza’s memoirs corroborate the pattern for the mass peasant market. The shift’s causes were British machine textiles’ growing share after the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Convention lowered tariffs and abolished monopolies, Beirut’s rise as Greater Syria’s principal port, Tanzimat centralization binding Jabal Nablus closer to Greater Syria, new ports, steamships, roads, railroads and telegraph lines, and the Damascene textile sector’s restructuring — English, Damascene and local textiles literally woven together — in the face of European competition. Nabulsi merchants were subordinated to middlemen between the large Beirut and Damascus trade houses and the peasantry, each keeping a private account with a house instead of employing agents; the houses’ intermediaries (jarrida) advanced capital with interest, stored, packed and shipped the goods, and employed agents in Nablus who collected weekly, the Haffar family’s office sitting in Khan al-Tujjar; payment was usually gold coins sent by post. Debt-collection suits by regional merchants against Nabulsis appear in the court registers only after the mid-nineteenth century — as on December 27, 1862, when the Damascene Rashid Agha Jabri proved a debt of 34,530 piasters owed by Ahmad and Muhammad Masri and had their inventories ordered sold — as do Nabulsis’ suits against peasants. A receipt of April 20, 1837 among the Nimr family papers shows the older system: the Damascene wool dealer Sayyid Abd al-Ghani al-Sawwaf turned over promissory notes totaling 5,500 piasters to Ahmad Agha Nimr to cash and buy soap with, the soap reaching Damascus through Nimr’s agent Shaykh Sulayman al-Banna; the powerful local family was then indispensable to the circulation of merchant capital and was paid in soap — liquid capital in Damascus, and for Nimr, who owned a soap factory, an assured sale whose underlying debts he could reschedule at further interest. The new enforceable framework of Advisory Council, commercial courts and centralized bureaucracy let merchants bypass the political families, at least at first, but raised large merchants’ power over retailers and peasants: money’s power, less fettered by personal ties, boded ill for the weak, the poor and the unlucky. The Arafats remained textile merchants throughout, but what that meant changed after mid-century — connections shifted from Egypt to Syria, soap declined in importance to imports, and port-city and Damascene families came to dominate the market.

“Local Trade Networks,” “Weddings” and “Keys to the City” (lines 1366-1556): local networks were more deeply rooted and less vulnerable to change than regional ones; Nablus needed the peasants’ surplus and their militia, and in return supplied goods, services and political and cultural points of departure. Main arteries ran from the regional roads to larger villages serving as hubs for clusters of two to three hundred villages; transport was by donkey, through hired transporters (makaris), often poor peasants with little or no land, and itinerant merchants (haddars) who hawked textiles, utensils and shoes, especially at harvest, exchanging goods for grain or olive oil. Merchants carved the countryside into spheres of influence: Abd al-Razzaq’s customers came primarily from Kafr Qaddum, Jamma’in, Til and Ya’bad; Hajj Isma’il’s included Kafr Qaddum, Jaba, Tammun and Dayr Istiya, with the largest concentration of his family’s villages in Mashariq al-Jarrar. Access and debt collection depended also on relations with ruling families — Ibrahim Khalil Jarrar’s letter of December 26, 1899 orders a caftan and scarf from Hajj Isma’il, addresses him as “sir” and “our father,” and warns him to hand nothing to his sons without a sealed letter from him, implying they ran up their father’s tab. Merchant networks overlapped dozens of others — political, fiscal and Sufi — and were informal, needing no official sanction: merchants lent money and made opportunities available to political leaders while binding peasant clients by credit (payment delayed to harvest), shops that served as banks where peasants deposited goods and money, village visits, wedding attendance, gifts, food and lodging in the city — there were no boarding houses for peasants in Nablus — and brokerage. Weddings were the backbone of the hinterland textile business: Uthman Abd al-Wahhab’s letter ordering a Haffari dimaya, a dark abaya to below the knee, a fez, shoes and women’s dima pieces against a payment of 336 piasters sent through a bearer — the cloak to come immediately, because “there is a wedding coming up at Abu Muhammad’s” — shows weddings as exercises in power and influence in which not only bride and groom but parents, uncles, relatives, neighbors and even other clans’ leaders could expect gifts of clothes. The kiswa’s components are detailed from the Arafat estates, Muhammad Izzat Darwaza and Malik Masri: daily kiswas prepared in advance as ready packages of qanabiz, waistcoats, shirts and trousers, cut by merchants and sewn by their own and neighbors’ women at home; wedding kiswas always including a silk saya and cloaks, the most expensive of camel hair, with headbands given as complementary gifts; cloth sold by the shaqqa, about seven arms’ lengths or approximately 475 centimeters; western Jabal Nablus peasants wearing brighter colors than eastern ones and preferring Lebanese silk belts. Peasants came to buy the kiswa in processions (mawkib al-kassaya) with singing, dancing and gifts in kind — James Finn describes such a procession of women from Tireh to Caifa in mid-September 1855 — and stayed one to three nights in the merchant’s house, women in a reserved room, men in the garden (hakura) at the Masris’, and at Hajj Isma’il’s Qaryun-quarter house (demolished by the British during the 1936-1939 rebellion) women upstairs and men on the ground floor with its diwan, stables, cistern and orchard; dinners were substantial — lamb over rice on bread soaked with cooked yogurt or tomato sauce — and the evenings festive, peasants singing and dancing to the dirbakka drum, among younger merchant-family members’ most pleasant childhood memories. Most clients paid a small downpayment or none, the rest postponed to the grain or olive harvest and expected then in cash, sometimes in olive oil or wheat; merchant-peasant agents — themselves peasants who bought their kiswa on credit until the grape, fig, oil, wheat or barley seasons, at prices higher than cash sales and varying with the loan’s length, against written IOUs — also collected debts, placed orders and recommended customers, as Salih Yusuf of Kafr Qaddum did in 1897, introducing Ahmad Abadi of Kafr Qari, and as Mustafa Abu Asa did in placing a large order for a relative on his own account and asking a friendship discount. Agents also became rural retailers on urban wholesale credit: a contract of November 23, 1879 records Qasim son of Muhammad I’days al-Hammur of Jaba owing Isma’il Arafat 3,739 piasters for a bundle of unprocessed foreign-made calico and foreign-made yarn, payment delayed three months and guaranteed, with penalty, by two fellow villagers. Merchants collected in person, tying their horses by the oil press (badd) or threshing floor (baydar) to watch the harvest, or sent horsemen collectors (khayyala, each an al-jabi), often peasants attuned to evasion, who prolonged their stay on village hospitality (diyafa) in the village guest room (madafa); merchants played “good cop/bad cop,” Ahmad Arafat and his sons relying heavily on horsemen while Hajj Isma’il’s other sons were less strict. Credit bankruptcies were not uncommon: Abd al-Razzaq’s estate is the case in point, and two of Hajj Isma’il’s sons also went bankrupt, unable to collect from peasants. Peasants used merchants as their key to the city — headquarters for storing surplus, buying goods, sending communications, obtaining credit, reaching political figures and getting legal counsel — and were not passive: they could withhold payment or take their business elsewhere, and peasants’ sons claimed their parents’ key to the city as merchants’ sons inherited customers. The key was usually the merchant who marketed the village’s main cash crop: Bayt Wazan’s onion growers sold to the Asi family, who accompanied them to buy kiswas from Hajj Abd al-Rahman Anabtawi in Suq al-Basal, mediated prices, guaranteed their credit and stored goods for them; Burqin’s olive-oil producers sold to the Ashur family and lodged at their house, indebted growers paying 30 percent interest and forced to sell immediately after harvest at low prices, the debt-free depositing oil in the soap factory’s wells and selling later at higher prices. Khalid Qadri’s grandfather, a cheese merchant neither shaykh nor hajj but known as straightforward and deeply religious — he opened the neighborhood mosque each morning — received cheese from peasants of Tubas, Tammun, Rujib and Salim and bedouins from Jabal al-Khalil’s vicinity in the mid-February-to-June season, often giving neither cash nor receipts, only his word, and in return was expected to pay on demand and lend in hard times, and to buy, store and broker goods for his suppliers, bringing customers to textile and gold merchants for a commission. Contracts were usually verbal and peasants’ disadvantage structural — constant needs against fluctuating rain-fed resources, their word in court worth less than a respected merchant’s. Middle and well-to-do peasants could meet merchants as near-equals: Hajj Ahmad Isma’il Abu Hijli of Dayr Istiya, of a clan outside the rural ruling families, addressed Hajj Isma’il as “my brother,” ordered the most expensive stock, quince and rare coins in a letter of January 10, 1900, routinely asked for foods, coffee, tobacco, kitchenware, herbs, rope, a watch and onions and for mail forwarding, sent carpets to be sold against his account, and sent a leopard skin as a gift on Hajj Isma’il’s purchase of a new horse; the two were agents for each other’s interests.

The conclusion restates the chapter: local trade networks were dynamic social spaces, not mere exchange mechanisms, governed by a system of meanings linking social practice, trade and family history, which partly produced Nabulsi society’s regional identification, family politics, religiously coded everyday language, conservative atmosphere and cultural continuity; family was a dynamic construct, and peasants actively reproduced the networks and used their keys to the city. The networks let merchants organize and invest in cash-crop production for regional and international markets and, as commercial agriculture and the money economy expanded, to compete with and eventually bypass the subdistrict chiefs and urban ruling families for control of the rural surplus — incubating a different breed of urban notable under the Egyptian invasion and Ottoman reforms. The tensions the sources play down are named: competition among merchants, with ruling families and with their own agents — mostly middle peasants for whom service in a merchant’s network was a first step to a network of their own, often in their former employer’s territory — and, above all, debt, whose moneylending spearheaded merchant capital’s expansion, facilitated appropriation of village lands and integrated rural areas into the urban legal and political spheres. The peasants of Talluza’s satirical maqamat oration al-Tarabish wa al-Barabish (the fezzes and the waterpipes), learned by Malik Masri from Talluza’s peasants and inspired by a song usually performed on the last Friday of Ramadan (al-jum’a al-yatima), gives the peasant counter-voice: moneylenders and debt collectors descending with “their friend the police,” and the debtor in the olive season forced to pay or renew the loan at twice the fee. Regional networks’ shifts are summarized — Egypt to Damascus and Beirut, multifamily to single-family enterprise, politically mediated to legally enforced credit, regional to increasingly European textile sources, agents to individual accounts with regional trade houses — and the reinforcement of the local meanings system is presented as what preserved Nabulsi merchants’ access to the rural surplus. Chapter 2’s notes 1-32 fall in this part (lines 1558-1686) and continue past line 1686; among other things they identify Geertz’s “clientelization” as the comparative term for the customer networks, record that the Umm Dawud negotiations took place in John Mills’s own room and followed shari’a inheritance rules although no court or Muslim officials were involved, caution that the merchant-estate percentages rest on a small absolute number of cases and are general indicators only, and note the Arafat family’s first professionally trained doctor, pharmacist and architect, all educated in Istanbul early in the twentieth century.

2. Family, Culture, and Trade — notes, continued and concluded (lines 1687-2086)

The remainder of Chapter 2’s notes (notes 32-131) completes the documentation set out in part 2. They fix the Arafat family tree’s basis in the first fourteen volumes of the Nablus Islamic Court records — the family’s own compiled tree differing in some respects — the intrafamily marriages, including a man wedding his brother’s widow to support his nephews and nieces and keep property within the household, and the long standing of the Egypt soap relationship, from sixteenth-century Egyptian investment in Jerusalem soap production to Sarah Graham-Brown’s estimate that Egypt consumed approximately one-half of Nablus’s soap output during the Mandate period. They also record that reliance on textiles can give the misleading impression that subregional trade networks were of little importance (the social life of grain would emphasize those connections), name the textile-merchant families who did business primarily with Egypt besides the Arafats (Fityan, Nabulsi, Abd al-Muhsin, Ghazzawi, Balbisi, Darwish-Ahmad, Kawkash, Bishtawi, Zu’aytar, Masri, Qutub and Tuffaha), identify the Damascene agent families (Haffar, Mansur, Khattab and Tuban), gloss mukhkhamasat as pentagon-shaped coins often used for jewelry and majarrat as the plural of majaer, a gold coin probably from Hungary, and note that because the currency’s value fluctuated widely, relational measures were often mentioned in loan contracts, that according to Sharif Kamil al-Jarrar most peasants in his village were indebted during the early twentieth century, and that a typical early-twentieth-century kiswa procession, according to Najib Arafat, consisted of three or four women and five or six men plus their children.

3. Cotton, Textiles, and the Politics of Trade (lines 2088-2529; the Conclusion and the chapter notes continue past line 2529)

The chapter opens with Zahir al-Umar’s late-1771 siege of Nablus — mounted after he took Jaffa, expelled Ahmad Beik Tuqan and forced Mustafa Beik Tuqan of Bani Sa’b to retreat, with his Egyptian Mamluk allies invading and the Jarrar clan allied to him — in which, according to the eyewitness scribe Ibrahim Danafi al-Samiri, the Tuqans and Nimrs divided the city’s defence west and east of Khan al-Tujjar and faced him with 12,000 riflemen, many of them peasants, through nine days of skirmishes and one heavy battle before he withdrew, laid waste defender villages, plundered the first post-siege caravan (one hundred camel-loads of clothes, yarn and other things for Damascus) at Uyun al-Tujjar and cut the Damascus road. The siege introduces both cotton and textiles’ centrality — processing and trade in cotton goods were the core of Nablus’s manufacturing, consuming the majority of artisans, wage-earning women and merchants, producing inexpensive goods for the mass market of peasants and lower urban classes — and the chapter’s focus, the changing relationship between politics and trade: Zahir, more than any other Palestinian leader of the Ottoman period, was associated with the growing cotton trade, and his export monopoly put him on a collision course with Jabal Nablus’s leaders. Nabulsi merchants posed the biggest challenge to Zahir and his Acre successors because they limited the Politics of monopoly and made Nablus Palestine’s centre of cotton processing even though the cotton villages were closer to the coastal ports; yet precisely when they finally dominated the cotton trade they faced the politics of “free trade,” and the chapter investigates how they competed with each other, with coastal and foreign merchants and with the Ottoman government for the rural surplus in the new environment created by the Egyptian invasion and the reforms, using their recent access to the Nablus Advisory Council to adjust “free trade” to their favour.

“Cotton and the Politics of Monopoly” and “Cotton and the Rulers of Acre” (lines 2106-2191): Palestinian cotton reached European shores from at least the tenth century, its major market until the eighteenth century being Egypt; processed cotton bulked largest in tenth-to-thirteenth-century exports, Venice imported mostly raw cotton by the early fifteenth century, and from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries processed cotton, mostly carded and spun, was the chief commodity in Palestine’s trade with Europe, France replacing Venice and practically monopolizing Palestine’s northern coast. French demand for Levant raw cotton rose more than fivefold over the eighteenth century while processed imports fell (Table 2: raw 4,316 quintals in 1700-1702 to 95,979 in 1785-1789; spun 16,946 to 10,805), part of a general European raw-cotton demand trend (Table 3: British cotton imports from Turkey 667,279 pounds in 1725 to 4,406,892 in 1789). French merchants invested in local production from the 1720s, paying village shaykhs for harvests a year in advance; Zahir severed that direct access in the mid-1740s by implanting himself, with his financial manager Ibrahim Sabbagh, as middleman between French merchants and the cotton villages, the monopoly profits transforming Acre into a fortress city and autonomous enclave. Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar enforced an even stricter monopoly over cotton and cereals in 1784 and by 1790 broke the French grip and expelled them to Sidon — Volney is quoted that the pasha “cornered all cotton stocks, forbade all sales, and became sole master of the market” — but the expulsion might not have raised revenues, since cultivation had spread beyond his control to Jabal Nablus, transport difficulties in the Napoleonic Wars and competition from Anatolia and India cut profits, and Acre’s base began to decline. The monopoly did not survive al-Jazzar intact: Sulayman Pasha al-Adil (1805-1819) gutted the military machine, relaxed control over Acre’s dependencies and, on Haim Farhi’s advice, ran a limited monopoly — sale of grain, oil and cotton to foreigners exclusively through Acre, the day’s surplus taken and paid at that day’s price and sold by the government to foreign ships at the highest possible price, while peasants and merchants enjoyed a relatively free cotton market for local and regional consumption — with five permanent cotton employees in Acre, government intervention at production level, and officials amassing fortunes through speculation. Tension, conflict and smuggling followed; Sulayman’s accession declined monopoly from above, smuggling eroded it from below, and the Egyptian invasion of 1831 dealt it a fatal blow, the Egyptians surprisingly making no effort to corner Greater Syria’s cotton market — Muhammad Ali Pasha’s September 1833 communiqué leaving the Acre, Nablus, Jaffa and Gaza harvest to its inhabitants to dispose of as they wished, more likely, Doumani suggests, to allay European concern than because of the harvest’s small size.

“Cotton Production in Jabal Nablus” and “Decline of the Cotton Connection” (lines 2192-2260): monopoly never took hold in the rest of Palestine; in Jabal Nablus competition, not monopoly, characterized the cotton trade, Nabulsi merchants securing regular raw-cotton supply through their local networks, mostly as payments for debts. By the 1830s Jabal Nablus was Greater Syria’s largest cotton producer (Table 4, 1837: Nablus 4,500-5,000 qintars against Aleppo’s 500-600), its cotton reputed the Fertile Crescent’s best; the April 28, 1851 Sidon governor’s letter distributing four uqqas of Istanbul cotton seeds through the council — two to Jenin, one each to Bani Sa’b and Sh’arawiyya al-Gharbiyya — and the 1850 factional-fighting loss documents (one clan alone losing 8,300 waznas of cotton-in-the-boll, 505 waznas ginned, 7 qintars spun and 145 waznas of seeds) locate production in villages including Attil, Dayr al-Ghusun, Zayta, Baqa, Shwayka, Qaqun, Talfit, Muqaybli, Arrana, Kafr Dan, Zaboya and Dannaba. After 1831 Nablus became Palestine’s cotton-processing and trade centre, peasants sending cotton there to be ginned and sold though Acre and Jaffa were closer, and in 1837 three-quarters of Jabal Nablus’s harvest was exported to Marseilles. Production then declined, non-linearly — Egyptian rule likely increased it, Ibrahim Pasha’s “forced cultivation” being estimated, as guesses, to have doubled Greater Syria’s cotton areas by the late 1830s; decline by the mid-nineteenth century, a peak during the early-1860s cotton famine, then decline again (Table 5) — overtaken by wheat, barley, sesame, olive oil and eventually the Jaffa orange, under pressure from Egyptian long-staple (Jumel/Mako, 1820) quantity and quality, British grain demand after the Corn Laws’ repeal (peasants preferring hardier, less laborious, less risky grains) and English machine yarn imports undercutting local demand.

“The Politics of Free Trade,” “Merchants, the State, and the Movement of Commodities” and “Competition and Sabotage” (lines 2261-2389): in the 1830s, at the peak of Nablus’s cotton domination, Egyptian centralization and support for foreign merchants, the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention (1838) striking down monopolies and lowering tariffs, and the Tanzimat announced in 1839 made it easier for European and regional merchants to reach interior markets, foreign merchant communities expanding sharply especially in Beirut — while the reforms’ own institutions, above all the Advisory Councils, gave local merchants access to official posts they could use to participate in, resist and manipulate fiscal and economic policy, which is why full implementation took more than two decades (1840-1860). Nabulsi success itself paved the way for outside networks; competition for the rural surplus came from European traders and their agents in the port cities (backed by their governments, milking the Capitulations and offering high prices), regional trading houses of Beirut and Damascus (seeking provincial-government backing over tax-farming bids and purchase of taxes-in-kind, zakhayir) and a reinvigorated Ottoman state — Nabulsis answering through the council, which also arbitrated commercial disputes, and their hinterland networks. The movement of zakhayir is traced leg by leg: mid-nineteenth-century taxes-in-kind around Nablus (wheat, barley, meadow vetch, lentils, corn, olive oil, clarified butter and cotton) and Jenin (wheat, barley, corn, sesame, clarified butter and cotton) were carried by peasants to collection points and stored in storehouses rented from Nabulsi merchants, then auctioned; the state and merchants raced for the harvest — the Sidon governor’s 1850 instruction to Sulayman Beik Tuqan to collect as soon as the harvest was at hand, lest “the entire harvest will end up in the hands of the merchants” — merchants holding the built-in advantage of prior-season loans and indefinitely rescheduled debts; the Jerusalem governor Adham Pasha’s 1850 abolition of corvée transport, substituting payment by distance, shifted the burden to merchants. At the storehouses the council won the measuring dispute — its six unsalaried employees (two supervisors, two accountants, two measurers) paid from the difference between domed incoming measures and levelled outgoing ones — the Sidon governor permitting continuation “as in the days of old,” a small victory cutting to control of resources in the fluid Tanzimat transition. The struggle over knowledge follows: Adham Pasha’s September 18, 1849 letter ruling out local sale of olive oil and clarified butter, demanding detailed reports on prices, quantities, ports and transport costs and dispatching the Jerusalem council member Sayyid Faydallah Alami to investigate, read as a distrustful exercise against a council then supporting the soap merchants’ tax strike. The council defended local circulation — its September 9, 1852 letter, citing “a petition from the people,” insisting the non-Nabulsi customs inspector Uthman Afandi’s tax on cotton seeds be abolished — and supported peasants’ cash-in-lieu petitions (September 13, 1850). Against the customs inspectors Haqqi Afandi and Khawaja Casper’s June 30, 1852 accusation that Nabulsi leaders treated the hinterland as their tax-farm for life (malikane), the central government recruited foreign and regional bidders and occasionally substituted their bids at the last minute; the council, unable to challenge approval of final bids, was accused of delay and sabotage — the Beiruti Sayyid Muhammad Afandi Halawani’s 550 kaylas of worm- and rot-damaged wheat (the council answering that prices had doubled in an export-demand week and fallen steeply before his agent Fayyad Beik Tuqan collected, forcing a loss sale, or possibly covering a scheme to unload rotten grain), the delayed April 4, 1850 wheat sale to the Beiruti Khawaja Ilyas Najjar, and the September 26, 1850 “Escowage” ginned-cotton dispute, in which the Nablus officials Mas’ud Agha and Khawaja Arakil denied delay and the council sided with its fellow merchants. The “free” market was free only from a single strongman’s monopoly; some Nabulsis broke ranks as foreign traders’ agents, as al-Abd Ikhrem did for Escowage. Auction records for 1848-1853 show the overwhelming majority of successful bids made by Nabulsi merchants, but from the 1850s European-dominated commercial tribunals and European commercial laws steadily eroded local councils’ power.

“Textiles: Resilience and Restructuring” (lines 2389-2529; the chapter Conclusion begins at the end of this range and continues past line 2529): the mid-August 1833 inventory of the weavers Hajj Yasin Taha and Dali daughter of Bakur — who died poor with two looms (idatayn hiyaka) worth 7.5 piasters each, six small gold pieces worth two piasters each and half the estate going to burial, court and a textile-merchant debt — opens a rejection of the Deindustrialization metaphor: restructuring exacted a heavy toll from textile workers, especially women, rather than simply killing the sector. Next to Safad, Nablus was sixteenth-century Palestine’s most important weaving and dyeing centre (cadastral taxes, 1538/1539, 1548/1549, 1596/1597); Safad’s expensive woolen export industry collapsed in the seventeenth century while Nablus’s mass-market industry endured. Inalcik’s three-stage invasion — machine yarn in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, imitation of well-to-do dress, a mass-market push by the 1850s — is set against Tables 6-7 (English cotton-goods exports to the Ottoman Empire rising to 229,201 thousand yards of cloth and 22,824 thousand pounds of yarn by 1860; cotton goods 89.5-97.5 percent of British exports to Syria/Palestine in 1836-1850), with Owen’s higher yarn figures (1,700,000 pounds in 1831 to nearly 6,350,000 in 1850) noted against Inalcik’s. Contemporary observers’ pronouncements of handicrafts’ end, Avitsur’s 1975 version and Ihsan Nimr’s “Undermining and Destruction” epitaph are quoted and qualified — Nimr conflating post-World War I developments — against Chevalier’s 1962 rebuttal and Owen’s and Quataert’s objections (growing internal market, failed and reversed imitation, cheap especially female labor). Nablus’s resilience is explained by interior location and small size (no European trade mission in the city), plentiful water, cheap local raw materials (cotton; wool; dyestuffs — gallnuts, indigo, sumac), mass-market products (the cotton thawb, 13 piasters locally made medium against 44 for a thawb malti in Shaykh Abdullah Fityani’s 1840 estate; the practically indestructible white-with-red-stripes woolen bisht, “like wearing a carpet”), cheap equipment (gins 1.5 piasters in 1800 to 35 in 1830; looms 1.5 to 10 piasters) and cheap labor, above all women spinners and weavers (thirteen of the sixteen individuals owed small amounts in Hasan son of Salah Zakar’s 1806 estate were women, named by first names only). The textile merchants’ April 2, 1850 petition against the Egyptians’ 1838/1839 cloth-sellers’ tax of 3,710 piasters is read as both an attack on the previous multazim and evidence the sector had difficulties since the 1830s, before foreign competition’s greatest impact; the key internal factor was merchant capital’s diversion into moneylending, land and real estate, olive oil and above all soap. The Conclusion as far as read holds that the 1856-1882 leap Schölch documented was not sudden nor solely European “penetration”: Palestinian merchants and peasants had prepared its structures, regional trade remained paramount until Ottoman rule’s last decades for interior regions, and integration was slow and uneven — cotton grown only in the coastal areas and plains, whose villages were more involved in trade with Europe than the olive-producing central highlands and eastern subdistricts.

3. Cotton, Textiles, and the Politics of Trade — Conclusion, concluded, and notes (lines 2530-3027)

The Conclusion’s remainder holds that integration’s political ramifications were uneven (monopoly in the north, merchant competition in Jabal Nablus, which consequently avoided Acre’s radical fluctuations), that the Egyptian occupation and the reforms from the 1830s laid the groundwork for the politics of “free” trade among interior, regional and European merchants and an increasingly intrusive state, and that through their networks and the Advisory Council Nabulsi merchants sought to preserve their control of commodities’ movement, meet local manufacturing’s and regional trade’s needs, minimize state interference while using its legitimacy, and keep out foreign and regional merchants — though there was no internal consensus in 1840-1860, the main beneficiaries being capital-holders who speculated or served as outside traders’ agents. Textiles, the sector most vulnerable to foreign competition, restructured and survived, much changed, into the twentieth century, its stagnation redirecting investment and careers until olive oil and soap became merchant capital’s primary focus. Chapter 3’s notes 1-121 complete the documentation: they fix the al-Samiri manuscript’s provenance (a privately owned manuscript first published in NIMR, 1:390-399; the Danafi were Samaritan scribes and treasurers), record Masters’s argument that Paul Maashouk was a local against Cohen’s statement that he was a Dutchman, caution that the 1596 cadastral survey listing no Nablus-region cotton villages also omitted Nablus’s vibrant soap industry, give Bowring as the most reliable early-nineteenth-century source, detail the 1861 empire-wide Ottoman cotton campaign of shows, awards and abolished gin taxes, define khawaja (in Nablus, rich merchants regardless of religion until the mid-nineteenth century), record that part of the zakhayir supplied stationed soldiers and the local militia rather than being sold, note that weaving and spinning were one of women’s four major income sources (with moneylending, inheritance and the marriage dowry), and explain the absence of direct evidence on peasant women textile workers by peasants’ general absence from the court records, except for moneylending and land cases, until the late 1850s.

4. The Political Economy of Olive Oil (lines 3028-3372; the Conclusion continues and the chapter notes fall past line 3372)

The chapter opens with two epigraphs — the Jaba peasants forced by the tax season’s timing to sell their future olive-oil crop in advance through a Salam contract, and a description of Nablus’s richest people as the soap manufacturers, the same people working in agriculture, trade, industry and moneylending, against whom most peasant complaints were directed — and with Mary Eliza Rogers’s February 1856 visit to the Abd al-Hadis’ Arraba compound, where the household’s women asked of her father how many camels he had and whether his olive trees were new and fruitful: the two key indicators of an important family’s material base. Olive oil was Jabal Nablus’s number one agricultural product and cash crop, and the chapter’s departure question is how olive oil moved from the hands of peasants to those of merchants. A February 1862 lawsuit — Hamad Rummani of Bayta suing his relative Khader, his partner in an oil salam financed by the soap manufacturer Sayyid Mahmud Hashim, over ten jars of profit — points to moneylending as the primary mechanism, salam as its most pervasive form, and a differentiated peasantry with a Rural middle class mediating merchant capital’s circulation: at least six Rummani men ran a wide salam network for olive oil and sesame and made qard loans across Bayta, Bayt Furik and Qabalan.

“From the Hands of the Peasants” and “Salam Moneylending Contracts” (lines 3028-3099): moneylending became the defining factor in urban-rural relations over the nineteenth century, propelled after the internal conflicts of the late 1790s-1823 by large capital investment in a soap industry that more than tripled in size and by increased olive-oil exports, and reinforced by the merchant community’s political coming of age — by the late 1830s merchants had infiltrated the soap-factory owners and the tax farmers, and by the 1850s a fluid merchant-dominated alliance of merchants, ruling families and top religious leaders had emerged, united against the peasants because almost all engaged in moneylending and soap manufacture. Salam’s mechanics are set out from the Nimr family papers: an advance at a reduced fixed price, delivery in kind regardless of the harvest-time market price, and a hidden interest tied to the waiting period — Ahmad Agha Nimr’s January 1828 contract advanced four Salim peasants 1,025 piasters for 100 jars at 10.25 piasters a jar over ten months, against an average open-market price of 23 piasters. Contracts were drafted in a majlis al-aqd, appear in no state or court archive, and were practically unchallengeable when they technically fulfilled Hanafi conditions — only one of the dozens of salam disputes of 1850-1870 raised usury, and its defendant lost. Alongside the Nimrs’ traditional production contracts, the social base widened: by the 1840s almost anyone with capital could lend, as the retail grain merchant Abd al-Rahman Qan’ir’s 1861 estate shows — eighteen outstanding loans, all to Salim peasants, combining salam and qard, collateral in land, draft animals and maris-land shares, a network of dependency among eighteen families that paved the way for urban investment in rural production and for land’s commoditization — and even a poor upholsterer and a small retailer held salam contracts in 1861-1864.

“Moneylending and Production for Overseas Markets” and “Moneylending, Taxation, and Olive-Based Villages” (lines 3100-3159): the Jaffa Christian 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 a third of the profit promised to the peasant, who had travelled to Jaffa and negotiated it a season before French sesame imports rose — shows salam benefiting both parties when an outside merchant had to lure peasants past local networks; Nabulsi oil merchants’ contracts, facing no such need, were characterized by low prices, no profit sharing and the constant threat of enforcement. Elizabeth Anne Finn’s probably exaggerated Bayt Jala story — a father-in-law’s bond to the soap merchant Sulayman Asali doubling deficient jars year on year until eighty jars were owed — introduces the taxation-moneylending vicious circle, posed as a dilemma for the central highlands’ olive villages by a more intrusive state’s efficient tax collection, a tax season timed to the grain harvest months before olives matured, frayed patronage ties with rural ruling families, and oil merchants’ new political power and aggressiveness. Two Jerusalem court documents follow: the September 6, 1833 salam in which Shaykh Husayn Abd al-Hadi’s agent contracted with Bayt Jala’s whole population for 1,000 jars for 30,000 piasters of treasury money, probably to cook soap for the Egyptian military; and Salama Makhluf’s March 15, 1835 suit, seven years after the event, in which a well-to-do middle peasant recovered 128 jars and 1,175 piasters from his own village’s shaykhs — a conflict between a middle peasant and leaders resting on kinship and seniority that symbolizes the rural sphere’s tensions. The Jaba petition of fall 1851, sent directly to Jerusalem’s governor Hafiz Pasha against the village’s own shaykhs, and Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi’s December 28, 1851 council reply are then read closely: the same unnamed merchant had paid Jaba’s taxes two years running, at 953 jars at 36.7 piasters a jar and then 1,330 jars at about 23 piasters, a hidden interest in the falling price; the council’s “usual practice” framing is qualified as a possibly recent practice defended by a consciously arrogated monopoly in tradition’s meanings, against the background of the Jarrar clan’s 1848 split and Mahmud Beik’s factional appointment six weeks earlier; and the council’s vagueness — the merchant unnamed, the negotiation unexplained, the one person escaping recrimination the moneylender — is traced to council members’ own soap interests.

“A Forced Marriage?”, “Polarization” and “Integration” (lines 3160-3219): urban-rural relations grew at once more intertwined and more riven. Muhammad Rafiq Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat’s 1916 tour frames the polarization: Salfit’s complaints, the Dayr Istiya sayings (“Nablus is the seat of corruption”; “wash after you shake hands with a Nabulsi”), and their report’s finding that most wealthy Nabulsis lent at 60-70 percent a year — qualified as modern-nationalist accounts that portray peasants as one-dimensional victims and moneylending as new, when what was new was its context. Integration is measured through the Nablus court’s social composition: peasants virtually absent until the later 1830s, a small wave then (mostly land disputes, following the Egyptian occupation), a trickle, and a flood from the late 1850s (moneylending suits first, land disputes a close second, peasants suing peasants, and peasant women bringing inheritance cases) — the second wave distinguished by the 1858 land law, the rural middle class’s coming of age, and increased pressures on land. The women’s cases show the contradiction the new legal sphere created: concentration and market relations encouraged disinheriting sole female heirs, while the urban court made Islamic inheritance rules more enforceable, and women actively precipitated the change by bringing the cases — as Salman al-Dabbak’s wife, daughter and mother did in September 1860 over four cows, 23 pieces of land and a house, losing on the defendant’s two witnesses.

“Commoditization of Land” (lines 3160-3279): most agricultural land technically belonged to the state, peasants holding usufruct so long as the land did not lie fallow more than three years, while treating it as their own — a conception a minority jurist school (Ramli, Ibn Abidin) also supported. Peasants mortgaged, rented and sold usufruct rights (a 1724 Askar mortgage costing a peasant seven years’ control of two timar pieces for a 25-piaster debt; Yusuf al-Asmar’s May 29, 1837 cession of a Khirbat Balata piece to Sulayman Abd al-Hadi for 700 piasters, in wording that sold the right, not the land), and judges’ quandaries followed, as in the April/May 1860 shuf’a case, where an earlier sale of state land was vindicated while preemption over it was denied. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 is argued to have been not an initiator of new land-tenure relations but a recognition of the need to contain ongoing processes: its intent — streamlining tax collection and protecting small landownership — was defeated by the pre-existing market infrastructure, urban notables’ dominance, and the new merchant elite’s power; peasants’ own refusal to register, fearing taxation and conscription, eased notables’ claims. Conversions of state land into full private property are evidenced from the late 1830s, in two Abd al-Hadi family waves of 1836-1840 (the May 27, 1838 sale to Muhammad Abd al-Hadi for 29,500 piasters, from more than fifty sellers of four villages, including women, absent recruits and orphans); merchants entered heavily only from the 1850s, first around the city, then in nearby villages’ olive groves, then in the dry belt — many appropriations coming directly from salam defaults enforced by the whole urban apparatus, as in Abd al-Rahman al-Shaykh Husayn’s April 1864 Aqraba suit and Hajj Yusuf Bishtawi’s pursuit of a runaway debtor’s sheep, movables and, in 1865, his guarantor’s vine-orchard. Khawaja Khalil Mitri’s unregistered August 1, 1852 purchase of Kafr Bayta state lands from Abd al-Rahman and Mustafa for 10,000 piasters — deducting 4,420 piasters owed to him and 1,420 owed to Qasim al-Nabulsi, the land resold three years later to Abd al-Fattah Agha Nimr, again unregistered — shows the traffic already beyond the court’s control; an 1855 decree ordering registration on pain of nullity went unheeded, and ruling families’ own claims (amir Faris al-Harithy’s July 30, 1852 request to notarize his ownership against peasants cultivating valley lands by ihya al-mawat) show the pressure ran both ways.

“Redefining Identity and Political Authority,” “Islam, the Rural Middle Class, and the Subdistrict Chiefs” and “Resistance and Notions of Justice” (lines 3220-3372; the chapter Conclusion begins at line 3358 and continues past line 3372): commercialization and moneylending undermined the old patronage networks, the cash nexus spread horizontal connections at vertical loyalties’ expense, and peasants’ notions of identity, legitimacy, authority and justice were incrementally redefined. The subdistrict chiefs’ decline is attributed not solely to Egyptian and Ottoman centralization from above: economically, the rural middle class reproduced urban business practices at village level (the May 19, 1849 Burqa-Kafr al-Labad mudaraba dividing 743 piasters of profit on 4,000 of capital invested through salam in oil, wheat and barley); culturally, it appropriated orthodox, urban Islam and Hanafi law — universal, commerce-celebrating, and practically detailed — to protect its networks, a process hastened by village mosque-building and the 1850s introduction of Islamic courts into seat villages; politically, villagers used the urban court against the chiefs themselves, as Odeh al-Bab did against Shaykh Isma’il al-Burqawi on March 18, 1861, and as the rich Jaba villager Abdullah al-Hammud did in reverse on April 29, 1864, recovering 6,300 piasters from Shaykh Ibrahim Jarrar, his own chief enrolled as his mudaraba agent. The chiefs were not wholly marginalized but were transformed into appendages of the urban elite and servants of the state, their title shrinking from shaykh al-nahiya to muhassil, their appointment by letter and council oath — contested, as the Sidon governor’s December 20, 1850 letter rebuking unsalaried chiefs’ exactions, and their salary plea in reply, show. The Asira al-Shamiyya petition of early February 1852 is then read in full against the council’s memorandum: the petitioners, having paid taxes “to the last penny (para),” accused Ahmad al-Yusuf Jarrar of imprisoning ten of their people over eight days to satisfy “his aim for bribery” and asked Jerusalem’s governor to order the tax books checked and Jarrar removed; the council answered that the village owed the oil merchant Muhammad Abu Hijli — himself a recently relocated member of the rural middle class — a salam debt, that villagers had stoned the collecting cavalryman’s representative, breaking his sword and pistol, and that four ringleaders had been imprisoned for a lesson (min ajl al-tarbiya) and released once 120 piasters of damages were paid. Both petitions, Doumani argues, deliberately bypassed the council, echoed the Tanzimat’s equality before the law, portrayed native-son rulers as public servants with a limited mandate, and claimed the state’s protection as tax-paying citizens — while pointedly omitting the salam debt that underlay the dispute, hoping to deal with the merchant on their own terms; the state’s own protective orders of 1841-1850 (cancelling illegal taxes, forbidding eviction of debtors, the December 2, 1850 order that “those who are not coreligionists are [still] brothers in the fatherland”) supplied the language, and the council’s conservative response — shoring up the notables rather than effecting change — showed the authorities choosing the status quo. The Conclusion, as far as read, sets the olive tree, today a Palestinian national icon whose political significance has risen in inverse proportion to its material importance, against the chapter’s findings: differentiation, integration, land commoditization and monetization, all driven by pervasive moneylending, dominated even the slower-assimilating highland olive villages by the early nineteenth century; the rural middle class, not only urban merchants, drove the processes from within; and the heightened tensions acquired some characteristics of class struggle, the petitions’ tax-paying-citizen language precipitating the very state involvement the reforms are usually credited with initiating.

Key passages

• “cornered all cotton stocks, forbade all sales, and became sole master of the market” — Volney on Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar’s Acre monopoly, quoted by Doumani (lines 2167-2330)

• “We must…reduce the taxation of our subjects and impose it on the foreigners.” — Haim Farhi’s advice to Sulayman Pasha al-Adil, quoted by Doumani (lines 2167-2330)

• “The busy hum of the cotton gins greeted us on all sides, and heaps of cotton husks lay about the streets.” — H. B. Tristram on Nablus in the early 1860s, quoted by Doumani (lines 2390-2529)

• “Moneylending and borrowing have brought conditions of slavery to our constitutional lands” — Muhammad Rafiq Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat, quoted by Doumani (lines 3160-3219)

• “The Olive is the physical document of history” — David Urquhart, quoted by Doumani (lines 3340-3372)

• “those who are not coreligionists are [still] brothers in the fatherland [ikhwan fi al-watan]” — the mutasarrif of Jerusalem’s order of December 2, 1850, quoted by Doumani (lines 3340-3372)

• “Local industry was undermined in inverse proportion to [the import of] Western manufactures.” — Ihsan Nimr, quoted by Doumani (lines 2390-2529)

• “This book attempts to write the inhabitants of Palestine into history.” (lines 66-79)

• “Arab agriculture did not change its traditional character throughout the nineteenth century. German and Jewish settlers introduced some innovations, but subsistence farming continued to be the predominant type of agriculture in the country, and the growing of cash crops was rare.” — Gabriel Baer, quoted by Doumani (lines 148-171)

• “The Turkish Mediterranean [in the sixteenth century] lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian…with identical problems and general trends if not the same consequences.” — Fernand Braudel, quoted by Doumani (lines 172-189)

• “no one from our land has remained, even a few days, in this most interesting district, visited and passed through by hundreds of British travellers, for pleasure, but cared for by none” — James Finn, quoted by Doumani (lines 190-198)

• “Olive oil was literally liquid capital” (lines 459-495)

• “Send us the cloak immediately…for you are well aware that there is a wedding coming up at Abu Muhammad’s; and a new cloak is important for a good image because strangers as well as relatives will be present.” — Uthman Abd al-Wahhab, quoted in Chapter 2’s epigraph and in full in “Weddings” (lines 1173-1178, lines 1366-1491)

• “All or most of the Arafats are textile merchants; they have not transcended this fate.” — Najib Arafat, quoted by Doumani (lines 1231-1284)

• “I worked with textiles since I opened my eyes.” — Najib Arafat, quoted by Doumani (lines 1285-1365)

• “The poor soul is forced to submit and God is Great, God is Great.” — from the Talluza peasants’ satirical oration al-Tarabish wa al-Barabish, quoted by Doumani (lines 1492-1556)

• “No district in Syria has been more turbulent and less manageable to the Turkish government, than that of Nablus and the surrounding villages” — John Mills, quoted in Chapter 1 note 6 (lines 677-843)

Evidence the work relies on

• Nablus Islamic Court Records (NICR), including the firmans, petitions and registrations on the 1798-1801 levy (vol. 6), appointments and tax records, as presented in the Introduction and Chapter 1 and their notes.

• Nablus majlis al-shura (Advisory Council) Records (NMSR), spanning 1848-1853, including the 1850 administrative table (pp. 76-77, 167), the 1853 qirabiyyin price letter (p. 307) and the 1853 Jamma’in suspects letter.

• Private family papers, including the Tuqan Family Papers and Ihsan Nimr’s collection and his Tarikh Jabal Nablus wa al-Balqa (NIMR), the source of Shaykh Yusuf Jarrar’s 1799 poem (1:210-211).

• Jerusalem Islamic Court Records (JICR) for the Jabal al-Quds and Jabal al-Khalil leaders’ pledges of fighters (281:130-136).

• Ottoman population counts for Nablus, as treated in Doumani’s “The Political Economy of Population Counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, circa 1850,” IJMES 26 (1994).

• Arafat Family Papers, including the textile orders, letters from peasant customers and agents (Jaba, April 7, 1901; Uthman Abd al-Wahhab; Sa’id Hajj Zubayda, April 24, 1900; Hajj Ahmad Isma’il Abu Hijli, January 10, 1900) and the debt contract of November 23, 1879, as presented in Chapter 2.

• The memoirs of Muhammad Izzat Darwaza, Mi’at am filastiniyya (One Hundred Palestinian Years), and of Malik Masri, Nabulsiyat, and John Mills, Three Months’ Residence, as presented in Chapter 2 and its notes.

• Western consular reports and travellers’ accounts as used by Alexander Schölch and quoted in Chapter 1 (Finn, Mills, Thomas, Crosby, Tristram), and the secondary literature cited in the Introduction’s notes (Hourani, Owen, Schölch, Rafeq, Barbir, Cohen, Abu-Husayn and others).

• Ibrahim Danafi al-Samiri’s eyewitness account of the 1771 siege of Nablus, as presented in Chapter 3.

• Nablus majlis al-shura Records (NMSR) correspondence on the movement of taxes-in-kind (zakhayir) in 1849-1852 — Adham Pasha’s letter of September 18, 1849, the 1851 cotton-seed distribution, the cotton-seed tax letter of September 9, 1852, and the Halawani, Najjar and “Escowage” disputes — as presented in Chapter 3.

• John Bowring, Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria, Table 4’s source (pp. 13-14), and the trade tables adapted from Roger Owen, Alexander Schölch (Tables 1.3 and 1.7 of “European Penetration”) and Halil Inalcik (Table 17.2 of “When and How”), as presented in Chapter 3.

• Nablus Islamic Court Records (NICR) inheritance inventories for weavers, merchants and artisans (Hajj Yasin Taha and Dali daughter of Bakur, 1833; Hasan son of Salah Zakar, 1806; Shaykh Abdullah Fityani, 1840), as presented in Chapter 3.

• Nimr Family Papers’ salam contracts (including Ahmad Agha Nimr’s January 1828 Salim contract) and the August 1, 1852 Mitri land purchase, supplemented by Nablus Islamic Court lawsuits and inheritance estates (Abd al-Rahman Qan’ir, 1861; Abd al-Al al-Masri, 1861; Sa’id al-Ra’i, 1863; Hajj Rajab Abi Suwwan, 1864), as presented in Chapter 4.

• Jerusalem Islamic Court Records (JICR) for Bayt Jala: the September 6, 1833 government salam for 1,000 jars and Salama Makhluf’s March 15, 1835 testimony, as presented in Chapter 4.

• Nablus Advisory Council correspondence on the Jaba petition (Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi’s reply of December 28, 1851) and the Asira al-Shamiyya petition (the council’s February 1852 memorandum), together with the central authorities’ protective orders of June 24, 1841 and December 1850, as presented in Chapter 4.

• Muhammad Rafiq Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat, Wilayat Bayrut survey of 1916-1917 as quoted in Chapter 4, and Elizabeth Anne Finn’s Bayt Jala account, as presented in Chapter 4.

Analysis

The part read so far is programmatic and scene-setting: it states the book’s method (local sources read as literary texts, chapters organized by the social lives of commodities), its historiographical targets (the decline thesis, the incorporation narrative’s periphery’s periphery, and the shared nationalist assumption of Ottoman-period discontinuity), and its political-history frame (four turning points from 1657 to 1859 in a slow, multilayered centralization). Its central analytic move is to relocate mediation between centre and locality from Hourani’s notables as officeholders to interior merchants as organizers of credit, production and trade. The claims in this part rest largely on the court, council and family-paper records introduced here; their detailed testing is assigned to the commodity chapters that follow.

Chapter 2, read in this part, is the book’s first commodity study worked in full, and it carries the Introduction’s program into evidence: the Arafat case study is built from inheritance estates, waqf documents, lawsuits and the family’s own papers, supplemented by the Darwaza and Masri memoirs and interviews with family members (Najib, Saba, Hani and Ibtihaj Arafat), and Doumani flags the limits of that base himself — the estate percentages rest on a small absolute number of registered cases because most merchant estates were probably never registered in the court, and Saba Arafat’s recollections are marked as admittedly sympathetic. The chapter’s central claim — that merchant-peasant networks were negotiated, culturally reproduced social spaces rather than one-way exploitation — is argued from the texture of the letters and lodging, credit and collection practices it quotes, including the peasant counter-voice of the Talluza satire; the same evidence also documents the asymmetry it qualifies, in verbal contracts, receiptless deposits and the 30 percent interest and forced early sale imposed on indebted Burqin growers.

Chapter 3, read in this part, is the book’s second commodity study and its first worked test of the incorporation question: cotton’s story is told as a succession of trade politics — Acre’s monopoly, its decline from above and below, and “free trade” as a contested regime rather than an absence of politics — each link in the movement, measurement, storage, sale and transport of commodities treated as a contested arena among peasants, village brokers, Nabulsi merchants, regional trading houses, European traders and a reorganizing Ottoman state. Its textile half argues restructuring against Deindustrialization from the same local base (court inventories, council correspondence, Nimr) supplemented by the Owen, Schölch, Inalcik and Kurmus trade tables, whose limits are flagged in the text itself: Table 4 is a one-year snapshot, Table 5 is full of unknown entries, Table 6’s record-keeping was irregular, and the forced-cultivation doubling figures are only guesses.

Chapter 4, read in this part, is the book’s third commodity study and the full working-out of the Salam system the Introduction promised: because salam contracts survive only in private family papers, the chapter’s evidentiary base shifts from the court and council registers to the Nimr papers’ contracts, read against lawsuits, inheritance estates and the two petitions it quotes at length. Its central analytic moves are to disaggregate “the peasantry” — a Rural middle class of village moneylenders, agents and partnership investors mediates merchant capital and drives differentiation from within — and to reverse the usual causal arrows twice over: the 1858 land code ratified a land market that moneylending and the Abd al-Hadis’ purchases had already created, and peasant petitions invoking Tanzimat citizenship helped precipitate the state involvement the reforms are usually credited with initiating. Doumani flags the base’s limits as he goes: Finn’s Bayt Jala story was probably exaggerated by informant and writer alike, the court records are an admittedly biased urban perspective whose waves need not mirror actual practice, the Jaba merchant is never named in the council’s letter, and the questions that letter raises cannot be easily answered.

People, organizations, places and events

Muhammad Rafiq Tamimi, Muhammad Bahjat, Khawaja Khalil Mitri, Rummani family, Ottoman Land Code of 1858, Beshara Doumani, Sulayman Pasha al-Adil, Haim Farhi, Ibrahim Danafi al-Samiri, Roger Owen, Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention (1838), Arafat family, Hajj Isma’il Arafat, Muhammad Izzat Darwaza, Malik Masri, Khan al-Tujjar, Ihsan Nimr, Yusuf Jarrar, Gabriel Baer, Alexander Schölch, Albert Hourani, Zahir al-Umar, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ibrahim Pasha, Tuqan family, Nimr family, Jarrar clan, Abd al-Hadi family, Nablus Advisory Council, Jabal Nablus, Nablus, Acre, Jenin

Concepts

Politics of notables, Politics of monopoly, Deindustrialization, Rural middle class, Commoditization of land, ‘Urf, Hamula, Dawra, Tanzimat, Salam, Kiswa, Timar, Iltizam

How it relates to other sources

• Doumani supplies an Ottoman-period social and economic history of the Nablus interior that the wiki’s Mandate- and 1948-centred sources presuppose: the Nablus of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation and the 1936-1939 rebellion of The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine are here traced to a region Doumani describes as playing a leading role in the 1936-1939 rebellion and shaped by merchant-peasant networks and a tradition of autonomy (lines 410-445).
• His critique of the shared nationalist assumption of discontinuity from the Ottoman past runs parallel to, and is cited within, the historiographical critiques in The Question of Palestine (Doumani cites Said and Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims, in Introduction note 22).

Open questions

• The text says Palestine was divided into “five districts” after 1516 and then lists six names — Safad, Nablus, Jerusalem (Quds al-Sharif), Gaza, Ajlun and Lajjun (lines 496-526). Kept as printed.

• Table 1’s blank village counts (lines 577-620): resolved by checking the HTML original in raw/ — the cells for Sanjaq Nablus, Sha’rawiyya (east) and Wadi al-Sha’ir (east) are empty in the original table, not lost in the text copy, and the printed figures sum to 213 (computed), the total stated in the text.

• Shaykh Yusuf Jarrar’s name is spelled “Shaykh Yusf” once in the Introduction to Chapter 1’s poem discussion (lines 367-380). Kept as printed.

• Nimr’s account that Nabulsi fighters entered besieged Acre in 1799 is flagged by Doumani (Chapter 1 note 13) as unconfirmed and possibly originating in a similar incident in 1832.

• The two epigraphs opening Chapter 1 are unattributed in the text copy read so far; their sources may appear in the chapter notes continuing past line 843.

• Whether the name Palestine was commonly used by the native population for a specific territory before the late nineteenth century is stated by Doumani (Introduction note 1) to await systematic investigation.

• The Jaba debt contract of November 23, 1879 (lines 1366-1491) prices a bundle (farda) of foreign-made calico at 3210.10 and foreign-made yarn at 487.10, which sum to 3697.20 (computed), but gives the total twice as 3739.20 and “Only 3,739 piasters and no more.” Kept as printed.

• The April 24, 1900 letter of Sa’id Hajj Zubayda prints its gaps as ellipses (for example “5 manadil [head kerchiefs], red…” and “your most distinguished person…our father”), with no other rendering; the January 10, 1900 letter of Hajj Ahmad Isma’il Abu Hijli renders its three unclear words as ”…[word not clear]” (“one-half…[word not clear] to our brother Yusuf”; “If you have any…[word not clear] liras”; “I don’t think that…[word not clear] is empty”). An earlier version of this entry described words in these letters as rendered ""; that rendering is not in the text copy and the entry is corrected here.

• Chapter 1 notes cite Rafeq, Province of Damascus, at pp. 4–1 (lines 844-1172), as printed. Chapter 2 note 26 prints “mustbe” and “facili-ties” (lines 1492-1686), and Najib Arafat’s recollection in Chapter 2 prints “Myfather” (lines 1285-1365); the western/eastern colors passage prints “the easter part” (lines 1366-1491). Kept as printed.

• Chapter 2’s second epigraph — “You could say that Nablus, surrounded by villages on all sides, was a port for the peasants, and every hinterland region had a merchant it depended on” (lines 1173-1178) — is unattributed in the part read so far; the first epigraph is identified in “Weddings” as the postscript of Uthman Abd al-Wahhab’s letter. The two Chapter 1 epigraphs likewise remain unattributed after the completion of Chapter 1’s notes in this part (superseding the earlier note that their sources might appear in those notes).

• Chapter 3’s two epigraphs are unattributed at the chapter head (lines 2088-2105); within the chapter the first is identified as the Sidon governor’s 1850 collection instruction quoted in “Merchants, the State, and the Movement of Commodities,” and the second as Bowring’s list of locally produced textile products (“Bowring’s list of locally produced textile products in the epigraph of this chapter,” lines 2390-2529).

• Owen’s figures for Ottoman imports of British twists and yarns (1,700,000 pounds in 1831 to nearly 6,350,000 in 1850) are substantially higher than Inalcik’s in Table 6 (yarn 3,272 thousand pounds in 1835 and 5,830 in 1845, with 1840 and 1850 entries given differently); Doumani records both and treats only the trend as certain (lines 2390-2529).

• Tables 4 and 5 as printed leave entries unknown: Table 4 gives ”?” for Latakia and for Acre and Jaffa (lines 2167-2330), and Table 5 gives ”?” for most Jaffa years before 1860 and for Acre and Haifa after 1863 (lines 2167-2330). Kept as printed.

• Printed slips in this part, kept as printed: “soap was sometimes was used” in Chapter 2’s notes (lines 1900-2166); “NICR, 6.198” with a period (lines 1900-2166); “betweenthe eastern and western slopes” in Chapter 2’s notes (lines 1900-2166); “and as well as of the port city of Jaffa” (lines 1900-2166); “Sh’arawiyya al-Gharbiyya” for Sha’rawiyya (lines 2167-2330); “This is the order we received in this regards” in Adham Pasha’s September 18, 1849 letter (lines 2331-2389); “such achallenge” for “such a challenge” (lines 2331-2389); “cotton cloths from Nablous” in the Buckingham quotation (lines 2390-2529).

• The Asira al-Shamiyya petition and the council’s memorandum give different numbers of imprisoned villagers: the petition says Ahmad al-Yusuf Jarrar’s cavalrymen “picked ten persons” who had been imprisoned for more than eight days (lines 3280-3339), while the council’s answer says an investigation found four who headed the movement and that they were imprisoned and then released (lines 3280-3339). Kept side by side.

• The Jaba petition as relayed in the council’s reply accuses the shaykhs of forcing promissory notes for 1,200 jars for this year and 1,400 for next year, while the council’s own account gives contracts of 953 jars and 1,330 jars (lines 3100-3159). Kept side by side.

• Printed slips in this part, kept as printed: “could also been seen” in Chapter 3’s Conclusion (lines 2530-3027); “pp, 73” in Chapter 3 note 21 (lines 2530-3027); Finn’s soap merchant as both “Sulayman Asali” and “Sulaiman Assali” in the same passage (lines 3100-3159); “Themost” and “a smatteringof” and “weredesignated” (lines 3160-3219); “new realties” for realities (lines 3280-3339); the interviewee of Chapter 3’s notes as “Abu llaya” (lines 2530-3027) against “Abu Alayya” as printed in Chapter 2’s notes, and Hamid Abu Aysha’s interview dated “August, 10, 1990” (lines 2530-3027).

• Whether the incentives in Khawaja Khalil Mitri’s 1851 sesame salam — paid transport and a one-third profit share — were an isolated case or typical of coastal merchants’ dealings with interior peasants is stated by Doumani to be uncertain; he judges typicality more likely (lines 3100-3159).

• Chapter 4’s Conclusion continues past line 3372 and its notes are not yet read; the merchant in the Jaba contracts is never named in the council’s reply, and Doumani raises, without answering, whether he could have been a council member (lines 3100-3159).

Coverage

lines 1-3372 of 5900, read in parts 1-4 of 7