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

Doumani, Beshara. Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. 340 pp.

This social history of the Palestinian town of Nablus and its hinterland is organized around the "social life" of three commodities: cotton (and textiles), olive oil, and soap. Given the non-chronological approach of the study and its astute questioning of abrupt turning points, the span of the two centuries in the title is covered in a loose sense. The discussion of the eighteenth century is synoptic, and references to the post1860 period are slight. The implications of Doumani's work, however, are far reaching. The book offers new methodological avenues, challenges prevalent scholarly assumptions, and debunks ideological distortions of Palestinian history.

"This book attempts to write the inhabitants of Palestine into history" is the first sentence of the study; and the last sentence posits that the politics of Palestinian identity cannot be understood without proper knowledge of economic, social, and cultural relations in Palestine during the Ottoman period. Much to his credit, Doumani extricates himself from polemics in this highly textured and sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of Palestine's interior. The rigor of the scholarship buttressed by keen analytical insight and compelling original data (culled from family papers, documents of the Nablus Advisory Council, and Islamic court records), all woven together with the most elegant of prose, speaks for itself

Doumani's focus is on the merchants and peasants of Nablus after about 1820, when the production and export of cotton had already placed Nablus in the world capitalist economy and led to capital accumulation. This capital was not effectively invested because of political crises having to do with the rise of autonomous rulers in adjacent Acre. Despite such political vicissitudes, the picture Doumani draws of Jabal Nablus during most of the cotton era is one of internal social and political harmony in decentralization. In the seemingly ordered universe of Nablus (spared the brunt of the expansionist zeal of Acre's local potentates), networks of merchants and peasants that derived from personal ties and informal business contracts, based on trust and sustained by communal law, prevailed. Textile merchants with access to agricultural and industrial production enriched themselves by dominating the countryside through credit arrangements with a large number of peasants. In the 1830s, when Syria got under Egyptian rule, the merchants of Nablus gained advantages over foreign merchants beyond the closely-knit and patronage-based networks, as they came to control the advisory council set up by the Egyptian administration. Though Nablus emerged as the cultivation and production center of Palestinian cotton in the 1830s, sustained growth in the cotton sector suffered from coastal and international competition, but also from the emergence of other and more profitable opportunities for capital investment, foremost in olive oil and soap.

Olive oil trade and soap production were not new to Nablus. There were no significant changes in methods of cultivation of trees, in the technology of soap production, or in the structure and extent of the markets. The comparative advantage of Nablus in terms of resources (suitable land, abundant water, availability of the barilla plant, a source for alkaline soda needed in soap production) was what it had always been. Olive-oil-related ventures proved to be ideal for the capital that was accumulating in the hands of Nabulsi merchants in the first half of the nineteenth century. Advance purchase contracts and money lending arrangements assured to them a stable and cheap supply of olive oil. Indigenous merchant capital that flowed into olive oil trade and soap industry expanded production and transformed social and political relations in Jabal Nablus, making the town the largest trade and manufacturing town in Palestine by 1850. Backed by centralizing administrative and legal practices of first the Egyptian administration and, after the 1840s, of the Ottoman government, the merchants appropriated land and real estate. In alliance with urban notable families the merchants enhanced their political power and came to dominate the Nablus Advisory Council. The merchants also managed to infiltrate the soap industry by purchasing soap factories from urban ruling families. The social composition of the urban elite was transformed with the ascendance of these commercial elements engaged in trade, landowning, money lending, and manufacturing.

The expansion of the olive oil economy was conducive also to peasant differentiation and the emergence of a class of "middle peasants" who replicated urban money lending practices in the countryside to prosper and, in their turn, challenge the social predominance of local chiefs. They catalyzed the integration of the countryside to the city as active participants, conscious of their economic interests and seeking to promote them in negotiation with urban commercial elements.