POOR GEOGRAPHICAL ASSESSMENT IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE

Poor Geographical Assessment in Ottoman Palestine Arno Rosenfeld Student No: 56124126 Geography 121: Geography, Modernity and Globalization

POOR GEOGRAPHICAL ASSESSMENT IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE

Pick one case of colonial or imperial rule and explain both the ways the colonial or imperial power imposed authority and the forms of autonomy and power that colonial societies retained and exercised. Consider in particular the ways in which power was expressed and contested geographically through surveys, settlement systems and the structuring of space. Imperial control of Palestine by the Ottomans from 1512-1914 is an example of the failure of an imperial power to effectively geographically assess, and thus better control, their holdings. The central Ottoman government struggled to assert serious control of the Palestine region, especially when it came to agricultural and land reform. This stemmed in large part from their inability to successfully measure the land in a cohesive way, either through mapping, land registries or other forms of geographical surveys.1 The Ottoman empire encompassed all of what is now the modern state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, as well as the territory surrounding. While Filastin, the Arabic word for the region employed by the Ottomans, appeared on some maps of the empire, for many centuries the are was ruled from Beirut as part of a larger region2. Despite not being clearly delineated, due to its religious significance, the region was more documented by nineteenth-century European geographers than any other area of comparable size.3 That extensive documentation gives us a geographical framework to draw boundaries for the purpose of understanding Ottoman administration in the area. According to Israeli geographer Gideon Biger's study of Palestine's definition in European, Russian and American encyclopedias of the nineteenth-century, the generally agreed upon border of Palestine covered approximately 10,000 square miles. It was bounded in the north by the lower Litani River and in the northeast by the southern foot of Mount Hermon. The eastern border was either the Jordan River
1 Inalcik, H., & Quataert, D. (Eds.). (1994). An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2 Biger, G. (1981). Where Was Palestine? Pre-World War I Perception. Area, 13(2), 153. 3 Goren, H. (2002). Sacred, but Not Surveyed: Nineteenth-Century Surveys of Palestine. Imago Mundi, 54, 88

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or somewhere just east over the river. The southern border passed from the Wadi Arnon through the southern point of the Dead Sea and Beersheba, west toward the mouth of Wadi Gaza.4 As Biger puts it, Palestine was an ill-defined yet familiar area.5 This paper will discuss methods of Ottoman rule primarily through an examination of their taxation and land registry policies within the region defined by Biger and illustrated below. Understandings of Palestine's location based on encyclopedias from various countries.6

The Ottoman empire's revenue structure was based almost exclusively on agriculture from its formation in the 1300's until its dissolution following the first World War.7 Thus, the Ottoman system of land-management, including how they assigned land and taxed agricultural revenue, was the greatest form of imperial authority expressed in Palestine. The Ottomans applied a system of land-management known as cift-hane across their empire.8 The cift-hane system first categorized all arable land as miri.
4 Biger, 158 5 Biger, 158 6 Biger, 157 7 Inalcik & Quataert, 847 8 Inalcik & Quataert, 996

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Miri land officially belonged to God, but was overseen by the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople.9 The miri land was leased out to local peasants who were taxed on what they grew on the land as well as conscripted into the Ottoman army.10 The cift-hane system included other elements but for the purposes of understanding Ottoman authority in Palestine, the aspect of leasing and taxing miri land is most relevant. The problems with the cift-hane system itself were plentiful, especially in Palestine. Since the miri land was state-owned, the Ottomans taxed peasants only on what they grew on the land, as opposed to the property itself. This meant there was no incentive for agricultural innovation, as the taxation system penalized higher yields with higher taxes.11 The flaws in the Ottoman-imposed system were compounded by the local traditions of land cultivation that persisted under Ottoman rule in many areas of Palestine. The mushaa system of collective ownership was the primary way land, including miri land, was distributed among villagers in Palestine. Unlike the Commons in Britain, where the land was collectively by villagers used simultaneously, the mushaa system distributed plots of land for the exclusive use of one family through a lottery system that repeated itself annually.12 Farmers did not cultivate their land in ways that would improve the yield in future years, since they only farmed their plots once. The problems this caused for agricultural output in Palestine were clear. From 1820-1860, agricultural output across the Ottoman empire sharply increased as new technology was introduced, but the output in Palestine remained flat.13 Early European observers were surprised to find the inhabitants of Palestine living primarily in rural villages in the mountainous parts of the region, away from the fertile valleys and costal areas

Sowards, S. W. (1996). The principles of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. In Twenty-Five Lectures on History. 10 Inalcik & Quataert, 157 11 Inalcik & Quataert, 827 12 Kark, R. (Ed.). (1990). The Land That Became Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 92 13 Inalcik & Quataert, 847

Modern Balkan

POOR GEOGRAPHICAL ASSESSMENT IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE

where farming would have been easier.14 Before the second half of the nineteenth-century there was little Ottoman presence in Palestine, other than to collect taxes and enforce military conscription. In light of this, living in fertile areas like the Jezreel Valley in northern Palestine posed dual risks for the locals.15 First, the Ottomans did not maintain a security presence to protect peasants from raids by the nomadic Bedouins who travelled through the area. Second, when the Ottoman army did come through, or when the government sent representatives to collect taxes and enforce conscription, they had easy access to any settlements located in places like the Jezreel Valley and other fertile areas that would have otherwise seemed natural locations for agricultural settlements. Thus the locals chose to live in more easily fortified mountain villages that were protected from the nomadic raiders and less accessible to the Ottoman tax collectors.16 The Ottomans lost control of the region in other ways as well, with Arab villagers paying protection taxes to the Bedouins and local elites collecting their own taxes, siphoning revenue away from the central Ottoman government.17 With villagers living in small mountain villages and mostly practicing subsistence-agriculture, few urban centers capable of becoming industrialized developed.18 In light of this, agricultural surplus was rare and tax-revenues from Palestine were generally quite low. One might ask why the Ottomans did not make more shrewd decisions such as relocating villagers to more fertile areas, building a robust infrastructure that could handle industrial levels of agricultural production, or in other ways exert their authority in a way that would build up Palestine and provide a stronger revenue base for Constantinople.19 One reason behind this was that no extensive geographical surveys of Palestine were
14 Doumani, B. B. (1992). Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History. Journal of Palestine Studies, 21(2), 11 15 Margalit, H. (1963). Some Aspects of the Cultural Landscape of Palestine During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Israel Exploration Journal, 13(3), 210 16 Margalit, 215 17 Doumani, 12 18 Margalit, 216 19 Biger, G. (1994). An Empire in the Holy Land: Historical Geography of the British Administration of Palestine 19171929. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 29.

POOR GEOGRAPHICAL ASSESSMENT IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE

conducted by the Ottoman government for almost the entirety of Ottoman rule in Palestine. Without a thorough cadastral survey of Palestine, it was nearly impossible for the Ottomans to empirically grasp how, and by whom, the land was being used. This became of some concern to the Ottomans as their empire went into decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. They gradually turned to Western practices, including reforming land laws and attempting cadastral surveys.20 The Ottomans created the Jerusalem-based El-Quds sanjak, or region, in 1856. The new administrative region was intended to herald a new era of closer oversight of, and more revenue from, Palestine. Toward this end, the Ottomans passed The Land Laws of 1858, which revamped the landmanagement system to be more similar to the private-property and enclosure policies in Europe.21 One component of the Land Laws was the mandatory registration of all land in Palestine. But instead of commissioning an official map of the region, the Ottomans simply opened three land registry offices in Palestine and told the locals to come register their land. There was no verification of residents claims on land, resulting in vast inaccuracies in the amount, boundaries, and type of land registered.22 When the Ottomans eventually did set out to map portions of Palestine, in 1869 and 1873, they mapped only the general boundaries of a handful of villages and the number of taxpayers in each.23 They did not map villages in the mountainous regions at all, preserving those villages as less subject to taxation.24 Furthermore, residents quickly realized that the land registration would become the basis for stricter taxation and military conscription policies and attempted to avoid or deceive it.25 The locals realized their best bet at maintaining their autonomy was to avoid cooperation with the Ottoman land registry process. The more confused the Ottoman records were, the less basis they would have for imposing any
20 Inalcik & Quataert, 888 21 Gavish, D., & Kark, R. (1993, March). The Cadastral Mapping of Palestine, 1858-1928. The Geographical Journal, 159(1), 70 22 Gavish & Kark, 71 23 Kark, R. (Winter, 1997). Mamluk and Ottoman Cadastral Surveys and Early Mapping of Landed Properties in Palestine. Agricultural History, 71(1), 58 24 Kark, 58 25 Kark, 62

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changes to society in Palestine, such as the reformation of the mushaa system, which the Ottomans finally came to realize was working against their interests.26 When Ottoman representatives at the land registry offices did set out to map the region, their maps were so disjointed from one another as to be rendered useless for use in any Palestine-wide cadastral survey. As Dov Gavish and Ruth Kark write in their paper on Ottoman mapping of Palestine, The common denominator of these maps is their individual nature, detached from each other or any standard reference system similar to a triangulation network, and none were part of any cadastral system.27 Further underlining the low credibility of the Ottoman land registry system, and the resulting lack of ability to effectively enforce authority in the region, was the fact that Jewish and German settlers, who came from Europe to establish settlements in Palestine starting in the last quarter of the nineteen-century, created their own cadastral surveys and land registries to prove ownership.28 When the British took over Palestine from the Ottomans following World War I, the Jewish and German land registries were given more weight than the vague, incomplete, and often contradictory land registry of the Ottomans.29 In conclusion, the primary way the Ottoman Empire asserted its rule in Palestine was through the cift-hane system of land management. However, the system was dually ineffective. The imposition of Ottoman taxation system did nothing to aid industrialization or progress in Palestine, and further it led to a situation in which the the local inhabitant's most effective strategy of retaining their autonomy was to maintain their traditional lifestyles and avoid improving production techniques that might have allowed for industrialization. Furthermore, they exploited the physical geography of the region by living in areas that were inaccessible to Ottoman government representatives. The ineffectiveness of
26 27 28 29 Kark, 74 Gavish & Kark, 71 Kark, 74 Kark, 78

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the Ottomans in getting a handle on the geography of Palestine led to their remarkable failure to reform the land-management system in Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth-century, and allowed the inhabitants of Palestine to maintain the significant amount of autonomy they had under the flawed cift-hane system that had been in place for years.30

30 Doumani, 12

POOR GEOGRAPHICAL ASSESSMENT IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE

Works Cited

Biger, G. (1994). An Empire in the Holy Land: Historical Geography of the British Administration of Palestine 1917-1929. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

Biger, G. (1981). Where Was Palestine? Pre-World War I Perception. Area, 13(2), 153-160.

Doumani, B. B. (1992). Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History. Journal of Palestine Studies, 21(2), 5-28.

Gavish, D., & Kark, R. (1993, March). The Cadastral Mapping of Palestine, 1858-1928. The Geographical Journal, 159(1), 70-80.

Goren, H. (2002). Sacred, but Not Surveyed: Nineteenth-Century Surveys of Palestine. Imago Mundi, 54, 87-110.

Inalcik, H., & Quataert, D. (Eds.). (1994). An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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Kark, R. (Winter1997). Mamluk and Ottoman Cadastral Surveys and Early Mapping of Landed Properties in Palestine. Agricultural History, 71(1), 46-70. Kark, R. (Ed.). (1990). The Land That Became Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Margalit, H. (1963). Some Aspects of the Cultural Landscape of Palestine During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Israel Exploration Journal, 13(3), 208-233.

Orni, E., & Efrat, E. (1966). Geography of Israel (2nd ed.). Jerusalem, Israel: Israel Program For Scientific Translations Ltd.

Sowards, S. W. (1996). The principles of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. In Twenty-Five Lectures on Modern Balkan History.