Ottoman Palestinian Peasants and the Seeds of Revolt: Agriculture, Property, and Tax Farming, 1552–1720

Previous scholarship about peasants in early Ottoman Palestine often experienced two main historiographic biases, which limited the scholarly accuracy of this particular context. The first is the reactionary nationalistic framework shaped by the contemporary Israeli occupation of Palestine. The second is the top-down approach to studying legal history — a tendency to conceive of a central imperial power unidirectionally shaping the agrarian relations in a rural margin. In attempts to circumvent these reductionist approaches, this article examines land and property policies amongst the rural peasant and merchant populations of south Greater Syria by reviewing a broad range of primary sources, including maps, court registers, fatawa, and firmans (religious decrees from the Ottoman sultans). This study finds its chronological genesis with the first impositions of imperial surveillance and control of rural areas in the 1550s. It concludes with the rise of Zahir al-‘Umar in the 1720s: a local tribal leader who gradually attained political and proprietary autonomy of the Galilee. The presentation is divided into three main topics to understand the causes and effects of these two moments: 1. early Ottoman property law in Palestine, 2. marriage tax as a parallel for land relations, and 3. the local legal responses to Ottoman land tenure policies. I argue that rural populations in Ottoman Palestine were active participants in the legal and bureaucratic systems that mitigated their movement and controlled the body politic of the population, particularly with regard to land cultivators and their proprietary statuses. Through the examination of primary sources, this study broadly tracks the changing relations between imperial Istanbul and provincial Palestine by focusing on the legal and conceptual terrains of property, marriage, and agrarian land reform to understand the resulting migration of peasants to more populated urban areas in the 18th century.