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ABSTRACT
The historiography of the abolition of repartitioned mushāʿ—the practice of parcels substitution among cultivators in peasant communities—is mistakenly traced back to the Ottoman Land Code of 1858. Neither that Code, nor Ottoman land registration, attempted the abolition of this type of mushāʿ. It was instead the abolition ordinances of the British and French Mandatory governments during the 1920s which began a conflict over land titles. The common estimates of that time suggest about 50 per cent of the lands in the Levant were held under repartitioned mushāʿ, but this was an exaggeration for most localities. French officials in Syria and Lebanon were not unanimous in opposing mushāʿ and in practice resorted to a laissez-faire policy. The British, however, annulled the legal titles to large areas of repartitioned mushāʿ lands in Palestine and Transjordan, wrongly believing this would increase investment in and productivity of cultivated lands. Their view was backed by Zionist experts, possibly due to the realization that the abolition of mushāʿ would facilitate Jewish land purchases.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The term ‘Levant’ is not precisely defined in the literature. In this article, the Levant signifies the combined area under the British Mandate in Palestine and Transjordan (from 1922) and the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon (from 1923).
2 Michael Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 50, 70; Roza El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine 1929––1948 (London: Routledge, 2006), 934; Birgit Schäbler, ‘Practicing Musha‘: Common Lands and the Common Good in Southern Syria under the Ottomans and the French’, in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East ed. Roger Owen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 245–46; Lucine Taminian, ‘ʿAin’, in and Part-Time Farming: Agricultural Development in the Zarqa River Basin, Jordan, eds. Martha Mundy and Richard S. Smith (Irbid: Yarmouk University, 1990), 16, 20; Scott Artan, ‘Hamula Organization and Masha’a Tenure in Palestine’, MAN, 21, no. 2 (1986): 271–95; Amos Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate: A Story of Colonial Bungling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 261–66.
3 Martha Mundy, ‘Qada’ ‘Ajlun in the Late Nineteenth Century: Interpreting a Region from the Ottoman Land Registry’, Levant 28 (1986): 84–87.
4 Discussed below.
5 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturalists in Palestine and the Fiscal Measures of Government in Relation Thereto (Jerusalem: Government Printer, also known as ‘The Johnson–Crosbie Report’, July 1930): 44–45, 55. For a similar French perspective in Syria and Lebanon, see Schäbler, ‘Practicing Musha‘,’ 279–81.
6 Schäbler, ‘Practicing Musha‘,’ 281.
7 Martin Bunton, Colonial Land Policies in Palestine 1917–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9.
8 Ibid. See also El-Eini, Mandated Landscape; Warwick P.N. Tyler, State Lands and Rural Development in Mandatory Palestine, 1920–1948 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001).
9 Shukrī ʻArrāf, al-Qarya al-ʻArabiya al-Filasttiniya (Maʻliya: Dar Nashr ‘Ilá al-ʻUmq,’ 1996), 87. Aida Essaid, Zionism and Land Tenure in Mandate Palestine (London: Routledge, 2014). Scott Atran, ‘The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917–1939’, American Ethnologist, 16, no. 4 (1989): 719–744. Amos Nadan, ‘Colonial Misunderstanding of an Efficient Peasant Institution: Land Settlement and Mushāʿ Tenure in Mandate Palestine, 1921–47’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 46, no. 3 (2003): 345–8.
10 Ibid., 9.
11 Haim Gerber, ‘Mushāʿ’, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2nd edition online, accessed in 2017).
12 Ruth Kark, ‘Consequences of the Ottoman Land Law: Agrarian and Privatization Processes in Palestine, 1858–1918’ in and Societies, Social Inequalities and Marginalization: Marginal Regions in the 21st Century, eds. Raghubir Chand, Etienne Nel and Stanko Pelc (Cham: Springer, 2017), 101.
13 Attila Aytekin, ‘Agrarian Relations, Property and Law: An Analysis of the Land Code of 1858 in the Ottoman Empire’, Middle Eastern Studies, 45, no. 6 (2009), 936.
14 Translation of R. C. Tute, President of the Land Court in Jerusalem, The Ottoman Land Laws: With a Commentary on the Ottoman Land Code of 7th Ramadan 1274 (Jerusalem: Greek Convent Press, 1927). The translation of the same Articles by Ongley are similar: F. Ongley, The Ottoman Land Code: Translation from the Turkish (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1892).
A comparable Turkish version is available from the Turkish General Directorate of Mining Affairs: http://www.migem.gov.tr/mevzuat/kanun-dok/1858arazi.pdf
A comparable Arabic version is available from the Jordanian Department of Lands & Surveys: https://www.dls.gov.jo/ar/_layouts/15/download.aspx?SourceUrl=/ar/dlsDocuments/chapter1-ImmovableProperties/low1_1.doc
A comparable Hebrew and French versions can be found at: https://www.nevo.co.il/law_word/Law90/ifrach.pdf.
15 E.g. Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 31; Shaul Ephraim Cohen, The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 34.
16 Electronic in-text searches were conducted to the following sources: R. C. Tute, The Ottoman Land Laws, 9, 17–19, 21. The Arabic version of this law is available online via the Jordanian Department of Lands and Survey (https://www.dls.gov.jo) and via Qistas’s data (http://qistas.com/legislations/jor/view/80757); the relevant sections in Turkish are available via the Turkish Government (http://www.migem.gov.tr).
17 Ongley, The Ottoman Land Code; Tute, The Ottoman Land Laws. The Arabic version of this law is available online via the Jordanian Department of Lands and Survey (https://www.dls.gov.jo) and Qistas’s data (http://qistas.com/legislations/jor/view/80757); a partial version in Turkish is available via the Turkish Government (http://www.migem.gov.tr).
18 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 35, 38. Schäbler, ‘Practising Musha‘’, 278–79; James Long Whitaker, ‘The Union of Demeter with Zeus: Agriculture and Politics in Modern Syria’ (Doctoral thesis, Durham University, 1996), 23–24, 162–74.
19 Susynne McElrone, From the Pages of the Defter: A Social History of Rural Property Tenure and the Implementation of Tanzimat Land Reform in Hebron, Palestine, 1858–1900 (Doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2016), 119, 133–35, 161.
20 Michael Provence, ‘Ottoman and French Mandate Land Registers for the Region of Damascus’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 39, no. 1 (2005), 38.
21 Mahmoud Rajeh Mohammed Abu Al-Wafa, milkiya al-ʾaradi fi qadaʾ ginin, 1858–1918 (MA Thesis on Land Ownership in Jenin, An-Najah National University, 2013), 191–2.
22 Great Britain, Report of the Palestine Royal Commission: Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the United Kingdom Parliament by Command of His Britannic Majesty (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1937), 227. This report also known as the Peel Report, after the Chairman of the Palestine Royal Commission.
23 Tute, The Ottoman Land Laws, 17. For the Young Turk legislation, see also Robert Eisenman, ‘The Young Turk Legislation, 1913–17 and Its Application in Palestine/Israel,’ in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political, Social and Economic Transformation, ed. David Kushner (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1986), 59–73.
24 Tute, The Ottoman Land Laws, 18. In fact, the same two methods of registering repartitioned mushāʿ are mentioned for the Hebron area under the Ottomans in McElrone, From the Pages of the Defter.
25 There is particularly evident in Palestine and Transjordan, but some evidence from Syria hints at a similar tendency: Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 29–35. Ruth Kark and Haim Gerber, ‘Land Registry Maps in Palestine during the Ottoman Period’, Katedra (in Hebrew), 22, (1982): 113–18. McElrone, From the Pages of the Defter. Provence, ‘Ottoman and French Mandate Land Registers for the Region of Damascus’, 36–37.
26 Martin Bunton, ‘Inventing the Status Quo: Ottoman Land-Law during the Palestine Mandate, 1917–1936’, The International History Review, 21 (1999): 38–9.
27 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, 267–70.
28 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 104–05.
29 Schäbler, ‘Practicing Musha‘’, 281.
30 Details on this Committee and its survey was not found; see also El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine 1929–1948, 312, n. 195.
31 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists (Johnson–Crosbie), 44–45. See also Gabriel Baer, Mavo layahasim ha’agrariyim bamizrah hatikhon, 1800–1970 (Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971), 70.
32 Israel State Archives, T/18/35, ‘Expansion of Land Department of Trans-Jordan: Replies to Questionnaire on points on information required by the Advisory Committee of the Colonial Development Fund’ (1935), p. 1. This memorandum was attached to a confidential correspondence between 13 June 1935 and 26 November 1935 between the High Commissioner for Transjordan [and Palestine], Arthur Wauchope, and His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies, Malcolm MacDonald. Note that saying that the argument that the majority of arable lands were held in mushāʿ seems to be an overestimate—with no parallel survey of land—while the data provided by Fischbach mentioned below record less mushāʿ in Transjordan.
33 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 68.
34 For the reduction of mushāʿ as a result of the land reform, see Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan; Martin Bunton, ‘Demarcating the British Colonial State: Land Settlement in the Palestine Jiftlik Villages of Sajad and Qazaza’, in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, ed., Roger Owen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 121–58; Amos Nadan, ‘Colonial Misunderstanding of an Efficient Peasant Institution: Land Settlement and Mushāʿ Tenure in Mandate Palestine, 1921–47’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 46, no. 3 (2003): 320–54.
35 Jacques Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie et Du Proche-Orient (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 98, 107.
36 Whitaker, ‘The Union of Demeter with Zeus’, map between p. 148 and p. 149.
37 Dov Gavish, Qarqa vemapa: mehesder haqarqa’ot lemapat erez yishra’el (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1991). Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 82–86. Bunton, ‘Demarcating the British Colonial State’, 121–58.
38 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 82–86.
39 Bunton, ‘Demarcating the British Colonial State’, 121–22, 148, 150; Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 82–86.
40 Ernest M. Dowson, Progress in Land Reforms, 1923–1930 (Kent, 1930), 4.
41 Ibid., 4–5.
42 Ibid., 1.
43 Bunton, ‘Demarcating the British Colonial State’, 121–58. These issues are further explored below.
44 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists (Johnson–Crosbie).
45 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 86.
46 Ibid., 106–07, 111.
47 Dov Gavish, Qarqa vemapa, 183.
48 Government of Palestine, Palestine Development Department, Agricultural Development and Land Settlement in Palestine (First and Supplementary Reports), by Lewis French, Director of Development (Jerusalem: The Government Printer, 1931), 12–13.
49 Government of Palestine, Report by Mr. C. F. Strickland of the Indian Civil Service on the Possibility of Introducing a System of Agricultural Co-operation in Palestine (Jerusalem: The Government Printer, 1930), 43–44.
50 Gavish, Qarqa vemapa: mehesder haqarqa’ot lemapat erez yishra’el, 173; Government of Palestine, Report by Mr. C. F. Strickland, 44; Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 109.
51 Up to 1946, out of about 1000 Arab villages in Palestine, 473 were settled, 102 were in the process of settlement and the rest were not settled at all. Gavish, Qarqa vemapa: mehesder haqarqa’ot lemapat erez yishra’el, 115–205. In Jordan, Land Settlement was accomplished under the Mandate: Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 105, 124.
52 Schäbler, ‘Practicing Musha‘’, 283.
53 Ibid., 279–84. See also: Abdallah Hanna, ‘The Attitude of the French Mandatory Authorities Towards Land Ownership in Syria’, in and The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives, eds. Nadine Méouchy and Peter Sluglett (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 462–63.
54 Allen J. Tower, ‘Geographical Record: Asia’, Geographical Review, 29, no. 1 (Jan. 1939): 147.
55 André Latron, La vie rurale en Syrie et au Liban: Etude d’économie sociale (Beirut, 1936), 191–92.
56 Élicio Colin, ‘Jacques Weulersse (1905–1946)’, Annales de Géographie, 56, no. 301 (1947): 53–54.
57 Jacques Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie et Du Proche-Orient, 99–104.
58 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists Johnson–Crosbie, 41. For similar approach by the French in Syria and Lebanon, see Elizabeth Williams, ‘Mapping the Cadastre, Producing the Fellah: Technologies and Discourses of Rule in French Mandate Syria and Lebanon’, in and The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, eds. Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan (London: Routledge, 2015), Ch. 10.
59 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists Johnson–Crosbie, 55.
60 Great Britain, Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, 248.
61 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 104.
62 Translated from Ze’ev Avrahamoviz and Izhaq Guelfat, Hamesheq ha-ʿaravi (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1944), 33–34.
63 Theodore W. Schultz, Transforming Traditional Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 37, 43–44, 118.
64 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists (Johnson–Crosbie), 44–45, 55.
65 Israel State Archives, T/18/35, ‘Expansion of Land Department of Trans-Jordan: Replies to Questionnaire on points on information required by the Advisory Committee of the Colonial Development Fund’ (1935), 1.
Note that the argument that the majority of arable lands were held in mushāʿ seems to be an overestimate—with no parallel survey of land and while the data provided by Fischbach, mentioned above, reveal less mushāʿ in Transjordan.
66 Israel State Archives, T/18/35, Confidential correspondence between 13 June 1935 and 26 November 1935 between the High Commissioner for Transjordan, Arthur Wauchope, and His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies, Malcolm MacDonald.
67 See the Map Archive of the PEF. Also, Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
68 See broadlyʿAli Nasuh al-Tahir, Sajarat al-zaytun: tarikhha, ziraʿtha, ’amradiha, sinaʿtha (Jaffa: Maktabat al-Tahir Ihwan, 1947).
69 Charles Thomas Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holy Land (New York: Dutton & Co.,1906), 199.
70 This will be explored in another publication.
71 These are returns from interviews conducted with Arab fallāḥīn, mukhtārs and others, see Amos Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, 275–76.
72 Bunton, ‘Demarcating the British Colonial State’, 139; Gavish, Qarqa vemapa: mehesder haqarqa’ot lemapat erez yishra’el, 115–205; Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 112, 172.
73 See, for example, discussion of Yaakov Shimoni’s view in Geremy Forman, ‘Review of Warwick Tyler’s book on State Lands and Rural Development in Mandatory Palestine, 1920–1948’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 34, (2002): 764–7.
74 Scott Atran, ‘The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917–1939,’ American Ethnologist, 16, no. 4 (1989): 719–744.
75 See, for example, Avraham Granovsky, Land and the Jewish Reconstruction in Palestine (Jerusalem: Palestine and the Near East Publications, 1931), 136–9. Avraham Granovsky, Land Policy in Palestine (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1940).
76 Granovsky, Land Policy in Palestine, 6/.
77 David Tidhar, ‘Dr. Avraham Granovsky’, Encyclopedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel, in Hebrew, vol. 1, (1947), 274. Avraham Granovsky, Land Policy in Palestine (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1940).
78 Avraham Granott, The Land System in Palestine: History and Structure (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, translated of the Hebrew edition from 1949, 1952), 108.
79 Ibid., 260.
80 Scott Atran, ‘The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917–1939’, American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 725.
81 Artan, ‘Hamula Organization and Masha’a Tenure in Palestine’, 271–95.
82 Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London, 1979), 33.
83 Gavish, Qarqa vemapa: mehesder haqarqa’ot lemapat erez yishra’el, p. 173. Government of Palestine, Report by Mr. C. F. Strickland, p. 44. For more on the process of Land Settlement, see Bunton, ‘Demarcating the British Colonial State’, 137–47.
84 Up to 1946, out of about 1000 Arab villages in Palestine, 473 were settled, 102 were in the process of settlement and the rest were not settled at all. Gavish, Qarqa vemapa: mehesder haqarqa’ot lemapat erez yishra’el, 115–205.
85 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 104–124.
86 Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Jerusalem: The Government Printer, 1946), 547.
87 Israel State Archives: ISA/(RG2)//L/135/46 ‘Land Settlement Fees: Petitions.’
88 The data are available for 1944. That year, one kilogram of wheat was worth 18.3 mils (yet, while this is the average value for the year as a whole, fallāḥīn who sold directly after the harvest received much less; moreover, fallāḥīn were paid in the producer price, i.e. less than the wholesale price). Average wheat production per dunum that year stood at 39.6 kg. Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1944–45 (Jerusalem, 1946). Government of Palestine, Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Annual Reports 1944–45 and 1945–46 (Jerusalem).
89 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 124.
90 Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine, 342–43.
91 Ibid., 237.
92 Ya’akov Firestone, ‘The Land-Equalizing Musha‘ Village: A Reassessment’, in Ottoman Palestine, 1800–1914, ed, Gad G. Gilbar (London, 1990), 92, 119–23.
93 Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, Village Statistics, 1937 (data collected in 1935: Jerusalem, 1937). Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, Village Statistics, 1945 (Jerusalem, 1945).
94 Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy, 261–298.
95 ʻArraf, al-Qarya al-ʻArabiya al-Filastiniya, 78.
96 Stein, The Land Question of Palestine, 71.
97 Fischbach, State, Society and Land in Jordan, 210.
98 Ibid., 127.
99 Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturists (Johnson–Crosbie), 44–45, 55. Artan, ‘Hamula Organization and Masha’a Tenure in Palestine.’
100 Taminian, ‘Ain’, 16, 20.
101 Government of Palestine, A Survey of Palestine, 426.
102 Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939.
103 See broadly: Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate.
104 Israel State Archives, T/18/35, ‘Expansion of Land Department of Trans-Jordan: Replies to Questionnaire on Points on Information Required by the Advisory Committee of the Colonial Development Fund’ (1935), 1.