Safa Saraçoğlu, Bloomsburg University

People and Property in Nineteenth-Century

Transjordan

• The descriptive part• The political economy of Transjordan • The reforms• The refugees• Wealth accumulation and agency• Oil and foreign powers

The general structure

Clarifying terminology

• Tribes: The tribe is a social group defined in genealogical and territorial terms. Genealogies are politically constructed and is open argued by scholars like Margaret Meriwether or Beshara Doumani, both male and female members of the society can assume dominant roles in devising new families' affiliations with the tribes.

• Frontiers: In his study of Transjordan, Eugene Rogan borrows the term frontiers as defined by scholars of North America and Southern Africa. According to this definition, frontiers are "a zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies, one of which is indigenous to the region and the other intrusive. The frontier ‘opens’ in a given zone when the first representatives of the intrusive society arrive; it ‘closes’ when a single political authority has established hegemony over the zone“(1999, 6).

The Descriptive Part: Regions and

connections of Transjordan

Jabal ‘Ajlun – network of mountain villages - ‘AjlunBalqa – predominantly Bedouin except SaltKarak – West-East tribal coalitions centered around KarakMa‘an – arid, underpopulated zone on pilgrimage routes

Bedouin – settler dynamics

Hicaz and HajjNablusHaifa and YaffaTiberias

The political economy: Reforms

• Reforms, modernization, modernity• “Modernity here means the multiple institutional forms, or orderings of social

reality, that since the sixteenth century responded to and enabled commercial expansion and competition among different political entities. In this sense, modernity does not merely indicate the institutional configurations of the nineteenth century but incorporates their early history in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries” (Islamoglu and Perdue 2001, 274).

• Reforms and codification: people and things • Sacralizing a relationship: 1839 Gülhane edict

• Every person will enjoy the possession of his property of every nature, and dispose of it with the most perfect liberty, without any one being able to impede him. Thus, for example, the innocent heirs of a criminal will not be deprived of their legal rights, and the property of the criminal will not be confiscated.

• Land code: 1858• Provincial restructuring: 1864

The political economy: Refugees

• The origins:• Civilizing mission?• Demographic warfare?

• The impact:• Frontier• Regional tensions• Settlement as a practice

The political economy: Wealth accumulation and agency• Regional economy:• Nablus and merchant networks• Pilgrimage and Imperial legitimacy

• The impact:• Monetization, Selem contracts, accumulation of land• Creating a base for a “culture of sectarianism”

• Lebanon• Tiberias

The political economy: Oil and foreign powers• To produce or not to produce• The origins of Wilson’s 14 points• South Africa• British politics

• The design of mandates• Foundation of Israel• Ottoman Jewry: Ideas of Ottoman citizenship• European Jewry: Kafka, vs. Brod• Nachmani and Tiberias

Conclusion: the legacy of the 19th century• Observing the long nineteenth century• Upward social mobility and a culture of sectarianism• The ambiguity of mandates and regional imbalance• From land to property, from Transjordan to Jordan