Colonial Capitalism and Rural Class Formation (ص 110)

غرض

عنوان

Colonial Capitalism and Rural Class Formation (ص 110)

المحتوى

form of production can be a progressive step, such as on the Maritime
Plains, where surplus value extracted from the peasants was re-
invested in the production process. It can also be a regressive factor
and an obstacle to capitalist changes, such as in the Marj Plain and
Beisan.
Yet, even in its most backward manifestation, where it managed to
turn free peasants into serfs, such as in lanes controlled by heads of
Hamulas, share-cropping produced its own contradictions as well. The
increasing differentiation and polarization of the Hamula testified to
this.
The culmination of the socio-economic changes during the 19th
century found their full expression only after British colonization of
Palestine in 1920. Until then Palestine's class structure was still
largely composed of masses of peasants in the process of being
depeasantized and newly formed classes of landowners.
The depeasantization and the beginning of the _ process of
polarization of the peasants, this chapter shows, was rooted in 19th
century socio-economic changes. The process began from within the
structure of pre-capitalist production and was further enhanced by the
western capitalist encroachment into the Ottoman Empire. This process
not only led to the emergence of new classes of landlords, such as the
western capitalist industrialists represented by the Rothschilds and
the Bergheims, and the Absentee landlords like the Sursuks, but also
gave rise to fundamental changes in the structure of the Palestinian
peasantry. The appreciation of this phenomenon, it must be added was
largely possible because of the re-examination of Palestine's pre-
capitalist forms of production discussed in this chapter.
AS pointed out in this chapter, Palestine in its pre-capitalist
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Colonial Capitalism and Rural Class Formation

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المنشئ

Nahla Abdo-Zubi

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