From the Pages of the Defter (ص 38)
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- From the Pages of the Defter (ص 38)
- المحتوى
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corporations were active by the late 1840s with the purchase and sale of (the usufruct right
to) miri lands in Palestine, almost a decade before the issuance of the 1858 Land Code.*°
Doumani also brings into focus the question that is at the heart of the debate about
how un/successfully land-tenure reform was carried out in Palestine. The paradigm of
success/failure as it has been crafted hinges its final assessment of censure on the increasing
forfeiture by peasants of their lands in the last decades of the empire and later, due to
unpayable debts. The conventional paradigm that has developed has offered a range of
possibilities to explain how this happened. You may have noticed. They range from
unscrupulous land clerks registering lands in their own names and heartless mukhtars and
shaykhs stealing the title to the land of their neighbors and relatives in their villages or tribe,
to primarily urban-based moneylenders who acquired rural lands that peasants had
mortgaged to them, when those same peasants could not repay their loans and interest
charges. This important issue of land loss resulting from high-interest mortgages from urban
moneylenders, and the complementary discussion of the Ottoman Agricultural bank as an
alternative to this private system, is discussed in Chapter 4 of this study. | will argue that, in
the case of long-term loans and some short-term loans, urban-based moneylenders offered
villagers better terms of borrowing and conditions of repayment than the Ottoman
© Her dissertation-in-progress, “The Business of Property: Peasants, Settlers, and Beiruti Corporations in
Palestine, 1850-1923” examines the agency of villagers and family groups in the legal and commercial
development of late-Ottoman northern Palestine. See www.histproj.org/completed/ALFF.pdf , accessed
12 April 2015.
21 - هو جزء من
- From the Pages of the Defter
- تاريخ
- ٢٠١٦
- المنشئ
- Susynne McElrone
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