People and Property in
Nineteenth-Century
Transjordan
Safa Saraçoğlu,
Bloomsburg University
The general structure
• The descriptive part
• The political economy of Transjordan
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The reforms
The refugees
Wealth accumulation and agency
Oil and foreign powers
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 - ‘Ajlun
Balqa – predominantly Bedouin except Salt
Karak – West-East tribal coalitions centered around Karak
Ma‘an – arid, underpopulated zone on pilgrimage routes
Bedouin – settler dynamics
Hicaz and Hajj
Nablus
Haifa and Yaffa
Tiberias
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