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From the Hands of the Peasants
From the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, moneylending occupied a quickly expanding social space and became the defining factor in urban-rural relations. Of course, moneylending had been an integral element of rural-urban networks since ancient times, but over the course of the nineteenth century a number of factors propelled it to unprecedented levels in terms of frequency of contracts, degree of infiltration into the rural areas, and level of enforcement of debt obligations.
As far as the social life of olive oil is concerned, the second half of the 1820s was an important turning point. The interruptions caused by a prolonged period of intermittent internal conflict in Jabal Nablus from the late 1790s until 1823—which happened to roughly coincide with the slackening of European demand during the Napoleonic Wars—were followed by a vigorous economic expansion. Most conspicuous was the beginning of large capital investment in the soap industry (see Chapter 5). Because this industry more than tripled in size during the nineteenth century and because its growth was predicated on the availability of olive oil, moneylending to olive-based villages, especially in the form of salam contracts, became far more pervasive. Later on in the century, increased exports of olive oil from the port cities also created incentives for urban merchants to redouble their efforts to secure this precious commodity from the peasants.
Reinforcing the greater reach of merchant capital was the political coming of age of the merchant community, which gave merchants the power to enforce the collection of debts and to facilitate the appropriation of land. Merchants were the main beneficiaries of the changes brought about by the Egyptian occupation and the implementation of Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat), especially their access to political office through the Advisory Council. By the late 1830s they had managed to infiltrate the exclusive club of soap-factory owners and, to a lesser extent, the ranks of tax farmers—in the latter case not only as financial backers but also as bidders in competition with ruling urban and rural families.[5] By the 1850s a new merchant-dominated elite—or, more accurately, a fluid alliance between influential members of the merchant community, key ruling families (both urban and rural), and the top religious leaders—had emerged (see Chapter 5). Although the various elements of this elite differed, often violently, on a number of issues, they all huddled in the same political corner when it came to relations with peasants. This is because almost all of them, regardless of their background, were heavily engaged in moneylending and the manufacture of soap made from pure olive oil.
Salam Moneylending Contracts
Of the many types of credit arrangements available, salam (advance-purchase) contracts were the most widely used, especially in olive-producing hill regions. The underlying principle of a salam contract is the immediate advance of money by the first party for the future delivery by the second party of movable collateral—usually foodstuffs—at a reduced price fixed at the time of agreement. The key provision is that the agreed-upon amount of, say, oil must be delivered to the first party in kind regardless of what the market price of this commodity happens to be at the time of harvest. Depending on the power relationship between the parties, the cash advance could contain a substantial (illegal) hidden rate of interest that insured a handsome profit for the moneylender even if market prices dipped below anticipated levels.
Salam contracts were not a modern innovation. The rules governing them had been laid out clearly in Islamic law many centuries before. The Hanafi school of jurisprudence,[6] for example, requires that the capital be advanced at the time the contract is drafted and that the type, quantity, and quality of the commodity be specified, along with the date and place of delivery and whether the commodity was grown on irrigated or rain-fed land.[7]
Moneylenders did not turn to state institutions to legitimize this type of transaction. Rather, salam contracts were drafted in what actual documents refer to as majlis al-aqd (contract assembly or meeting). Majlis al-aqd did not indicate a specific location or a public space. Rather, it was anywhere two people sat down together in order to draft a contract—usually at a merchant’s shop or home. Consequently, there are, to my knowledge, no salam contracts recorded in the central Ottoman archives and certainly none in the records of the Islamic court or Advisory Council, though the latter two contain lawsuits that refer to the existence of such contracts.[8] Fortunately, the private papers of the Nimr family contain a sufficient number of salam contracts to allow for an in-depth look at how they worked and how their use changed over time.[9] These are supplemented by additional information in the lawsuits over salam arrangements, in some inheritance estates that listed outstanding loans, and in peasant petitions.
As the following example, dated early January 1828, shows, these contracts invariably conformed to guidelines set by the Hanafi school of jurisprudence:
On the date [registered] below, Husayn Abd al-Qadir, Awad son of Shehada, Abd al-Hayy son of Jabir, and Musa son of Abid—all from the village of Salim—testified that they received from the Respected Right Honorable Ahmad Agha…al-Yusufi [Nimr] a sum of 1,025 piasters…as a legal salam for 100 jars of oil [measured by] the container of the [Yusufiyya] soap factory—each jar for 10.25 piasters—for a period of ten months. [They are to] deliver one-half [of the oil jars] now, and the other half in the middle of Rabi II, 1244 (late October 1828) to the Yusufiyya soap factory.[10]
Regardless of whether the price of olive oil multiplied many times during these ten months, the three peasants from Salim had to provide the amount of oil in kind that was agreed on and not ask for a single piaster over and above what they originally received. Of course, a bumper harvest might bring the price of oil to a point lower than the amount set earlier. Moneylending arrangements, however, usually worked in favor of the owner of capital: he could spread his risk around, had a far greater knowledge of the market, and, in the case of big merchants, was able to influence the market trends on certain commodities. Peasants were often in no position to bargain for favorable prices because they usually borrowed money out of dire necessity: to pay taxes, to recover from a bad harvest, to purchase goods for a wedding, or to meet a myriad of other needs.
Most important, salam contracts usually contained a calculated rate of interest disguised as an artificially low price for the commodity in question, hence guaranteeing a profitable return when the lender sold the goods on the open market after they were delivered by the borrower. Usury (riba), of course, was officially prohibited. In practice, however, moneylenders tied the amount of interest to the length of the waiting period: the farther away the delivery date, the lower the unit cost to the merchant (see below). Thus, Ahmad Agha Nimr advanced the paltry sum of 10.25 piasters for every jar of oil to be delivered ten months later, even though the price of each jar on the open market averaged 23 piasters.[11] The frequency with which moneylenders swore in writing at the end of many contracts that no usury was involved is in itself an indication of at least the perception that usury was an integral part of this arrangement.[12]
The ease with which a rate of interest could be hidden in salam contracts was one reason for their popularity. No matter how low the price, most peasants could not legally challenge these contracts in court as long as they technically fulfilled all the conditions of Islamic law.[13] Only one of the dozens of disputes over salam contracts registered in the Nablus Islamic Court between 1850–1870 mentioned usury as an issue.[14] In all of the rest, peasants insisted that no salam contract had been drawn up, that they were willing to reimburse the moneylender in cash, not in kind, or that the goods had already been delivered.[15]
The exception involved the case of two peasants from the village of Awarta, dated January 20, 1862.[16] The plaintiff, Odeh al-Qasim, testified that he had advanced the defendant, Sulayman al-Bashir, a sum of money in return for 68 jars of olive oil and claimed that he had only received 42.5 jars and 3 uqiyyas. He then demanded that the terms of the lawful salam contract be fulfilled. Sulayman al-Bashir freely admitted to the contract and the remaining debt, but he insisted that he was not obligated to provide the rest of the oil because usury was involved. The judge asked al-Bashir to prove this charge, but he could not. The defendant’s last hope lay in demanding that the first party swear under oath that no usury was involved. Odeh al-Qasim readily did so and won the case.
Another reason for the pervasiveness of this type of moneylending was the need of merchants and artisans to secure supplies of agricultural raw materials for the purposes of local production and regional trade. This was especially important with olive oil: urban soap merchants and manufacturers needed large quantities of olive oil every year, and they could not risk wide fluctuations in availability and price.[17] In the salam contract quoted above, Ahmad Agha—scion of the Nimr family at the time and waqf superintendent of the Yusufiyya soap factory (built by his ancestors more than two hundred years earlier)—clearly entered into an advance-purchase contract for precisely this reason. The contract was drawn at the end of the olive harvest season (early January 1828), and one-half of the olive oil was to be delivered ten months later, at the beginning of the next harvest season (late October 1828). In short, Ahmad Agha Nimr used this type of contract for the purposes of production, not for speculation, investment, or trade in agricultural commodities.
Salam contracts were also desirable because most other forms of moneylending required immovable property as collateral. Aside from their lands, peasants could offer little in return except the future delivery of their harvests. Finally, salam contracts negotiated directly with peasants allowed merchants to bypass market regulations and various revenue-collection measures imposed by the government and ruling families. Salam contracts, in short, were flexible and allowed for a wide range of urban-rural moneylending arrangements. As will be seen below, this flexibility also proved to be eminently suitable for speculation and for the local organization of commercial agricultural production for export overseas. Indeed, local moneylending arrangements cleared a path for the increasing involvement of foreign and coastal merchants who wanted to extend their operations to the interior.
The same factors that caused a steep rise in moneylending transactions, especially the much more conducive political environment, also led to a diversification in the social composition of moneylenders. Previously, the enforcement of debt obligations had been fraught with uncertainties despite the influence of the merchant community and the rootedness of its networks. By the 1840s, however, moneylending had become a much easier proposition for those who lacked political influence. Indeed, it seems that almost anyone with access to capital, no matter how small, found opportunities for moneylending and trade. Although this phenomenon was neither new nor unique to Jabal Nablus[18] or Greater Syria,[19] there is little doubt that during the nineteenth century moneylending came to involve far more people and to take on an even more central and defining role in the social formation of Jabal Nablus than it had during the previous Ottoman centuries. Illustrative in this regard is a comparison of two instances of moneylending to peasants in the same village, Salim.
The first case (1828), cited above, was typical of more traditional uses of the salam contracts. The male representatives of three peasant families who borrowed money from Ahmad Agha Nimr shared with him a common memory of frequent dealings over generations. Salim was located in an area east of Nablus to which the Nimr family had had privileged access for generations in the form of timar land grants and tax farms, as sipahis and multazims, respectively.[20] The brother of Ahmad Agha Nimr’s great-grandfather, for example, collected taxes from Salim on a regular basis in the early 1700s.[21] Ahmad Agha Nimr, therefore, could rely on his family’s historic ties and political influence over this region in order to secure supplies for his soap factory. The Nimrs also took advantage of long-standing political, economic, and social connections to subcontract salam loans on behalf of oil merchants and soap manufacturers.[22]
The second case (1861), shows that even a simple merchant was able to establish an impressive foothold in Salim village, primarily through moneylending—even though he was neither rich nor politically influential. This information can be gleaned from the inheritance estate of Abd al-Rahman Qan‘ir, a retail grain merchant who dealt mostly in wheat, barley, corn, burghul (wheat that is cooked, parched, then crushed), and meadow vetch.[23] When his belongings were registered in late November 1861, he had eighteen outstanding loans, all of them owed by individual peasants from the village of Salim. Some of these loans were salam contracts for wheat and barley; others were non-interest-bearing loans (qard); and some were a combination of both. For instance, Jabir son of Yusuf al-Dabbagh owed Qan‘ir 80 piasters’ worth of wheat and barley, as specified in a salam contract. He also owed him 565.5 piasters for a non-interest-bearing loan for which he put up one-quarter of a feddan (one feddan being equal to one-quarter of an acre) as collateral (rahn).
Qan‘ir also invested heavily in factors of production in order to better control the grain surplus of Salim village. For example, he helped the Salim peasants buy draft animals, and at the time of his death a number of them owed him shares of cows and bulls. He also had the right to shares of the proceeds of a number of maris lands,[24] put up as collateral by peasants who owed him money but were not able to pay on time. Over the years, therefore, Qan‘ir managed to construct a network of dependency among eighteen peasant families. His business network illustrates how moneylending could be used not only to secure needed supplies but also to pave the way for urban investment in rural production and trade and for the commoditization of land and its appropriation by urban merchants.
In this supportive economic, political, and legal atmosphere, even poor artisans and small merchants could safely enter moneylending arrangements—though these were usually for minuscule amounts. For example, the estate of a poor artisan (1861), Abd al-Al al-Masri al-munajjid (upholsterer), showed that he had concluded a salam contract with a bedouin in order to secure his supply of wool.[25] Similarly, the estate of a small retailer (1863), Sa‘id son of Hajj Salim al-Ra‘i—who sold iron tools for peasants as well as grains and olive oil for city folk—included salam contracts for wheat, olive oil, and onions whose value amounted to almost half of the estate’s total worth.[26] Around the same time (1864), the proprietor of a cotton-ginning shop, Hajj Rajab son of Hajj Salih Abi Suwwan, had a number of salam contracts with peasants from Baqa al-Gharbiyya and Attil villages for small amounts of cotton-in-the-boll and for cotton seeds.[27] These examples all illustrate the extent to which peasants had been individually recruited and integrated into a quickly expanding and increasingly depersonalized market of exchange.
This trend is further illustrated by two important developments in the use of salam contracts. First, salam contracts were frequently turned into a tool of speculation, trade, and investment in agricultural production for overseas markets. Second, salam contracts were resorted to on a routine basis not just by individual peasants but also by the populations of entire villages, primarily in order to meet their tax obligations. Both developments created dynamics that further facilitated the circulation of merchant capital in the hinterlands. These two developments will be addressed in turn.
Moneylending and Production for Overseas Markets
The increasing pervasiveness of moneylending and the deepening of market relations in Jabal Nablus helped pave the way for coastal and foreign merchants to invest in the interior regions of Palestine. The following salam contract, drafted in early May 1851 between a Christian merchant from Jaffa and a Nabulsi peasant from the village of Aqraba, provides some clues as to how this type of moneylending practice was used in the local organization of producing cash crops for European markets:
On the date [recorded] below, Khalil Mitri son of Yusuf Khawaja Mitri arrived and paid to the sane mature man, Abd al-Rahman al-Khalil, one of the people of Aqraba village, a sum of 2,997 piasters…as salam on the amount of 81 kayla of sesame—the good unirrigated sesame free of dirt and straw, and that is measured by the kayla of Nablus city in the usual sa. [It is to be] transported from this aforementioned town to Jaffa, where the salam was contracted. The [transportation] fee is to be paid by Khawaja Khalil…not by Abd al-Rahman.…[The grace period is] five months from this date. The aforementioned Abd al-Rahman has acknowledged receiving the salam capital [ra’smal] in full…after which, Khawaja Khalil promised that as soon as the sesame arrives and is sold, and no matter how much the Supreme God might bestow in profit, he will pay a third of this profit to the aforementioned Abd al-Rahman.[28]
Khawaja Mitri was apparently a well-informed merchant, for he invested in sesame production in 1851; and, according to Alexander Schölch, French imports of Palestinian sesame increased greatly beginning in 1852.[29] Because Schölch’s conclusion is based on export statistics from Jaffa, the financing of this increase must have started the previous season, which is exactly when Khawaja Mitri signed the salam contract with Abd al-Rahman from Aqraba.
The stamp and list of witnesses on the contract tell us that Abd al-Rahman signed it in Jaffa. This might not sound striking, but considering the prevailing view of Palestinian peasants during the Ottoman period as living in isolated villages and engaged solely in subsistence agriculture, the initiative and entrepreneurial spirit of Abd al-Rahman are worthy of note. Indeed, Abd al-Rahman had come to Jaffa a few months earlier and negotiated a similar contract.[30] His actions indicate that he was free, willing, and capable of responding quickly to such offers and that he knew full well that his crops would be shipped to France. Abd al-Rahman should not be considered unique. As seen in the Chapter 3, and as Alexander Schölch and Marwan Buheiry both argued, on the basis of export statistics from the latter part of the nineteenth century, Palestinian peasants were sharply attuned to the fickle changes of international demand and acted accordingly.[31]
Abd al-Rahman, like most Palestinian peasants at that time, probably needed a quick infusion of cash in order to stay afloat in an increasingly monetarized agricultural sector. The availability of cash could make the difference between success or failure for many peasants, especially for those who were heavily dependent on rain-fed agriculture, where productivity fluctuated with the vagaries of the weather. His success in seeking out a faraway merchant at a time of high demand suggests that he had exerted considerable effort to negotiate the most favorable conditions for himself—in essence, bypassing the Nabulsi merchant community.
Apparently confident of the profit margin he was about to make on this deal and eager to insure the supply of sesame, Khawaja Mitri offered Abd al-Rahman two incentives not normally encountered in salam contracts. First, he agreed to cover the transportation costs, which were considerable given the distance involved. In effect, this increased the per-unit price in favor of the peasant. The second incentive was innovative and reflects the adaptability of salam contracts: a profit-sharing arrangement. Abd al-Rahman still had to provide the sesame regardless of weather conditions or price changes, but he could augment the moneys he received in advance with a percentage (one-third) of the profits made by the merchant.
It is not certain whether the incentives offered in this contract represented an isolated case or whether they were typical of the dealings between coastal merchants and the peasants of the interior. The latter was more likely, if only because non-Nabulsi merchants, as was seen in Chapter 3, had a difficult time bypassing local commercial networks and luring peasants, much less guaranteeing the enforcement of contracts.[32] In this regard, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that under certain conditions, like those that characterized this case, the use of the salam contract could encourage trade, help meet local needs for liquid capital, increase investment in agricultural production, promote economic growth, and even work to the benefit of both parties concerned.
Salam contracts took on a much more sinister character once the context was changed, however. Judging from the available evidence, the salam contracts drawn up by Nabulsi oil merchants reflected neither the urgency felt by Khawaja Mitri nor his need to sweeten loans with incentives. On the contrary, they were usually characterized by low prices, no profit sharing, and constant threat of enforcement by government officials and subdistrict chiefs. This is because most Nabulsi peasants suffered from a heavy imbalance in power relations with locally powerful moneylenders. At the same time, they were forced to turn to them in order to meet their tax obligations. The olive-based highland villages of Palestine became more vulnerable to this combination of taxes and debt over the course of the nineteenth century.
Moneylending, Taxation, and Olive-Based Villages
Elizabeth Anne Finn, wife of the British Consul of Jerusalem at midcentury, related the story of a woman from Bayt Jala—a village near Bethlehem—whose family turned to a soap merchant, Sulayman Asali, when it could not pay its taxes:
He [the woman’s father-in-law] pledged his olive trees for 500 piasters and wrote a bond upon himself to pay fifteen jars of oil to Sulaiman Assali; and if there is any deficient, he has to pay two jars of oil next year for every one. That year was also a bad one, and our olives were stolen, and we had only three jars of oil; so Sulaiman wrote a bond upon my father-in-law for twenty-four jars of oil for the next harvest, and if any were deficient, two were to be given for every one.…We now owe him eighty jars of oil.[33]
This story was probably exaggerated, both by an informant who hoped to elicit the sympathies and help of a European consular couple who earned a reputation for interference in local affairs and by the writer, who prided herself (and her husband) on being dedicated to giving “succour to the weak.”[34] It does reveal, however, the vicious circle that can be created when the forces of taxation and moneylending intertwine.
The potentially devastating consequences of these combined forces have been a recurrent theme in peasant lore all over the world for centuries. But by the first half of the nineteenth century, a confluence of circumstances posed a serious dilemma for the olive-based villages in the central highlands of Palestine, even though, historically, they have been less vulnerable to the combined impact of moneylending and taxation than have the coastal villages, where the government’s presence has always been stronger. First, a more aggressive and intrusive Ottoman state made tax collection more efficient and inflexible in the interior regions than it had been during most of the eighteenth century. Second, olive-based villages were especially hard hit because the timing of the increasingly predictable and rigorously enforced tax-collection season was based on the grain harvest, which fell months before olives matured in the late fall. To pay their taxes, peasants who depended primarily on the olive crop needed to have money saved from the previous season, or else they had to borrow money. Third, the peasants’ patron-client relationship with once-powerful rural ruling families had become progressively frayed; hence their autonomy and ability to maneuver around the tax season were undermined. Fourth, Nabulsi olive oil merchants and soap-factory owners came to wield considerable political power in the nineteenth century, a development that only accelerated the already ongoing process of urban-rural integration. Fifth, as mentioned previously, these merchants became much more aggressive in ensuring future supplies of olive oil, due to the vigorous expansion of soap manufacturing at this time and due to the increased regional and international trade in this commodity.
Unlike foreign or coastal merchants, Nabulsi oil merchants and soap manufacturers did not need to lure peasants with high prices, profit sharing, and other incentives. Rather, they used their intimate knowledge of local conditions and their growing political clout to draw up highly unfavorable salam contracts not just with individuals but also with entire villages. An oil merchant, for example, would pay the taxes of a village and consider the sum a loan in the form of a salam contract. When the olives were harvested and pressed for oil, the village was then to deliver a formerly agreed upon number of olive oil jars to the soap factory specified by the merchant.[35] The following two documents from the Jerusalem Islamic Court records show that the story told by Elizabeth Finn would not have come as a surprise to the residents of Bayt Jala. In the 1830s and 1840s, this village was battered by the political, social, and economic tensions generated by the combined forces of taxes and moneylending.
The first is a somewhat unusual salam contract negotiated between the government and the elders of Bayt Jala. On September 6, 1833, an agent of the Nabulsi Shaykh Husayn Abd al-Hadi (then the Egyptian government’s right-hand man in southern Syria) signed a contract in the Jerusalem Islamic Court with a number of peasants representing the entire population of Bayt Jala village.[36] The contract specified that in return for 30,000 piasters the peasants were to deliver four months hence (that is, at the end of the olive harvest season) a total of 1,000 jars of good-quality, unadulterated olive oil as measured by the jar of soap factories in Jerusalem.
What was unusual about the case, and probably the reason it was publicly registered in the Jerusalem Islamic Court in the first place, was that the capital advance was paid from the city’s treasury. It was also specifically stipulated that the oil was to be delivered to the local government. Most likely, Bayt Jala was chosen because it had been behind in its tax payments for some time (see below) and because Shaykh Abd al-Hadi, no stranger to salam contracts, took the opportunity to gain access to its olive oil surplus. It is also probable that the olive oil was to be used to cook batches of soap for the Egyptian military forces then in Palestine; hence the use of public moneys. Shaykh Abd al-Hadi, who was soon to become the owner of a soap factory in Nablus, was probably commissioned to produce this soap, and he used his political position and Bayt Jala’s vulnerability to secure his supplies. This arrangement brings to mind the early monopoly practices of Muhammad Ali Pasha in Egypt. Ken Cuno, for example, relates how government officials in the al-Mansura region in Egypt usurped the role of merchant-creditors by purchasing the harvest of entire villages beforehand and/or credited the future delivery of crops at fixed prices against taxes.[37]
The second case concerning Bayt Jala illustrates how this situation was further complicated by tensions arising from the growing social differentiation within the village itself. On March 15, 1835, Salama son of Issa Makhluf stood in front of the Jerusalem Islamic Court judge and testified that seven years earlier he had been imprisoned by the governor of Jerusalem because his village had not paid the 2,675 piasters it owed in taxes to the city’s treasury.[38] He continued that when he was released shortly thereafter, he went to the leaders of Bayt Jala’s clans and asked them to come up with the tax moneys (so he would not be imprisoned again). He then pointed his finger at three shaykhs from his village who had been summoned earlier to the court and accused them of having “ordered” him to write up a salam contract with the people of Bayt Jala so that the taxes could be paid. Salama went on to say that he had advanced his fellow villagers the sum of 1,500 piasters for the future delivery of 128 jars of oil, and he also paid the rest of the tax due (1,175 piasters) to the government in cash on their behalf. He further claimed that for the past seven years he had been asking the defendants to pay him back the oil in kind, according to the conditions of the salam, as well as the cash he had paid on their behalf, but to no avail.
The defendants denied that they had ordered the plaintiff to draw up a salam contract or to cover the rest of the taxes in cash. They argued, instead, that his imprisonment was a simple case of extortion. The governor, they said, “deprived him of this money as a matter of personal dispossession.” When the presiding judge asked the plaintiff to prove his allegations, Salama Makhluf left the court for Bayt Jala and brought back two witnesses who corroborated his story. The judge accepted the witnesses’ testimony as valid and ordered the shaykhs of Bayt Jala to pay back 128 jars of olive oil to the plaintiff, as well as 1,175 piasters in cash.
The fact that Salama Makhluf waited seven years to take his grievance to court provides a very important clue as to the complicated interactions among taxation, moneylending, and peasant differentiation. He was a well-to-do middle peasant whose wealth made him a target of both the government and fellow Bayt Jala villagers. No doubt the governor chose him because he had the money to pay Bayt Jala’s taxes, and it was inconsequential to the governor whether Salama chose or was forced (depending on whose testimony one believed) to translate this payment into a moneylending arrangement whereby part of the village’s olive harvest would be pledged to him in advance as reimbursement. The only difference was that the supplier of capital was not an outsider but, rather, a person who actually lived in the village itself. Salama probably waited this long because he was exposed to immense pressures from many of his fellow villagers to drop his claims, and it might have been very difficult for him to recruit two witnesses willing to testify on his behalf in the face of concerted opposition from the clan elders. Indeed, it must have taken some courage to pursue the enforcement of the salam contract in an urban court, because this involved crossing the boundaries of village solidarity and humiliating the village elders in public.
The vaunted collective ethos of this and other villages, if it ever existed in the manner described by nationalists who would romanticize the Palestinian peasantry, was certainly vulnerable to the triple blows of taxation, moneylending, and internal differentiation, all of which could not but be accompanied by painful and divisive political struggles. In this particular case, the conflict between a middle peasant and established village leaders, who based their authority on the twin pillars of kinship and seniority, can be seen as a symbol for the tensions that wracked the rural sphere during the nineteenth century.
The Bayt Jala cases were not unique. The following example from Jabal Nablus shows that by the mid-nineteenth century it became quite common for entire villages to enter into salam contracts with urban oil merchants in order to pay their taxes and that this situation combined with internal divisions to heighten tensions between villagers. Sometime during the olive harvest season in the fall of 1851, the inhabitants of Jaba village in Jabal Nablus sent a petition directly to the governor of Jerusalem, Hafiz Pasha, in which they complained bitterly against their own elders. The governor promptly passed it on to the Nablus Advisory Council, then headed by Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi, qa’immaqam of Nablus and son of Shaykh Husayn, who concluded the salam contract with the village of Bayt Jala mentioned earlier.
On December 28 of that year Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi wrote the following reply to the governor of Jerusalem:
[I] have relayed to the council your Noble order containing the petition of the people of Jaba of Jabal Nablus in which they accuse the shaykhs of their own village of forcing them to sign promissory notes for this year worth 1,200 jars [of oil] and for next year, 1,400 jars. [The people of Jaba further claim] that this constitutes treachery against them because their shaykhs’ motivation was no more than their own personal aggrandizement. In carrying out your…order that their complaint be relayed to the council and a report be written explaining the truth of the matter, and [in order] to prevent the recurrence of such unlawful behavior, the respected and wise men of the village, who are relatives of the petitioners, were called in to the council [premises]. When…this case was examined, we found that the villagers’ claim that this oil was only for the benefit of the shaykhs is untrue. Instead, what was ascertained from the report of the old and wise men of…Jaba, who were appointed by the people of the village to pursue their case, is that when the tax [miri] [season] opened, they could not pay the taxes owed by their village because the olive harvest was not yet at hand. Consequently, and as is the usual practice among people of the villages, they were forced to sell their future crop of olive oil in advance for reduced prices through a salam [contract] for the amount of taxes due from their village. It is well known that the oil season does not come until the middle or just after the middle of the [fiscal] year. They received from one of the merchants an advance sum of 34,966.3 piasters for 953 jars of oil [in order to pay] the 1266 [1849–1850] dues, and the oil was to be delivered to the aforementioned merchant from the oil harvest of 1267. Similarly, they received from the same merchant an advance sum of 30,511.3 piasters for 1,330 jars of oil. This money had already been used to pay the 1267 [1850–1851] taxes, and the aforementioned oil was to be delivered the aforementioned merchant during the 1268 [1851–1852] harvest. Yet 130 jars of oil are still owed by the villagers for the 1267 taxes, and they have yet to be paid. After clarifying this matter through receipts and vouchers presented in the council, and [after] persuading the people of the village of this, they made up and shook hands with each other. Accusations and counteraccusations were dropped, and each went his own way after they were warned not to cause such disturbance and to be loving and peaceful with each other. The shaykhs of the village were also warned that from now on they are not to draw up salam [contracts] without the knowledge of the entire village, so that such confusion and recrimination will be avoided.[39]
Before analyzing the implications of this document, it is important to point out that the same oil merchant paid the village’s taxes two years in a row in return for a set number of olive oil jars to be delivered in two consecutive seasons. In a manner reminiscent of the predicament described by the woman of Bayt Jala to Elizabeth Anne Finn, the per-unit price given to the peasants went down by one-third, while the amounts owed went up. Thus the first salam contract specified 953 jars of oil at 36.7 piasters per jar, whereas the second involved 1,330 jars of oil at approximately 23 piasters per jar. There is no doubt here that a hidden interest was calculated into the price.
The council’s statement that the village’s collective resort to salam contracts in order to pay their taxes was the “usual practice” leaves no doubt as to the pervasiveness of this combined dynamic in mid-nineteenth-century Jabal Nablus. It is possible that entire villages entered into such contracts long before the first half of the nineteenth century, but the new elements here were the involvement of urban merchants, as opposed to ruling families, the more efficient tax-collection measures, and the clear political backing for the oil merchant by a new governing institution staffed by other merchants. Also new was the fact that these peasants challenged their elders and the entire Nabulsi political structure by petitioning the governor of Jerusalem directly.
The council’s explanation that the timing of the tax season created the inexorable chain of circumstances must be qualified. As already argued, the collective resort to moneylending in order to pay taxes was not the outcome of an age-old technical problem but the result of the relatively recent political, social, and economic processes. In addition, the words “usual” and, more often, “customary” were frequently used in the council’s correspondence with their superiors in order to justify practices that might actually be recent in origin—such as the “old way” of measuring of grains in storehouses discussed in Chapter 3. The argument of “tradition” was also often used as a weapon against those innovations of Ottoman reform policies that the council members deemed not to be in their favor (they did not complain about innovations they approved of, even those that did in fact challenge established practices). Indeed, the council consciously arrogated to itself a monopoly in the meanings of tradition—hence the position of interpreter of local realities—in order to strengthen its hand in dealings with the central authorities. This is because, as explained in Chapter 3, the fluid political boundaries between central and local forces during the era of reforms were negotiated one conflict at a time.
Another qualification to the meaning of “usual practice” was the complicated political background of this specific petition. Jaba was the seat village of the Jarrar clan, which split into two factions in 1848—that is, just before the first salam contract was signed.[40] Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi, who supported one of the Jarrar factions, was appointed qa’immaqam of Nablus in place of Sulayman Beik Tuqan, who supported the second faction, just six weeks before he received the peasants’ petition from the governor of Jerusalem.[41] These events might well be related to the “misunderstanding” between the Jaba villagers and their elders—that is, the political balance was altered and the peasants seized the opportunity to go over the heads not only of their own shaykhs but also of the Nablus Council itself. By sending their petition directly to the governor of Jerusalem they, in effect, were asserting a more inclusive political identity for themselves that went beyond the borders of Jabal Nablus. The implications of this assertion for the issues of citizenship, sources of political authority, class tensions, and notions of justice will be addressed in more detail in the last section of this chapter.
The council’s quick and paternalistic dismissal of this conflict was no doubt an attempt to close the door to further interference by the central government that the peasants’ petition opened. Thus the council’s report ignored political ramifications and presented the conflict in terms of a moneylending agreement gone awry. The manner in which the clearly unfavorable terms of the salam contract were negotiated was also left intentionally vague, and the council’s letter raises many questions that cannot be easily answered: Was it possible that the Jaba shaykhs could have either forced their relatives into a salam contract or secretly negotiated this contract without the knowledge of members of their own clan and village? Who exactly were the “respected and wise men of the village” who allegedly represented the petitioners, if not the accused shaykhs themselves? Why was the oil merchant not named? Could he be one of the council members? And, finally, why were the villagers so easily persuaded, if they were at all, that this entire affair was only a simple misunderstanding?
The one person who escaped recrimination was the oil merchant/moneylender. The vagueness of the council members’ letter, therefore, was the result not only of the strategy of selective feeding of information to their superiors but also of their unwillingness to question the modes of operations of moneylenders, much less the legitimacy of moneylending itself. All of them, it will be recalled, were engaged in soap manufacturing, and they relied on a steady supply of cheap olive oil in order to maintain their rates of profit. Any fundamental challenge to moneylending by the peasantry threatened to undermine the council members’ economic interests no matter what their internal political differences were. The reasons for and consequences of the emergence of this new “notable” elite, dominated mostly by merchants, will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 5. For now, we turn to the impact of moneylending on the peasants’ relationships to the land, to the city, and to each other during the nineteenth century.