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The Beisan Land Settlement: State, Elite, and Peasants in late Ottoman and British-ruled Palestine, 1876-1948

Modern systems of land registration have deeply impacted societies and politics everywhere they were implemented. And yet, they are often seen, from the point of view of government officials and legal practitioners, as benevolent state interventions on the level of private relations, preventing conflict and establishing peace between individuals over borders, inheritance rights, and terms of access to land. My proposed project is a critical examination of these conventions in the context of British-ruled Palestine - especially what the British termed, the Beisan Land Settlement (1921-1932), its Ottoman background, and consequences. British rule in Palestine introduced an adaptation of the Australian colonial system of titling by registration (known as the Torrens system) to replace the modern Ottoman Tapu system (established in 1859 and implemented sporadically in Palestine from the 1860s and 1870s onward). And through this deeply reshaped power relations in the country. My study examines the Beisan settlement from three points of view: (1) state power: political economy, governmental technologies, and the legitimation of sovereignty; (2) class and race: the competition over economic and political power between the native elite and the Zionist settlers; (3) subaltern politics: peasants struggle to protect historical entitlements to the land under adverse legal, political, and economic circumstances.